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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.
Gevurah and Chesed
------------------
"The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or
mixed, are good laws and good arms; and because there cannot
be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there
are good arms there must needs be good laws, I will omit
speaking of the laws and speak of the arms."
Machiavelli
"God is the great urge that has not yet found a body
but urges towards incarnation with the great creative urge."
D.H. Lawrence
The title of the sephira Gevurah is translated as
"strength", and sometimes as "power". The sephira is also
referred to by its alternative titles of Din, "justice", and
Pachad, "fear". The title of the sephira Chesed is translated as
"mercy" or "love", and it is often called Gedulah, "majesty" or
"magnificence". Gevurah and Chesed lie on the Pillars of Form and
Force respectively, and possess a more definite and generally
agreed symbolism than any other sephiroth: Chesed stands for
expansiveness and the creation and building-up of form, what can
very appropriately be referred to as anabolism, and Gevurah
stands for restraint and both the preservation of form, and the
breaking-down (or catabolism) of form.
Within the symbolism of the Kabbalah the most explicit and
concrete expression of form occurs in Malkuth, the physical
world, and as it takes a conscious being (e.g. thee and me) to
comprehend the world in terms of forms which are built-up and
broken down, so Chesed and Gevurah express something vital about
our conscious relationship with the external, material world.
When I see something beautiful being created I may well think
this is "good", but when I see the same thing being wantonly
destroyed, I would probably think this is "bad", and this type of
thinking pervades early Kabbalistic writing. In his commentary on
"The Bahir", Aryeh Kaplan writes [1]:
"The concept of Chesed-Love is that of freely giving, while
that of Gevurah-Strength is that of restraint. When it is
said that Strength is restraint, it is in the sense of the
teaching "Who is strong, he who restrains his urge". It is
obvious that man can restrain his nature, but if man can do
so, then God certainly can. God's nature, however, is to do
good and therefore, when He restrains His nature, the result
is evil. The sephira of Gevurah-Strength is therefore seen
as the source of evil."
The Zohar also contains many references to the "rigorous
severity" of God (another synonym for Gevurah) and its being the
source of evil in the creation. However, when one considers that
the creation and uncontrolled growth of a cancer would correspond
to Chesed, and the attempts of the immune system to contain and
destroy it would correspond to Gevurah, it should be clear that
it is not useful to consider creation and destruction in terms of
good and evil. It *is* useful to look at a living, organic system
as a *balance* between these two opposed tendencies, and the
manifest Creation in Kabbalah is very definitely pictured as a
living, organic system (i.e. a Tree of Life).
The most vivid metaphors for Chesed and Gevurah come from a
time when European societies were ruled by kings and queens, when
(in principle at least) the ultimate authority and power in
society rested in a single individual. Chesed corresponds to the
creative aspects of leadership, and early texts are one-sided in
characterising this by love, mercy and majesty. Gevurah
corresponds to the conservative aspects of leadership, to the
power to preserve the status-quo, and the power to destroy
anything opposed to it. These two aspects go hand-in-hand - try
to change anything of consequence in society, and someone will
invariably oppose that change. To bring about change it is often
necessary to have the power to over-rule opposition. Consensus is
an impossibility in society - there will always be someone whose
opinions are at best ignored and at worst suppressed - and Chesed
and Gevurah represent respectively the kingly obligation to seek
what is good for the many (enlightened leadership of course!),
and the power to judge and punish those opposed to the will of
the king. The following description of Margaret Thatcher comes
from Nicholas Ridley, a minister in her cabinet [2]:
"She governed with superb style, carrying every war into the
enemy's camp, seeking to destroy rather than contain the
opposition, and determined to blaze a radical trail. But she
never let power corrupt her; nor did she ever fail to be
compassionate and kind as a human being."
Whether this description is accurate or not is irrelevant to
this discussion; what it does do is capture in two sentences
something essential about a leader, the balance between power,
strength and militancy on one hand, and humanitarianism,
compassion and caring on the other. This is very much a model of
divine kingship (or queenship!): a king who loves and cares for
his people and seeks to bring about "heaven on earth", but at the
same time punishes transgression, and fights for and preserves
what is good and worth preserving. Kabbalists thought of God in
this way: God loves us (so the argument goes), and the mercy and
benignity of God is represented by the sephira Chesed, but at the
same time God has made his laws known to humankind and will judge
and punish anyone who opposes these laws. Read the book of
Proverbs in the Bible if you want to enter into this view of
reality.
