Qabalah
The Tree of Life
Three arrangements of the Tree, kept separate so their paths, emphases and lineages do not blur into one another. Choose one to study its spheres, paths and sourced correspondences.
The trees
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Hermetic Qabalah
Hermetic Qabalah is the Western esoteric form of the Tree of Life system developed most fully by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, via the work of Eliphas Levi (né Alphonse Louis Constant).
- Ten sefirot
- 22 lettered paths
- 8 lenses
- 125 sourced claims
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Jewish
Jewish Kabbalah
Jewish Kabbalah understands the sefirot as channels of divine expression, presented here through Lurianic and Chabad frameworks.
- 11 drawn, 10 counted
- No paths — Jewish Kabbalah declines to pick an arrangement
- 7 lenses
- 59 sourced claims
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Jewish
Gra Arrangement
The arrangement printed with the Vilna Gaon's commentary on Sefer Yetzirah, in which the three Mother letters really do lie on the three horizontals.
- Ten sefirot
- 22 lettered paths
- 17 sourced claims
Why the Gra tree is different
The shifted middle rows are not decorative. They let the three Mother letters cross horizontally, the seven Doubles descend vertically, and the twelve Simples run diagonally—a geometrical reading of Sefer Yetzirah rather than a Jewish repainting of the Hermetic tree. Read the arrangement →Hebrew gematria
Gematria reads Hebrew letters as numbers, then compares words whose letter-values have the same total. Translate an English word by meaning, inspect the exact Hebrew spelling and arithmetic, and find Biblical Hebrew words with the same standard value. Open the calculator →Also in this section
- Kabbalah, Cabala and Qabalah A history of continuity, transformation, appropriation and living traditions.
- The archangels The angels of the spheres, from their older texts to the Hermetic Tree.
- Merkavah and the Hekhalot literature The chariot texts that come six centuries before any of this, and why they are not drawn on the Tree.
- Tarot on the Tree The twenty-two trumps are attributed to the twenty-two paths of the Hermetic tree. The Jewish trees carry no tarot at all.