The Universal Kabbalah

The

Universal

Kabbalah

Deciphering the Cosmic Code

in the Sacred Geometry

of the Sabbath Star Diagram

LEONORA LEET

Inner Traditions

Rochester, Vermont

To the

tradition of

my grandmother

Pessie Neznir and to

the cherished memory of

my mother, Tania Neznir Leet,

and to my most beloved daughters

Susannah Rachel Brodwin and

Tamar Brodwin Goodman

and the special blessing

of my granddaughters

Stephanie Caroline

and Sarah Julia

Goodman

a Tree

of Life

in Israel

Contents

Foreword by Dr. Julian Ungar-Sargon

Note from the Publisher

Preface

PART ONE

Introducing a New Model for the Kabbalah

  1    The Star and the Tree

Hebraic and Pythagorean Sacred Science

The Hexagram and Hebraic Sacred Science

The Hexagram: An Esoteric Key to Genesis and the Zohar

The Hexagram of Creation

A Further Study of Jewish Cosmology

  2    The Sabbath Star Diagram

Discovering the Geometric Source of the Tree of Life Diagram

The Science of Expressive Form

A General Preview

PART TWO

A New Model for Kabbalistic Cosmology

  3    Generation of the Fourth-World Diagram

A Summary Introduction to the Fourth-World Diagram

Generating the Fourth-World Diagram

The Fourth-World Diagram and the Fall

The Fourth-World Diagram and the Transformative Moment

The Sabbatical Model of Redemption

The Trivalent Logic of the Sabbath Star Diagram

  4    The Evolution of the Fourth World

Preliminary Definition of the Sabbath Stars

The Sabbath Stars of Yetzirah

The First Sabbath Star of Asiyah and the Minerals

The Second Sabbath Star of Asiyah and the Plants

The Third Sabbath Star of Asiyah and the Animals

The Fourth Sabbath Star of Asiyah and Man

  5    The Fifth-World Diagram and the Messianic Age

Introduction to the Fifth World Diagram

The Fifth-World Sabbath Stars and the Messianic Age

Stages of Ruach Consciousness

  6    The Sixth-World Diagram and the World to Come

A Manual for Sixth-World Diagram Construction

The Laws of Diagram Construction and Number Theory

The Construction Elements and Gender

The Construction Elements and the Partzufim

  7    The Culminating Diagram of the Cosmic Octave

Construction Elements of the Octave Diagram

The Unification of the Name

The Working of the Chariot

The Octave Diagram and the Tzimtzum

The Angels of Aravot

PART THREE

A New Model for Kabbalistic Soul Psychology

  8    The Fourth-World Matrix Model of the Nefesh Soul

Understanding the Hexagram Matrix

The Dual Spiral Matrix in Its Unfallen and Fallen Forms

Temptations beyond the Matrix Border

  9    The Fifth-World Matrix Model of the Ruach Soul

Primary Definition of the Fifth-World Matrix

The Ruach Matrix Model of Meditation

The Levels of Ruach Master Power

10    The Sixth-World Matrix Model of the Neshamah Soul

The Completed Pattern of the Spiral Tree

The Matrix Partzufim

The Sefirot and the Path of the Soul

The Spiral Tree as Psychological Model

The Fourth- and Fifth-World Matrix Models of the Nefesh and Ruach Souls

The Sixth-World Matrix Model of the Neshamah Heart

The Sixth-World Matrix Model of the Neshamah Mind

11    Forbidden Crossings and the Illusion of Knowledge

Introduction: Tohu or Tikkun?

Beyond the Fourth-World Matrix Borders

Beyond the Fifth-World Matrix Border

Beyond the Sixth-World Matrix Border

Light Units and the Illusion of Knowledge

12    The Octave Matrix of the Chayah Soul

Cherubs and Trees

The Double Spiral Tree: Redemption through the Other Side

The Sixfold Cherub Tree and the Measure of the Body

PART FOUR

A New Model for the Infinite

13    Exploring the Geometry of the Infinite beyond the Cosmic Circle

The Seventh World

The Eighth World

The Ninth World

14    Charting the Infinite Future

Extrapolating the Matrix to Infinity

The Relationship of Construction and Matrix Elements

15    The Final Model of Infinity: The Sabbath Star System

The Periodic Decimal Sequence

The Converging Decimal Sequence

Convergence and the Law of Complex Magnitudes

APPENDICES

A New Universal Model

A     Scientific Implications of the Hexagram Matrix

B     A Systems Model of Sociology

C     Systematic Linguistics

D     A Gender Model of Human History

Index

Footnotes

Notes

Also by Leonora Leet

About the Author

About Inner Traditions

Copyright

Foreword

Leonora Leet received her Ph.D. from Yale University and was, until her untimely death in the spring of 2004, professor of English at St. John’s University. Her other books on the Kabbalah are Renewing the Covenant, The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah, and The Kabbalah of the Soul. Given her training in classical English literature and that the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation was Elizabethan drama, we might have expected further work along the lines of her celebrated scholarship on Marlowe and Elizabethan love tragedy, but this was not to be, for about twenty years ago she had a sudden spiritual awakening that was to change her life and her written work. Having experienced being touched by an Indian mystic, she went back to sources in esoteric Judaic texts in an attempt to discover the roots and trajectory of her own tradition. Her discoveries are published in this volume, the fruit of twenty years of research.

It is with great sadness that I write this posthumous tribute. It was only a few months before publication of The Universal Kabbalah that I received the news of her untimely death. I am, however, encouraged by the fact that she lived to see all but the final stages of the publication of this culmination of her life’s work and mission. I was involved in translating and reviewing its Hebrew citations from original material and researched some of the more obscure sources on her behalf, so I had the pleasure and privilege of working with her over the last few years more closely than anyone, I believe. I was moved by her honesty, passion, diligence, and perseverance. She had an uncanny intuitive sense about the connection between the divine and humanity, and having had a profound spiritual experience, went about finding the tools by which to express this enormous insight.

