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"... the paths which connect the tenth Sephira, Malkuth, with the other nine higher Sephiroth. The letters Tau, Shin, and Qoph make the word Quesheth, a bow, the rainbow of promise..."

- The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the Outer Ritual for 1 = 10 (Grade of Zelator)

The paths leading from Malkuth...

The phrase rolled around in my head. I had been staring (at this point quite blindly) at a glyph of the Tree of Life - the Golden Dawn version once again - one of many in the scattered papers adorning what I presumed to be my desk, far underneath. Crumpled sketches, aborted starts, and mishapen ends trailed off to lay dejectedly near the bin in the corner - a testament to wasted hours of fruitless work and poor aim.

I had been trying to make a "Better" Tree of Life - the framework of Kabbalistic Sephiroth and Hebrew letters that underlies a large chunk of modern ceremonial magic. I was taking as inspiration the attempts of Charles Stanfield Jones, Frater Achad to use his adopted moniker, to improve on the arrangement of the Tree that was the backbone of the Golden Dawn hierarchical graded system. That he earned nothing but Crowley's disdain and eventual expulsion from the Order meant only to me that he had been on the right track - a well-aimed Molotov cocktail of anarchic fervor in the face of a rigid control structure. Or, he was just going insane due to his Oath of the Abyss, a meglomaniacal fit of pique... either way, it interested me.

At first I had experimented with differing physical arrangements - the positioning of the 10 Sephiroth. Rather than the more-or-less regular descending trigrams of the "classical" Trees, I tried starting with Kether at the bottom and working up - forming a "trunk" that split into two (Chokmah and Binah) and then various arrangements of seven "branches" for the rest. Attempts at connecting the 22 letters of the Hebrew Alphabet to this monstrosity were tried, deemed lacking, and rejected. I then gave up on the arborial motif completely and tried an arrangement in the shape of an Aleph, with Tav at the center and the 20 remaining letters in angled arms, the Sephiroth being more implied by the interesections of angles, center and circumference. A good idea, but really just ended up looking like a swastika (definitely not what I was going for). A new candidate for the bin! He shoots! The ball arcs towards the net, the crowd cheers madly, the fate of the game riding on this one shot... and... a miss! The shot goes wide, the buzzer goes off, the game is lost. A chorus of boos follows the team off the floor, relegated to the status of also-rans, the season is over. They have lost.

The paths leading from Malkuth...

Next I experimented with more "traditional" Hebrew Kabbalistic arrangements. I had just recently received the Sefer Yetzirah, and while not descrbing a Tree per se, the divisions of the letters in that book fall naturally into the three horizontals, seven verticals and twelve diagonals of the standard Tree letter-path arrangements. To be honest though, it didn't really do much for me. I didn't know at that time enough about the book, or the divisions of letters, or what any of that really meant or was supposed to mean, or even if it was intended to be meaningful. Scatch marks in the sand, devoid of semantic import. [ed. note - See Trees of Life 1 for a discussion of the divisions of the alphabet.]

I did however, come up with something I thought was cool. Instead of the right-left, right-left down the tree arrangement of the twelve "Simple" letters - representative of the twelve signs of the zodiac, the twelve tribes of Israel etc. etc. - that seemed to be the standard for a Hebrew arrangement (the Golden Dawn one completely ignores all of this implicit structure), I thought to myself, "if the diagonals are supposed to represent the zodiac, why not treat them as such? The zodiac is a circle, and around and around it goes. Why not place them on the Tree that way?"

So I tried that - taking the twelve simple letters and running them down from the top-right diagonal that connects Kether and Chokmah, down and around and up again to end up at the top-left, connecting Binah back up to Kether. Aries through Pisces, easy-peasy. The circle of the zodiac.

"At Last!" I cried. "Progress!"

And stuck there I remained. That's all I had. A new arrangement of twelve of the letters. Hooray. Ten to go and no meaning, no rhyme nor reason except something something about a circle in the sky, but now on a Tree or something. Whatever. It didn't work.

The paths leading to Malkuth...

... An idea. A light in the darkness. The glimmer of a sketch of a notion of a premise...

