the lurianic tree of life
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Or, another way of putting it is that the Tree design you name is an artificially forced "fit" of a certain narrow point of view. Nature is wilder than that, and the nature of the Paths (by which, in this case, I mean the actual stages of progress between sephirothic states) is steeped in paradox and surprise.
The classic Tree does fi8t exceedingly well - it's just that most of its meanings are evident on a first glance. Usually, though, the main ones are all visible by, say, the third glance.
The Tree format usually called Lurianic isn't really traceable to Simon, but is a 17th Century codification by his successors. In the broadest view it is a 16th to 18th Century formulation (the details changing every few decades), which puts it many centuries after the form of the Tree that we use. It's pretty clear that the basis of its formation was a theoretical retro-fitting to certain patterns in the Zohar.
In fact, that's one place the Tree does very well - as an intellectual ideal, even presented in the Golden Dawn 3=8 (Hod) grade as an idyllic form of the Tree. However, it doesn't rightly reflect the actual psychological patterns of humanity or the established pathways of the Path of Return.
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Could you post a link to this? I'd be interested to see it.
Having said that, Lurianic cabala is not well regarded. Not only was much of it based on misinterpretation of what were by then 300 year old texts, it led to the Messianic movements of the 17th and 18th century which were a disaster for the Jews who followed these spurious leaders.
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thank u Jim and sethur.
sethur, i dont know a link that leads to a pic of the lurianic tree. i've only read about it in books. and both of ur answers helped me a lot. i wasnt quite sure which was the oldest one, and that's why i asked. and u r right about it being an ideal tree of life.
the qabalah seems like one of the foundations of all magick, and i wasnt sure which tree would be best to use. u really helped me figure out an issue i have been pondering for a while. again, thank u both.Fraternally,
Patrick -
@daredevil92103 said
"thank u Jim and sethur.
sethur, i dont know a link that leads to a pic of the lurianic tree. "You find these things in the strangest places. The "Lurianic Tree" is pictured as the frontispiece to a mystically-flavoured fictional e-book called Messiah's Logic, at:
www.scribd.com/doc/439555/Messiahs-Logic
and (now I know what it's called) there's a sparer but clearer one at: www.kheper.net/topics/Kabbalah/Ari-tree.html
I'd arrived at this in the past few weeks, "bottom up", as it were; I was poking around the introductory material of the "Kabbalah Center" (the establishment that recruited Madonna and the like) and noticed, from fleeting pictures of it in their video that it was not the Tree I was used to.
I then found a similar-looking Tree (lacking what we would call the Qoph and Shin paths) in a reproduction of a 16th C engraving, but just by Googling on various keywords, eventually found the "Messiah's Logic" illustration, nicely coloured to make the elemental/ planetary/ Zodiacal (or in alphabetical terms Mother/ Double/ Simple letters) distinction plain.
The reproduction is tiny. It can be enlarged by clicking on the + button, six times, then it won't enlarge any more. Some of the letters are still unclear at that resolution and I was meaning to go back and figure out the way the simple letters had been arranged. I also meant to post here, asking "what is this different Tree and is it more or less 'authentic' than the layout we know?"
As Jim suggests, it's too tidy. For that reason it has a certain appeal for someone who likes logic; but so neat as to appear, as you say, Jim, an artificial "fit".
I don't like not having the Qoph and Shin paths; it makes us poor creatures down in Malkuth look even more isolated from the rest of the "anatomy of the body of God" than usual.
I see the 22 are made up by putting in paths from Binah to Chesed and from Chokmah to Geburah through Da'ath. The former of these is on the Lightning Flash and the lack of it on the conventional Tree seemed strange to me; but I suppose that's what an "Abyss" is.
Crowley refers to it in a marginal note in Konx Om Pax (I think) as "Via quae non est" - the Path which is not - a phrase I quite liked.
But thanks all of you for answering my question before I got round to asking it
OP
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I have often wondered about this. Can there possibly not be a connection between the 3 horizontal, 7 vertical and 12 diagonal paths of the diagram and the 3 mother, 7 single and 12 double letters of the alphabet?
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@Gawain said
"I have often wondered about this. Can there possibly not be a connection between the 3 horizontal, 7 vertical and 12 diagonal paths of the diagram and the 3 mother, 7 single and 12 double letters of the alphabet?"
