Trees of Life 1
In the introduction to The Tree there was mention of the rearrangement of the paths on the Tree of Life by "one who should have known better". This, according to Master Therion, was a desecration of the highest order, for the paths on the Tree were bound by logic and tradition, and to alter but one would be to destroy the entire edifice.
This of course is hogwash. Well, it's technically true, but not for the reasons put forth by Crowley.
The person to whom Crowley was referring to was Charles Stanfield Jones, who had risen rapidly through the ranks of Crowley's Magickal Order the A∴A∴. Jones (or Frater Achad as he was known), who at one point was regarded by Crowley as his Magickal Son, and the one prophesied in the Book of The Law to uncover its deepest secrets, was quite the Qabalistic prodigy - his discovery of the Secret key of Liber AL (31) presaged a long career of magickal attainment, perhaps even greater than Crowley's own.
However, this was not to be. In the early to mid 1920's Jones wrote a series of books outlining his theories of a rectified Tree - a reassignement of the Letter-Paths that would unlock the true potential of the Tree as an explanitive symbol of the Universe. Crowley, being rather invested in his own system, vehemently rejected this. Jones subsequently joined an offshoot of the Theosophists, got kicked out of the A∴A∴ and became a Roman Catholic. He then died of pneumonia. These things do happen...
But to understand the magnitude of Achad's alleged perfidy a brief review of what all the todo is about is in order.
The Tree of Life Origins: From a Seed to The Sefer Yetzirah
Trees are a ubiquitous symbol of the connection of that which is below and that which is above throughout the world, for obvious reasons. From Ancient Mesopotamia to the Scythians, throughout India and China, the Americas, you name it, if a tree grows there, then it is a symbol of life. In Jewish cosmology and then into Kabbalistic usage the first appearance is in Genesis (בראשית) 2:9 (913), being planted smack dab in the center of the Garden of Eden along with its troublesome sapling-mate (offshoot? trunk buddy?) the Tree of Knowledge. By more or less general scholarly consensus this was written down sometime in the 6th Century BCE, though certainly may have been based on earlier writings and/or oral history.
The next rung in the ladder, conceptually at least, in the development of the Kabbalistic Tree is to be found in the pages of a most singularly esoteric book - the Sefer Yetzirah. This short enigmatic treatise is, after the Tanakh itself and the Talmud(s), probably the most commented on piece of Jewish literature, and certainly credited as one of the formative texts of (pre) Kabbalistic thought. There are several extant versions of the book, running from 1300 to 2500 words but each describe the formation of the Universe (Yetzirah means formation) by way of 32 Paths of Wisdom - 10 enumerations/utterances/dimensions of nothingness called Sephiroth and the 22 letters of the Hebrew Alphabet.
The book is traditionally attributed to the Patriarch Abraham in an introduction and conclusion, though not all recensions include those. That seems pretty unlikely. It has been dated variously from the 2nd to 9th centuries CE, with most scholars favoring the much earlier end of that range. It has been linked to a similar sounding book referenced in the Talmud, the Hilkot Yetzirah which would put its anonymous author squarely in the Mishnaic period (2nd to 3rd Century CE).
The Sefer Yetzirah is the source text for the concept of SPIRVTh, Sephiroth. The word is of uncertain etymology - as used in the Sefer Yetzirah it is linked to the root SPR (340) which means book, letter, enumeration, story, count, etc., but also could stem from SPIR meaning sapphire. While phonetically similarish, it has absolutely nothing to do with the Greek sphaira, from which derives eventually the English "sphere". As described in SY the Sephiroth are "belimah" BLIMH (87) , a word that roughly translates to "without what" and is usually transcribed as "nothingness" though it also has the sense of a limit or restraint.