The paths leading to Malkuth. Qoph, Shin and Tav. Quesheth, the Rainbow. Symbol of the promise made to Noah by God that he wouldn't freak out and kill everybody again, at least not by drowning them. ("It wasn't you, it was me. Sorry about killing everything on the face of the Earth, I just got so... angry. It totally won't happen again. Here, have a rainbow. See? It's pretty.") Q, Sh, Th. Three letters. They make a word. But also... they have a value...

800. They add up to 800. What if, in some weird way, that had meaning? What if, looked at in a certain way, the paths leading to Malkuth, form an actual aspect or root quality of Malkuth? That their combined value (800) are part of what makes Malkuth Malkuthy? Like so:

And at last I had something interesting! Something that, as far as I know, was New. A new way of looking at the Tree of Life. Based on the value of the letter-paths that lead to each Sephiroth. For, using the word/value associations of Gematria, this unlocks endless possibilities of meaning.

Feverishly I pulled out a new blank template of the Tree of Life. Faster and faster I entered the standard paths and their values and totaled the new Sephirothic enumerations. Me. I! I had found a new form of Kabbalistic interpretation!

Moments later, I had it finished. The Tree of Life, with Numbers! Numbers for the Sephiroth! I leaned back and marveled at what I had wrought.

Immediately I reached for my handy copy of 777 and flipped to Sepher Sephiroth! What new vistas expand before me? What deep meaningful insights would I now gain? 16 for Chokmah? 690 for Hod? Bring it on! Let's see. 16... 16... we have AZVB, that means "Hyssop". Cool. Very nice plant. And HIA, that means "Her" or "She is".. well kind of weird for Chokmah, but sure, I can dig it. Let's see... 690. MNRTh. Menorah (alternate spelling). The alternate spelling of "Candlestick". Huh. How about that. ThMRIM. Date palms. Date palms. Plural. More than one Date Palm. Wow.

I was, to say the least, slightly underwhelmed. This was not turning out quite as I had hoped.

"Well fuck." I said to myself - and here was my good idea number two - "What I need is Cooler Numbers. This Kircher/Golden Dawn Tree is a one way ticket to Nowhere."

So I decided to rearrange the letter paths on the Tree of Life so that I would end up generating "better" numbers for the Sephirothic valuations. Hell if it was good enough for Frater Achad, it was good enough for me. First I tried my 'round the circle of the zodiac' idea I had had earlier for the diagonal paths, and then used the Hebrew Kabbalistic methodology for the verticals and horizontals. This too, proved somewhat unsatisfying.

Then I thought to myself, the idea of the Sephiroth is in general, one of dialectics. A series of apparent oppositions, that are resolved into a united whole. What if I paired the zodiac letter-signifiers by the sign that is directly opposite? Aries and Libra, Taurus and Scorpio, Gemini and Sagitarius, etc. etc. thus:

Immediately, I knew that this was right. It felt right. Natural. The way it ought to be. Each pair the horizon in its totality. Now I had a framework for the rest. Again I quickly filled in the remainder of the Tree using the letter divisions from the Sefer Yetzirah and totaled the Sephirothic enumerations derived.

To be honest, this version seemed better. More coherent somehow, but still none of the resultant valuations leapt out at me as being deeply profound or anything. (In retrospect, and had I known then what I know now, there are actually some very pertinent correlations on this version of the tree - for instance the imputed value of Kether being 37. 37 is the value of IChIDH Yechidah, roughly meaning "Unity" or "one-ness", which is the Kabbalistic term for the highest possible aspect of the Soul... But then I wouldn't have come up with the Tree 528).

No, what I needed was more control over the outcome. "Damnit Scotty! I said I needed Cooler Numbers!" I did like the idea of having the seven "Double" letters be the seven vertical paths, all Jewish-style, but maybe I could just rearrange them a bit like I did with the diagonals. I started with Kether. With just the diagonals placed as crossed pairs of zodiac signs, I had a total of 35. (Heh 5 - Aries - heading towards Chokmah, and Lamed 30 - Libra - leading to Binah). All I needed was a letter-number for the blank path leading down to Tiphareth. The seven "double" letters I had available were:

• Beth - 2 (which I had just used to come up with 37 in my last attempt, so that was probably out)
• Gimel - 3
• Daleth - 4
• Kaph - 20
• Peh - 80
• Resh - 200, and
• Tav - 400

So I started plugging these in and looking up what the resultant valuation got me by way of Gematria. The two I liked were Kaph and Peh. (Which gave, along with the 35 of the diagonals, a value of 55 and 115 respectively), and, while the 115 was dear to my heart for many reasons, it was 55, using Kaph as the letter-path from Kether to Tiphareth, that I settled on.

