The Kabbalah and the Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is the central diagram of the Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition. The Golden Dawn tradition mapped both the major and the minor cards onto it, making it the most systematic layer of advanced tarot study, and the one most likely to scare people off.

The basic structure of the Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is made up of 10 sephiroth (singular sephirah) and 22 paths connecting them, plus one more sephirah, Daath ("Knowledge"), which is not counted among the ten and lies hidden in the middle of the structure. From top to bottom, the 10 sephiroth roughly represent ten levels running from pure divinity to material manifestation. The 22 paths connect the sephiroth in pairs, and they also correspond to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet and the 22 major cards of the tarot.

Above Kether, the highest sephirah, the Kabbalistic tradition places three "veils of negative existence", representing the state before creation: Ain (nothing; pure emptiness, without any concept at all), Ain Soph (the limitless; the first appearance of the very idea of limited and limitless, meaning a point of awareness has formed), and Ain Soph Aur (limitless light; awareness further reveals itself to itself and begins to "shine"). The three veils do not yet amount to creation, because the energy in them simply radiates outward without direction or intention. Some accounts hold that divinity truly begins to take form at Kether; a stricter view holds that divinity has already appeared higher up, at Ain Soph Aur.

The movement through the ten sephiroth from top to bottom, from abstract to concrete, is traditionally called the Lightning Flash, or the path of manifestation. The reverse route, climbing back from Malkuth up to Kether, is called the path of return, also known as the Serpent Path. It is often drawn as a flame coiling up the spine, echoing images such as kundalini, the awakening of life energy upward. The sequence of creation is not simply a count from 1 to 10: after passing through Binah, the Lightning Flash first passes through the hidden sephirah Daath and then enters Chesed. The full order is Kether → Chokmah → Binah → (Daath) → Chesed → Geburah → Tiphareth → Netzach → Hod → Yesod → Malkuth.

The ten sephiroth also follow a logic of cumulative inclusion. The lower a sephirah, the more it contains the qualities of all the sephiroth above it; the higher a sephirah, the less it contains of anything below it. Two (Chokmah) contains the drive of One (Kether), and Ten (Malkuth) contains the qualities of all nine sephiroth from One to Nine. It does not work the other way: One has none of the expansion of Two, and from the position of Four one cannot feel the severity of Five or the reason and instinct further down. This is why the higher sephiroth are more abstract and harder to grasp through concrete experience, and the lower ones are more concrete and closer to everyday experience.

The names, meanings, colors and planets of the ten sephiroth are below (the colors follow the Golden Dawn's Queen Scale, and the correspondences support and are supported by the sections "The three triangles and the three pillars" and "The four worlds" below):

The colors of the ten sephiroth are not assigned at random. One, Two and Three are achromatic (white, grey, black), because their level is still pure light and concept and has not entered material creation in the sense of color. The logic of the colors from Four to Ten is closely tied to the structure of the three triangles and the three pillars; see "The three triangles and the three pillars" below.

The Major Arcana and the 22 paths

There are 22 major cards, 22 Hebrew letters and 22 paths on the Tree of Life. Because the numbers match, the Golden Dawn system places each major card on a specific path, and each path also corresponds to a Hebrew letter; the full list is in the table on Correspondence Table. The Magician, for example, corresponds to the letter Beth (ב) and to the path connecting Kether (the Crown) and Binah (Understanding). It reads as pure will (the Crown) first being given definite form as a possibility for action (Understanding) ^inferred.

One of the 22 paths is special: the path connecting Kether and Tiphareth (1 and 6) is the only one that runs straight down through the middle of the Abyss, by way of the hidden Daath; the other paths pass to either side of it. The reason is explained in "The three triangles and the three pillars" below.

The three triangles and the three pillars

Besides the ten sephiroth and the twenty-two paths, the Tree of Life contains two more basic structural frameworks: three triangles and three pillars. Understanding them makes the table of sephiroth above "stand up", and shows the directional relationships between the sephiroth.

