Resources / Qabalah
Tree of Life Correspondence Explorer
Sephiroth and paths with their Hebrew names, divine names, angelic orders, colour scales, and symbols — every attribution labelled by the system it belongs to.
The instrument
Choose a Sephirah or a path
Each sphere and each lettered path opens its correspondences: the divine name, archangel and choir of a Sephirah, the letter, sign or planet and trump of a path, and the four colour scales of both.
This is the Hermetic Tree of the Golden Dawn, presented as that system. Earlier Jewish Kabbalah arranges the paths and their letters differently, and does not attribute tarot trumps at all.
The Golden Dawn's Tree · ten Sephiroth, twenty-two paths
The Tree of Life
Painted as the Order painted its Minutum Mundum: the Sephiroth in the Queen scale, the paths in the King scale. All four scales are compared on the Golden Dawn table. Open the four scales
One Tree across four worlds
The four worlds
Each world takes a letter of the Name YHVH and an element. Choose one to mark its Sephiroth on the Tree above.
This is one instructional layering, by triads: the Supernals in Atziluth, Chesed, Geburah and Tiphareth in Briah, Netzach, Hod and Yesod in Yetzirah, Malkuth in Assiah. The Golden Dawn also taught a whole Tree within each world, and other layerings put the boundaries elsewhere.
Sephirah 6 of 10
Tiphareth
Tiferet · Beauty
תפארת
The centre of the Tree, joined by paths to every Sephirah but Malkuth: the place of balance, of the Sun, and of the sacrificed god.
- Divine name
- YHVH Eloah va-Daathיהוה אלוה ודעת
- Archangel
- Raphaelרפאל
- Choir of angels
- Malakimמלכים
- Heaven
- Shemeshthe Sunשמש
The four colour scales
- Clear pink roseKing scale · Atziluth
- Yellow (gold)Queen scale · Briah
- Rich salmonEmperor scale · Yetzirah
- Gold amberEmpress scale · Assiah
Symbols, after Dion Fortune
The lamen · The rosy cross · The calvary cross · The truncated pyramid · The cube
Paths that meet here
In the Aetherica archive
- The Stone That Says I AM: Balance, Humility, and the Alchemy of Freedom (Freedom PT 3)
- Spiritualizing Matter , Natural vs Unnatural, Angels, Intelligences, spirits
- QABALISTICA PT 2 : Secret Names, Sacred Vibration, and the Architecture of Becoming
- Esoterica & Cryptographia, Trithemius, Ramond Llull, Quabalistic Pathworking & The Light Body
Paths eleven to thirty-two
The twenty-two lettered paths
The paths are numbered on from the ten Sephiroth, so the thirty-two together are the Paths of Wisdom. Sefer Yetzirah divides the letters into three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples; its versions give the planets to the doubles in different orders, and the order here is the Golden Dawn's.
The tradition
The ten Sephiroth come from Jewish Kabbalah: Sefer Yetzirah names ten and the twenty-two letters as the thirty-two paths of wisdom, and the medieval Kabbalists drew the ten as a tree of linked emanations. Christian Kabbalists of the Renaissance took the diagram up, and Athanasius Kircher's Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–54) printed the arrangement of paths that most later Hermetic diagrams follow.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn made that Tree the frame of its whole curriculum. It hung the tarot trumps on the paths, gave every Sephirah a divine name, archangel, choir and heaven, and painted the diagram in four scales of colour, one for each of the four worlds. This instrument shows that Tree, named as that system.
Reading the instrument
- Choose any sphere or lettered disc on the Tree, or any row in the table beneath. A path can be chosen anywhere along its line, not only at its letter. The detail beside the Tree on a wide screen, or below it on a phone, shows what the Order attributed to it.
- "In colour" paints the Tree as the Order's Minutum Mundum diagram did: the Sephiroth in the Queen scale, the paths in the King scale. The swatches are this site's rendering of the named colours; the names are the source.
- Da'ath is drawn, dashed and unnumbered, because modern Hermetic diagrams draw it. It is not one of the ten and the tables give it nothing.
- The four worlds marked on the Tree follow one instructional layering by triads. The Order also taught a complete Tree in each world.
Where it descends from
- Sefer Yetzirah
- The early book of creation that names the ten Sephiroth and divides the twenty-two letters into three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples. Its versions disagree on which planet goes with which double.
- The Golden Dawn
- Israel Regardie's publication of the Order's papers, 1937–40: the divine names, archangels, choirs, the tarot on the paths and the Minutum Mundum.
- 777
- Aleister Crowley's tables of 1909, which reproduce the Order's attributions column by column, the four colour scales among them.
- The Mystical Qabalah
- Dion Fortune's 1935 study of the Sephiroth one by one, whose lists of symbols this instrument gives for each sphere.
What this does not claim
This is one system: the Golden Dawn's synthesis of Kabbalah, astrology and tarot, made in the 1880s and 1890s. Jewish Kabbalah arranges the paths and letters in other ways and attributes no tarot; other Hermetic schools change the trumps or the colours. The readings beside each path are short interpretive glosses, not quotations, and nothing here claims an effect.
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