Many modern Kabbalists have a more jaundiced view of
leadership than medieval Kabbalists, and certainly do not see
Chesed as purely the love or mercy of God. In the twentieth
century we have seen a succession of leaders harness their
vision, creativity and leadership to the four Vices of Chesed,
which are tyranny, bigotry, hypocrisy and gluttony. It takes an
uncommon skill and vision not only to contemplate the
annihilation of entire races, but to create a structure in which
it happens. And how many people would dream of a socialist utopia
where traditional communities are forcibly bulldozed and replaced
by dilapidated concrete slums, and have the power to bring this
about? You may not like this kind of leadership, but it is still
leadership, and in its own way it is inspired. A leader may be
inspired by a vision, and may have the power to bring that vision
into reality, but it is unfortunately also the case that the
result can become a new definition of evil. Good and evil are not
static qualities with fixed meanings; in every generation there
are exemplars who define for the whole of society the meaning of
the words in new contexts. Tamerlane may have built pyramids from
skulls, but what did he know about asset stripping?
Tyranny, bigotry, hypocricy and gluttony, the vices of
Chesed, are the meat and drink of daily newspapers. Tyranny is
leadership without authority, an illegitimate or unconstitutional
leadership usually oiled with large helpings of cruelty, the Vice
of Gevurah. Bigotry is a quick and easy way to drum up a power
base: find a minority group in society, emphasise and magnify to
grotesque proportions the differences between them and the rest
of society, and use the natural fear of the strange or unfamiliar
to do the rest. Hypocrisy can be found in religious leaders who
denounce normal human behaviour as a sin, sin comprehensively in
private, and use genuine religious aspirations as in excuse to
line their pockets. It can be found in those who talk about the
dictatorship of the proletariat in public and buy their luxury
goods from exclusive party shops - the collapse of state
socialism in Europe has revealed to those who didn't already know
it the full extent to which pious utterances about social
equality were a cover for almost limitless privileges for the
few. Gluttony is over-consumption, an appetite well in excess of
need, and one has only to remember Imelda Marcos's wardrobe to
get the idea. It is virtually a fashion among modern tyrants to
siphon billions of dollars into Swiss bank accounts - the scale
on which men like Idi Amin Dada, Ferdinand Marcos, Baby Doc
Duvalier, Mengistu, and Saddam Hussein (to name but a few) were
able to beggar nations for their own personal advantage goes so
far beyond any rational measure of human need it is hard to
comprehend.
When one looks at the worst twentieth century tyrants, men
who were directly responsible for the deaths of thousands or
millions of people, it is hard to find any Einsteins of evil -
one is struck by the sheer ordinariness of these men. Clever,
manipulative, politically adept, lucky, exceptional in their
ability to climb to the top of the heap, successful in grasping
and holding power, but not conscious, plotting allies of a
terrible dark power. Behind the brutality, murder, torture,
imprisonment, and the apparatus of oppression one can see a very
human vulnerability, self-importance, vanity, folly, insecurity,
and greed. The vices of Chesed are the vices of all the other
sephiroth writ large - power magnifies a vice until it becomes a
ravening monster. A man with rigid and unbending views on human
morality will do no harm if he has no audience, but give him
enough power and he will put society in chains which might last a
thousand years. A greedy man with enough power might loot an
entire country. A petty and irrational bigot with enough power
might enslave or annihilate whole races. They say power corrupts,
but this is not so; corruption is already within all of us, and
we lack only the necessary authority and power to unleash our own
personal evil on the world.
The moral is that power needs to be tempered by mercy and
love, and the correspondences for Chesed emphasise this so
strongly it is easy to for a novice to ignore the
appalling negative qualities of Chesed - power without restraint,
indiscriminate destruction, everything in excess. The Virtue of
Chesed is humility, the ideal of leadership without self-
importance and all its accompanying vices. The Spiritual Vision
of Chesed is the Vision of Love, love and caring for all living
things, and the desire to find a way (be it ever so small -
remember humility) to make the world a better place. There is a
strong message in the positive correspondences for Chesed:
without humility and love, leadership and power become the
instruments of self-importance, and the petty vices of human
nature are transformed into the monsters of evil which terrorise
the human race.