These 10 enumerated emanations of restrained nothingness lacking whatness are further described in the Sefer Yetzirah as AaVMQIM (266) meaning depths, or deeps, or intensities. They are not named in any way, they only have an order, First through Tenth. These depths (which are intrinsically one) delineate, not a Tree, mind you, but a five dimensional hyper-cube that is the very structure of Universe, with each Depth the infinite extension of 10 paired "directions". A depth of Beginning, a depth of End, a depth of Good, a depth of Evil, a depth of Above, a depth of Below, a depth of East, a depth of West, a depth of North, a depth of South. (SY 1:5)
After describing various aspects and attributes of the Sephiroth, the remainder of the book is dedicated to an analysis of the Hebrew Alphabet and their interactions - letters are grouped in various ways and assigned correspondences reflecting three fundamental aspects of reality: The physical Universe - also called Teli ThLI, a word variously ascribed to the constellation of Draco, the Ecliptic, the Axis Mundi, the Canaanite God Baal, the Serpent and Leviathan - The Year, denoting the cycle of Time - and the Soul, which correlates to the Body of Man/Adam. You know, the usual stuff.
The letters are related to the Sephiroth in the following manner: picture if you will a Cube - a three dimensional block. This can be placed on a Cartesian coordinate system and charted with the axes X, Y, and Z.
Now technically there are two other axes in our five dimensional hyper-cube - one for the Beginning/End pairing and one for the Good/Evil pairing, but those are considered slightly separately from the three physical dimensions and our cube of letters. The Sephirothic depths of Above, Below, East, West, North and South however, can be considered the ends of the X, Y, and Z - axes stretching out in their respective directions unto infinity.
The letters of the Alphabet are then divided into three groups. The first is called the Mother letters, consisting of the letters A, M and Sh. In the context of the Cube they can be said to represent the three Axes themselves. A (Aleph) represents the primordial Element Air, the temperate part of the Year and the Chest of the body/soul and is the balance between the other two letters. M (Mem) represents Water, cold, the Belly and the Earth and Sh (Shin) represents Fire, The hot, the Head and Heaven. You get the drift here.
The next group is called the Double letters - B, G, D, K, P, R, and Th. These seven letters can be said to represent the 6 sides of the Cube as well as the center. The seven doubles have a lot of correspondences (seven being one of those mystical numbers that everything gets attributed to) but in the context of the SY, the primary attributes are the seven classical planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon) in the Universe, the days of the week in Time or The Year and the various orifi (orifices?) of the face in the Body - the two eyes, the two nostrils, the two ears and the mouth. Unsurprisingly, as Jewish exegesis is basically predicated on disagreements, there is great variety between the different versions of the Sefer Yetzirah (and even more so in the Commentaries to it) of what particular double letter goes with what Planet, Day or Face Hole. Add to that the seven firmaments, earths, heavens, seas, rivers and deserts etc. ad nauseum, and you have the recipe for irate Rabbbinical stew I tell you what... nonetheless for this brief history lesson, they are the sides and the center of the cube.
Lastly there are the 12 Simple letters - H, V, Z, Ch, T, I, L, N, S, Aa, Tz, and Q - on our Cube these represent the edges, the boundaries if you will, marking the connections between the different directions - East to North, or West to Below, or South to Above - giving a limit yet also extending off into infinity. These are slightly less controversial than the Doubles. They represent the Astrological signs in the Universe (in the order presented by the letters above and by the natural order as viewed in the sky - Aries through Pisces. In the Year they represent the months, also without controversy. For the Body they represent different body parts, hands and feet, kidneys, shoulders and legs and so on. Different recensions of the SY have different orders for these as well and differnt correlations to the 12 tribes of Israel, but for some reason people seem to get a bit less worked up over them.
The Sefer Yetzirah has a lot of other detail regarding the Sephiroth and the Letters and their combinations - each word and stanza has generated thousands of pages of commentary and shaped entire schools of Kabbalistic thought, but the above diagram of the Cube is the most pertinent to the development of the Kabbalistic Tree as it engendered the specific correlation of the 10 Sephiroth (whatever you might think those represent) and the 22 letters of the Alphabet, the two major components of the Hebrew Tree of Life.
"With Thirty and Two inconceivable paths of Wisdom, Engraved Yah, the Lord of Hosts, the Living God... and Created the Universe....."