I have innumerable delicacies of the divine TAANUG or “Delight” of the great Secrets, but I would share one of them here. This concerns the great Partzufim, the Atik Yomin.
I don’t have the time, patience, or energy to explain what Atik Yomin is. If you don’t already know, I don’t see why you’d want to read this. I will just wiki it:
" In 16th-century Lurianic Kabbalah, Atik Yomin is systemised as the uppermost Partzuf (Divine “Countenance/Configuration”) in the rectification of the World of Atzilut (“Emanation”) after the “Shattering of the sephirot Vessels”. Keter of Atzilut acts as the guiding Divine motivation in creation, developing into two partzufim, Atik Yomin (Ancient of Days) and Arich Anpin (“Long Visage/Infinitely Patient One”). Atik Yomin is the inner partzuf of Keter, synonymous with Divine Delight, (TAANUG) that enclothes within and motivates Arich Anpin, the outer partzuf of Keter, synonymous with Divine Will.(RATZON) Arich Anpin is said to extend down all levels of Creation in ever more concealed mode as the divine substratum of everything. The Zohar goes into great detail describing the White Head of God and ultimately the emanation of its anthropomorphic personality or attributes.[3] In the descending realms explained by Luria, the Gulgalta (“Skull”-Keter Will) within Arich Anpin enclothes the Chesed (Kindness) of Atik Yomin, becoming the origin of the lights of the world of Atzilut; the Mocha Stima’ah (“Concealed Brain”-Chokhmah Wisdom) within Arich Anpin enclothes the Gevurah (Severity) of Atik Yomin, becoming the origin of the vessels of the world of Atzilut.[4] The Dikna (“Beard”) of Arich Anpin constricts the infinite light originating from Atik Yomin in 13 channels of rectification to lower, relatively finite reality.[5] The Merkabah text Re’ uyot Yehezkel identifies the Ancient of Days as Metatron.[6] "
What I have to say here can be visualized using a massive Ilan I have composed, though you will understand little of it in whole. So I am here only to mention a few tiny parts of it, which I will zoom in on for analysis. But after reading this message, then I would suggest going back to look at the whole thing here: i.imgur.com/x1tVEvU.jpg
Each world of descent contains its own sephiroth within sephiroth. You draw four sephirotic trees and then connect them/line them up so that the Keter of one links up with the Tiferet of the other. Four trees due to the descent of the four worlds of formation. And centered on Keter-Tiferet due to what the Zohar calls the 9 rivers by which Tiferet, receiving its source of divine water from Keter, sends this water out to fuel the other remaining 9 sephira. Hence, nine rivers. Thus, I have done this for you here:
You see the diagonal line moving from Dikna all throughout the four trees? Count the resonances across these trees beneath Dikna.
Count them. There’s 13 of them, (I marked them in the diagram, chan. 1-13) ending on the total network of sephira within the Zeir Anpin, which is the 13th level of these resonances. This is not a coincidence. The zohar states that, through Dikna, the infinite light radiating from the Akin Yomin, of which it is the final partzuf, is communicated to the Worlds through “13 channels of mercy.” That is why there’s exactly 13 levels of resonance beneath Dikna in my Ilanot diagram. These 13 levels mathematically resulted from the superimposition of four sephirotic trees (the four worlds). The 13th channel, which is the network of Zeir Anpin, is the source of Taanug, where the other isolated network, Arich Anpin, is the source or Ratzon.
This explanation as to why there’s 13 levels of communication within the Dikna is an unpublished, unknown, kabbalistic secret, the result of my own plumbing of the depths of the great mystery. The source of Taanug and Ratzon I have detailed here is, also, unpublished.
Removing the duplicate resonances across these channels, you get four unique sephirotic-combinations. The first being Keter-Tiferet of course, which we started with, but also Daath-Yesod, etc. Again, this is no coincidence, and these four unique resonances correspond to the four worlds of creation attested to by the Zohar and Lurianic system. You can see these singled out here:
Singling them out in this way also reveals the mystery of BAMARAH or prophecy. Again, a discovery not to be found in the published literature.
