Medieval alchemy, Kabbalah and Islamic esotericism

Sefer Yetzirah

The Book of Formation: creation through ten sefirot and twenty-two Hebrew letters, producing the famous structure of thirty-two paths.

Dates: probably 3rd–6th centuries CE – perhaps later
Dating: tradition or corpus

The life

One of the earliest foundational works of Jewish mystical cosmology, and indispensable to all later Kabbalah.

Place in the tradition

Here the ten sefirot and twenty-two letters first appear together—the numbers from which later Trees of Life are built.

a note on the record

History and later legend

Anonymous, despite the legendary attribution to Abraham. Dating remains disputed, with scholarly proposals extending considerably later than the traditional range.

the written record

Principal works

probably 3rd–6th centuries CE

Sefer Yetzirah

ספר יצירה

Ten sefirot, twenty-two letters, thirty-two paths. Its division of the letters into three Mothers, seven Doubles and twelve Simples is the structural rule every later tree is measured against.

held in the source catalogue Read at sacred-texts.com ↗