The Tree of Life is Kabbalah's central diagram: ten spheres, the sephiroth, joined by twenty two paths, laid out as a map of how the divine unfolds into the created world. A Kabbalistic reading places a chart onto that map, naming which spheres a person's planets answer to and which paths between them carry effort or imbalance.

History

The earliest surviving text to set out ten sefirot and twenty two Hebrew letters together as the components creation is built from is the Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, a short and dense work of disputed but early date; modern scholarship places it somewhere in the rabbinic era, various arguments putting it between the third and sixth centuries CE, well before Kabbalah existed as a named movement. The ten sefirot reached their fullest classical development centuries later in the Zohar, the central work of theosophical Kabbalah, which appeared in thirteenth century Spain and is principally associated with the Castilian mystic Moses de Leon. A further major reshaping came from Isaac Luria's school at Safed in sixteenth century Ottoman Palestine, whose cosmology of divine contraction and the shattering and repair of vessels remains foundational to later Jewish mysticism.

The specific pairing of the Tree's twenty two paths with the twenty two trump cards of the tarot deck, which this report item's reading leans on, belongs to a separate and much later lineage: nineteenth century Western Hermeticism, most influentially systematized by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn from 1888 onward. That attribution is not part of historical Jewish Kabbalah and is the same Golden Dawn layer the Tarot page already names for the trump cards themselves; this page keeps the two lineages, the Jewish mystical tradition and the Western Hermetic adaptation of it, distinct rather than folding one into the other.

The Ten Sephiroth

Arranged in three columns and read as descending from the most abstract to the most manifest, the ten sephiroth are Keter (Crown), Chokmah (Wisdom), Binah (Understanding), Chesed (Mercy), Gevurah (Severity), Tiferet (Beauty), Netzach (Victory), Hod (Splendor), Yesod (Foundation) and Malkuth (Kingdom), the last of these read as the material world itself, where the divine emanation finally lands.

The Four Worlds

Lurianic Kabbalah reads the whole Tree as repeating across four worlds of decreasing abstraction, Atziluth (Emanation), Briah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation) and Assiah (Action), a further layer some modern Kabbalistic and Hermetic readings map onto a chart alongside the ten spheres themselves.

How A Reading Is Constructed

A reading places a chart's planets onto the Tree using the Golden Dawn era planet to sephirah correspondences (the same table Western Hermeticism attaches to the tarot's minor and court cards), naming which spheres are emphasized and which paths, each lettered with a Hebrew letter and imaged by a tarot trump under that same later system, run between the spheres a chart's placements light up. Where effort or imbalance shows in the chart, the reading names the path it sits on rather than only the sphere at either end.

Where To Read More

• CrownKeter, Crown, the first and most abstract sphere.
• WisdomChokmah, Wisdom.
• UnderstandingBinah, Understanding.
• MercyChesed, Mercy.
• SeverityGevurah, Severity.
• BeautyTiferet, Beauty, the Tree's central sphere.
• VictoryNetzach, Victory.
• SplendorHod, Splendor.
• FoundationYesod, Foundation.
• KingdomMalkuth, Kingdom, the material world, where the emanation lands.
• AtziluthAtziluth, Emanation, the world of pure divine will.
• BriahBriah, Creation.
• YetzirahYetzirah, Formation.
• AssiahAssiah, Action, the most manifest of the four worlds.