Tree of Life

Ten spheres, twenty-two paths. A map, mystics say, of everything.

The Kabbalistic diagram of ten sephirot and twenty-two paths mapping the emanation of creation, developed in medieval Jewish mysticism (the Zohar, 13th century, Spain). In the Renaissance, Christian occultists lifted it wholesale; by the 19th century the Golden Dawn had made it the filing cabinet of Western magic — tarot, astrology, and ritual all cross-indexed to its branches. It appears on this map because it is the original everything-is-connected diagram: a claim that one structure underlies all systems.