Egyptian-Hebrew stream·Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation)·Chapter II — The Ten Sefirot
The decade of ineffable existences
The ten Sefirot are described as ten numerations without substance — beginning and end conjoined as flame is bound to coal. The directions, dimensions, and the depths of the five worlds.
Source context
- Theme
- The thirty-two paths of wisdom: ten sefirot and twenty-two letters as the structural matrix of creation
- Soul-faculty
- Consciousness Soul
Steiner
not engaged in the GA corpus
Cross-tradition
- Neoplatonic emanation (Plotinus)Cross-tradition congruence: the Plotinian schema of emanation from the One through successive hypostases offers a structural parallel to the sefirot as graded ontological powers proceeding from Ein Sof.
- Sanskrit phonology and mantra-science (Vedic tradition)Cross-tradition congruence: the attribution of cosmogonic efficacy to discrete phonemes — where sound-forms are treated as generative principles — parallels the Sefer Yetzirah's treatment of the twenty-two Hebrew letters as instruments of formation.
- Pythagorean number-philosophyCross-tradition congruence: the Pythagorean doctrine that number is the archetype of being offers a structural parallel to the chapter's grounding of cosmic structure in ten primary numerical-spiritual principles.
CHAPTER II
1The foundations are the twenty-two letters, three mothers, seven double, and twelve single letters. Three mothers, namely A, M, SH, these are Air, Water, and Fire: Mute as Water, Hissing as Fire, and Air of a spiritual type, is as the tongue of a balance standing erect between them pointing out the equilibrium which exists.
2He hath formed, weighed, transmuted, composed, and created with these twenty-two letters every living being, and every soul yet uncreated.
3Twenty-two letters are formed by the voice, impressed on the air, and audibly uttered in five situations, in the throat, guttural sounds; in the palate, palatals; by the tongue, linguals; through the teeth, dentals; and by the lips, labial sounds.
4These twenty-two letters, the foundations, He arranged as on a sphere, with two hundred and thirty-one modes of entrance. If the sphere be rotated forward, good is implied, if in a retrograde manner evil is intended.
5For He indeed showed the mode of combination of the letters, each with each, Aleph with all, and all with Aleph. Thus in combining all together in pairs are produced these two hundred and thirty-one gates of knowledge. And from Nothingness did He make something, and all forms of speech and every created thing, and from the empty void He made the solid earth, and from the non-existent He brought forth Life.
He hewed, as it were, immense column or colossal pillars, out of the intangible air, and from the empty space. And this is the impress of the whole, twenty-one letters, all from one the Aleph.