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Notes on Kabbalah
The author grants the right to copy and distribute these Notes provided
they remain unmodified and original authorship and copyright is retained.
The author retains both the right and intention to modify and extend
these Notes.
Release 2.0
Copy date: 15th. January 1992
Copyright Colin Low 1992 (cal@hplb.hpl.hp.com)
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Chapter 4: The Sephiroth (continued)
========================
This chapter provides a detailed look at each of the ten
sephiroth and draws together material scattered over previous
chapters.
Tiphereth
---------
"Nothing is left to you at this moment but to burst out into
a loud laugh"
From "The Spirit of Zen"
The sephira Tiphereth lies at the heart of the Tree of Life,
and like Rome all paths lead to it. Well, not all, but Tiphereth
has a path linking it to every sephira with the exception of
Malkuth. If the Tree of Life is a map then the sephira titled
Tiphereth, Beauty, or Rachamin, Compassion, clearly represents
something of central importance. What does it represent? Can you
imagine in your mind's eye what it might be? Do you feel anything
within you when you contemplate Tiphereth? If asked could you
define what it stands for? Well, if you can do any or all of
these things you are almost certainly barking up the wrong Tree.
As Alan Watts comments [1]:
"The method of Zen is to baffle, excite, puzzle and exhaust
the intellect until it is realised that intellection is only
thinking *about*; it will provoke, irritate and again
exhaust the emotions until it is realised that emotion is
only feeling *about*, and then it contrives, when the
disciple has been brought to an intellectual and emotional
impasse, to bridge the gap between second-hand conceptual
contact with reality, and first-hand experience."
The sephira Tiphereth presents the student of Kabbalah with a
conundrum. Whatever you say it is, it isn't; whatever you imagine
it to be it isn't; whatever you feel it might be, it isn't; it is
an empty room. There is nothing there. The modes of consciousness
appropriate to Hod, Yesod and Netzach respectively are not
appropriate to something which is clearly and unambiguously shown
on the Tree as being distinct from all three. So what is it? The
student is told that the Virtue of Tiphereth is Devotion to the
Great Work. What is this "Great Work"? The student is told
solemnly that in order to find the answer he or she should obtain
the Spiritual Experience of Tiphereth, which is the Knowledge and
Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. So the student runs off
and duely reports (after some work in the library perhaps) that
the Great Work is the raising of a human being in every aspect to
perfection. Or it is the saving of the planet from industrial
pollution. Or it is the retrieval and perpetuation of knowledge,
or perhaps it is the spiritual redemption of humanity. The
student then burns enough frankincense to pay off the Somalian
national debt, records endless conversations with the Holy
Guardian Angel in the magical record, and impresses all and
sundry with an unbending commitment to the Great Work. This
enthusiasm, commitment, personal sacrifice and sense of moral
purpose leads to the development of a special kind of person:
pious, preaching, judgemental, a humble servant of the highest
powers with a blind spot of intolerance. Those who inhabit the
vicinity of such moral incandescence may have reason to recall
that the Vice of Tiphereth is self-importance and pride.
A student can spend years running around in circles,
bringing to the planet the benefits of advanced spiritual
consciousness, and this seems to be a necessary exercise. People
need to sweat various personal obsessions out of their systems,
and the empty room of Tiphereth is an excellent set on which to
act out a personal drama. If the devotion to the Work is genuine,
and if Tiphereth and the HGA are invoked with passion and
determination, then sooner or later the hand of fate lends a hand
and the student has the shit knocked out in a big way. An attempt
to penetrate the nature of Tiphereth does seem to bring about
that state which the Greeks called "hubris", an overweening
arrogance, self-importance and pride, until eventually the
inevitable happens and one's life comes crashing down around
one's ears. The resulting mess varies from person to person; in
some people every idea about what is important is turned upside
down, while in others an emotional attachment to habits,
lifestyle, possessions or relationships turns to dust. The daemon
of the false self is dealt a massive blow and sent reeling, and
in that moment there is a chance for real change and the dawning
of the golden sun of Tiphereth.
This is how I interpret the word "initiation": there is a
state of being represented by the sephirah Tiphereth which is
absolutely distinct from what most people experience as normal
consciousness. Once attained the change is irreversible and
permanent; it causes a permanent change in the way life is
experienced. When it occurs it is recognised instantly for what
it is...as if every cell in one's body shouted simultaneously "So
*that's* all there is to it!" This state has been widely
documented in many parts of the world, and Alan Watts' book
(referenced below) is as guarded and explicit on the subject as
any worthwhile book is likely to be.
