Tree of life

Let's talk about the rank, astrology, and element of the Knight of Wands.

And I think we'll also add in a bit this time about the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

First of all, rank.

In the Rider–Waite-Smith tarot, knights present as masculine, and they are the next rank up from the pages.

Always have, and always will.

Okay.

And now let's talk about one more correspondence which is kind of new for us here on the podcast, and that is the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

I haven't talked a ton about Kabbalah on the show because it's pretty in the weeds, and also because the term Kabbalah itself needs some unpacking.

the Essenes would pray in the evening to the father, and then in the morning to the mother.

And this image that I'm looking at, listeners, is really, to me, very similar to the Kabbalistic tree of life.

What I love about this is that the father is the light, something that is out of this world, and then the mother is the divine within this world, within matter.

And they understood the divinity of both of those things and brought them together.

I care way less about settling every historical claim in the Essene material than I do about what follows from that possibility, because again and again Anne returns to Yeshua as an exemplar.

the essenes and the materials she's working with understand jesus as someone who had gone way further in his spiritual development and could show other people what a human being might be capable of following someone like that makes a demand on you it's easy to admire someone like that worship can be easy too Looking at the qualities you admire in someone and asking what it would require of you to develop them in yourself is something else entirely.

You can read Jung for 20 years, study Gnosticism, memorize the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, know every correspondence in a tarot deck.

But if none of that changes how you behave when someone irritates you or how you speak to your child or how you treat someone with less power than you or whether you remain present with another person when there's absolutely nothing in it for you, then I'm not really sure what all that knowledge is for.

And I think he was talking about the AO with this particular statement, but he was talking about the middle pillar and how there's like really advanced techniques for the middle pillar that are like in the higher degrees that are like, immaculate like amazing techniques and are really powerful he spoke really highly of it

yeah the metal pillar is the metal pillar is definitely okay so the how familiar are you guys with the tree of life the separate yes or no

Um, I mean, we just did an episode on it, but not, it was more so the, the tree of the trees of life throughout all the different cultures and stuff like that.

So Yidrisil and, uh, the, the, the Jewish mystical tree and a bunch of other ones, but yeah.

I

mean, I think Yggdrasil is more so, you know, talking about the distinctive different realms of reality and less about maybe mystical workings, but I could be wrong.

So the Sephiroth, the Tree of Life in the Hermetic Kabbalism, that's going to be basically like a map for the universe in general, the macrocosm, but it also can be attributed to you, the microcosm.

And so when you're doing the middle pillar, those spheres that I just mentioned right now, that's going to be the middle pillar, pretty much, of the Tree of Life.

Both of those phrases that are on the Great Seal of the United States of America are 13 letters.

If you take the Kabbalah Tree of Life, There's something that Freemasons learn how to draw, and it's called Metatron's Cube.

And Metatron's Cube is interesting because it has all of the platonic solids in it.

So it's a pure geometry exercise when you're learning how to draw it.

But it has this weird benefit, and that is that if you take the Kabbalah Tree of Life, complete with the 11th Seraphim, the circles on a Kabbalistic tree of life are called sephiroth.

And there's a 10-sephiroth tree of life, which is for the profane, and then there's a sacred version of it that has a secret 11th sephiroth.

But if you take the tree of life and just looking at it, and there's all of this lore that goes with each one of the each one of the circles represents a certain kind of consciousness.

And it's a bunch of, to me, it's a bunch of mumbo jumbo.

Yeah.

So Archangel Raziel is one of the, I think there's seven archangels that are mentioned in the Kabbalah Tree of Life.

Now, I went to Catholic school from elementary, kindergarten, up to junior high.

So I only knew this angel, Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael.

As we explained in previous articles, our primary reward is to obtain the desire to bestow, called reflected light.

As it is said in the general preface to the Tree of Life, the whole reward that we hope for is the reflected

light.

Therefore, if the desire to bestow is called the light, then this deficiency, when one sees he does not have the power to bestow, is called a vessel.

Eventually, the initiate progressed towards higher levels associated with the deeper mystical knowledge.

One of the most important symbols was the Tree of Life from Jewish Kabbalah.

The Tree of Life provided a symbolic map of existence.

It contained 10 spheres known as Sephiroth connected by paths.

Golden Dawn used the Tree of Life as a framework for organizing enormous amounts of occult information.

Planets could be associated with particular spheres, tarot cards could be connected with paths, Hebrew letters could be incorporated, elements could be incorporated, and astrology.

And suddenly, what appeared to be a complete separate occult system, become part of one enormous symbolic machine.