The three triangles

Connect 1-2-3, 4-5-6 and 7-8-9 into triangles, and the Tree of Life divides into three triangles, plus Malkuth standing alone at the bottom:

• The upper triangle (Kether-Chokmah-Binah): the level of divinity itself, purely abstract; humans cannot truly imagine what it looks like. Any concrete image of a god is only one culture's projection of this abstract level.
• The middle triangle (Chesed-Geburah-Tiphareth): because it contains Tiphareth, which corresponds to the Sun, it is also called the solar triangle. Because it deals with selfless, noble beings (angels and saints, beings that keep their divinity even after descending) and not with personal desire, it is also called the ethical triangle.
• The lower triangle (Netzach-Hod-Yesod): because it contains Yesod, which corresponds to the Moon, it is also called the lunar triangle. It deals with the level of the soul that has personal consciousness and is not yet fully selfless (human souls that have not undertaken spiritual practice, and spirits and sprites without bodies but with selfish desires), so it is also called the astral triangle, echoing the astral meaning of Yesod itself.

The upper and middle triangles are separated by the Abyss. The Abyss surrounds the hidden sephirah Daath. It is an empty region with no sephirah of its own, which the paths do not cut across directly (there is no line from Binah to Chesed or from Chokmah to Geburah). This gulf marks the difference in nature between the world of God and the created world. What is above can freely manifest downward, but what is below cannot cross the Abyss upward by its own power and touch divinity directly. The one path on the Tree that runs straight through the Abyss, by way of Daath, is the Kether-Tiphareth path mentioned above. Between the middle and lower triangles, by contrast, there is no such gulf; the two continue in the same direction of manifestation, with no further leap into a different nature.

The color assignments of the ten sephiroth confirm this triangular structure. The white, grey and black of the upper triangle are achromatic and belong to the world of light. The blue, red and yellow of the middle triangle are the three primary colors of paint, marking the point where real material creation begins. It is like a creator making creatures in its own image: the creatures bear the creator's likeness but are not of the same substance, so the colors of the middle triangle are a reflection of the upper triangle and not a copy. The green, orange and violet of the lower triangle are secondary colors mixed from pairs of the middle triangle's primaries (blue + yellow = green, red + yellow = orange, red + blue = violet), the way children inherit and recombine the traits of both parents. Color also shows why the Abyss is so hard to cross in reverse. Mixing all three primary colors of paint gives only black; it can never give white the way mixing the three primary colors of light does. However the colors of the lower and middle triangles are blended, they cannot get back to the pure light of the upper triangle.

The three pillars

The Tree of Life can also be divided from left to right into three vertical pillars:

This structure shows up everywhere in tarot imagery. The two pillars behind The High Priestess, one black and one white, are the Pillar of Severity (left, black) and the Pillar of Mercy (right, white), and the High Priestess herself, standing between them, corresponds to the middle pillar. The black and white sphinxes on either side of the driver of The Chariot are a variation on the same structure. In all four Aces, the hand holding the suit's emblem is drawn as a right hand, which also echoes the masculine energy of the right pillar (the Pillar of Mercy), standing for giving and opening a new stage. With a left hand, the picture would more easily read as taking back or limiting.

The three pillars also give a systematic explanation for the positive or negative feel of the number cards. Two, Four and Seven, on the right pillar, carry expansive, giving, masculine energy, and in everyday terms they tend to read as positive. Three, Five and Eight, on the left pillar, carry contracting, limiting, feminine energy; they often have to take something away before things can move to the next step, so in everyday terms they easily read as negative, although what they are really doing is necessary shaping and correction, which is not the same as being bad. One, Six, Nine and Ten, on the middle pillar, tend toward balance and neutrality, and whether they are good or bad depends more on the specific situation. This framework and the section "The number cards and the sephiroth" below are two ways of saying the same thing.

The four worlds

The Kabbalah holds that the whole universe can be divided into four nested worlds. From abstract to concrete they are the archetypal world (Atziluth), the creative world (Briah), the formative world (Yetzirah) and the material world (Assiah). The four worlds correspond to the four elements of Fire, Water, Air and Earth, and each to one letter of the Tetragrammaton, the four-letter divine name YHVH (read as Jehovah or Yahweh, though its true pronunciation was lost long ago and only the four consonants remain):

The letter for the material world is the final Heh, the one silent letter of the four. It symbolizes that the material world is the quietest of the four worlds, the one with the least creative power, as if sound breaks off by the time it reaches this level.

