Sephiroth

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Sephiroth." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://divinity.interactivelion.com/categories/sephiroth.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Sephiroth. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://divinity.interactivelion.com/categories/sephiroth

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-sephiroth,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Sephiroth},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://divinity.interactivelion.com/categories/sephiroth},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The ten sephiroth are the emanations through which, in Kabbalah, the infinite unfolds into the created world. They are set out as the Tree of Life, a diagram of ten spheres joined by twenty-two paths, developed in medieval Jewish mystical texts and elaborated at length in the Zohar and in later Lurianic Kabbalah. Each sephirah carries a name (Kether, Chokmah, Binah and the rest), along with a divine name, an archangel, a planet, a virtue and a vice. The correspondences here largely follow the Golden Dawn's synthesis, which is the version most Western esoteric material assumes.

Facts

Origins

Origin of the Name

From the Hebrew sefirah, plural sefirot, the word the Sefer Yetzirah uses; the root is the Hebrew for counting and number. The familiar derivation from the Greek sphaira, sphere, is a folk etymology. 3

Whose Classification This Is

The enumeration of ten sefirot is the Sefer Yetzirah's; the developed sefirotic system is medieval Jewish Kabbalah, above all the Zohar of late-thirteenth-century Castile and the Lurianic school of sixteenth-century Safed. 3Jewish Kabbalah

Whose Classification This Isthe subject's own account

The planetary, tarot and colour-scale correspondences this atlas attaches to the sephiroth are the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn's, set out in its papers between 1888 and 1900. They are a nineteenth-century English synthesis, not Jewish tradition. 4Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn (1888-1900)

Contested Use

Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Kabbalah is a living current of Jewish religious thought and practice. From Pico della Mirandola in 1486 and Reuchlin in 1517 the Tree was taken over by Christian scholars, and from 1888 by the Hermetic orders, who used it as a frame for correspondences drawn from elsewhere. That adaptation is recorded here as an adaptation. 2

Overview

Size of the Traditional Set

Ten sefirot 1

Learn More

The Ten Emanations

The ten sephiroth are the emanations through which, in Kabbalah, the infinite (Ein Sof) unfolds into the created world. They are set out as the Tree of Life, a diagram of ten spheres joined by twenty-two paths, running from Keter (the crown) at the top through Chokhmah and Binah, down the pillars to Malkuth (the kingdom) at the foot, the world of matter.

Each sephirah is a divine attribute or stage of manifestation (wisdom, understanding, mercy, severity, beauty, and so on), and carries a name of God, an archangel, a colour, a planet and much else in the elaborate scheme of correspondences the tradition built up.

Jewish and Hermetic layers

The sephiroth were developed in medieval Jewish mystical texts, above all the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar, and elaborated in the Lurianic Kabbalah of the sixteenth century. From the Renaissance, Christian and then Hermetic Kabbalists took over the Tree and hung upon it the correspondences of astrology, tarot and magic. The atlas distinguishes the Jewish source from these later adaptations.

The entries give each sephirah its attribute, its position on the Tree, and its principal correspondences. The paths that join the sephiroth, the four worlds they span, and the qliphoth that shadow them are treated in their own categories under Kabbalah & the Tree of Life.

Cross-Tradition Connections