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Tree of life

Also called Etz Chaim, the sephirot

The diagram crystallizes in medieval Kabbalah

Jewish symbols

Tree of life meaning

In Kabbalah the tree of life is ten sephirot, stations of divine emanation, and a map for return. It is not the Norse world-tree and not a generic “family tree.”

Ten stations of emanation, and a way back up.

The name. Etz Chaim, tree of life. Ein Sof, the boundless, is not one of the fruits.

Where it comes from

Sefer Yetzirah already counts ten sephirot and twenty-two letters, without this picture. The drawn tree — three pillars, ten circles, twenty-two paths — settles in medieval Kabbalah and in sixteenth-century prints. Right pillar mercy, left severity, middle equilibrium. Ein Sof, the boundless, is not a sephira; it is what the tree comes out of and cannot contain. Christian Cabala and the Golden Dawn adopted the diagram and moved the furniture. A poster is often the Victorian occult version.

Jewish

A map, not a species

It is not a biological tree and not Yggdrasil, though both are worth holding side by side as world-trees. This one is a psychology and a cosmology at once: how overflow becomes a world, and how a person climbs back by way of the same stations. The lightning-flash order of creation and the serpent’s path of return are later teaching devices. They are useful. They are not the only reading of the lines.

Hermetic

Which tree you were handed

If the paths are colored by tarot trumps and the planets sit in little circles, you are in a modern Hermetic tree. If the names are Hebrew and the essay is about devekut, you are somewhere else. Both are real traditions. Pretending they are one manuscript is how the sign goes muddy.

Near this

Sources

  • Sefer Yetzirah and later Zoharic and Lurianic diagrams
  • The usual ten-circle diagram is medieval and later

Named when the entry depends on a text, a date, or a standard. Catalog numbers are not invented.

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symbol.wiki, edited as Sigilla. Last reviewed 2 October 2026. A reading of public tradition, not a ruling.