Hermetic Qabalah
The Tree of Life in Qabalah
Ten sephiroth and twenty-two paths in the arrangement of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Select a sephira or a path in the figure to read it here.
Three traditions read this diagram. Jewish Kabbalah, its source, took shape in Provence and Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Christian Cabala adapted it in Renaissance Italy and Germany. Hermetic Qabalah, the tree on this page, was built from both in the nineteenth century by Éliphas Lévi and the Golden Dawn, and it is the tree that carries the Tarot. The name comes from the Hebrew root q‑b‑l, to receive. A different tree of life stands in Genesis, another in Darwin’s diagram of descent; this one is the Kabbalistic tree.
Ten sephiroth hang on three pillars: Severity on the left, Mercy on the right, and the pillar of balance in the middle. Kether, the crown, stands at the top and Malkuth, the kingdom, at the foot. Twenty-two paths join them, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, which brings the count to the thirty-two paths of wisdom named in the opening line of the Sefer Yetzirah. Above Kether the Hermetic tradition places three veils of negative existence, Ain, nothing, Ain Soph, the limitless, and Ain Soph Aur, limitless light; the rings around Kether stand for them.
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The twenty-two trumps of the Tarot match the twenty-two letters, and so the twenty-two paths. The match is a modern construction, not part of Jewish teaching. Éliphas Lévi proposed it in Dogme et Rituel de la Haute Magie (1854 to 1856), placing the Magician on Aleph. The Golden Dawn moved the Fool to Aleph, the first path, and swapped Strength and Justice so that the zodiac runs in order down the tree. Aleister Crowley later exchanged the Emperor and the Star in The Book of Thoth (1944). Every trump on this tree follows the Golden Dawn attribution.
The Christian reading began with Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose theses of 1486 included kabbalistic conclusions, and with Johann Reuchlin’s De Arte Cabalistica (1517). Athanasius Kircher printed the path layout this tree still uses in Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652 to 1654); Jewish diagrams join several sephiroth differently. The Golden Dawn, founded in 1888, attached colours, divine names and archangels to every sephira, Crowley gathered these correspondences in Liber 777 (1909), and Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah (1935) made the system readable outside the lodges. The correspondences are associations, not equations: Netzach answers to Venus without being Venus.
Each path entry quotes its title from the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom, a short text printed with the Sefer Yetzirah in William Wynn Westcott’s translation. Westcott himself calls it very obscure and probably corrupt in places, so the titles are best read as names handed down, not as definitions.