I know of no other scholar who single-handedly tackled a field so foreign to her own primary area of expertise. Yet she doggedly pursued the source material in fields such as mathematics, geometry, and Kabbalah until she had mastered them with the same acumen as she did her literary studies. Leet’s major claim is that within the Jewish esoteric tradition humankind plays a pivotal role in the perfection of the divine personality by uniting the finite with the infinite. Working from an original synthesis of the major kabbalistic traditions of cosmology derived from the Hechalot literature, the Zohar, and the school of Isaac Luria, Leet attempted to erect a new framework for understanding the mechanism of the transformative spiritual work that enables the human soul to reach increasingly higher dimensions of consciousness.

Her voice reached many, both in her classes and through her previous books. As is evident from general sales of esoteric literature and expanded course offerings in esoteric subjects, increasing numbers of people are seeking a more direct connection with spirituality. As part of this phenomenon, Leet, in her Renewing the Covenant, provides access to Jewish spirituality as a means for achieving higher consciousness, a path that could deepen the devotions of both nonobservant and traditionally observant Jews. This process of covenant renewal begins with effective kabbalistic techniques of meditation, combining mantra with visualization; proceeds through the return to a reconstructed Sinai-Sabbath; and arrives at the culminating practice of ritual prayer, the performance of which can fulfill the kabbalistic purpose of creation. When undertaken in the steps outlined in her book, this process has helped many to discover forms of spiritual practice precisely tailored for the modern world, as well as a new appreciation for the rich spiritual heritage of Judaism.

Leet explores the false temptations of worldly power and pleasure that lead to the fall of the soul and then the means of its redemption. She develops a powerful meditative technique called the Transformative Moment, the workings of which are exemplified by Jacob and Joseph and which allow the individual to progress through all the higher levels of the soul, even possibly to attain the miraculous powers of the legendary spiritual masters. She further correlates the hierarchy of soul levels with Ezekiel’s throne vision to show the various paths the soul may travel toward self-realization: sex, love, power, knowledge, holiness, and unification. The first four paths relate to the four-faced living creatures (Chayot) of Ezekiel’s throne vision—the bullox, lion, eagle, and man. The final two paths correlate to the prophet and the envisioned man on the throne that he recognizes to be his divine higher self—the knowledge that defines the secret doctrine of the whole of the Jewish mystical tradition culminating in the Kabbalah.

Leet’s twenty-year quest and departure from classical Western literature produced a vast reconstruction of the knowledge of the ancient Jewish priest-scientists, with vital implications for contemporary spirituality and science. She cast Kabbalah as an ancient Hebrew sacred science that used geometry, sound, and number to link the finite world of human experience with the infinite realm of the divine, and she attempted to make use of teachings extending back thousands of years to explicate key concepts of quantum physics and quantum cosmology.

Unlike previous, purely historical explorations of the Jewish esoteric tradition, Leet’s work in The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah resurrects this ancient body of knowledge to reveal eternal truths that can have a profound and positive impact on contemporary spirituality. In this text she explores new experimental methods of practicing Hebraic sacred science that explain as never before the meaning of the central cosmological diagram of the entire Western esoteric tradition—the kabbalistic Tree of Life. Leet shows that the Kabbalah and its central diagram enshrine a key to the purpose of the cosmos, a key that has vast implications for modern physics and cosmology. She takes what has always been considered a two-dimensional model of the famous kabbalistic tree of anthropos and insists on a three-dimensional projection more common to other hermetic traditions. In a final synthesis she envisions a culmination in which the universe and its divine child, perfected humanity, achieve that unification of the finite and infinite that has ever been the secret doctrine of the Kabbalah.

The acceptance of The Universal Kabbalah for publication turned out to be a moment of glory and grace for Leonora Leet, for to her this book marked the acme of her life’s work. Reviewers of her writings, which included those well connected to the world of theoretical kabbalistic study as well as practical therapists and mystics, noted the depth and significance of her ideas. Gerald Epstein, M.D., director of the American Institute for Mental Imagery, commented: . . . a daring and innovative exposition of the secret doctrines and practices of traditional Jewish mysticism uniquely applicable to the present.

Nevertheless, I encouraged her to return to her old familiar archive to reconcile the more scientific aspects of her highly technical sacred science and the inner connection of longing and desire that she so eloquently described in her literary work.

In her literary scholarship there were subtle similarities as yet to be unfolded between what she evoked in her analysis of mythic themes running through literature and Kabbalah. She was interested, for instance, in the characters of the unconditional lover and the warrior, both of whom were involved with the conversion of love into power, albeit with a difference: The lover’s selfless concern to empower the powerless diffuses his or her power, while the self-possession of the spiritual knight concentrates it. It is this concentration that is needed to direct spiritual power into manifestation, a concentration that depends upon possessing rather than losing the self. Such possession is also different from the self-confidence of the ordinary hero, for where the power of the merely brave warrior relies on his faith, that of the master warrior is recognized as a product of his own consciousness. He is not dependent on but is the maker of his moods. In possessing himself, he has brought all the levels of his being into the light and control of his conscious will. Such power is certainly formidable and, if placed in the service of a diseased will, can become most dangerous.

Viewed through her kabbalistic work, in the fight between those whose use of power is good and those whose use is for evil, the good master will always win because the right that goodness adds to power will make it the more attractive. The good master will be more relaxed and graceful in his manner, will exude an air of freedom exhilarating to all, offering the double attraction of power and beauty in one fully realized being. Where the evil or false master is coercive, whipping his followers into an obsessional frenzy, the good and true master is liberating, lifting his followers into creative joy. Offered a choice between two such masters, few would choose to serve the egomaniac. But the choice is more often between the modes of power presented by the diseased master and the Ruach path of the heart, and in such a contest it is the warped master of evil who will win. For he offers a more direct source of power than does love, one already mature rather than the seedling offered by unconditional love. Because any form of power is vitalizing, even coercive and destructive power will draw adherents where there is a power vacuum, such warped vitality being predictable to none insofar as it can organize otherwise dissipated energies into the production of some form of nourishment.

