15
Kabbalah Unveiled
The cascade of consciousness from Absolute to material, through logos,
planet, monad, down to the heart of the electron, is subtly and mathe-
matically depicted in that most remarkable of ancient hieroglyphs, the
kabbalists' ten-branched Tree of Life.
The meaning of the word kabbalah, etymologically related to the
Hebrew QBL, "to receive," is supposed to indicate secret knowledge
received by word of mouth, hidden knowledge considered so profound
that "few could be trusted with its essence, let alone fully understand its
complexity." Tradition has the kabbalah somehow hidden in the first
five books of the Pentateuch.
Many years ago Madame Blavatsky pointed out in The Secret Doc-
trine that the kabbalah, with its mystical and occult formulation of the
doctrines of the Jewish religion, encoded the story of this descent of
consciousness using the metaphoric language of the creation myth in
Genesis.
The central books of kabbalistic wisdom, the Sepher Yetzirah, or
Book of Formation, along with the Zohar, or Book of Splendor, and
the Sepher Bahir, Book of Brdliance-all fruit in their modern ver-
sio,ns of intense medieval scholarship-postulate the existence beyond
everyday reality of a vast, unseen, multilayered cosmic reality, with
everything in the universe connected to everything else, all in constant
interaction.
The Tree of Life, with its ten branches, the so-called sephirah (plural
sephiroth), meaning "numerical emanations," turns out, in a remarkable
analysis by Stephen Phdlips, to be nothing less than a mathematical
blueprint of the cosmos-a notion that raises mathematics from servant