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The 32 Paths



בשלשימ ושתימ נתיבות פליאות חכמה הקק יה ... וברא את עולמו

In Thirty and Two Paths of Mystical Wisdom Engraved Yah*... And Created The Universe



So begins that runaway Bestseller of the Ages, the Sepher Yetzirah, the brief enigmatic handbook of the Formation of the Universe, or construction of a Golem, neither nor and/or both and more.

But why 32? Why not 156, or 165, or 247, or Six Hundred, Three Score and Six? What are these Paths NThIBVTh (868)? What's the deal?

Ostensibly the reasoning is that the 32 Paths are comprised of the the numbers 1 - 10 (the Decad, base unit of the most common and prevalent mathematical symbolic system, inherited from the Ancientest of Ancient Egyptians, and because fingers), referred to in the book as Sephiroth (enumerations) of nothingness (BLIMH 87), and of the 22 letters of the Hebrew Alphabet.

Or, could it be that 32 written as numeral-letters in Hebrew is LB לב, meaning "Heart". In times Medieval, the heart was considered not only the seat of the body and soul, but of the mind as well. The center of centers.

Or is it that the Torah, the five books given unto Moishe via ardenti rubo - the undeniable heart of Judaism as a whole - begins with the Beth (2) of BRAShITh 913 and ends with the Lamed (30) of IShRAL 541 some 79,847 words later? (Or even that the two tablets containing ten injuctions - one would assume five each - mirrors 25... 32? (Though in that case, one wonders what the meaning of the first set would be)). The SY quite clearly describes the Universe as a five-D hypercube, and as every one knows, those have 32 corners...

Is it the 31 nerves radiating from the spine and the brain sitting on top? The number of teeth?

The standard Kabbalistic explanation is that 32 mirrors the number of times that the word ALHIM (Elohim, God, or Gods - 86) appears in the first Chapter of Genesis - the part about the first Creation. In Gen 1 (we are on good terms, so I abbreviate) if you include the first line (In the beginning Created Elohim....) with the other 9 times Alhim "says" and stuff appears, there are 10 utterances - and indeed there are some kabbalists that translate the word Sephiroth as "utterances" rather than "enumerations". The other 22 times are the total of the 3 times Alhim "made" something, the 7 times our plucky creator-entity(ies) "saw" the stuff he/she/they had made (and, damn, 6 times of 7 they were good!) and then the 12 times that Alhim hovered, or called, placed, blessed, or created Mankind in their image or whatnot... you know, the yujhe. These demote the letters of the alphabet, and the divisions of those letters as spelled out (hah!) in the pages of that skinny tome.

Then, some 1000 years later give or take, in the powerhouse sequel, the Bahir (though some say that the idea had been passed around and received by way of an extremely secret oral tradition called QBLH 137), the basic framework of the SY was rearranged into the Form of a Tree... which through innumerable remakes evolved into the general forms we see today. A tree with 10 Sephiroth and 22 connecting Letters, which, collectively, are known as the 32 Paths of Wisdom.

These are the 32 Paths:

There might be a question for some of you that this is not order that is normally given in most books on Qabalah. That is because it is not. This is intentional. There is a rhyme to this reason...

Oh yeah. And then there's Daath.




*Yah (IH 15) of course is the God name of the second Sephira, Chokmah (ChKMH 73) which has the meaning of "Wisdom". Being second, this Sephirah is known as "Beginning".....