Atziluth

Atziluth is the highest of the Four Worlds of the Kabbalistic cosmos, the World of Emanation or of the archetypes. It is pure, undifferentiated divine radiance, the realm of the Sefirot in their most exalted being and of the divine Names, where the Godhead and its outflowing are held to be still one. The four-world scheme is not biblical but is derived from a reading of Isaiah 43:7, in which three verbs, bara to create, yatzar to form and asah to make, are taken as naming three descending activities, with emanation added above them; the derivation is set out in the medieval sources and is one of the clearest cases of a Kabbalistic structure built out of close reading of a single verse.

Each world is also correlated with one letter of the Tetragrammaton, Atziluth with the initial Yod, and, from 1888, with a Golden Dawn elemental and colour-scale attribution, Fire and the order's so-called King scale, part of the fourfold set of correspondence tables it built onto the older medieval structure in London. In the Lurianic Kabbalah systematized at Safed in the sixteenth century, Atziluth is not quite the topmost reality either: Isaac Luria's system places a prior configuration, Adam Kadmon, the Primordial Man, above all four worlds, as the first patterning of divine light after the initial contraction (tzimtzum), so that even emanation's world is already a step down from the system's true beginning.

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, the four letter Hebrew name of God, and Atziluth, the highest, is assigned the first letter, Yod, read in this scheme as the point of origin, undifferentiated and prior to any extension into form. The correspondence gives the cosmology a second structure layered onto the first: not only four descending worlds but four letters of a single name, each world a further unfolding of what the letter before it contains.

Kabbalistic teaching also holds that each of the Four Worlds contains a complete Tree of Life within it, ten sefirot repeated at every level, so that Atziluth is not simply the topmost world but a whole tree in its own right, its own crown, wisdom and understanding folding downward into the world of Beriah below, which in turn contains its own complete tree. This fractal image, worlds within worlds each holding the same structure, is sometimes described as a ladder, ascended in meditation or descended in the account of creation.

Atziluth corresponds in the soul scheme to Chayah, or in some formulations to Yechidah, the highest levels of the soul, placing the human being's own subtlest aspect at the same rung of the ladder as the world nearest the divine name's first letter.