It is not love that can fight such evil power but only a form of equally masterful power ranged on the side of holiness. And this is true not only of a fallen world but of the whole structure of cosmic consciousness. To win the spiritual battle on the side of right, the devotees of spiritual love must be ready to accept power so that they may perfect the world as they perfect themselves on the Neshamah path of power. This is particularly important for the work of the Tikkun that, like power, is future-oriented. The master in the arena of power is always figuring a few moves ahead and working with future probabilities. And his or her ultimate concern is for some form of divine communion without loss of self. The concept of the Tikkun has been primarily associated with the forward thrust of spiritual evolution, that reconstitution by which the cosmos, like humans, can become twice-born, and it requires the spiritual mastery of the uses of power with which we have here been concerned.

I looked foward to Leonora Leet’s scholarship to come: her bringing to bear on the works of classical English literature her experience with and understanding of the Western esoteric tradition. But it was not to be. She has left that kind of connection for us, her students, to continue.

JULIAN UNGAR-SARGON, M.D., PH.D.

Note from the Publisher

Throughout a lifetime of work, every publisher has the opportunity to engage with an author who is indomitable in spirit, fortitude, exactitude, and purpose. Such an author was Leonora Leet. When she first submitted her manuscript to us in 1994, we were stunned by the enormity of the task she had set before herself and convinced her to allow us to release portions of her work in several smaller books, each of which would have a more narrowly defined topic and focus. This request resulted in our publication of her first three books on the Kabbalah: Renewing the Covenant: A Kabbalistic Guide to Jewish Spirituality (1999), The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah: Recovering the Key to Hebraic Sacred Science (1999), and The Kabbalah of the Soul: The Transformative Psychology and Practices of Jewish Mysticism (2003).

It had always been Leonora’s hope and desire to publish The Universal Kabbalah as her first and definitive work on this topic, but as with all innovative thinkers, her ideas were still growing and expanding in complexity and depth. We now have the pleasure and honor to see with this publication her complete opus brought to fruition. This book represents her more than twenty years of study and synthesis in deciphering the sacred geometry of kabbalistic cosmology derived from the Tree of Life and her own geometric model, the Sabbath Star Diagram. In order for readers to grasp the full measure of the progression of her new scientific model of the laws of cosmic manifestation, some of the foundational components that were explored in her previous books will by necessity appear in The Universal Kabbalah as well.

Preface

Thomas More expressed my situation best when, in detailing the professional and family obligations that had left only stolen time for his writing, he said: "Slowly, therefore, because this time is but little, yet finally, because this time is something, I have finished Utopia. . . ." My similar reasons for the thirteen years it has taken me to complete the writing and illustration of my work and the following thirteen years to prepare it by stages for publication may also explain, if not excuse, its length. For had I been able to complete at least the writing of this project in one unbroken block of time, it would doubtlessly have been the simpler work I had originally envisioned. But the vacation periods and even two research leaves were never long enough to do more than individual sections of the work, and the intervening periods of teaching left me just enough time to research yet another unexpected area suggested either by my own ongoing analysis or the developments in a variety of related fields, with the result that the work expanded with the ever richer complexity that also characterizes its subject. This work centers on a self-generating geometric construction I have named the Sabbath Star Diagram that, in addition to the interesting combination of predictable and unpredictable elements that endows each of its regular expansions with unique qualities, also seems expressive of cosmological meanings, particularly those of the Jewish esoteric tradition known as the Kabbalah.

It was in June of 1978 that I stumbled upon the discovery of the geometric construction I would name the Sabbath Star Diagram that was to demand my unremitting efforts at that joint labor of construction and cosmological interpretation I have named the Science of Expressive Form. But when I had completed the more creative part of this labor in 1991, the main analysis of the Sabbath Star Diagram had become overgrown with a flora of supplementary analyses that more than doubled the size of what I had earlier thought of as a single-volume work, bringing it to three volumes totaling 2,600 pages. Because it appeared that important supplementary chapters would be buried under the sheer weight of the total work, I decided to present in independent books those related analyses that could be largely separated from the Sabbath Star Diagram model, the clearer focus thus given the themes of these studies compensating for their loss of the larger cosmological context for their reflections they had previously enjoyed in terms of this geometric model. These first supplementary analyses were published in 1999 by Inner Traditions under the titles The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah: Recovering the Key to Hebraic Sacred Science and Renewing the Covenant: A Kabbalistic Guide to Jewish Spirituality. But though preceding and hopefully arousing interest in the foundational work now finally appearing, it should be realized that all of these prior analyses were inspired by various aspects of the geometry and interpretation of the Sabbath Star Diagram contained in the present work. This is particularly true of my most significant contribution to an understanding of the history of the Jewish mystical tradition, that secret doctrine of the Kabbalah whose key only emerged from certain mathematical features of the seventh expansion of the Sabbath Star Diagram.

As these earlier published analyses had, however, lost the references to parts of The Universal Kabbalah on which some of them had depended, it has become necessary to present again a portion of the material appearing in these earlier books, leading to some duplication in the present volume. This is particularly true with much that is to follow in this preface as well as with the first two chapters of this book, the latter of which appeared in only slightly modified form as chapter 6 in, and the former as the preface of, The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah. This original introduction to my three-volume work is a necessary foundation for the present volume, and all of the repeated material from The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah is presented again to validate two main points of this analysis, the ancient Hebraic association with the hexagram and the long history of a seven-world cosmic model in the history of Jewish thought, the subjects of chapter 1. Even more important is the subject of chapter 2, the elementary derivation of the Sabbath Star Diagram from that of the Tree of Life. Small portions of chapter 5 and chapter 9 also appeared previously in Renewing the Covenant.

