The Sefer Yetzirah Study – Chapter 5

“A great, mystical secret covered and sealed with six rings” Sefer Yetzirah, Gra version 3:2(Bath 2004 – Leicester 2005)
Having sufficiently married the ideas of theory and practice of the Sefer Yetzirah in the mind of the reader, we will treat chapters 3 – 5 of the SY, i.e. the concept of Kingship only in practice.

These chapters outline the “domain” of each letter or the principle that it governs in the manifest world of Assiah. In Ch. 2 the student was required to gain an understanding of the letter itself and although this was attained primarily in Yetzirah, the student could not help but notice some of the physical effects of the meditation in Assiah. Ch 3 – 5 are devoted to understanding the Kingship (Malkuth/Assiah) of each letter, or looking at how this Yetziratic idea finds manifestation in Assiah. Since one now knows the letters in Yetzirah, one is primarily concerned with the effects they generate in the material, be it through the action of “Yah” or the student, i.e. dependent upon whether you read the text in the 3rd person or the imperative. This section of the essay will focus on some of the general problems of the Kingships and then realizations specific to the mothers, doubles and simples accordingly.

General
The main problem that I encountered at this point in the study is that there are several versions of the Sefer Yetzirah and each of them have different Kingships and associations with the letters and since I could not decide which version was the most authentic I resolved to simply study the Kingships themselves, and use the letter attributions of the Gra only loosely.

Mothers (Bath ’04)
“A pan of liability, a pan of merit and the tongue of decree that decides between them” or so the Mothers and their action is described. They are a symbol of the problems of decision making, balancing between two extreme forms of action and/or deciding between them, i.e. choosing between right and wrong, or to do something advantageous or disadvantageous and the point of neutrality which rests between them. Water and Fire, are the Kingships of Mem and Shin although it is difficult to say which one is more liable, and which one is more worthy of merit, as fire burns, but warms, and water cleanses but drowns, but they are useful to contrast as a pair of opposites and when fire meets water, steam is produced which as vapour is a useful metaphor for air. During the Ash/Fire Kingship I had a near fatal fall after meditating for a long time on a physical fire and maybe put this down to my own foolish over amplification of what is defined as an extreme energy (and typically Shin is associated with “liability”). If I was doing the working again, I would study the 3 Kingships in a group rather than individually and would urge later students to take my advice in this respect and focus on their interaction rather than the individual Kingships themselves.

Doubles (Leicester 04/05)
These were particularly difficult to relate to letters but essentially these kingships govern 7 aspects which dominate our perception of how our self relates to the external world, as opposed to the 12 Kingships of the simples which clearly relate to our own inner attributes.Governing such Kingships as Wisdom, Wealth, and Grace they can be used to induce phenomena or increase awareness of already existing phenomena associated with them depending whether you choose the imperative or the 3rd person interpretation.It was at this point in the study that the differences and arguably corruptions in the text began to make progression extremely difficult and again the general advice would be to study them in a group and then use the different associations from the different texts as an exercise in mind mapping and looking at a letter from a number of different perspectives. One could conceivably argue that these letters govern the group of kingships in the same way it is the combination of planetary influences in a person’s horoscope that governs the combination of life, wisdom, wealth, etc that the person will engage in life so they [the 7] are responsible for all 7 Kingships and the text alludes to this.

Simples (Leicester April ’05 – March ’06)
For the study of the Kingships associated with the zodiac signs we decided to tie our study to the relevant zodiac sign beginning in April with Heh and Aries and sticking to the Gra version of the Kingship attribution.This was a much more powerful experience than the doubles or arguably the mothers and lasted a full zodiac year. There would be some of the Kingships that I would argue are inaccurate as they did not seem to match with the experience of the month and the meditation therefore jarred slightly but there were definitely some that were entirely appropriate.The general feeling after each Zodiac Kingship was an increased awareness of the faculty of sight, speech, or smell as an internal Kingship. By discerning “smell” from all possibilities of the senses, the fusion of the sense, and focusing a great deal of one’s mental energy on smelling for a whole month seemed to lead to a heightening of this sense and a deeper perception of what it means “to smell” to the soul of man. It was also as if from the head to the feet, the Zodiac man was opened up in the self, and one was more aware of the link between microcosm and macrocosm.