Mathematicians considered the best symbol for God in the act of creation would be a simple circle around a central point, since the Deity was likened to a circle with a centre everywhere and a circumference nowhere. Besides, the circled point had been and still is a symbol for the Sun or Cosmic Light-Life. So they set the point of the instrument which had been in the centre at the perimeter of the circle and traced another which intersected the centre of the first. They repeated this process until it became an ever-recurring pattern.

At first this seemed to fit their concepts nicely until they realised that if God were placed at the top, and Man at the bottom which seemed natural, the polarity of the fourth Sphere down would be wrong, because it should have been on the masculine right instead of the neutral centre. They solved this problem by considering that if the final creative act were equivalent to the expulsion of an individual from a womb, then the final Tenth Sphere of the “Human World,” should be another stage lower and the two above it should follow suit to balance the design.

The next logical step was to show the descent of God to the state of man by connecting the Spheres up by lines. Since this was reminiscent of a lightening-flash, and God was said to have created by means of light, that was what this part of the design got called. It then remained to show the transverse triplicity of masculine-feminine-neutral, by placing Pillars behind the right-left-centre spheres, and in the eyes of very early Kabbalists, that completed the Great Plan. They called the lines of descent Paths of Power, because that was what they were, and they were ten. As the original script said: “Ten and not nine, ten and not eleven. Count carefully and calculate with caution.”

Sometimes the “lightening-flash was termed a “sword,” because of the “Fiery Sword” which God was supposed to have placed before the Garden of Eden to prevent humans going back there before they had solved all the problems they would have to face in the outside world. That was also why this design became known as the “Tree of life,” because having fallen by the Tree of Knowledge, man would have to rise (or evolve) by the Family Tree of life connecting us with God by a series of step-by-step efforts until we had enough Knowledge to bridge the Abyss between us and that God (which represented ignorance) and so become in the words of the Bible: “Like unto the Gods, immortal.”

The Tree of course is just the bare bones or ABC of the Kabbalistic System. The separate blocks as it were, by combinations of which all the rest of an enormous edifice can be built up out of consciousness alone. That is how Cosmos was constructed “by the thoughts of God.” Divinity combined one piece of consciousness with another in mathematical order and precision. In fact the whole Tree is a mathematical calculation in itself concerning God-Man relationships. Being forbidden to worship any solid kind of shaped idol, the Hebrew produced an energy-concept which was purely a mental arrangement of numerical values based on the decimal system. Not that Kabbalah is an Orthodox Hebrew practice at all. In fact it is regarded as heretical by most pious Jews, because it implies a distinctly feminine side to Divinity which would not suit their paternalistic attitude.