My third book published by Inner Traditions, The Kabbalah of the Soul: The Transformative Psychology and Practices of Jewish Mysticism, which appeared in 2003, focused primarily on the modeling of kabbalistic soul psychology and contained both supplementary analyses and analyses directly modeled on the less-expanded forms of the Sabbath Star Diagram that could be separated from this original and more precise model. Chapters 3, 4, and 8 contain material from chapter 2 of The Kabbalah of the Soul, and chapters 5 and 9 reprise material from chapter 3 of that same book. The solution for separating these analyses from the modeling of the Sabbath Star Diagram that had originally inspired their distinctive features was to invent a new theoretical three-dimensional cosmic model that could be imaginatively projected and would contain the essential characteristics on which much of the original analyses had been based, a model that proved to have its own power to illuminate this material. But in adapting the material appearing in chapters 2 and 3 of The Kabbalah of the Soul to the new model developed in its first chapter, some regularizing of these analyses was necessary to fit them to this new model, and so there are some minor inconsistencies between these adapted analyses and the original forms that will be met here. Unlike the supplementary analyses in its fourth and fifth chapters, those in its second and third chapters could not be cut from the present volume since they are essential to both the geometric development of the Sabbath Star Diagram and its primary modeling of the Kabbalah. But readers of The Kabbalah of the Soul should be interested to see how precisely its analyses are supported by the geometry of the Sabbath Star Diagram. In general, the principle that I adopted as to what portion of these earlier published studies to include and what to cut from the present book was, in the interest of reducing the excessive size of this volume, to cut everything not germane to the just stated purpose of this work, its new modeling of the Kabbalah by the successive expansions of the Sabbath Star Diagram, especially if such material could be referred to in notes. Thus the material appearing in chapters 2 and 3 of The Kabbalah of the Soul is both richer in detail and poorer in the precise modeling that can benefit by comparison with the original form of these analyses appearing in this book.

To aid readers of my previous books in navigating through the varied streams of analysis in the present work, I have added footnotes at the beginning of repeated sections advising them of these repetitions. But for analyses integral to the development of the Sabbath Star Diagram as a geometric model for kabbalistic cosmology and soul psychology, I have felt it would not be fair to new readers of my work to simply relegate such material to note references. I hope the use of footnotes to alert readers to material repeated largely verbatim from earlier books will help those readers familiar with these works in progressing through this book as well as interest new readers in exploring the often richer development of parallel passages in these other books.

The following volume develops a new form of experimental geometry that can equally provide a powerful new model for the Kabbalah and also one for complexity theory and for the various other fields modeled in the appendices. In terms of the Kabbalah, the construction elements of the Sabbath Star Diagram are correlated with its outer cosmological stages, and the matrix produced within each diagram expansion by these construction elements is correlated with the inner soul levels corresponding to these cosmic worlds. The construction elements are the subject of part 2, which provides a new scientific model for kabbalistic cosmology, whose seven dimensions or worlds can integrate the past orientation of the Zohar and the future orientation of Luria with biblical cosmology; and its third part, whose subject is the expanding matrix, provides a new model for the multileveled spiritual psychology of the Kabbalah. Finally, part 4 takes its experimental geometric model beyond the circumference of the Lurianic cosmos in a numerical extrapolation to infinity that finally leaves the Sabbath Star Diagram behind to develop the Sabbath Star System that can provide a fuller model for complexity theory with its own cosmological implications.

As rewarding to me as the final publication of this foundational basis of my previous books and the work I consider the most important is the opportunity it provides to give thanks to the various people whose help through my long years of work on this project has been especially appreciated. My discovery in 1978 of a key to the geometric derivation of the kabbalistic Tree of Life Diagram, the major cosmological diagram of Western esoteric thought, was partly the result of my initial exposure to Pythagorean geometry two years earlier. It was in the fall of 1976 that I took a course in such geometry with Robert Lawlor, this at a place called Lindisfarne, an institution of esoteric learning founded by William Irwin Thompson that flourished for two and a half years in New York City. Lawlor’s explanations of the meaningfulness of geometric forms and processes both inspired me and gave a foundation for what would become the major work of my life, and I am most indebted to him. His parting advice to me was that I do actual geometric drawing. And so it was that on a fateful June day in 1978 I attempted to diagram the generation of the Platonic solids in a manner more symmetrical than the various versions I had seen. I need not elaborate on the details of that construction because its true importance for me was something quite unexpected, the fact that the Tree of Life Diagram with almost all of its paths popped out at me from the particular two-dimensional arrangement of these solids I had made. Though there seemed no way to generate the missing lines on the basis of my original Platonic solids diagram, I realized that this could be done if the various orthogonally drawn solids were first redrafted in the simplified form of the expanding series of hexagrams, Stars of David, they could be seen to suggest. It was the Tree of Life Diagram, then, that finally led me both to the form of the hexagram and the modes of its expansion by which not only its own geometric derivation could be explained but also the basis on which the reciprocally derived Sabbath Star Diagram could become self-generating.

By the time I made this initial geometric discovery in June of 1978, my exploration of various Western and Eastern esoteric traditions had finally brought me to the Kabbalah, with its strange, seemingly arbitrary diagram, and it was the convergence of these two streams of sacred geometry in my own awareness that enabled me to recognize both the fact and the importance of my chance discovery of this geometric key to the Tree of Life Diagram. By the end of that summer, my initial study of the Sabbath Star Diagram and of the Kabbalah convinced me that there was a book I had to write on this association of a particular cosmology with a self-generating geometric construction. Though I was not the scholar of the Kabbalah that I was of Renaissance English literature, my skills as a literary critic proved to be just the hermeneutical tools needed to do the mode of modern kabbalistic geometry I have called the Science of Expressive Form. And the structure of the Sabbath Star Diagram, as I successively generated each of its regular expansions, provided the guideposts necessary to give direction to my exploration of the Kabbalah, enabling me to find those cosmological concepts that could be precisely modeled by the geometry of this diagram in a way that seemed mutually validating.

As I began the serious study of the Kabbalah, I sought a teacher, and I almost immediately found myself in the classes that Aryeh Kaplan was conducting in his Brooklyn home on the Sefer Yetzirah. Kaplan approached the Kabbalah not only as the scholar he assuredly was but as a Kabbalist, one who believes it to be an ancient though developing tradition that enshrines a coherent key to cosmic functioning, a sacred science whose rigor can be brought into coherence with modern secular science. And it is just such a Kabbalist that I was to become. Not only did Kaplan’s sense of the meaningfulness of the Kabbalah have a profound influence upon me, but he was also of immense help to me both directly and indirectly, pointing me to the textual sources of certain materials that I needed and, in his works, providing me with a wealth of newly translated texts that, however differently I may have interpreted them from his own surrounding commentary, became the basis of much of my own analysis of this tradition. My indebtedness to Kaplan is apparent in the multitude of my quotations from his works. I am also grateful to Seymour Applebaum, a psychiatrist and fellow student in Kaplan’s classes, for having made certain of his posthumous manuscripts available to me.

