Assiah

Assiah is the fourth and lowest of the Four Worlds, the World of Action or of Making, the world of matter, the physical universe, and everyday human deed. It is the point at which the emanation that began in Atziluth is fully manifested and made dense; its sefirah is Malkuth, the kingdom, and the level of soul that belongs to it is nefesh. In the Lurianic system it is also the world in which the kelippot, the shells or husks left from the primordial shattering of the vessels, are most active, and in which the work of tikkun, repair, is chiefly done. That last point is the theological weight of the scheme: the lowest world is not a place of exile to be escaped but the place where the repair of the whole is carried out, through the commandments and through intention.

Assiah takes the Tetragrammaton's final Heh as its letter and, in the Golden Dawn's London attributions, the element Earth and its own colour scale. Later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writing, developing the Lurianic material further, holds that each of the four worlds itself contains a smaller fourfold structure, so that Assiah has its own inner Atziluth, Briah, Yetzirah and Assiah; on this reading even the lowest world's own highest reach touches emanation, and the physical world named by asah is sometimes distinguished from a subtler "Assiah of the angels" active within it, the plane on which the practical, protective and healing angel-work of the tradition is chiefly said to operate.

Sources The ZoharTraditionally attributed to Moses de Leon with The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie, Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic FellowshipLawrence Fine

The Four Worlds are widely correlated with the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, and Assiah, the fourth and lowest, is assigned the final He, read in this scheme as the completion of the name, the point where the pattern handed down from Yetzirah becomes fully dense, material and particular. The correspondence treats the whole descent from Atziluth to Assiah as the successive spelling out of a single divine name across four worlds of increasing solidity, ending where the name itself ends.

Kabbalistic teaching holds that Assiah, like each of the Four Worlds, contains a complete Tree of Life within it, its own ten sefirot, so that the physical universe and the realm of everyday human deed is not simply the bottom of a list but a whole structure in miniature, receiving the formative pattern handed down from Yetzirah above it. Because Assiah is the last world, this nested tree is also the one most directly identified with material existence, and some sources hold it to contain a further, coarser layer, the world of shells or kelipot, beneath even its own tree.

Assiah corresponds in the soul scheme to Nefesh, the level bound most closely to the body, placing basic instinct and appetite at the same rung as the world of matter and action, the pairing Jewish mourning custom draws on when it describes Nefesh as lingering near the grave.

Sources The ZoharTraditionally attributed to Moses de Leon with Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.)