The two reasons I chose 55: First, because 55 is the Triangle Number of 10. A triangle number is the number one gets by adding all the positive integers (natural numbers) from one to your chosen base. For instance, the Triangle Number of 4 is 10: 1+2+3+4 = 10. It is called a triangle number because if you picture (for the base of 4) starting with one and make that a dot, and then go down to your next row and put two dots, and then three dots and then four, and then add up all the resultant dots, you get 10 dots.

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(Congratulations Pythagoras, you invented the Tetractys)

The triangle number of 10 is 55: 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10 = 55. I thought this was cool because it is a number that represents the totality of all ten Sephiroth (and, as I was later to find out, there is a Kabbalistic notion that Kether as the first emanation, does indeed contain all other Sephiroth within it). Second, by Gematria (and by the actual letters I used), 55 equals HKL which means "The All" or "Everything". Cool right?

Then I hopped down to the paths around Malkuth (mostly because this was the only other spot where I would just have to make one choice). Per my arrangement of zodiac-based opposites, I had waiting for me 110 - Yod (Virgo) 10, on the path from Netzach to Malkuth and Qoph (Pisces) 100, on the path from Hod to Malkuth. I had but to fill that lonely path from Malkuth to Yesod. Accordingly I started plugging in the remaining six Doubles to see what I could come up with.

... Which was nothing. None of my choices available - 112 (using Beth), 113 (Gimel) , 114 (Daleth), 190 (Peh), 310 (Resh) or 510 (Tav) - seemed to have enough gravitas to fulfill the role of Malkuth, the Kingdom. Or at least I couldn't find a corresponding Gematria that I liked right then.

Only slightly daunted, I seized upon the only other option left to me. Try the only other three remaining letters! Aleph, Mem or Shin. Air, Water, Fire. The three "Mother" letters. Using Shin (300) - that would give you 410. The value of QDVSh, Qadosh - "Holy" or "Sacred". Ok. Pretty cool. Mim (90)? That ends up as 200 - QDMVN, Qadmon - "Ancient", "Primordial", or AaTzM - "Bone" or "Essence". Also cool! Aleph (1)? Well that gives you... well that gives you 111 - ALP, Aleph, the first letter, where it all begins...

And it hit me. That was perfect! With the implied Sephirothic value of Malkuth being the Aleph, the One, the First, it becomes a reflection of Kether, the first Sephirah. And Kether, having a value of 55, the sum of the 10 Sephiroth, the All, and also KLH, the Bride (a designation of Malkuth) - a mirror to Malkuth, the tenth. Each contained within the other. That Which is Above is That Which is Below.

Perfection.

Then all that remained was to fill in the rest of the blanks. Since I had used Aleph, one of the Mothers, and thus traditionally one of the horizontal paths, as a vertical, I needed to pick one of the Doubles to take its place. More or less at random I chose Daleth (4) and placed it on the path from Chesed to Geburah. Traditionally the 3 Mothers were placed with Fire (Shin) above (the path between Chokmah and Binah), Water (Mim) below (the path between Netzach and Hod), and Air (Aleph) between, so I just put the Daleth where the Aleph normally would have been. Then I dropped in the remaining five Doubles. For some reason, instinctively I started at the top left vertical path with Beth - even though Hebrew reads right to left. Why? I don't know. It seemed the proper way. And that was it. I was done. I had rearranged the Tree of Life. From start to finish (after deciding on the arrangement of the diagonal paths) it maybe took me 15 minutes. 22 Letters in a new and unique pattern and the 10 Sephirothic numbers derived from them. I had a vague idea what two of them meant - for the rest, this was uncharted waters.

Little did I know that more than 10 years later, I would still be studying the arrangement.

Next: The Tree 528, Part II: Why 528? The Lightning Path