Of the various other individuals for whose support and aid I am particularly grateful, the first I wish to acknowledge is Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a major figure in the world of Jewish spiritual renewal, whose great heart immediately intuited the nature and importance of my project and gave it his unstinting support. His high and extended recommendation of the manuscript was of especially great help to me in finding a publisher for my unusual work. Through most of the long years that I have been engaged on this work, I have also been most beholden to my best friend, Esse Chasin, whose subtle knowledge of Hebrew was a treasure I could always call upon at need. More recently, I have been much indebted to Dr. Julian Ungar-Sargon for his enthusiastic support of my work and the help he has given me in understanding the Hebrew subtleties of certain talmudic and kabbalistic texts, for being, in truth, my chavrusa, study companion, though unfortunately at long distance. Finally, I would like to thank my mathematician colleague Maurice Machover for sharing with me something of his knowledge of the latest developments in science and especially for the most valuable contribution he made to the final numerical extrapolation of the diagram, in the culminating chapter of this work, by discerning in my calculations the workings of a formula through which the expansion of the diagram could more easily be taken to infinity.

There are a few additional scholars whose personal suggestions or comments to me I have acknowledged in notes, most prominently Stanley Krippner, Martin Samuel Cohen, and Gerald Epstein. I would also now like to acknowledge the following individuals for their various appreciated contributions to this work: Darren P. Rosa for the art work in figure 10.4; James White for an early interpretative suggestion; Robert Stein for helping me to crystallize certain ideas; John Anthony West, Maia Gregory, Richard Falk, Deborah Foreman, and, most crucially, Gerald Epstein for their help in securing a publisher for my works.

Of the many individuals at Inner Traditions who have variously helped with the production of my books for this press, I would like especially to single out Jon Graham for his sensitive appreciation of my efforts and unstinting support of them through the more than six years of my involvement with this press, years during which I twice revised what was originally a two-volume version of this work until it finally achieved its present superior form that best suited it for publication; and for their equally sensitive editorial overseeing of my work, I would like to express my deep appreciation to Cannon Labrie, Jeanie Levitan, and Elaine Sanborn, Cannon particularly for his careful and knowledgeable line editing of my previous two books as well as of this; and finally I must thank Peri Champine for her creativity in designing the beautiful covers of my previous two books and this last and most important work.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge my great debt to St. John’s University for its generous support of my research, including various research leaves and course reductions, and to give special thanks for the support given me by former Graduate Dean and Vice President Paul T. Medici, the late Fr. Thomas Hoar, C.M., and my former chairperson, Angela Belli. I would also like to give special thanks to the Word Processing Center at St. John’s University for the priority that was given to my enormous and constantly revised manuscript in an earlier three-volume format and to that best of typists, Kathy Leander. Perhaps even more important was the help given me on the computer graphics for this work by the Faculty Support Center, most substantially by its former director, Fr. Frank W. Sacks, C.M., who not only taught me how to use the Superpaint program on the Macintosh computer but, recognizing my need for a triangular grid on which to draft my diagrams with greater accuracy than the Superpaint program could otherwise afford, laboriously constructed such grids as could be hidden in the final printing for the fourth-through seventh-diagram expansions, the grids provided in the text for the fourth and sixth expansions being largely his own work. Also of great help to me has been another of its former directors, Robert Lejeune, particularly for enlisting the aid of a systems analyst at the University Computer Center, Paul Karagianis, who programmed the IBM mainframe computer with the formula devised by Dr. Mackover for generating an infinite periodic decimal out of a central diagram function, one that, taken to 6,300 formula iterations at 1,500 decimal places each, provided the raw data for the final numerical extrapolation of the diagram developed in the culminating chapter of this volume. This final development of the Sabbath Star System into a model for complexity theory is one that would never have been possible without the computer technology and resources made available to me through the university during the final phase of its initial manuscript preparation, 1989–91. I would also like to give thanks to all those at the university E Studio who have recently helped me in drafting some new black and white figures to complement the color diagrams that could not appear directly in the text, particularly Rammy Joudeh for all his efforts at finding a version of Superpaint for me that enabled me to open up and work on my old files and for his other invaluable aid that made these figures possible.

Two points about my stylistic practice should also be noted. The first involves the practice I adopted with regard to Hebrew words. Whether wisely or not, I decided not to italicize the multitude of such words appearing in my text and yet to give them the slighter distinction of capitalizing their initial letters, a compromise to be sure. I also decided not to note in most cases the editions from which I took classical literary quotations, as in the quotation beginning this preface.

There are a few final comments I would like to make on the intentions and hopes I have concerning this work. The attempt of this work to validate the substance of the Kabbalah in terms of the precise symbolic expression it can give to the archetypal truth of a self-generating geometric model is one that goes counter to the direction of academic scholarship on the Kabbalah, whose primary concern is with the circumstances of kabbalistic texts and schools in terms largely of cultural history. For though I have both made use of this research and will hopefully contribute something to it at various points in my analysis, my primary concern has been to reveal as best I could the vital meaning of this ancient esoteric lore and to synthesize its various aspects into one coherent structure of cosmic understanding. It is a structure that I also hope will interest scientists as a new model for complex systems. And while I understand that my previously published studies might more readily draw readers interested in broader theoretical and practical concerns and wary of even such a nonspecialist approach to geometric models as here essayed, I also hope that, if not sooner, then finally, their greatest appreciation will be for the Sabbath Star Diagram, whose very geometric modeling may not only serve to validate kabbalistic cosmology and soul psychology through the meaningful structure it can impart to them, but further provide the needed new paradigm that can synthesize sacred and secular science into a coherent cosmology acceptable to the modern mind.

