The Four Worlds of the Qabalah are:enlarge this window close this window
The Four Worlds of the Qabalah are:
see RGD 63 (I 124-25), also A Garden of Pomegranates, 118-123.
The four-fold division is based upon the Tetragrammaton, Yod-Heh-Vau-Heh (
), the four letters of God’s unutterable name. Each Sephirah is manifested at each level, so that Tiphareth has an Archetypal aspect, a Creative one, a Formative one and a Material one. Alternatively, these four levels or aspects can be seen as separate Trees, so that an entire group of ten Sephiroth is manifested at each level, or to an interlinked version of the extended Tree of Life, in which the Tiphareth of the higher level is the Kether of the subsequent level, its Malkuth the lower Tree’s Tiphareth and so on. Within the simple Tree of Life, the highest Sephirah, Kether, is referred to Atziluth; Chokmah and Binah to Briah; Chesed, Geburah, Tiphareth, Netzach, Hod and Yesod to Yetzirah; and Malkuth to Assiah.
These are further linked to the four elements: Fire, Water, Air and Earth respectively, and to the four suits of the Tarot pack, Sceptres or Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles respectively. The Golden Dawn further rearranged the Court Cards of the Tarot, so that the mounted Knight (sometimes renamed King) was referred to Yod/Fire, the seated Queen to Heh/Water, the Prince in a chariot (traditionally the King) to Vau/Air and the standing Princess (traditionally Knave or Page) to Heh/Earth (Regardie, Golden Dawn, Volume 4, 142-54. The further assignation by the GD of the Tarot cards to the heavens and the Zodiac is a complex subject and treated in Mathers’s essays, Golden Dawn, Volume 4, 137-176 & 218-257.)
When Yeats was constructing the Celtic Mysteries with Mathers’ help, in one schema that he drew up of ‘The Ten Nuts of the Hazel Tree in the Four Worlds’ (the ten Sephiroth), he saw the Atziluthic level as the World of the gods, the Briatic level as the World of the Blessed (Tir na nOg), the Yetziratic level as possibly the World of Voyages, and the Assiatic level as the Earth. For example, Lug is identified with the Tiphareth of the gods, while Cuchulain with the Tiphareth of the Blessed (see Ithell Colquhoun, Sword of Wisdom). The four elements are identified with the four treasures of Ireland, in a manner similar to the Tarot suits: Yod/Fire, with the Spear of Lug; Heh/Water, with the Cauldron of Dagda; Vau/Air, with the Sword of Nuada; Heh/Earth, with the Stone of Fál. These in turn are linked with the four provinces of Ireland and so on.