A large component in that Ilanot is the Autiot or Autiot-Yassod. This refers to a key cipher within the Talmudic corpus and Zoharic text. I will cite an essay on it from one of my books:
On the Yetziratic CIPHER or AUTIOT
The ‘sacred binary’ of the Zoharic tradition is permuted from the 22 Hebrew letters arranged,
following the diagrams of the Sefer Yetzirah, along the circumference of a circle and correlated
by what we would, in modern combinatorics, call Brujin sequences, to produce the 231 Gates of
Wisdom, forming a zig-zag, cross-lineating pattern named the Leviathan by the Kabbalists,
(“Malut Leviat Hem”) or the ‘Engraving of the Divine Serpent’. When this pattern is reduced to
the plane and superimposed on the circle, it forms a twin-gyre like system, or yet another instance
of the spirogrammatic structure noted here in only a few of its endless variations. I would
furthermore note that the ecstatic-prophetic kabbalah of Abulafia, quite distinct as it is from the
more theoretical Lurianic kabbalah, the philosophic and literary Zoharic kabbalah, and the
Hermetic, Western cabala, (each of which deserve study) is entirely developed out of a singular
esoteric praxis which, at its heart, constitutes a kind of extended meditative recitation of the entire
sacred binary’s 231 permutations, in linear alphabetical order, from first to last, in which the
Master of the inner Torah essentially traverses the skeletal outline of the Godhead’s storehouse of
eidetic hieroglyphs constituted therefrom, (eventually inserting between the two letters of each
dyadic sigillum one or more of the five primary vowels, so as to generate lists of words from them
which, in successive passage through the Gates, may then be used to further generate entire
sentences and cumulative texts) learning eventually to permeate this ‘womb’ or
Binah-consciousness with the ‘photic body’, saturating the empty DAAT with new godforms from
whose semiotic superabundance he draws the potency of the Yesod-consciousness into stable
images imprinted by Tiferet,- from which he draws, in a word, the inexhaustible creative energies
peculiar to Abulafia, which may of course be expended freely upon any object the practitioner of
such techniques desires, though Abulafia himself insists on the use of such hypercognitive states
and creative fervor in attaining to prophetic vision.
A note on the ‘Engraving of the Serpent’ and the double-spiral latently contained by the Yetzirah
cipher: where the I Ching lends itself to representation as a Boolean algebra through the binary
Complement Operator, the 22 letters of Hebrew lend themselves, through the Jacobi-identity and
the relevant non-commutative logical operators, to representation as a Lie algebra, where the 22
letters are a vector space (g) scaled by numbers corresponding to the sephirot (of which there are
10) and the 231 gates are the field, (f) similarly encoding lie-groups within higher-dimensional
structures (ie. polygons. The E8 lattice for example is a 2-d representation of a 3-dimensional
representation of a 4-dimensional projection of an 8-dimensional object.) embedded in the gates,
only one of which is the 64-tetrahedron that itself encodes the entirety of the I-Ching. We could
also apply a Tensor algebra here, like the dot product mapping two vectors to a scalar. The lattices
formed by the Gates do not homogenously distribute energy, just as a rock might have different
resistances to stress forces on different areas of its surface: tensor math is useful in modeling such
inequal distributions of force across the tensor field. At the lower level of abstraction, that of the
Gates themselves, we have a binary logic, much like that of the I Ching, but we find also a ternary
logic in the first layer of root words, like that of the Peircean model of the triad grounding
‘semiosic action’, along with a quaternary logic at the level of four-letter roots, whereby a model
of dramatic motive is incorporated alongside a model of action. [Jonathan Griffin, A pentadic
model of semiotic analysis: “Peirce’s triadic model of representamen, object (significate),and
interpretant seem sort of minimally necessary in order to get semiosic action, and as such, this
triad involves action prospectively.”] Just as a Burkean pentadic logic is needed to incorporate,
alongside Peirce’s model of dramatic action, a working model of dramatic motive, so the
quaternary logic here advances modalities of analysis not available to lower-order logics. *
- In the same way that, in modernity, we have used binary logic to achieve a computational simulation of reality,- just as lines of 1s and 0s can
produce the copy of an image, a song, a book, or in fact anything at all,- so the I Ching used binary logic to explore the abstract dynamics of change,
offering a prototypal simulacrum of man’s internal, mutable microcosm, in which to read the external transformations of the world of Nature.
However, the true secret of the I Ching lies in what cannot be simulated through binary logic, that is,- what cannot be computed. The limitation of
binary logic necessitates the incorporation of other logical schema, as we find explored in both Kabbalah and Gnosticism.
Kabbalah is a model of divine immanence derived analogically, (various analogical schemes appear in the differing kabbalistic traditions; the
analogical correspondences of alchemy in the Hermetic tradition, the correspondences of gematriac calculation in Abulafian kabbalah, the
correspondences of the partzuf in Luria, etc.) that is, in man progressing outward toward God, (God as a recursive infinity contracted to a
0-dimensional point as the origination of all consciousness and energy) while Gnosticism serves as a model of divine transcendence derived
synthetically through a series of emanations of God toward Man, (the unfolding of the syzygies, in which the internal instability of the Godhead is
dynamically synthesized) wherein God acts as a transcendentally occluded Object,- a kind of strange attractor conditioning the Grund of
consciousness’ emergence, or as an eschaton at the end of History.