CHAPTER ONE

The Star and the Tree

HEBRAIC AND PYTHAGOREAN SACRED SCIENCE

At the heart of most sacred traditions lies a holy diagram in which the knowing can read a record of cosmological history, the ritual use of such forms of illumination attesting to the understanding, long before Kepler, that God forever geometrizes. In the Zohar, the central work of the Jewish mystical tradition broadly designated as the Kabbalah, allusion is made at the very beginning to a diagram underlying all creation, a diagram whose existence in the supernal thought is said to have been first disclosed through the direct revelation of Elijah:

This mystery was only revealed one day when I was at the seashore. Elijah . . . said to me, "Rabbi, the word was concealed with the blessed Holy One, and he revealed it in the Academy on High. Here it is:

‘When Concealed of all Concealed verged on being revealed, it produced at first a single point, which ascended to become thought. Within, it drew all drawings, graved all engravings, carving within the concealed holy lamp a graving of one hidden design, holy of holies, a deep structure emerging from thought. . . . called by no name . . . Through this mystery, the universe exists.’"¹

The fact that this most hidden design is said to be called by no name suggests that it is not the famous Tree of Life Diagram, a detailed geometric design that forms the basis of most later kabbalistic thought and that would already have been known by the author or final redactor of the Zohar in thirteenth-century Spain. It is just such a more hidden diagram that is the subject of this work, one that was discovered through the key of the Tree of Life Diagram and that, because it features a unique configuration of seven hexagrams, or Stars of David, has been named the Sabbath Star Diagram. In its form and derivation it serves to combine the two major geometric expressions of the Kabbalah—the Star of David and the Tree of Life Diagram, the star and the tree—whose symbolic association spans the millennia from the cartouche proclaiming the pharaoh to be king of Lower Egypt² to the decorative motifs identified with the Christmas celebration, an association that seems to express the universal spiritual understanding that all that grows on earth is fertilized from above. Initially constructed from the mysterious arrangement of hexagrams required to explain the geometric derivation of the Tree of Life Diagram, this underlying cosmological construction not only provides a geometric demonstration of the principles of kabbalistic cosmology but a geometric model applicable both to kabbalistic concepts of the soul and modern scientific theories, a model that lends support to the esoteric belief that matter and spirit are homologous structures of a coherent cosmos.

Unlike the seemingly arbitrary arrangement of the Tree of Life Diagram,³ the Sabbath Star Diagram becomes a self-generating geometric construction following its own discoverable laws of expansion. Whatever may be the source of the Tree of Life Diagram, it can, in fact, be argued that its purpose was not only to model the esoteric cosmology identified with the Kabbalah but to serve as an initiatic key to unlocking this more complex but also more intelligible geometric construction, one whose geometric processes appear to encode with uncanny precision the archetypal principles of cosmic development. Whether or not the Tree of Life Diagram has ever been previously used to unlock this more hidden diagram, it enabled me to discover both the geometric laws of its construction and the methodology appropriate to interpret its implications.

As shown in chapter 6 of The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah,a the Tree of Life Diagram is not simply an arrangement of various circles and the lines connecting them, its parts are named and their spatial arrangements given an associative mythological interpretation. Thus the kabbalistic geometry of the Tree is distinguished by what shall later be shown to be a quasi-Talmudic approach to geometric form as something very much like a literary text whose meanings must be grasped not through logical demonstration but mythological association.⁴ The question of the methodology of kabbalistic geometry, the methodology of this work, will be addressed in chapter 2, and it should serve to validate this linguistic method of geometric interpretation, explaining how it is possible to read a geometric form as a sign, to construe its meaning and translate its absolute truth into a secondary order of mythological explanation. For in addition to such use of precise geometric processes to model creation as this chapter will demonstrate can be found in the Zohar as well as in Genesis, the Kabbalah developed its distinctive approach to geometry in which form could not be separated from cosmological interpretation. It is this method that will be further employed in chapter 2, in which the Sabbath Star Diagram is derived from the key of the Tree of Life Diagram in an elementary version that, though not yet self-generating, is expressive at every stage of its development of cosmological implications consistent with the basic principles of kabbalistic cosmology, here especially its concept of four cosmic worlds.

The remarkable coherence between the Sabbath Star Diagram and the Kabbalah will be the primary focus of this work, as each expansion of the diagram takes us to new worlds and levels of consciousness. In the process, the Kabbalah of the Tree of Life Diagram will be both elucidated and shown to be coherent with the broader Jewish esoteric tradition originating with the Bible. All aspects of this tradition will find their place in the Sabbatical cosmic structure that the seven expansions of the Sabbath Star Diagram can so well model, a structure that derives from Genesis 1 and can contain both the four worlds of emanation of the Kabbalah developed in fourteenth-century Spain and the future worlds of rectification projected by the normative Messianic tradition as well as the Lurianic Kabbalah of sixteenth-century Palestine. The development of such a seven-dimensional cosmic model wholly interpreted in terms of Jewish esoteric cosmology and its correlated concept of soul levels should contribute to the new understanding of the Kabbalah now emerging, providing the scientific foundation for the Sabbatical cosmology presented in my earlier books that was derived from the geometric modeling now to be developed.⁵ In addition, this work both represents an approach to the interpretation of geometric form that is new to modern mathematical science and also a new form of experimental geometry that in its fully self-generated form can provide a model for the theory of complex systems.

But however wide this focus may be, encompassing all aspects of the Kabbalah and its fuller tradition, it never ranges too far from its geometric base. For it is geometry in general, and the geometry of the Sabbath Star Diagram in particular, that can provide the meaningful structure to cosmological and related areas of speculation that seems to partake of absolute truth, the truth inherent in the processes and forms of geometric construction. That geometry is particularly expressive of cosmological meaning was understood as well by the Greeks, Plato developing his cosmology on the basis of the earlier geometric insights of Pythagoras. As such a core of geometrically encoded knowledge is to be found in the whole of the Western esoteric tradition, including that of the Kabbalah, further consideration should first be given to the reason for the remarkable association of geometry with such philosophy as attempts to bring the precise workings of matter and spirit together in one comprehensive explanation.