The illusion of Chesed is Right, in the sense of "being
right". It is difficult to lead without conviction, when one sits
on every fence and wavers on every question, but no-one is ever
right with a capital "R", and anyone who seeks the reassurance of
Being Right is evading the essence of responsibility.
The qlippoth of Chesed is ideology, not in the philosophical
sense, but in the common-use sense of "political ideology". The
rationale behind this is that it is very easy to take a creed, or
a doctrine, or a dogma, or whatever, and use it as a platform for
leadership. If you see a politian (or a religious leader) being
interviewed on television, and the response to every question is
just the same old empty jargon, the same old formulae, the same
old evasions, the same old arguments and irrefutable assertions,
and you feel you have heard the same thing a dozen times before
out of a dozen different mouths, then this is the dead, empty
shell of leadership.
The sephira Gevurah is as often misunderstood as the sephira
Chesed. The planet associated with Chesed is (appropriately)
Tzedek, Jupiter, leader of the gods; the planet associated with
Gevurah is Madim, Mars, the god of war and destruction. The
magical image of Gevurah is a king in a chariot, or conversely a
mighty warrior. Most novices take this imagery at face value and
envision Gevurah as a very forceful, violent and destructive
sephira, and cannot understand why it is positioned on the pillar
of form. Almost all novices will (wrongly) attribute the emotion
of anger to Gevurah. It is worth recalling from Chapter 3. the
traditional Kabbalistic view [3]:
"It must be remembered that to the Kabbalist, judgement [Din
- judgement, a title of Gevurah] means the imposition of
limits and the correct determination of things. According to
Cordovero the quality of judgement is inherent in everything
insofar as everything wishes to remain what it is, to stay
within its bounderies."
This is a statement about *form*. The form of something
determines what it *is*, in distinction from everything else, and
when it no longer has that form, it no longer *is*. Take a table
tennis ball and squash it; it stops being a table tennis
ball...it stops being a ball. Something still exists in the
world, but its form *as a ball* has been destroyed. Take these
notes and randomly jumble the letters; the letters still exist,
but the notes are gone. These notes are contained in the *form*
of the letters; destroy the form of the letters and the notes are
also destroyed.
Everything in the world *is* its form. We cannot see the
natural substance of the world; we cannot see atoms, and even if
we could, we would see protons, neutrons and electrons arranged
in different *forms* to create the chemical elements. It has
taken physicists most of this century to deduce that the protons,
neutrons and electrons are not the "true" stuff of the world, and
underneath there might be "quarks", "leptons" and "gluons"
arranged in different *forms* to create the fundamental
particles. Is that the end? Are quarks and gluons the "true
stuff", the raw, primal gloop which carries all form? No-one
knows. Sometimes I think, in common with the earliest Kabbalists,
that Malkuth sits upon the throne of Binah, and at no point will
we find the raw gloop of Malkuth. Someone will write down an
equation and show the properties of quarks and gluons are a
natural consequence of the *form* of the equation, and the form
of the equation is one of those things beyond any possibility of
explanation. "Look" we will say, "The form of all things is a
potential outcome of this one equation. The mother of everything
that exists can be written down on a piece of paper. Look, here
it is!"
There is a deep mystery in form. The world is made not of
things, but of patterns. In our minds we accept the reality of
these patterns, and forget that the sweet, white stuff we put in
our tea and coffee is just one of an infinite number of patterns
of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Carbon is just one of a large
number of combinations of protons, neutrons and electrons, and so
on. We forget that "War and Peace" is just one of an infinite
number of combinations of letters of the alphabet. The patterns
are our reality, and I suspect that *only* the patterns are real
- there is nothing more real than patterns waiting to be
discovered. I have read graduate texts on quantum electrodynamics
and quantum chromodynamics, and I find no grey gloop mentioned
anywhere. These texts do not explain the world, but they predict
it, often with astonishing accuracy, and something one does not
find is a prediction that the world is founded on a formless
gloop. As a programmer I have built realities out of pure
mathematical forms - sets, functions, containers - and nowhere
did I need any grey gloop; my worlds were the way they were
because the objects within them behaved the way they did, and
that behaviour was simply the structure or form I created. The
view of reality in Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" [4] has a deeply
Kabbalistic (if one-sided) flavour, the Vision of Splendour of
Hod in a distilled form:
"If I know an object I also know all its possible occurences
in states of affairs.
(Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature
of the object).
A new possibility cannot be discovered later.
If I am to know an object, though I need not know its
external properties, I must know all its internal
properties.
If all objects are given, then at the same time all
*possible* states of affairs are also given.
Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of
affairs.
........
Objects contain the possibility of all situations.
The possibility of its occuring in states of affairs is the
*form* of an object." (my italics)
I have digressed this far into the nature of form because I
do not believe it is possible to understand either Chesed or
Gevurah in depth without understanding the importance of form in
Kabbalah, and when talking about form I am not "talking
mystical". Programmers work with form; they shape programs out of
forms with the same inquisitive delight as a glassblower handling
a blob of molten glass. They talk about objects, and behaviours,
and classify objects in hierarchies according to behaviour. They
*create* new objects with a given abstract behaviour; they leave
unwanted objects to be tidied up by the "garbage collector".
There is much more which can be said about this, but as many
people are not programmers and most programmers do not admit to
being Kabbalists, I must leave this as a trail to be followed.
The important point is that when I talk about form I find similar
thinking in chemistry, physics, computer science, and Kabbalah;
the world of human beings is perceived in terms of form, and form
is created and destroyed. That is what Chesed and Gevurah
represent.
The sephira Binah is the mother of form. That is, Binah
contains within her womb the potential of all form, just as woman
in the abstract contains within her womb the potential of all
babies. The birth of form takes place in Chesed, and that is why
Chesed corresponds to the visionary; the preservation and
destruction of form takes place in Gevurah, and that is why
Gevurah corresponds to the warrior.
In most societies even a warrior takes second place to the
Law. The Law comes first, and the warrior swears to defend both
the Law and the country. This may sound a little idealistic, but
if one takes the trouble to listen to a few oaths of allegiance
(e.g. British Police, British Army, Soviet Army) one should find
that the essence is to obey, uphold and defend. Nothing about
violence, destruction, mayem or anger. The essence of Gevurah is
to uphold and defend - as Cordovero says, "the quality of
judgement is inherent in everything insofar as everything wishes
to remain what it is, to stay within its bounderies". If
Cordovero had the jargon he might have talked about "the immune
system of God".
The Virtues of Gevurah are courage and energy. There is a
saying among managers that "any fool can manage when things are
going well". The acid test of management is to have the courage
to tackle, and essentially destroy, organisations (forms) which
no longer work, and to have the energy to keep going against the
inevitable opposition. The Vice of Gevurah is cruelty - power is
seductive, and destruction can be pleasurable.
The spiritual experience of Gevurah is the Vision of Power,
and the Illusion is invincibility. I don't think these need any
explanation.
The qlippoth of Gevurah is bureaucracy, in the common-use
sense of a system of rules and procedures which has become an end
in itself. My most memorable experience was the time I went into
a social security office to ask whether they could issue me with
a social security number.
"You'll have to take a ticket and wait," the woman behind
the counter said.
"But you only have to tell me yes or no," I protested.
"You'll have to take a ticket and wait!" she snapped.
So I took a ticket and waited for twenty minutes. When my turn
came I asked the question again.
"Can you issue me with a social security number here?"
"No! Next please!"
This is probably not the best example of the dead hand of
bureaucracy at work, as it contains a certain amount of
deliberate cruelty, but we have all encountered endless forms
which *have* to be filled in, pointless procedures which *have*
to be observed, interminable delays and so on. The essence of
bureaucracy is that there is real power behind it, otherwise we
wouldn't suffer the indignities, but the power is locked up and
everyone is rendered impotent by the *forms* of bureaucracy.
Gevurah is a hard sephirah to work with, as Kabbalistic
magicians often discover to their cost. There is absolutely no
place for emotion, no place for excess, no place for ego. The
warrior works within the Law, and ignorance of the Law is not an
excuse. If you don't know what the Law is, don't work with
Gevurah. Most people are sloppy in thinking about problems, and
take what appears to be the simplest and superficially most
convenient solution. Gevurah is clinically exact, and if you
invoke Gevurah you are invoking well above the level of emotion,
particularly *your* emotions, and as you judge, so will you be
judged. Invoke on the Pillar of Form, and cause and effect will
follow without the slightest regard for your feelings. All good
programmers who have sweated throughout the night with a
programming error of their own making know this in their bones.