The 231 gates model 7 levels of abstraction upon which the 32 paths are recapitulated, with a final
number indicating a completion of the total cycle. (231 divided by 7= 33.) Adding all the divisors
of the 231 gates gives 384, which is the number of lines used to compress the I-Ching into a
64-tetrahedron, indicating that the 231 gates could be mapped 3-dimensionally to form the same
double-spiral as the I-Ching. Of course, one can approach a gate from two directions, so there are,
including the reversed permutations, 462, with 1540 possible ternary combinations of the binary
gates. Thus the 22 letters, the 231-462 gates, and the 1540 three-letter root words, constitute the
first three levels of the Hebrew language’s internal code for information ordering/processing. The
gates in fact serve as an informational-gradient * between the other two levels, by which energy
passes from diffuse to undiffuse states, thereby generating a negentropic potential. (‘meaning’) In
other words, Hebrew seems to be a symbolic language,- one which functions by transforming
elementary binary units (eg. Aleph-Tav) into progressively richer, more dynamic structures
through a kind of ‘intrinsic’ or internal semiotic,- a self-embedding, encoded algebra, just as a
six-dimensional hypercube mapped by the Boolean lattice can be unfolded into myriad sublattices
at lower dimensional projections, all the way down to the binary urs themselves, as noted by
someone who reached the same conclusion about the I Ching’s internal semiotic. (See: The Yijing
as a Symbolic Language for Abstraction, Andreas Schöter.) The Shem-ha-Mephorash or
42-lettered name of God is produced, for example, by arranging pairs of 3-letter roots derived by
varied gemetriac techniques in a 7 by 6 grid, each pair of trigrams in turn constituting a unique
partition of the Name with its own reputed powers, beginning with the name Sagathbama, as
extracted from the first word of Genesis by substitution, Bereshith. This name ( שגתבמא ץתגה ) is
found in Galatinus’ Arcanis Catholicae Veritatis, Reuchlin’s art of the kabbalah, (“First let me
separate the forty-two letters into seven words, then each word into two distinct parts in each of
which will be three letters in accordance with Hebrew idiom. If you multiply six by seven, you
will get 42, which is the sum total of the letters of that Name, which I entrust to your personal
inspection with this drawing: SGThBMA ShGThThKS MYThASB YMYPThA SThGHPS
ThGHSMA SASPPSH. Having put so many letters into this verse, I can immediately derive from
these seven words any other disyllabic portion of any single word. Each single utterance of this
precious name consists of six letters, as you see: … Sagathbama, Sagathechaz, Miathazab,
Iemibatha, Zethaghaphaz, Thegazama, Zaazpapas.”) as well as in the rarer Book of Wonder,
reportedly descending from essays composed by Nachonia Ha-Kana and the Utterances of
Avigdor of Prague.
- To return, parenthetically, to the more general concept of a self-embedding system, upon which basis we might more firmly explicate the meaning
of a possible ‘symbolic language’: according to Kampis’ model of self-organization and auto-propagation, all self-organizing systems originate in an
informational gradient or negentropic potential between highly entropic or low-informational states and higher-energy states. That negentropic
potentiality is ‘information’, and the gradient between the lower and higher energy states influences the extent to which, and the ease with which,
information can be extracted from the later. The informational gradient between the universe as it existed before the cosmological expansion and
only a nanosecond afterward was so great, following big-bang cosmology, that it brought into existence a kinetic effluxion of matter-antimatter
pairings whose inherent asymmetry led to baryogenesis,- the stage in cosmological evolution in which one of the two outlasted the other and
preponderated, if only by an infinitesimal percentage,- for otherwise, the two would have entirely annihilated one another, leaving us a universe of
nothing but perfectly diffuse radiation and attenuating interstellar gas. This informational gradient gave rise, obviously, to everything; to all of us.
To take another example, the informational gradient between the high-energy state of undiffused photons ejected from the sun in mostly
ultraviolent, gamma, x-ray frequency, etc. and that of the photons slowed down by our atmosphere and brought into the visible spectrum was great
enough that simple organisms could actually begin extracting the information from this visible light, using it to overcome entropy on a local scale
and build the simple proteins at the base of the chain of life through photosynthesis, whereby solar energy is converted through biosynthetic
pathways and stored in a relatively stable, molecular form. (The fossil fuels we extract from the planet testify to this stability, given the fact that
many millions of years later they still provide us with an ample energy reserve.) The tetrapole signifies two passages through the informational
gradient: a movement of the outer toward the inner, and then of the inner toward outer, in a recapitulating, doubled-dialectic: God descending to
man via immanent coparticipation, as Eriugena calls it, and Man ascending to God in transcendental emanation or ‘gnosis’. The spirogram simply
traces the self-embedding, recursive, self-propagating trajectory of this doubled movement, in a form likened to the mathematical torus, that is, the
interpenetration of the double ‘circles’ of the ‘inner and outer dialectic.’
