The Tree of the Sephiroth

Knapp painted the tree of the sephiroth the way Hall describes it and the way almost no one else draws it: upside down. The roots gather at the top inside a white triangle with a crown sitting on them; the trunk drops; the branches and leaves spread downward across the lower two-thirds of the plate, and among the leaves hang nine globes like small suns, with a tenth, white and radiant, at the heart of the foliage. At the foot, four overlapping circles of white, blue, red and green lie on the ground like fallen fruit.

Hall explains the inversion in his chapter on plants and trees: ‘The medieval Qabbalists represented creation as a tree with its roots in the reality of spirit and its branches in the illusion of tangible existence. The Sephirothic tree was therefore inverted, with its roots in heaven and its branches upon the earth.’ The ten globes are the ten sephiroth, the emanations by which, in the Cabala, the infinite God comes down into a world. Kircher's engraving of 1653, elsewhere in this archive, arranges them as circles in three columns with the crown at the top and the kingdom at the bottom, and Knapp's painting is the same doctrine grown into a plant: what is highest is the root, and our world is the tips of the leaves.

The crown on the roots is Kether, the first sephira, whose name means crown. Hall's sentence about it is a strange and good one: the tree ‘consists of nine branches, or worlds, emanating from the First Cause, or Crown, which surrounds its emanations as the shell surrounds the egg’. On the plate the crown does not surround anything; it sits at the top like a king's. But it is at the root, which is the point. Everything below it grows out of it.

The white triangle that holds the roots and the crown is Knapp's, not Hall's. The chapters do not mention it. A reader of the book will take it for the Trinity, since Hall spends pages arguing that the three highest sephiroth are one, or for those three themselves, Crown, Wisdom and Understanding, which Kircher called the three highest numerations; either reading fits, and the archive does not choose. The four circles at the foot, white, blue, red and green, are unexplained too, and the likeliest guess, the four elements or the four worlds of the Cabalists that Hall describes, is left as a guess.

Hall adds one more line that the scene keeps: ‘the tree has also been accepted as symbolic of the microcosm, that is, man’. A person, in this reading, is also upside down, rooted in spirit and leafing into the body, and Knapp's plate of the Macrocosm and the Microcosm, two plates earlier in this archive's rotation, makes the same claim with a mirror instead of a tree.