Qabalah and the Tree of Life

The Tree of Life maps the sefirot, the powers through which Jewish Kabbalists describe the entirety of divine activity and creation. Ceremonial magic later made a Hermetic form of the Tree its chief symbolic framework, placing divine names, planets, elements, tarot trumps and even ritual grades upon its spheres and paths. This section keeps that later occult use distinct from the Jewish traditions it drew upon.

The language of ten sefirot appears in the Sefer Yetzirah, while Kabbalah took shape in medieval works such as the Bahir and Zohar. Renaissance Christians recast parts of it as Cabala (often in an attempt 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 one universal diagram, so the Jewish and Hermetic arrangements here remain separate.