Of such a torroidal structure, we have Yeats to again refer to, who says of the faith of the mystic Judwalis Arabs, who purportedly discovered just
such an abstract form: “To the Judwalis, as interpreted by Michael Robartes, all living minds have likewise a fundamental mathematical movement,
however adapted in plant, or animal, or man to particular circumstance; and when you have found this movement and calculated its relations, you
can foretell the entire future of that mind. A supreme religious act of their faith is to fix the attention on the mathematical form of this movement
until the whole past and future of humanity, or of an individual man, shall be present to the intellect as if it were accomplished in a single moment.
The intensity of the Beatific Vision when it comes depends, upon the intensity of this realisation. It is possible in this way, seeing that death itself is
marked upon the mathematical figure, which passes beyond it, to follow the soul into the highest heaven and the deepest hell. This doctrine is, they
contend, not fatalistic because the mathematical figure is an expression of the mind’s desire and the more rapid the development of the figure the
greater the freedom of the soul. The figure while the soul is in the body, or suffering from the consequences of that life, is usually drawn as a double
cone, the narrow end of each cone being in the center of the broad end of the other.” We have here a formulation of the ‘Beatific Vision’. Note that
the ‘crystalline seeds or programs for the unfolding of being’, as stated in the next excerpted text, refer to the same beatific vision,- the
‘self-embedding’ of the Mind and of various systems expressing the Mind’s fundamental ‘mathematical movement’ in the self-embedded structure of
an ultimate abstraction, (as lie groups are embedded in higher dimensional polygons that can be projected into lower-dimensional lattices, or how
the 6-dimensional hypercube of a Boolean algebra can be represented by infinitesimal 3-dimensional slices) or what this text calls a hieroglyph, for
this process of self-embedding is the ‘unfolding’ of Being. William Irwin Thompson, “The time Falling Bodies Take to Light; Mythology, Sexuality,
and the Origins of Culture”: “… the unitive state of the great mystics; it is a state of being, analogous to music, in which myth is not simply a
description, but a performance of the very reality it seeks to describe. … In these parables and koans of spiritual enlightenment, there are certain root
structures or archetypes of order that derive from principles of cosmic order. These principles are not so much symbols of being as they are
crystalline seeds, or programs, for the unfolding of being. … an initiate like Plato can think in the hieroglyphic language of archetypes when he is in
an exalted state of consciousness.”
As Damascius and the Diadochus tell us, such hieroglyphic images are used because communion with the Ineffable One behind all causation is
impossible. We thus separate ourselves from the All and ascribe to it predicates that apply only to us, until,- yielding at the precipice of such
impossible endeavors,- we learn, not only to observe, but to think with and speak through the divine Images or Forms, which are hardly the
sophrosune or passivity most read Plato as indicating, but rather a mode of active, creative force and expression. The rediscovery of this true
meaning of the “Forms” is essential. To the classical evaluation of the golden, silver, and twilight ages of Men, that apocalyptical aeon must be
superadded,- that in which the cycles of history, by corso and ricorso, have, in the words of Vico, become interpenetrating, spirognomic, ‘spiralized’
and fractalized, through whose mysteria we might be returned to the golden age of heroes,- the mythic era, by means of such Images or
Forms, preferring a view toward man’s overall psychological organization, and that mode of analysis for which all hermeneutic efforts are staked on
recovering signatures of such an underlying phusis,- the anamnesis of Plato, or the ‘history of the soul’.
Moving from a gate produces a bilinear map and a lie algebra; it is non-commutative, as moving
through a gate from either the left or right changes the structuring pattern that unfolds therefrom.
(Autiot-Yassod signifies a movement in the direction of Aleph-Bayt, while the Netivot-Payiot
signifies a movement in the direction of Bayt-Aleph, that is, the reversal of the 231 gates. The
former creates the 22 permutations of the alphabet, the latter creates the 32 paths. “The
combination Aleph-Bayt leads towards structuration; the combination Bayt-Aleph goes in the
opposite direction.”) This noncommutative operation is called the Autiot by the Kabbalists. (The
anticommutativity itself derives from the symmetry-breaking began within the Partzuf of Binah,
as discussed earlier.) The Autiot is expressed by the trigrams Aleph-Waw-Tav; Yod-Waw-Tav. It
is Yassod (A tetragram: Yod-Sammekh-Waw-Dallet) that clarifies the otherwise ambivalent
fertilizing potency of the Autiot- the great wheel on whose circumference the 22 letters are
engraved, that might turn either to the left or the right; the Autiot turns this wheel in the direction
of Aleph-Bayt. The first formula indicates that Aleph, as the Ineffable, is reflected in Tav, or the
passive counter-force to the creative will, which is embodied negatively in the egoic imprint left
upon matter following the initial contraction of God to form the void. The waw or union of the
two signify the interpenetration of beginning and end, immanent and transcendent. The later
formula tells us that it is through both Aleph and Yod that the Autiot fertiles the Tav. (Taking the
number of all the Gates and their reversals, we see that 462 divided by 21, that is, by all the letters
excluding Aleph, is 22, thereby regenerating the entire alphabet from Autiot-Yassod, or the initial
permutation of Aleph-Yod-Tav.) The feminine plurality of the Autiot is crystallized by the
masculine singularity denoted by Yassod within Chokmah’s partzuf, ie. the Aleph sequence.
