Resources / Hermetic correspondence
Golden Dawn Correspondence Explorer
Paint the Tree of Life in each of the Order's four colour scales, one for each world, and read every Sephirah and path across all four with its letter, planet, element or sign, and trump.
Four scales for four worlds
The Tree in the Queen scale
The queen scale belongs to Briahבריאה. The Order painted its Sephiroth in this scale.
Flecked and rayed colours are drawn as flecks and rays. The swatches are this site's rendering of the colours the tables name.
Sephirah 6
Tiphareth
Beauty
תפארת
- Divine name
- YHVH Eloah va-Daath
- Archangel
- Raphael
- Choir
- Malakim
- Heaven
- Shemeshthe Sun
- Sun as a path
Sephiroth and paths, cross-indexed
The thirty-two in four scales
Read a row across for one station in all four worlds; read a column down for one world's colouring of the whole Tree. The “bis” rows are the second attributions of Shin, as Spirit, and Tav, as Earth.
The tradition
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1887–88, did something the earlier tradition had not: it welded planetary, elemental, zodiacal, tarot, Hebrew-letter and Tree of Life attributions into a single interlocking table intended to be learned as one system.
Its colour scales are the most visual part of that table. Every Sephirah and path has a colour in each of four scales, King, Queen, Prince and Princess, answering to the four worlds of Atziluth, Briah, Yetzirah and Assiah. The Order painted its Tree with the Sephiroth in the Queen scale and the paths in the King scale; the other two scales are given in its papers and in 777.
Reading the instrument
- Choose a scale to paint the whole Tree in it, then choose any Sephirah or path, on the Tree or in the table, to see its colour in all four worlds beside its letter, its planet, element or sign, and its trump.
- Read the table across for one station in four worlds, and down for one world's colouring of the whole Tree. Filter it to the Sephiroth or to the mother, double or simple letters.
- Each planet stands on the Tree twice, as the heaven of a Sephirah and as the attribution of a double letter's path; the detail links the two.
- Colours are the names the tables give. The painted swatches, flecks and rays are this site's rendering of those names, not a measured colour.
Where it descends from
- The Golden Dawn
- Israel Regardie's publication of the Order's papers, the reason the system is documented at all rather than remaining oath-bound.
- 777
- Crowley's tabulation of 1909, drawn from Golden Dawn material: columns XV to XVIII give the King, Queen, Emperor and Empress scales, the form in which the colours reached most later readers.
- Sefer Yetzirah
- The source of the division of the letters into mothers, doubles and simples, and of their elements, planets and signs; its versions differ on the planets.
What this does not claim
These tables record one influential nineteenth-century synthesis. They are not the only valid set of attributions: older sources assign differently, the versions of Sefer Yetzirah disagree over the planets, and later schools changed colours and trumps. A colour here is a name in a table, not a measured hue.
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