The Kabbalistic tradition in the strict sense holds that each of the four worlds has its own complete Tree of Life with ten sephiroth, and that the Malkuth of each world joins the Kether of the next one down, giving forty sephiroth across the four worlds. Creative energy flows down this chain from Kether in the archetypal world all the way to Malkuth in the material world, where manifestation is finally complete. There is also a simpler correspondence, more often used in everyday reading: cut a single Tree of Life into four parts using the three triangles from "The three triangles and the three pillars" plus Malkuth. The upper triangle corresponds to the archetypal world, the middle triangle to the creative world, the lower triangle to the formative world, and Malkuth to the material world. The two versions differ in detail but point to the same logic.

The correspondence between the four worlds and the four suits is the deeper source of the division in Numbers in Tarot of "Wands = action, Cups = feeling, Swords = thought, Pentacles = material things". More precisely: Wands correspond to the archetypal world (Fire, the level of will and purpose, not just outward "action"), Cups to the creative world (Water, the level of belief and emotion), Swords to the formative world (Air, the level of thought and order), and Pentacles to the material world (Earth, the level of the concrete and stable). Because the four suits follow the order of the four worlds (Fire → Water → Air → Earth), it is said that the number cards begin with the Ace of Wands and end with the Ten of Pentacles. The Ace of Wands is the first surge of archetypal Fire, and the Ten of Pentacles is the final landing of material Earth; the two answer each other at either end, marking one complete cycle of creation from Fire to Earth.

In the Kabbalistic tradition the human soul is layered by the same four worlds. The material world corresponds to Nefesh, the level of the id (animal instinct); the formative world to Ruach, the level of the intellect (reason and the self); the creative world to Neshamah, the level of intuition and the higher self (a selfless awareness beyond moral judgment); and the archetypal world to Chiah, the level of the source of life (the primal life force, at one with the divine).

The number cards and the sephiroth

The minor cards Ace to 10 correspond to the first through tenth sephiroth of the Tree of Life (Ace = Kether, Ten = Malkuth), and each of the four suits repeats this path from top to bottom. The name, meaning, color and planet of each sephirah are in the table in "The basic structure of the Tree of Life" above.

To read a number card through the sephiroth, first establish the level the suit corresponds to: Wands to action and will (the archetypal world), Swords to thought and order (the formative world), Cups to feeling and belief (the creative world), Pentacles to material things and stability (the material world); see "The four worlds" above. Then apply the qualities of the number's sephirah to that level. The combination gives the card's meaning at the level of the system. Two, for example, corresponds to Chokmah, the force that expands outward without limit or sense of direction. In Wands it reads as unlimited possibilities for action; in Swords, as information overload and difficulty deciding; in Cups, as an unlimited, all-embracing urge to love; in Pentacles, as chances to try every way of earning money and building security. The same expansive quality of Two takes shape at four different levels. Note that the meanings this system produces sometimes do not quite match one's first intuition from the Waite images (Waite drew on the Golden Dawn system but also made his own artistic choices). When they conflict, the intuition from the picture usually takes priority, and the system's meaning serves as a supplementary explanation in the background.

Five (Geburah, Severity) reads as conflict and difficulty in almost every suit, and Six (Tiphareth, Beauty) reads as harmony and reconciliation in almost every suit. This is no coincidence. Five sits on the left pillar (the Pillar of Severity, contracting and limiting) and Six on the middle pillar (the Pillar of Balance). The difference in how they feel in everyday terms comes from the polarity set by the three-pillar structure; see "The three triangles and the three pillars" above. The Ace corresponds to Kether (the Crown), the topmost sephirah of the Tree, and stands for the most undivided source of the suit's energy, echoing the point in Numbers in Tarot that the Ace is "not an ordinary one". Ten corresponds to Malkuth (the Kingdom), the form in which the suit's energy finally lands and is at its most complex; it is also the end point of the cross-suit cycle of creation described in "The four worlds".

Is this system worth learning?

The Tree of Life system is the part of tarot most deeply bound up with the Western occult tradition (especially the Golden Dawn, and later the Thoth system). It can explain the relationships among the major cards, and between the major cards and the number cards, in a very consistent way. It is also the part where it is easiest to get lost in a game of systems and drift away from actual reading. It is enough to understand it as advanced background knowledge; it is not required for reading cards. Numbers in Tarot and The Minor Arcana are enough to support everyday readings.

Related pages

• Correspondence Table
• Astrological Correspondences
• Numbers in Tarot
• How Tarot Became Occult
• The Magician
• The High Priestess
• The Chariot
• The Minor Arcana
• Anatomy of a Tarot Deck
• The Major Arcana
• The Hanged Man
• The Devil