The symbolism of Tiphereth is three-fold: a king, a
sacrificed god, and a child. This three-fold symbolism
corresponds to Tiphereth's place on the extended Tree (to be
explained in a later chapter), where it appears as Kether of
Assiah, Tiphereth of Yetzirah, and Malkuth of Briah, and to these
three aspects correspond the king, the sacrificed god, and the
child respectively. One interpretation of this symbolism is as
follows: if the kingdom is to be redeemed then the king (who is
also the son of God - see below) must be sacrificed, and from
this sacrifice comes a rebirth as a child. This is a metaphor of
initiation. It is also markedly Christian in symbolism, an aspect
many explicitly Christian Kabbalists have not failed to elaborate
upon, but it would be a mistake to make too much out of the
apparent Christian symbolism. The king, the child and the son are
synonyms for Tiphereth in the earliest Kabbalistic documents
(e.g. the Zohar), and the introduction of divine kingship and the
sacrificed god into modern Kabbalah owes a lot more to the
publication of "The Golden Bough" [2] in 1922 than it does to
Christianity.
The theme of death and rebirth is an important element in
many esoteric traditions, and provides continuity between modern
Kabbalah and the mystery religions and initiations of the
Mediterranean basin. The initiatory rituals of the Golden Dawn
[3], an organisation which did much to reawaken interest in
Kabbalah, were loosely inspired by the Eleusinian mysteries of
Demeter and Persephone - at least to extent that the Temple
officers were named after the principal officers of the
Eleusinian mysteries. The Golden Dawn Tiphereth initiation was,
like most Golden Dawn rituals, a witch's brew of symbolism, but
it was strongly based on the mysteries of the crucifixion and the
resurrection - at one point the aspirant was actually lashed to a
cross - and took place in a symbolic reconstruction of the vault
and tomb of Christian Rosenkreutz. The following extract [3]
gives the flavour of the thing:
"Buried with that Light in a mystical death, rising again in
a mystical resurrection, cleansed and purified through Him
our Master, O Brother of the Cross and the Rose. Like Him, O
Adepts of all ages, have ye toiled. Like Him have ye
suffered tribulation. Poverty, torture and death have ye
passed through. They have been but the purification of the
Gold."
Gold is a Tiphereth symbol, being the metal of Shemesh, the Sun,
which also corresponds to Tiphereth. Gold is incorruptible and
symbolises a state of being which is not "base" or "corrupt";
again, it is a symbol of initiation, of a state of being compared
to which normal consciousness is corruptible dross.
I do not wish to go any further into this kind of symbolism
- there is an awful lot of it. It is possible to write at great
length and succeed in doing nothing more than losing the reader
in a web of symbolism so dense and sticky that the inner state
one is pointing at becomes a sterile thing of words and symbols.
I wanted to provide an idea of how a large amount of exotic
symbolism has accreted around Tiphereth, but that is all. The
state indicated by Tiphereth is real enough, and lashing
comfortably-off middle-class aspirants to a cross in a wooden
vault at the local Masonic Hall and prattling on about poverty,
torture and death is somewhat wide of the mark.
In the traditional Kabbalah the sephira Tiphereth
corresponds to something called Zoar Anpin, the Microprosopus, or
Lesser Countenance. As might be expected, there is also something
called Arik Anpin, the Macroprosopus, or Greater Countenance, and
this is often used as a synonym for the sephira Kether. The
symbology connected with the Greater and Lesser Countenances is
extremely complex: the "Greater Holy Assembly" [4], one of the
books of the Zohar, is largely a detailed description of the
cranium, the eyes, the cheeks, and the hairs in the beard of both
the Greater and Lesser Countenances. In a crude sense the
Macroprosopus is God, and the Microprosopus is man made in God's
image, hence the symbolism, but this is too simple. The
Microprosopus is also the archetypal man Adam Kadmon, a mystical
concept which should not be confused with a real human being.
Adam Kadmon is androgynous, male and female, Adam-and-Eve in a
pre-manifest, pre-Fall state of divine perfection. The symbology
of the Macroprosopus, Microprosopus, and Adam Kadmon appears to
exist independently of the concept of sephirothic emanation, and
it is probably fair to say that the former was more highly
developed during the Zoharic period of Kabbalah, while the latter
is used almost exclusively at the present time - I have yet to
encounter a modern Kabbalist with much insight into the
thirteen parts of the beard of the Macroprosopus.
Another rich set of symbols associated with Tiphereth comes
from the divine name of four letters YHVH, usually written as
Jehovah or Yahweh. The letter Yod is associated with the supernal
father Chokhmah, and the letter He is associated with the
supernal mother Binah. The letter Vov is associated with the son
of the mother and father, and is both the Microprosopus and the
sephira Tiphereth. The final He is associated with the daughter
(and bride of the son), the sephira Malkuth. Tiphereth is thus
the "child" of Chokhmah and Binah, and also "the son of God". In
Hebrew the letter Vov can represent the number 6, and in Kabbalah
this refers to Chesed, Gevurah, Tiphereth, Netzach, Hod and
Yesod, the six sephiroth which correspond to states of human
consciousness and hence also to the Microprosopus. With a typical
Kabbalistic flexibility they can also stand for the six days of
Creation.