Associated with Chesed and Gevurah are two tendencies which
are so pronounced, readily observed, and deeply rooted that I
have called them the Power myth and the Annihilation myth, where
I use the word myth in the sense that there is pre-existent,
archtypal script in which anyone can play the role of
protagonist.
The Power myth features a protagonist who seeks power
because power means control. Everything is specified and
controlled down to the finest detail to eliminate every
possibility of discomfort, surprise or insecurity. The world
becomes an impersonal mechanism designed to provide for every
demand. The natural world is destroyed to reduce its
unpredictability and untidyness. All knowledge is subverted to
control. Personal relationships are restricted and formalised to
minimise intrusion or any possibility of personal hurt, and are
modelled to increase self-importance. Anyone who won't play can
be removed or suitably punished. The protagonist lives at the
centre of the world.
In the Annihilation myth the protagonist lives for the
Cause. The Cause is the most important thing in life. The
protagonist prays to be released from the thrall of ego and self-
importance that he may better serve the Cause with every atom of
his soul. "Yea, I am nothing", he whispers, "Less than the
smallest worm in the ground compared with the glory of the Cause.
I humble myself before the Cause. I live only to serve the
Cause." Pain, suffering and death are mere adornments for the
ever-lasting glory of the Cause. The Cause might be the Beloved,
the Revolution, the Great Work, the Mistress or Master, or God
(to name only a few).
Examples of both these myths in practice are legion; two
examples are the package-holiday tourist as an example of the
Power myth, and many Christian mystics as an example of the
Annihilation myth. Both myths can be observed in glorious,
infinitely repetitive, and predictable detail in S&M fantasies.
The God name associated with Chesed is "El", or Almighty
God. The archangel is Tzadkiel, the "Righteousness of God". The
angel order is the Chashmalim, or Shining Ones. In Ezekiel,
Chashmal is a substance which forms the splendour of God's
countenance, and as chashmal is the modern Hebrew word for
electricity, I find it useful to think of the Chashmalim in terms
of crackling thunderbolts - it goes well with the Jupiter
correspondence.
The God name associated with Gevurah is Elohim Gevor. All
the sephiroth on the Pillar of Form use Elohim in their God
names, and in this case it is qualified by "gevor", a word which
expresses the qualities of a great hero - strength, might,
and courage. The name is sometimes translated as "God of
Battles". The archangel is is sometimes given as Kamiel, and
sometimes as Samael. Samael, the "Poison of God" is an angel with
a *long* history - see [5], and is essentially the Angel of
Death. Samael is not the first choice of angel to invoke when
working Gevurah - work on Gevurah is tricky at the best of times,
and the Angel of Death does not mess around. Neither does Kamiel
(which I have been told means "sword of God" - I cannot confirm
this), but there is marginally more scope for interpretation! The
angel order is the Seraphim, or Fiery Serpents.
Chesed and Gevurah are the sceptre and sword of a king;
there are many statues of medieval kings in British cathedrals
which show a king seated with the sceptre of legitimate authority
in one hand and the sword of temporal might in the other. In
Kabbalah the King corresponds to the sephira Tiphereth, the union
of Chesed and Gevurah. This is a symbol of a human being in
relationship to the world - at the bottom of all initiations is
the full consciousness that we are kings and queens with the
freedom and power to do anything we please, and total
responsibility for the consequences of everything we do.
Somewhere between the extremes of power and love each one of us
has to find our own balance, and somewhere in a garden a Tree of
Knowledge of Good and Evil still grows, and still bears fruit.
[1] Kaplan, Aryeh, "The Bahir", Samuel Weiser 1979
[2] Ridley, Nicholas, "My Style of Government: The Thatcher
Years" Hutchinson 1991
[3] Scholem, Gershom G., "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism",
Schocken 1974
[4] Wittgenstein, Ludwig, "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus",
Routledge 1974
[5] Graves, R., and Patai, R., "Hebrew Myths: The Book of
Genesis", Arena, 1989
Copyright Colin Low 1991
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