(Every letter has 22 gates associated with it, forming the 231 gates and their 231 reversals,- two
groups which, when taken together, form the twin-spiral of the ‘engraven serpent’, the great cipher
of the Gates. The ten sephirot each have a partzuf composed of sequences formed in the
permutations of the letters through the Gates along the Paths.) The Sefer Yetzirah lists this along
with two other equalizing forms, such that we have the three: Autiot-Yassod, Nativot-Playliot,
and Sepherot-Belimah. This anticommutativity of the Yetzirah’s cipher is further proven in the
partzuf of Binah, where the shattering of the vessels occurs (ie. the breaking of the symmetry
began in Chokmah, echoing the Gnostic mythology around the fall of Sophia.) and we observe a
breaking of the symmetry exhibited in the partzuf prior to it, ie. Chokmah. As noted before, Binah
is the Womb, “Understanding” or the feminine counterpart to the male partzuf of Chokmah in
which this initial permutation occurs that produces division between the letters in the emergence
of the 32 paths from an Ineffable Simplicity. Yassod expresses the fact that Chokmah can only be
brought to fruition as Wisdom through delineation and separation, leading to the emergence of
quantity itself,- the numbers which, with the 22 letters, produce the 32 paths, such that Binah must
then receive the Yesodic fertilization of these ‘seed-letters’, (the 'primary letters) as the Womb or
Mother, which are then recomposed in conformation to the Image of Tiferet or Beauty. As Kaplan
writes: "The 32 paths are expressed as the letters and numbers. Since these represent division,
they are manifestations of Understanding. … In this respect, Wisdom and Understanding
(Chokmah and Binah) are seen as being male and female respectively. In Kabbalah, Wisdom is
seen as the Father, while Understanding is the Mother. The male represents unchanneled creative
force. This can only be brought into fruition when delineated, enclosed, and channeled by the
female womb. (Binah) It is for this reason that the Sefer Yetzirah calls the primary letters
“mothers”. "
Lattices, like those formed by the Gates and the root-words,- as higher-dimensional mathematical
structures,- need to be processed in such a way as to yield sublattices that can more easily be
explored in a projective lower-dimensional subspace. This is accomplished through various
algebraic expressions like the function sub(p, q) which represents taking a primary gate, p, and
then using another gate, q, as a measure of change-of-state by which to define a subspace of gates
representing all the possible changes that can occur in a movement from p to q. (You can use
three-letter roots, of which there are 1540, in place of gates. This produces subspaces as
three-dimensional cubes. If you use gates, the subspaces are 2-d planar facets or sublattices. Four
letter roots, of which there are 7315, will produce subspaces as 4-d tesseracts, like the one
encoding the tetragrammaton or 4-letter name of God as a hologrammatic projection from a 6-d
hyperobject encoded by a Boolean algebra. Abulafia systematically cycles through these
root-word collections one binary letter sequence to another, rotating in either direction of the
autiot, reconstructing the 11-dimensional Universe from the zero-dimensional point, fully
expanding the circle of the Logos from a ritualistically intonated seed-consciousness. In this
regard, we see that the Hebrew language itself behaves more like a computer program coopting
the processing resources of the human cortex than a language,- a transpersonal logos given to man
through divine inspiration, possessing its own intrinsic bent, that is, an internal semiotic code
influencing all speech generated by it,- a ‘computer program’ which was used to construct the
Biblical text as a crystallization of the Logos’ own desires, over and above the desires of any
human speaker.
One of the divine names of God produces the entire lattice of the 462 gates as its ‘subspace’.) This
is of course all a matter Boolean algebra, and, while we could also use Lie algebra, (choosing
individual gates or words to serve as the vector space over the field noted here) that is much more
complicated,- useful as it is in defining subspaces, not based on differentials, but on symmetries.
That is why Lie algebra is used in theoretical physics to work out relationships between
fundamental particles based on their symmetry and symmetry breaking.
It is crucial to understand that moving in the direction of Aleph-Bayt > produces the other 230
gates as its subspace, whereas moving in the direction of Tav-Aleph < produces only a
0-dimensional point, that is, the gate Tav-Aleph itself, unconnected to anything else in the lattice.
