Kabbalah Unveiled 9 155
animal life but also, on deeper inner levels, for mental and spiritual
births. "As Formators, they are responsible for shaping up energies in-
tended to be expressed in terms of what we call 'life,' guiding them
through the proper channels of birth. We might almost describe then1
as pre-birth nursery attendants who form the child in a womb or a
plant coming through a seed."
AU together, the nine sephiroth produce the fourth world of "man-
ifestation," again-as above so below-represented by a single sephirah,
Malkuth (or Kingdom): this is the phenomenal world of the four ele-
ments and of minerals, plants, animals, and humans. Here, where the fine
matter of spirit becomes the dense spirit of matter, the all-pervading
spirit of the first world is reflected in the crystallized spirit of the fourth.
The primal cause has reached its final effect in life, nature, humanity.
As the Tree of Life can represent both macrocosm and microcosm,
the ten sephiroth are also divided, from a microscopic point of view,
into seven planes to coincide with the human chakras. In this case the
tree grows upward out of the earth, which makes of it not only a map
of the descent of cosmic spirit into matter but a sort ofJacob's Ladder
for the individual monad to ascend, through meditation, back to re-
union with the Godhead in Kether.
Together the sephiroth are connected by twenty-two paths, said
by kabbalists to represent the psychological states or experiences en-
countered as the Logos descends into matter, or the monad ascends to
higher worlds.
As can be done with most complex symbolism, the same glyph of
ten sephiroth can be used to represent Dionysius's nine celestial hier-
archies (plus a tenth for humankind), with seraphim or lords of love in
Kether (the Crown), cherubim, the lords of harmony, in Chokmah
(Wisdom), and thrones, or spirits of will in Binah (Intelligence). The
rest follow in descending order into ever greater density all the way
down to the tenth sephiroth, Malkuth (Kingdom), which, according to
Phillips, denotes equally the outer organic form of the Cosmic Logos,
the entire universe, this solar system, a human body, or a single evanes-
cent subatomic particle.
Mathematically, says Wdliams-Heller, the fundamental realities of
existence are represented by the Tree of Life through the numbers from