The illusion of Tiphereth is Identification. When a person
is asked "what are you", they will usually begin with statements
like "I am a human being", "I am a lorry driver", "I am Fred
Bloggs", "I am five foot eleven". If pressed further a person
might begin to enumerate personal qualities and behaviours: "I am
trustworthy", "I lose my temper a lot", "I am afraid of
heights", "I love chessecake", "I hate dogs". It is extremely
common for people to identify what they are with the totality of
their beliefs and behaviours, and they will defend the sanctity
of these beliefs and behaviours, often to the death - a person
might have behaviours which make their life a misery and still
cling to them with a grip like a python. This inability to stand
back and see behaviour or beliefs in an impersonal way produces a
peculiar ego-centricity: the sense of personal identity is
founded on a set of beliefs and behaviours which are largely
unconscious (that is, a person may be unaware of being
grotesquely selfish, or pompous, or attention-getting) and at the
same time seem to be uniquely special and sacred. When behaviour
and beliefs are unconscious and incorporated into a sense of
identity it becomes impossible to make sense of other people. If
I am unaware that I regularly slip little put-downs into
my conversation, and Joe takes umbrage at my sense of humour,
then rather than change my behaviour (which is unconscious) I
interpret the result as "Joe doesn't have a sense of humour; he
needs to learn to laugh a little". There are many behaviours
which may seem innocuous to the person concerned but which are
irritating or offensive to others, and when the injured party
reacts appropriately it is impossible for me to make sense of
this reaction if my behaviour is unconscious and tightly bound to
my sense of identity. Our sense of identity thus becomes a kind
of "Absolute" against which everything is compared, and
judgements about the world become absolute and almost impossible
to change, even when we realise intellectually the subjectivity
of our position. Referring to this projection of the unconscious
onto the world Jung [5] comments:
"The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his
environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is
now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into
one's unknown face."
In summary, the illusion of Tiphereth is a false identification
with a set of beliefs or behaviours. It can also be an
identification with a social mask or Persona, something
discussed in the section on Netzach. So to return to the orginal
question: "what are you?". Is there an answer? If the answer is
to be something which is not an arbitrary collection of emphemera
then you are not your behaviours - behaviour can be changed; you
are not your beliefs - beliefs can be changed; you are not your
role in society - your role in society can change; you are not
your body - your body is continually changing. Out of this comes
a sense of emptiness, of hollowness. The intellect attempts to
solve the koan of koans but has no anchor to hold on to. Is there
no centre to my being, nothing which is *me*, no axis in the
universe, no morality, no good, no evil? Do I live in a
meaningless, arbitrary universe where any belief is as good as
any other, where any behaviour is acceptable so long as I can get
away with it? This sense of emptiness or hollowness is the
Qlippoth or shell of Tiphereth, Tiphereth as the Empty Room with
Nothing In It. Jung [6] provides a memorable and moving
description of how his father, a country parson, was
progressively consumed by this feeling of hollowness. There can
be few fates worse than to devote a life to the outward forms of
religion without ever feeling one touch of that which gives it
meaning.
The God Name of Tiphereth is Jehovah Aloah va Daath, or
simply Aloah va Daath. It is often translated as "God made
manifest in the sphere of the mind". The Archangel is sometimes
given as Raphael, but I prefer the attribution to Michael, long
associated with solar fire. His name "Who is like God" reinforces
the upper/lower relationship between Kether and Tiphereth. The
angel order is the Malachim, or Kings.
To cover all of the traditional material related to
Tiphereth is to cover most of Kabbalah. Tiphereth is at the
centre of a complex of six sephiroth which represent a human
being. This isn't a modern interpretation, an "initiated"
interpretation of obscure medieval documents. Kabbalah has always
been deeply concerned with the dynamics of the relationship
between God and the Creation, between God and a human being, and
the descriptions of the Macroprosopus and Microprosopus in the
Zohar are a bold attempt to grasp something ineffable using a
language built from the most immediate of metaphors, the human
body. According to the Bible and Kabbalah, a human being is in
some sense a reflection of God, and to the extent that Kabbalah
is an outcome of genuine mystical experience it is a description
of the dynamics of that relationship, and more importantly it is
a description of something *real*. Even if you don't like the
look of the word "God" (I don't) Kabbalah is trying to express
something important about a relatively inaccessible dimension of
human experience. Tiphereth is a reflection of Kether and
represents the "image of God", the "God within", whatever you
take that to mean; it is a symbol of centrality, balance, and
above all, wholeness. It can be an empty room, a gaping
emptiness, or it can be the heart and blazing sun of the Tree. It
is the symbol of a human being who lives in full consciousness of
the outer and the inner, who denies neither the reality of the
world nor the mystery of self-consciousness, and who attempts to
reconcile the needs of both in a harmonious balance.
[1] Watts, Alan W., "The Spirit of Zen", John Murray 1936
[2] Frazer, J.G., "The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and
Religion", Macmillan 1976
[3] Regardie, I., "The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic",
Falcon 1984
[4] Mathers, S.L., "The Kabbalah Unveiled", RKP 1981
[5] Jung, C.G., "Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the
Self", RKP 1974
[6] Jung, C.G., "Memories, Dreams, Reflections", RKP 1963
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