Post-Lurianic rabbinical kabbalists thought so. Their model, however, varies from the whole rest of the history of kabbalah.
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@Jim Eshelman said
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@Gawain said
"I have often wondered about this. Can there possibly not be a connection between the 3 horizontal, 7 vertical and 12 diagonal paths of the diagram and the 3 mother, 7 single and 12 double letters of the alphabet?"Post-Lurianic rabbinical kabbalists thought so. Their model, however, varies from the whole rest of the history of kabbalah."
Dwtw
Are you suggesting that strictly because the Lurianic Tree 'varies from the whole rest of the history of the kabbalah' that there is something wrong with it? Because as I noted on another thread, the letter Tzaddi being attributed to the sign Aries would most certainly 'vary from the whole rest of the history of the kabbalah' going back to the Sefer Yetzirah.
And you may be right that the Zohar, (many centuries after the SY) said the attribution of Tzaddi was a secret to be revealed, etc. But I imagine Isaac Luria and his school must have had equally good reason to think their Tree model was important, if they were going to make such a big change. Maybe their reason could be found in the Zohar too. I wouldn't know, it's a very big book and I haven't read it all.
Litlluw
RLG -
@hreefold31 said
"Are you suggesting that strictly because the Lurianic Tree 'varies from the whole rest of the history of the kabbalah' that there is something wrong with it?"
No, not at all. Nothing nearly so indirect. I'm just saying there's something (a lot) wrong with it! It's a significantly flawed mapping of the architecture of the human psyche.
"Because as I noted on another thread, the letter Tzaddi being attributed to the sign Aries would most certainly 'vary from the whole rest of the history of the kabbalah' going back to the Sefer Yetzirah."
I'll leave that discussion to it's own place, other than to add that, in this case, an error is being corrected. Also, in the least sympathetic scenario for the the Tzaddi-Heh clarification, we still aren't fundamentally reframing the architecture of the Tree.
"I imagine Isaac Luria and his school must have had equally good reason to think their Tree model was important, if they were going to make such a big change. Maybe their reason could be found in the Zohar too."
Absolutely! That Tree is the result of a prolonged committee action to rewrite the Sepher Yetzirah with the specific goal of retro-fitting it to The Zohar (which it preceded by at least half a millennium, and more likely more than a millennium).
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Dwtw
I guess I'm confused on your overall stance, because you're saying that the Lurians were trying to retrofit the ancient source, the Sefer Yetzirah, onto a more modern work, the Zohar, and this was not a good idea. They should have just left the Tree alone.
But then you say that we should change the letter-attribution of Tzaddi, from the Sefer Yetzirah, in part because the Zohar says it will be revealed. This is the exact same Zohar that you're implying shouldn't be used as a justification for changing anything in the SY, right?
It would seem in that case, that one can pick and choose which texts they want to use to support their positions. Obviously the Lurians really liked the Zohar.
Litlluw
RLG -
@hreefold31 said
"I guess I'm confused on your overall stance, because you're saying that the Lurians were trying to retrofit the ancient source, the Sefer Yetzirah, onto a more modern work, the Zohar, and this was not a good idea. They should have just left the Tree alone."
Yes, they should have. The Tree had been right for at least centuries. The Ari model distorted it significantly.
But you missed one piece. They weren't trying to retrofit the SY onto the more recent Zohar. Quite the opposite. They were trying to edit the SY so that it matched the more recent Zohar, rather than recognize the errors in the very human Zohar.
"But then you say that we should change the letter-attribution of Tzaddi, from the Sefer Yetzirah, in part because the Zohar says it will be revealed. This is the exact same Zohar that you're implying shouldn't be used as a justification for changing anything in the SY, right? "
No. You're misquoting me. When I cited the Zohar reference concerning Tzaddi, I made a point of saying that it was a nice side-issue but not the main point. The reason we need to clarify the Tzaddi-Heh attribution is that we have a directly dictated divine revelation in which I place total confidence, and which specified that its prophet would disclose the correct interpretation. He did and, additionally, decades of work subequently confirm it.
"It would seem in that case, that one can pick and choose which texts they want to use to support their positions. Obviously the Lurians really liked the Zohar."
But this forum concerns Thelema, so the one text that matters is The Book of the Law.