Yetzirah

Yetzirah is the third of the Four Worlds, the World of Formation, the realm of the angelic choirs and of the formative forces, where the creative ideas of Briah are given pattern and structure. It is often called the astral or psychic world, the plane of the ruach, the spirit, and its sefirot are the six from Chesed to Yesod in the common correspondence. The name is shared with the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, a short and enigmatic cosmological text redacted somewhere between the third and sixth centuries which describes the creation of the world through the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet; that book is the ancestor of much later Kabbalistic structure, though the four-world scheme itself is later than it.

The Sefer Yetzirah itself divides the twenty-two letters into three "mothers" (aleph, mem, shin, tied to the elements), seven "doubles" (letters with two pronunciations, tied to the planets and the days of the week) and twelve "simples" (tied to the signs of the zodiac and the months), a classification that later became one of the chief sources for the letter-planet-zodiac correspondences used throughout Western Kabbalistic and ceremonial magic. The world of Yetzirah takes the Tetragrammaton's Vav as its letter and, in the Golden Dawn's 1888 to 1900 London attributions, the element Air and its own colour scale.

Sources The ZoharTraditionally attributed to Moses de Leon with Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and PracticeAryeh Kaplan, The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie

The Four Worlds are widely correlated with the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, and Yetzirah, the third world, is assigned the letter Vav, read in this scheme as the connective letter, the point where the forming, patterning activity of creation links the higher worlds to the dense world of action below. The correspondence gives the descent from Atziluth to Assiah a second reading, as the successive spelling out of a single divine name across four levels of increasing density.

Kabbalistic teaching holds that Yetzirah, like each of the Four Worlds, contains a complete Tree of Life within it, its own ten sefirot, so that the astral or psychic world of the angelic choirs is not merely a midpoint on a line but a whole structure in miniature, receiving the pattern handed down from Beriah and passing its own formative structure into Assiah below. This nested repetition underlies the description of the Four Worlds as a ladder that can be ascended in meditation as well as descended in the account of creation.

Yetzirah corresponds in the soul scheme to Ruach, the moral and emotional soul, placing ordinary human feeling and ethical will at the same rung as the world of formation, the level Jewish mourning custom associates with a person's character as lived out in life.

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