Qabalah · Overview
Qabalah and the Tree of Life
The Tree of Life maps the sefirot, the ten powers through which Jewish Kabbalists describe divine activity and creation. Ceremonial magicians later took a Hermetic form of the Tree as their main symbolic framework, placing divine names, planets, elements, tarot trumps and ritual grades on its spheres and paths.
The language of ten sefirot appears in the Sefer Yetzirah, and Kabbalah took shape in medieval works such as the Bahir and Zohar. Renaissance Christians recast parts of it as Cabala, often while trying to convert Jews to Christianity; nineteenth-century occult orders, above all the Golden Dawn, joined it to Hermeticism, astrology and tarot. These stages did not leave a single agreed diagram, which is why the Jewish and Hermetic arrangements are drawn separately here.
Explore Qabalah
- TreesCompare the Hermetic, Jewish and Gra arrangements, then open a diagram.
- The Gra arrangementSee why its twenty-two letters fall into three horizontal, seven vertical and twelve diagonal paths.
- Kabbalah, Cabala, QabalahFollow the history from chariot mysticism through medieval Kabbalah, Christian Cabala and modern Hermetic Qabalah.
- GematriaInspect and explore Hebrew spellings, letter values and words with the same total.
- ArchangelsFollow the angelic names attached to the spheres and the sources behind them.
- MerkavahRead the earlier chariot and heavenly-palace literature and the disputed history of its relationship to Kabbalah.