Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/845

KABBALAH 811 Ages. The term primarily denotes " reception " and then "doctrines received by tradition." In the older Jewish literature the name is applied to the whole body of received religious doctrine with the exception of the Pentateuch, thus including the Prophets and Hagiographa as well as the oral traditions ultimately embodied in the Mishnah. It is only since the llth or 12th century that Kabbalah has become the exclusive appellation for the renowned system of theosophy which claims to have been transmitted uninterruptedly by the mouths of the patriarchs and prophets ever since the creation of the first man. The cardinal doctrines of the Kabbalah embrace the nature of the Deity, the Divine emanations or Sephiroth, the cosmogony, the creation of angels and man, their destiny, and the import of the revealed law. According to this esoteric doctrine, God, who is boundless- and above everything, even above being and thinking, is called En Soph (aTrftpos) ; He is the space of the universe contain ing TO Trav, but the universe is not his space. In this boundlessness He could not be comprehended by the intellect t or described in words, and as such the En Soph was in a certain sense Ayin, non-existent (Zohar, iii. 283). To make his existence known and comprehensible, the En Soph had to become active and creative. As creation involves intention, desire, thought, and work, and as these are properties which imply limit and belong to a finite being, and moreover as the imperfect and circumscribed nature of this creation precludes the idea of its being the direct work of the infinite and perfect, the En Soph had to become creative, through the medium of ten Sephiroth or intelligences, which emanated from him like rays proceed ing from a luminary. Now the wish to become manifest and known, and hence the idea of creation, is co-eternal with the inscrut able Deity, and the first manifestation of this primordial will is called the first Sephiva or emanation. This first Sephira, this spiritual sub stance which existed in the En Soph from all eternity, contained nine other intelli gences or Sephiroth. These again emanated one from the other, the second from the first, the third from the second, and so .on up to ten. The ten Sephiroth, which form among themselves and with the En Soph a strict unity, and which simply represent dif ferent aspects of one and the same being, are respectively de nominated (1) the Crown, (2) Wisdom, (3) Intelligence, (4) Love, (5) Justice, (6) Beauty, (7) Firm ness, (8) Splendour, (9) Foundation, and The Archetypal Man. (10) Kingdom. Their evolution was as follows : "When the Holy Aged, the concealed of all concealed, assumed a THE tNULESS form, he produced everything in the form of male and female, as things could not continue in any other form. Hence Wisdom, the second Sephira, and the beginning of development, when it proceeded from the Holy Aged (another name of the first Sephira) emanated in male and female, for Wisdom expanded, and Intelligence, the third Sephira, proceeded from it, and thus were obtained male and female, viz., Wisdom the father and Intelligence the mother, from whose union the other pairs of Sephiroth suc cessively emanated " (Zohar, iii. 290). These two opposite potencies, viz., the masculine Wisdom or Sephira No. 2 and the feminine Intelligence or Sephira No. 3 are joined together by the first potency, the Crown or Sephira No. 1 ; they yield the first triad of the Sephiric decade, and con stitute the divine head of the archetypal man, as will be seen in the accompanying figure. From the junction of Sephiroth No. 2 and 3 emanated the masculine potency Love or Mercy (4) and the feminine potency Justice (5), and from the junction of the latter two emanated again the uniting potency Beauty (6). Beauty, the sixth Sephira, constitutes the chest in the archetypal man. and unites Love (4) and Justice (5), which constitute the divine arms, thus yielding the second triad of the Sephiric decade. From this second conjunc tion emanated again the masculine potency Firmness (7) and the feminine potency Splendour (8), which constitute the divine legs of the archetypal man ; and these sent forth Foundation (y), which is the genital organ and medium of union between them, thus -yielding the third triad in the Sephiric decade. Kingdom (10), which emanated from the ninth Sephira, encircles all the other nine, inasmuch as it is the Shechina, or divine halo, which encompasses the whole by its all-glorious presence. In their totality and unity the ten Sephiroth are not only denominated the World of Sephiroth, or the World of Emanations, but, owing to the above representation, are called the primordial or archetypal man ( = Trptoroyorc^) and the heavenly man. It is this form which, as we are assured, the prophet Ezekiel saw in the mysterious chariot (Ezek. L 1-28), and of which the earthly man is a faint copy. As the three triads respectively represent intellectual, moral, and physical qualities, the first is called the Intellectual, the second the Moral or Sensuous, and the third the Material World. In the figure of the arche typal man it will be seen that the three Sephiroth on the right are masculine, and represent the principle of rigour, that the three on the left are feminine and represent the principle of mercy, and that the four central or uniting Sephiroth represent the principle of mildness. Hence the right is called "the Pillar of Judgment," the left "the Pillar of Mercy," and the centre " the Middle Pillar." The middle Sephiroth are synecdochically used to represent the worlds or triads of which they are the uniting potencies. Hence the Crown, the first Sephira, which unites Wisdom and Intelligence to constitute the first triad, is by itself denominated the Intellectual World. So Beauty is by itself described as the Sensuous World, and in this capacity is called the Sacred King or simply the King, whilst Kingdom, the tenth Sephira, which unites all the nine Sephiroth, is used to denote the Material World, and as such is denominated the Queen or the Matron. Thus# trinity of units, viz., the Crown, Beauty, and Kingdom, is obtained within the trinity of triads. But further, each Sephira is as it were a trinity in itself. It (1) has its own absolute character, (2) receives from above, and (3) com municates to what is below. "Just as the Sacred Aged is represented by the number three, so are all the other lights (Sephiroth) of a threefold nature" (Zohar, iii. 288). In this all-important doctrine of the Sephiroth, the Kabbalah