If geometry holds a central position in Western esoteric thought, it is because of its unique ability to supply an explanation, a blueprint, of those laws of existence that seem to apply equally to the processes of immaterial thought and to the material objects of such thought, an explanation of how consciousness and the world of material solids can be but different aspects of a coherent cosmos ordered by intelligible functions. Average liberally educated people of today have, however, so lost touch with the discipline of geometry that, even if interested in the Jewish branch of esoteric mysticism, they will not normally be attracted to its geometric aspect and, if they are, will feel themselves ill prepared to engage in its study. To overcome such hesitancy, there can be no more inspiring introduction to the spiritual importance of geometric constructs than the lines of the Romantic poet Wordsworth as he meditates on the special attraction of geometric science:

With Indian awe and wonder, ignorance pleased

With its own struggles, did I meditate

On the relation those abstractions bear

To Nature’s laws . . . there, recognized

A type, for finite natures, of the one

Supreme Existence, the surpassing life,

Which . . . hath the name of God. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

In verity, an independent world,

Created out of pure intelligence.

(THE PRELUDE, 6.115–67)

Though not even a rudimentary knowledge of classical geometry will be necessary to follow the discussions of geometric form and meaning in this text, the reader should come to share something of Wordsworth’s awe at the power of geometry to convey ultimate truths.

It is this unique power of geometry to provide an archetypal explanation of the functioning of cosmic consciousness that explains the long hold its principles and practice have had in all the Western esoteric traditions; and to the extent that the Eastern and Western traditions can be distinguished, it is largely due to the absence or presence of the Pythagorean leaven. Though there would seem to have been a native tradition of Hebraic sacred science, the later kabbalistic tradition was as imbued with Pythagoreanism as the gnostic systems that, like it, were fertilized in the rich spiritual soil of the late Hellenistic period. Indeed, the association of the Jewish esoteric tradition with Pythagoreanism goes even further back. Josephus tells us that the Essenes were Pythagorean;⁶ Philo Judaeus is known to have employed Pythagorean numerology in his biblical exegesis;⁷ and the most noted contemporary scholar of kabbalistic literature, Gershom Scholem, considers the first extant work of the Kabbalah, the Sefer Yetzirah, to have been written as early as the third century C.E. by a Jewish Neo-Pythagorean.⁸

As I proposed in The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah, the Jewish esoteric tradition was schooled in the same sacred sciences as informed the Pythagorean tradition—geometry, harmonics, and number—a proposition that will be demonstrated in the reading of the first chapter of Genesis offered later in this chapter. And this will show that the Hebraic sacred science of this early period, which was probably conserved and developed by the Zadokite priesthood of the Second Temple,⁹ was as sophisticated as its Pythagorean counterpart, despite its different focus. For the key to the ordering of the Genesis creation account will prove to be none other than these same three elements comprising the core understanding of Pythagorean sacred science, that there is a precise and inverse relationship, expressible in numerical ratios, between the length of the string and the frequency of the tonal pitch it will produce when plucked, that geometrical length is convertible into musical sound through an inversion of fixed numerical ratios, one in which the Pythagoreans also saw a more ultimate relationship of space to time, of the limited to the limitless.¹⁰

Evidence has just been noted of the continuous association of the Jewish esoteric tradition with Pythagorean geometry; but before the Renaissance, the geometric content of kabbalistic thought was rendered largely by verbal description or metaphorical allusion. Even the profoundly geometric Sefer Yetzirah gives only verbal directions, and these couched in an obscurity probably meant to be penetrated only by the initiate, for what appears to be the construction of a cosmological diagram. The same obscurity marks the geometric aspect of the Zohar. It is possible, nonetheless, to recognize the Pythagorean quality of geometric description in these two monuments of kabbalistic thought by the primary geometric concepts they employ. As we shall be focusing on Zoharic geometry in the next section, we shall now just briefly note the Pythagorean core of the Sefer Yetzirah.

On one level, the Sefer Yetzirah describes the process of constructing the cube of infinite space. In The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah I provided a full discussion of the Sefer Yetzirah Diagram that not only showed the Sefer Yetzirah to begin with the ascription to language of the same central aspects of Pythagorean sacred science—shape, sound, and number—but a proposed solution of its geometric enigma, one that explains the relationship of the twelve diagonals of the text to the previously defined cube of space and how this relationship permits the cosmic expansion of the cube.¹¹ This matter will be further discussed later in this chapter, it being sufficient at this point simply to observe that the author seems to have derived the structure of his cosmos from contemplation of the mysterious relationship of the diagonal to the side of a cube. This mystery emerges from the fact that when the side of a square is a whole number, such as 1, the diagonal will be the irrational number √2, and that it is this irrational element that provides the square with its potential for growth, the new base through which it can multiply its size. It was the incommensurability of the diagonal to the side that was the great secret the Pythagorean initiate was vowed to keep, not, as generally taught, because this fact destroys the rationality of Pythagorean geometry, but precisely because it is a revelation of the vital necessity of the suprarational, infinite element in all finite structures, that the square root contains a power whose nature is, in truth, unutterable in terms of finite measure and that points to the deepest of cosmic mysteries.¹²

The basic principles of Pythagorean cosmology are contained in Pythagoras’s great mystical symbol, the Tetractys, and because there would seem to be evidence that the Kabbalists of medieval Provence and Spain were practicing geometers with knowledge of this prime Pythagorean symbol, some elucidation of the Tetractys would be helpful. In this symbol, the association of geometry, number, and musical harmonics, which forms the essence of Pythagoras’s sacred science, is graphically presented. Its ordering of ten pebble points in the shape of an equilateral triangle not only provides the numerical ratios of the musical consonant intervals—2:1 of the octave, 3:2 of the fifth, and 4:3 of the fourth—but also a diagram of the emanation of four successive worlds or dimensions:

The single pebble on the top signifies the mathematical point, which represents the first world of unity. The two points on the second line signify the mathematical line that can be drawn between them and represent the second world of duality, of multiplicity. The three points on the third line signify the minimal surface of the triangle, which requires three such points, and are representative of the harmonizing third world. Finally, the four points on the bottom line signify the minimal solid, the four-pointed tetrahedron composed of four equilateral triangles, which represents the fourth world of manifest solids. The addition of the pebbles or dots that make up the four worlds of the point (1), the line (2), the surface (3), and the solid (4), equals the ten points of the Tetractys.