Aleph-Bayt is the first gate, and the highest-energy one. If one chooses this as q, the resulting
substructure p is Autiot-Yassod: the 21 permutations of the sacred Aleph by which Yod fertilizes
the Tav and sets into motion the Creation. (The gates Aleph-Bayt, Aleph-Gimel, … Aleph-Tav.)
This Yassodic sublattice is an expression of an energetic confluence of contrary forces involved in
the process of entering into and creating spacetime,- feminine plurality and masculine singularity,
creativity and entropy, etc. Bayt-Aleph is just as energetic as Aleph-Bayt when one moves to it
toward Aleph-Bayt, but it reverses the polarity of its operation; as the former moves toward
Aanaq or structuration, organic composition, etc. the later moves toward Naqaa, that is,
indeterminacy and deconstruction, the inorganic. The inherent spiral-patterning of the Autiot
represents a passage from one energetic pole to another,- from Aanaq toward Naquaa, that is,
from the indeterminate toward organization, imprinting the archetype of organic possibility or the
Goethean ur-form, or from Naquaa toward Aanaq. that is, from the structured and determinate
toward the indeterminate. The autiot-yassod itself contains the polarized forces in their totality,
the entire Hebrew alphabet, which might be used to move through the gates either toward
structure or entropy and collapse. As adding the Yod, the phallic marker of the truly existent and
actual, to Aleph, the inneffable mark of potentiality and essence, allows impregnation of the Tav,
namely by the movement of the Autiot-Yassod which produces the initial permutations of the 22
letters by forming Gates between Aleph and the remaining 21 letters, so adding Nun to Bayt
creates the Paths, which mirror Autiot-Yassod through Phayiot-Nativot, creating the 32 reversed
projections of the alphabet. This reversal is expressed by the equivalence: Nun Bayt-Yod-Tav,
Nativot; Phay-Lammed-Yod-Aleph, Phayiot. The reversal begins ultimately with Tav-Aleph.
Tav-Aleph would be the lowest-energy of all the gates, an ultimate indeterminate state; the last of
the 462. This signifies Aleph without the fertilizing seed of Yod which it inherits through Bayt
and uses to impregnate the Tav, setting creation into motion, as noted above; it is without the
energy imbedded in the Autiot-Yassod which is produced by the turning of the Autiot toward the
Aanaq. If this is chosen as q, the resulting substructure p is a single point, namely Tav-Aleph
itself; a 0-dimensional or empty void,- the same void that was contracted into the ineffable soph
by the tzimtzum to make room for the created world. If the 21st letter is paired in place of the
22nd and last, Tav, we form the gate Shin-Aleph, so that the resulting substructure is a
one-dimensional line passing between itself and the gate Tav-Aleph,- (comprehended by the
three-letter root word Shin-Aleph-Tav, which means, fittingly, “to lift up”.) the first radiating line
that pierces the void after being released from the God-head’s singularity and which furthermore
traces what will be emanated in an order of descent, the Pillars of Creation lifting the World, or
the skeletal form of the Sephirot. Using the 20th letter to constitute the gate Resh-Aleph would
yield a subspace as a 2-dimensional planar facet, so on and so forth. (Resh-Aleph-Shin-Tav. Note
that with the addition of Yod to these four letters, which the reversal we are exploring has
deprived the Aleph of,- leaving it no means to fertilize the Tav, we get the word Bareshit,- resh,
aleph, shin, yod, tav,- the beginning of Genesis, the word of Creation.) At any rate, we work
through these reversals,- the great secret of KHOSKETH,- until we get to the noted equation:
Nun-Bayt-Yod-Tav; phay-lammed-yod-aleph, by which we might derive the 32 paths of
Mystery.
