The Kabbalistic Horoscope and the Tree of Life

If you come across a kabbalistic horoscope somewhere, there is rarely a star chart behind it. What is meant is almost always a diagram: the Tree of Life with its ten stations. This page shows you how that diagram is built, where it comes from and when the planets were added.

Ten stations and twenty-two connections

The oldest source, the Sefer Yetzirah, speaks of thirty-two paths of wisdom: ten sefirot and twenty-two letters. The ten sefirot are not places but ways of working — steps by which something passes out of an idea into reality.

Their names, from top to bottom: Keter (crown), Chokhmah (wisdom), Binah (understanding), Chesed (kindness), Gevurah (severity), Tiferet (beauty), Netzach (endurance), Hod (splendour), Yesod (foundation) and Malkhut (kingdom). In the pictorial version the twenty-two letters become the lines between these stations. The drawing you see everywhere today is younger than the text, though: it took its fixed form only in printed editions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

What comes from the Jewish tradition and what does not

Kabbalah is in origin a tradition of interpretation within Judaism. Its central writings — the Bahir in the twelfth century, the Zohar at the end of the thirteenth — work on texts and on ideas of God. They describe no characters and hand nobody a prediction.

The step into esotericism came from outside. In the Renaissance, Christian scholars began to build kabbalistic terms into their own philosophy; from there a line runs to the occult orders of the nineteenth century, which made a closed system of correspondences out of them. Anyone who has a kabbalistic horoscope in front of them today is almost always reading this later, Western esoteric version — not the tradition whose name it invokes. Both carry the same name and do not mean the same thing.

How the planets got onto the tree

The connection to astrology is made at seven of the ten stations. The seven classical planets are assigned to them: Saturn to Binah, Jupiter to Chesed, Mars to Gevurah, the Sun to the centre at Tiferet, Venus to Netzach, Mercury to Hod and the Moon to Yesod, immediately above Malkhut.

This sequence is not arbitrary. It follows the traditional order of the celestial bodies by their apparent speed: Saturn moves through the zodiac most slowly, the Moon most quickly. On the tree, then, the slowest stands at the top and the fastest at the bottom, right up against the world. No planet is left over for the two topmost stations; on this reading they lie beyond what can be observed in the sky. And Malkhut, right at the bottom, needs none: it is where everything that has run through the whole sequence arrives.

Also in the nineteenth century, the twenty-two connecting lines were equated with the twenty-two trump cards of the tarot. Since then, tree, cards and planets have hung together in many systems — a comparatively recent stipulation, not something handed down.

The four worlds

Besides the ten stations, Kabbalah knows four worlds through which something descends until it becomes tangible: Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah and Assiah. Western esotericism later laid the four elements over these four. That too is an addition and not an origin. What fire, earth, air and water mean in astrology itself is on the four elements page.

What a horoscope like this can do

Soberly considered, the Tree of Life adds not one new piece of information to your birth chart. It takes the same seven classical planets and arranges them differently: not in a circle around a moment of birth, but in a chain from top to bottom. What it can do with that is ask a question: At which place does something get stuck for you? Does a matter never get past the draft, does it founder on the severity with which you test it, or is it simply the carrying out that is missing in the end?

As a picture of an order, that is usable. As a statement of fact about your life, it is not. If you would rather start with the building blocks that really can be calculated, you will find them under planets and horoscopes.