Figure 1.1. The Tetractys

Gershom Scholem has summarized some of the evidence of geometric concepts employed by the medieval Spanish Kabbalists of Gerona:

In the Zohar, as well as in the Hebrew writings of Moses de Leon, the transformation of Nothing into Being is frequently explained by the use of one particular symbol, that of the primordial point. Already the Kabbalists of the Geronese school employed the comparison with the mathematical point, whose motion creates the line and the surface, to illustrate the process of emanation from the hidden cause.¹³

The use by Geronese Kabbalists of the point, line, and surface to illustrate the process of emanation might well indicate a knowledge of the Tetractys. More significant, however, is the emergence of the related concept of four cosmic worlds in such late-thirteenth- and early-fourteenth-century Spanish texts as the Tikkunei Zohar and the Ma’asekhet Atzilut, a subject to be considered more fully near the close of this chapter. The connection of this four worlds concept with that of the ten Sefirot¹⁴ of the Tree of Life Diagram, in the form first appearing in the twelfth century Provençal Sefer ha-Bahir, is one seen and elaborated upon by almost the whole of the later kabbalistic tradition. The pervasiveness of this union of four worlds with ten constituents in this tradition indicates something of the importance it must have accorded to the practice of Pythagorean geometry.

For more than one thousand years, then, from the emergence of the Sefer Yetzirah as early as the third century to the golden age of Spanish Kabbalism in the thirteenth century, there seems to have been some core of geometric practice and understanding in the kabbalistic tradition. Indeed, the continuation of this practice in the later Kabbalah is indicated by the reference to what we know from the science of geometry,¹⁵ made by Chayyim Vital, the chief expounder of the system of cosmology developed in the sixteenth century by Isaac Luria, known as the Ari or lion. Such a practice provides the force of concrete demonstration that can allow the mystic to harmonize his intuitive experience with his rational mind. This is particularly true for the geometric construction of the hexagram, which involves basic geometric processes that can be associated with the primary processes of creation and that we shall see to have a special significance for Jewish esotericism. The next sections of this chapter should explain something of the importance of actual geometric practice to the adepts of Western esoteric mysticism through its study and construction of the hexagram. But first we must consider the problematic relationship of the hexagram to the early history of the Jewish esoteric tradition.

THE HEXAGRAM AND HEBRAIC SACRED SCIENCE

Variously called the Shield of David (Magen David), the Star of David, and Solomon’s Seal, the hexagram has come to be the symbol most identified with the Jewish people. Composed of two oppositely pointed equilateral triangles whose apexes are defined by the six radial arc points of a circle, this six-pointed star is an important esoteric symbol, associated with the heart chakra in Tantric yoga and discovered in the ground plan of Stonehenge.¹⁶ It has long been thought that it was Arabic alchemy that in the West most popularized this symbol of equilibrium between the opposed archetypal forces of fire (the expansive force represented by the upward-pointing triangle) and water (the contractive force represented by the downward-pointing triangle). Since it was only in the early Middle Ages that the hexagram began to be featured prominently in Jewish magical texts and amulets, most modern historians have concluded that it was probably through this Arabic source that the hexagram was most directly transmitted to the medieval Spanish Kabbalists. But since in the Arabic literature employing this symbol the hexagram is normally given a Hebrew derivation through the terms Solomon’s Seal or Shield of David by which it is called,¹⁷ it may well be that there was a continuous association of the Jewish esoteric tradition with this esoteric symbol of David and Solomon that preceded Islam. The Talmudic reference to the hexagram engraved on the seal ring of Solomon¹⁸ supports the possibility of an early association of the hexagram with Jewish esoteric understanding and practice reaching as far back as the biblical period, and this chapter will provide further grounds for such an association.

Gershom Scholem supports the contrary view that the hexagram is not a Jewish symbol.¹⁹ He does admit that this figure and its names Seal of Solomon and Shield of David . . . go back to pre-Islamic Jewish magic,²⁰ but considers that the hexagram had one and only one purpose in its career as magic: to serve as protection against demons.²¹ More allegorical treatment of the hexagram by the few later Jewish authors he cites is set down by him to the use of alchemistic symbolism,²² apparently of Arabic origin. But Raphael Patai, in his important recent work The Jewish Alchemists, has traced a very different history for the alchemical tradition that must cause a major revision of the received opinion concerning the relationship of Jews to alchemy and its hexagram symbol. As he reveals:

The first nonfictitious alchemists of the western world lived, as far as can be ascertained, in Hellenistic Egypt. And the earliest among them was Maria Hebraea, Maria the Hebrew, or Maria the Jewess, for whom our chief source is Zosimus the Panopolitan. Zosimus is the first Greek alchemical author whose actual writings have survived. He lived in Hellenistic Egypt, about 300 C.E. . . .We can thus tentatively assign her to the early third century C.E. at the latest.²³

In the quotations from Maria’s teachings, cosmological principles appear that have been thought to emerge only later in the Kabbalah:

One becomes two, two becomes three, and by means of the third and fourth achieves unity; thus two are but one.. . . Join the male and the female, and you will find what is sought.. . . If you do not render the corporeal substances incorporeal, and the incorporeal substances corporeal, and if you do not make the two bodies one, nothing of the expected will be produced.. . . She [Maria] said: The philosopher (Pseudo-) Democritus said . . . ‘Transform nature, and make the spirit which is hidden inside this body come out. . . . Destroy the body, and make it become water, and extract that which is in it.’. . . The ‘water’ which I have mentioned is an angel, and descends from the sky, and the earth accepts it on account of its [the earth’s] moistness. The water of the sky is held by the water of the earth.²⁴

Maria Hebraea reveals alchemy to be a sacred science much like the more theoretical sacred sciences of geometry, harmonics, and number, the precise procedures of metallurgy, the first human technology, being studied and valued not only for their mundane usefulness but for what they can reveal of