Qabbala Unshelled

Posted by: Nick Land

[This provocative – in fact insolently aggressive and sarcastic – short text on the numogrammatic incoherence of the Hebrew Tree of Life, was written by ‘Frater V.’ (widely assumed to be P. Vyparov) and appeared as a letter in the short-lived journal ‘Occultism Today’ on 6th September 1956.]

The Tree of Life is Essentially Qliphothic.

Professor Echidna Stillwell’s (literally) path-breaking researches have opened the way to a rigorous Lemurian apprehension of the Hebrew Tree of Life as a degenerated hyperstitional structure. Her numogrammatic perspective decisively reveals that there are no immanent principles supporting the arrangement of the Tree, but only a dead tradition of acceptation, authority without demonstration, order without coherence or consequence.

We only need to ask: Why does Kether, the first Sephira, occupy the crown of the Tree, unless by merit of a banal ordinal mechanism – no more than an instinctive reflex - binding primacy to supremacy and unity? Why does the zig-zag path of divine manifestation continue from Chokmah (2) to Binah (3) and then onwards in tedious ordinal conformity to the end of the series? Is the mere order of the decimal numerals already a map of creation? If so, why the contrivance of a two-dimensional arrangement at all? Why not simply say: the great hermetic truth of the scared ‘qabalah’ is the capability to count to ten and call it God’s work? And then why is Malkuth (10) entitled to sephirotic standing at all, unless as a proto-decimal atavism (attesting to an inability even to count to ten with understanding) whose numerical incoherence is available for subsequent exploitation as a ‘miraculous’ symbol of cyclic re-unification (an unwitting tautology gaudily clothed in the pretence of cosmic significance)? As to the patent absurdity of Da’ath (11), a ‘Sephira’ which would be simply laughable if not encrusted by bejewelled extravagances of magickal solemnity – at this point even elementary arithmetical competence has been sacrificed without reserve to the mysteries of inscrutable tradition.

Imagining momentarily it were possible to sympathize with the servile consciousness of a ‘magickal adept’ prostrating himself before this concoction of sub-numerical nonsense, combining the calculative capabilites of a 13th century European peasant with the credulous enthusiasm of a masonic zealot, how are the ‘paths’ between the Sephirot to be understood? Of course, there are 22 paths, for the overwhelmingly persuasive ‘reason’ that there are 22 letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Let us also leave aside the fact that 22 is a number without any compelling numerical interest, except as a tautological reverberation of tradition (being the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet - and of course a doubling of Da’ath …), and merely ask: what principle organizes their distribution? Except, of course, that there is no such principle, but only tradition, blind authority and – concretely – a slithering downwards, vaguely echoing that so gloriously exhibited by the Sephirot themselves. Even that exultant obscurantist of occultic traditionalism Aleister Crowley is driven to admit: “With regard to the numbers 11 to 32 of the Key-Scale [the Hebrew letters], they are not numbers at all in our sense of the word. They have been arbitrarily assigned to the 22 paths by the compiler of the Sepher Yetzirah. There is not even any kind of harmony …” - as if arbitrariness was any kind of stranger in this domain.

What a masterpiece of chaotic improvisation we are presented with: regions, paths, letters and numbers jumbled together discordantly, without anywhere betraying a hint of consistent articulation, procedural regularity or objective plausibility. One might as easily shuffle all these elements together on a whisky-soaked bar-table, entirely without systemic motivation or lucid intelligence, and then call the result a ‘qabalistic’ revelation. At least in this case some accidental order might arise to subvert the transcendent idiocy of the whole. The Tree of Life is to rigorous occultism what Ptolemaic astrology is to modern astronomy – a baroque relic of historical interest in the hands of scholars, but an indefensible embarassment when embraced by believers. Let all those who have serious work to do be done with it, lest the science of the Outer Spheres become universally derided as a joke.