The Tree Of Life
May. 20th, 2026 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphilo So I'm rereading Dion Fortune's The Mystical Qabalah.
Dion Fortune- aka Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946)- was a ceremonial magician.
Here she is, doing her thing
I don't have the temperament or the intellect for ceremonial magic. I can't remember- or be bothered to remember- all those lists of correspondences. Ceremonial magic ain't spontaneous. And I like spontaneity.
Still, if you want an introduction to Cabala- which is how I prefer to spell it- Dion Fortune is straightforward and readable- even chatty. She was also a Jungian and wrote novels. I'll acknowledge that she's very much out of date- but then I like old books.
She calls the Cabala the "Yoga of the West". It's roots are in Judaism, it was developed and elaborated by Jews and Christians through the Middle Ages- and taken up and made accessible to the modern mind by 19th and 20th century occultists. At its heart is the glyph known as The Tree of Life which "is an attempt to reduce to diagrammatic form every force and factor in the manifested universe and the soul of man." It looks like this
The circles are known as sephiroth and represent those forces and factors aforesaid. Malkuth at the bottom is the sphere of earthly manifestation and Kether at the top is the all but unknowable Godhead. The straight lines are paths that can be travelled {which the moderns have identified with the major Trumps of the Tarot) and the entire glypth tells you how things hang together. We used it a bit in Wicca.- and I once wrote a longish poem in which I travelled all round the tree- of which only parts still survive. The rest, the parts I ditched, were superficial and glib because what do I know?
I don't understand quite why I'm revisiting Cabala now, except that a dream seemed to be telling me to- and one must pay attention to dreams.....
Dion Fortune- aka Violet Mary Firth (1890-1946)- was a ceremonial magician.
Here she is, doing her thing
I don't have the temperament or the intellect for ceremonial magic. I can't remember- or be bothered to remember- all those lists of correspondences. Ceremonial magic ain't spontaneous. And I like spontaneity.
Still, if you want an introduction to Cabala- which is how I prefer to spell it- Dion Fortune is straightforward and readable- even chatty. She was also a Jungian and wrote novels. I'll acknowledge that she's very much out of date- but then I like old books.
She calls the Cabala the "Yoga of the West". It's roots are in Judaism, it was developed and elaborated by Jews and Christians through the Middle Ages- and taken up and made accessible to the modern mind by 19th and 20th century occultists. At its heart is the glyph known as The Tree of Life which "is an attempt to reduce to diagrammatic form every force and factor in the manifested universe and the soul of man." It looks like this
The circles are known as sephiroth and represent those forces and factors aforesaid. Malkuth at the bottom is the sphere of earthly manifestation and Kether at the top is the all but unknowable Godhead. The straight lines are paths that can be travelled {which the moderns have identified with the major Trumps of the Tarot) and the entire glypth tells you how things hang together. We used it a bit in Wicca.- and I once wrote a longish poem in which I travelled all round the tree- of which only parts still survive. The rest, the parts I ditched, were superficial and glib because what do I know?
I don't understand quite why I'm revisiting Cabala now, except that a dream seemed to be telling me to- and one must pay attention to dreams.....
no subject
Date: 2026-05-20 02:03 pm (UTC)I read, many years ago about book was writеn by Adam, first man. Only Kabbalah saved this book for us, but no one understands what was he wrote about. Maybe due to lost in translation or maybe it was just fake?
Who knows?
Another example is story about Lilith, first Adam’s wife…
no subject
Date: 2026-05-20 03:51 pm (UTC)Hmmm, sounds fishy to me......
no subject
Date: 2026-05-21 02:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-21 05:05 am (UTC)and lay it on the tree
10 of the suits in malkuth
going up to kether the pure essense of
fire air earth water and spirit
the pure essence at top
and it comes down to manifestation in malkuth
the cards make sense if you know the spheres
but most of what is visible
is a mirror
but there is much deeper hidden
I've found reference to
I'm sorry but I can't remember
the keys_ that refer to it
no subject
Date: 2026-05-21 05:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-05-21 04:09 pm (UTC)back in time for me too
the tree of life stacked
head to toe is a helix
they created mirrors that are still in the oldest places
that are doors in time
maybe you can see an old master still teaching