The word Khos’keth is connected to the Kabbalistic term Chos’ket, referring to the ‘material depth’
or darkness of the seven hells representing the divine penalties of the seven curses enumerated in
the book of Genesis, starting from 3:14, whose names are: Shahul, Pythihoz, Abaddon,
Baraschechtath, Sha’arimrath, Tzalemoth, Giyehanim; the Triple-Hell of the Supernals, the Death
of Clay, (‘to dust we shall return’) Perdition, the Pit of Destruction, the Gates of Hell, the Shadow
of Death, (“though I walk through the shadow of death …”) and finally, Hell. These seven curses
are reflections of the seven joys, freedoms, or graces once afforded to man at the Garden, prior to
the fall into Sin. One should note that the order in which the curses are presented is an exact
inversion of the order in which the seven graces had been depicted. This seven-fold structure
associated to the two divine Trees, that of Knowledge and of Life, whose recognition reduced
man to a creature subject, even with the others, to the dissolute flood of time, is also utilized in the
Neoplatonic schemes of emanation involving the fall of seven divine Aeons into matter, that is, to
the status of the material lords of the earth or Archons, each represented by one of the seven
classical planets and the seven alchemical metals. Indeed, it is the act of becoming aware of a kind
of temporal dualism itself, like that ontologically mapped by the Gnostic aeons, that led to the
dualism of good and evil, like that exampled between the Aeons and their male-female Archontic
pairs, for whose knowledge man was cast from Paradise. (The divine name TZABAOTH,
signifying the mystery of moral dualism within the primordial ILANOTH or the Tree yet split
between Knowledge and Life, can be reconstructed by taking the first letters in this section of
Genesis and spelling them out in order: TZAABAAOT.) To elaborate in greater detail on the
structure of khosketh, or the scattering of light over the first of the great veils in which the
sephirotic and qlippothic universes are both contained, we can turn to the tesseract and the idea of
tetrahedral pairs. The spatial representation of time, that is, the 4-d tesseract, when collapsed
2-dimensionally to a set of 16 vertices along the plane, affords a lattice-structure upon whose
scaffold two tetrahedra can be joined together at a single vertex point, occupying a total of seven
vertex points as shared between a pair of tetrahedron in antipode, while leaving behind another
nine unoccupied points we might associate with the sephirot, excluding Malkuth. (A tetrahedron
has four possible vertex points on its own, but in being joined together by a shared vertex, they
generate a total of seven.) When these nested tetrahedra are given scale-correspondence and
stellated by an octohedral frame, they can be perfectly fit inside a single cube (the cube of Saturn;
Time; the chaos or ‘lead’ of the philosopher-alchemist) of equal dimensions,- a cube we can then
double, double once more, and continue expanding within the 4-dimensional tesseract, or into
higher-dimensional manifolds at the fifth-dimensional level, etc. This dual tetrahedron is, in
essence, an abstract model of the primordial Tree of Eden, as opposed to either of the two divided
trees, in that it represents a prototypal subset in the very series modelled by the larger Tree of Life
diagram utilized by the Kabbalists as a set of polytopes that expands mathematically and
geometrically in accordance to the structuring patterns of the yetziratic cipher and the Gates, ie.
the symmetry-breaking initiated within the partzuf-configuration of Binah, as described in the
present text.)
There is further support in the literature for this seven-fold subtension of the qlippoth and its use over the more conventional inversion of the Tree of Life we see in the tradition of Western occultism. First, we must recall that all the varied forms of Gnosticism are grounded in a fundamentally transcendental model of the Divine expressed, in most cases, through vast schemes of correspondences drawn up between micro and macrocosm, including an evolutionary model of the godhead worked out through emanatory syzygies between the aeons, whereas Kabbalah is an immanent model of the Divine based on apophatic revelations like the approximations of the Ayn Soph, the sephirotic vestibules and shells, and the diagrammatic tzimzum. The reference to the “Corruptible, Intelligible, and Celestial” worlds in the Ilanot noted here refers to Pico’s Heptaplus and Cusanus’ Enneagon, as well as to the three principles in Boehme’s system, by which the seven ruling spirits (inviting the interpolation of both the 7 Qlippothic Hells/Lords, the 7 Archons, and the 7 planetary Aeons) are evolved through “intervals of discontinuity” in the divine unconscious. While Lurianic Kabbalah’s model of the tzimzum identifies innumerable, infinitely recursive self-contractions of the reverberating emanation of God’s creative intent, in which the AYN SOPH is concealed and the infinity of God is reduced to a comprehensible form, these contractions are gradually attenuated in the descent of the ‘four worlds’ or AbiYa so as to form the 10 fundamental occlusions of the zohar, that is, the ten shells of the Sephirot organizing God’s revealed light within the created world, leaving the infinite multiplicity of the contraction behind as so many initiatory ‘fragmentary universes’ preparing the work of Genesis proper. In a move toward a more Gnostic conceptualization, Boehme’s system explores the un-attenuated, infinitely dense series of discontinuities in the process of creation, which are a kind of “virtual hell” ('the God that dies before he is born", noting Nicolas Berdiaeff’s remark) preceding Manifestation. Boehme speaks of the ‘anguished circle’ in which the three principles of these worlds (the first being the “cold fire” of the Ungrund, or God conceived per privationem, without manifestation, eternally self-contained, the second being a countervailing positive force or ‘furious emanation’, and the last being a reconciling force Boehme calls a “fiat of manifestation”) revolve, recalling the Kabbalistic autiot, (The turning forward and back of the circle of the Autiot winds a secret pattern through the root-sequences and Letters, the “engraving of the Serpent”, Shaitan, or Malut-Leviat-Hem, that is, the Bahir serpent or Leviathan which twists itself spirogrammatically through the vertical tetrahedral stack, entangling the two Trees.) in the production of three cycles in which these three principles co-participate, otherwise referred to as the primary, secondary, and tertiary triads by Boehme himself. Citing Basarab Nicolescu, in “Science, Meaning, & Evolution: The Cosmology of Jacob Boehme”: “It is precisely at this point, when the wheel of anguish turns frantically on itself, in a chaotic, infernal whirlwind, that a principle of discontinuity must be manifested, to open the way for true evolutionary movement. This principle of discontinuity is none other than the third principle, which appears as the fiat of manifestation, the creative word of God.”
Combining the 7-vertex points of these qlippothic godforms, or the Lords associated to the 7 hells
here enumerated, with the 10 sephirot,- thereby re-uniting the tree of life and death into the one
primordial Tree of Knowledge,- yields a structure that occupies all 16 vertex points of the
tesseract when collapsed to the 2-dimensional plane. We see that this new structure serves Leval
in his Rites of Nullification to form a binary-switching network utilized in the ritual
deconstruction of the ego,- however this is only one of infinitely many uses for it. Thus, instead of
modelling 10 sephirot divided between 3 supernals (the partzuf of Keter, Chokmah, and Binah)
over 7 subtended emanations, we have these archetypal 10 sephirot added to the 7 qlippothic
lords, overlaying the stacked tetrahedral composite with the tree of life attested to in classical
kabbalah. The resulting structure fits into the planar projection of the tesseract, with one
remaining vertex point outside of the 16-vertex lattice representing the co-existence of the entire
structure within a single point on the higher-dimensional manifold from which the tesseract is
actually projected.
Note that, working through the reversals of the Gates, this subspace of the greater series becomes
4-dimensional at the following location:
Tsade-Aleph-Quoph-Aleph-Resh-Aleph-Shin-Aleph-Tav-Aleph. Or, in diagrammatic
representation:
Tsade-Aleph-Quoph-Aleph-Resh-Aleph-Shin-Aleph-Tav-Aleph
Quoph-Aleph-Resh-Aleph-Shin-Aleph-Tav-Aleph
Resh-Aleph-Shin-Aleph-Tav-Aleph
Shin-Aleph-Tav-Aleph
Tav-Aleph
To summarize what has been said here, we have the following illanot:
Aleph KETER ------------- AUTIOT YASSOD (Letters)
Tav CHOKMAH ------------- SEPHIROT-BELIMAH (Vessels)
(0) BINAH ------------ PHAYIOT-NATIVOT (Paths)
Tav
KHOSKETH -------- Aleph
T Z A B A O T H
AANAQ
7 (7 REMAINING SEPHIRA/AEONS)
7 (7 HELLS/ARCHONS)
NAQUAA
Ultimately, we must conceive the two doubled movements, from Aleph-Bayt and Tav-Aleph, as
another instance of the tetrapole, or the doubled dialectic of the inner moving toward the outer,
and the outer moving toward the inner.
The tetrapolar exchange thus makes its appearance in myriad forms, from Lacan’s four discourses
to the ancient Greek model of the four elements. Harman himself, speaking of the Quadruple
Object, tells us that the univocal dialectic of Hegel neuters the intrinsic agonism of the initial
binary opposition Being-Nonbeing (inasmuch as the two are synthesized to approximate the one
ternary component of the dialectic, or the ‘third term’ at the basis of our Aristotelian principium
identitatis, which Pierce more completely developed in its application to semiotic identity, for in
the later case we see how this third term both grounds and transcends the identity of either
member of the binary set) which, in a four-fold network, can exchange these members of the
binary set, moving pairwise between any two of its members, in 10 different ways. This is the
basis of Cusanus’ enneagon and the connection between it, spiromancy, and the tetrapole. The
tetrapole, in other words, re-embeds the initial polarity, or what I have named the outer dialectic,
within an inner dialectic, whose secondary polarity develops the agonistic potency of the
fundamental tension across the distinct vocities of the episteme without stabilizing the
motive-power of Thought in a metaphysics of presence, leading up to ‘Being per transcendentiam’,
or the mystery of the choraic co-participation of the One in the Multiple, and the re-dissolution of
the Multiple in the One: a perfect Greek archaism we might take as an image of this preserved
tension, or ‘negativity’, which in Bataille of course appears as an excessus accumulated by a
system’s free radicals. This ‘fourth term’ is the unwritten meaning of the Platonic
conceptualization of the aporia of discourse. Here, we find that a tetrapolar network can utilize
this ‘pure negativity’ as an ‘engine of thought’, a basic aporia, without compromising its own
strictures, that is,- without abandoning the terminal logic inherent to it, which produces the decad
from the 'four’, providing a richer model of the spirogram than that provided by the
nummogrammatic reduction of the continuum to ‘zero and nine’. The question of the fourth-term,
however, remains the same as it was for Plato himself: a question of ‘participation’. Harman
speaks of a continuous enfolding and unfolding of the two binary sets over the tetrapole,
remarkably similar to the spiromantic dance around the poles of the enneagon, as likewise the
four divisions of Yeat’s metaphysics.
