Imaginative Thinking with a Lurianic Diagram

J. H. (Yossi) Chajes

Jewish Quarterly Review, Volume 110, Number 1, Winter 2020, pp. 30-63
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T H E J E W I S H Q U A R T E R LY R E V I E W , Vol. 110, No. 1 (Winter 2020) 30–63

Imaginative Thinking with

a Lurianic Diagram
J. H. (YOSSI) CHAJES

I.

A P P RO AC HI N G T H E W E S T F R ON T of Chartres Cathedral, visitors for

nearly a millennium have marveled at the façade with its famous rose
window. Inside the church, the backlit kaleidoscopic representation of
the Last Judgment in the same window is all the more striking. Just
below it are three Romanesque glass panels made around 1145, which,
against all odds, survive to this day. These three depict the Infancy of
Christ, flanked by the Passion and the Tree of Jesse, the last presenting
the lineage of Christ using an arboreal schema or diagram.1 If the
beauty of Chartres’s windows camouflages their diagrammatic quality
somewhat, we may consider the mid-fourteenth-century diagrammatic
presentation of the Genealogy of Jesus, Reconciling Matthew and Luke in

This research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (Grant 1259/
14).
1. There is no universal, ahistorical definition of “diagram” and the term is
indeed contested in contemporary historiography. See the discussion in Faith
Wallis, “What a Medieval Diagram Shows: A Case Study of Computus,” Studies
in Iconography 36 (2015): 1–40. I will use it simply to refer to a drawing with
which one thinks in the course of its examination-contemplation. See Sybille
Krämer and Christina Ljungberg, “Thinking and Diagrams: An Introduction,” in
Thinking with Diagrams: The Semiotic Basis of Human Cognition, ed. S. Krämer and
Ch. Ljungberg (Boston, 2016), 1–19; James Franklin, “Diagrammatic Reasoning
and Modelling in the Imagination: The Secret Weapons of the Scientific Revolu-
tion,” in 1543 and All That: Image and Word, Change and Continuity in the Proto-
Scientific Revolution, ed. G. Freeland and A. Corones (Dordrecht, 2000), 53–115,
esp. 55. See also Eckart Conrad Lutz, “Diagramm, Diagrammatik und diagram-
matisches Denken,” in Diagramm und Text: Diagrammatische Strukturen und die
Dynamisierung von Wissen und Erfahrung: Überstorfer Colloquium 2012, ed. E. C. Lutz,
V. Jerjen, and C. Putzo (Wiesbaden, 2014), 9–23.

The Jewish Quarterly Review (Winter 2020)

Copyright 䉷 2020 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
All rights reserved.

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 31

a manuscript of the Postilla litteralis super Bibliam of Nicholas of Lyra

(fig. 1).2
This familiar-looking diagram is not what many readers of this journal
will presume it to be at first glance: it is the family tree of Jesus. The fact
that it is not a kabbalistic tree should serve to establish that diagrammatic
schemata are highly versatile and plastic signifiers and are not invested
with set meanings. Arboreal diagrams figured in a plethora of forms,
media, and functions in the learned culture of the High Middle Ages,
from stained glass windows to the standard textbooks of logic, rhetoric,
and natural philosophy. In the words of Pippa Salonius and Andrea
Worm, arboreal diagrams

expressed hierarchy and coherence in visual terms and illustrated con-

ceptual relationships between the various individual components and
the whole, thus rendering difficult intellectual concepts accessible to
their audience. At the same time, they interpret the order they repre-
sent as a natural order, implying growth and prosperity. Trees are poly-
valent symbols, stimulating thought on different levels of association,
and thus exciting the “creative metaphorical capacity of the human
mind.”3

Most germane to the kabbalistic tree, the twelfth century saw the rise of
the so-called Arbor Porphyriana as the preferred diagrammatic schema for
the presentation of the “scale of being” suggested by Porphyry in his
introduction (the Isagoge) to Aristotle’s Categories. Such diagrams showed
how the highest substance (summum genus) differentiates, resulting even-
tually in the lowest species (infimae species).4 The Kabbalah itself emerged

2. Princeton University Art Museum, Museum Purchase, Carl Otto von Kien-
busch Jr. Memorial Fund, MS y1937–266, fol. 122r. The manuscript dates to the
second quarter of the fourteenth century and was made by Johannes Brito, a
Paris University scribe. See Deeana Copeland Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers:
Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (Phila-
delphia, 2007), 46–47. My thanks to Marcia Kupfer for bringing this manuscript
to my attention, and to Calvin Brown, Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings,
and the Princeton University Art Museum for graciously supplying me with a
new high-resolution scan of the diagram for this publication.
3. Pippa Salonius and Andrea Worm, “Introduction,” in The Tree: Symbol, Alle-
gory, and Mnemonic Device in Medieval Art and Thought, ed. Salonius and Worm
(Turnhout, 2014), 1–12, citation on 3.
4. The many editions of Ramon Llull’s Arbor Scientiae published over the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries contributed to the increasing popularity of the

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32 JQR 110.1 (2020)

Figure 1. Princeton Art Museum MS Y1937–266, f122r.

in twelfth-century Provence, a center of the philosophical and scientific

renaissance that made unprecedented use of diagrams. The earliest extant
kabbalistic codices, dating to the late thirteenth century, not surprisingly
contain diagrams—though the iconic tree so similar to the diagram

tree as a structuring device; and arboreal schemata flourished in early modern

encyclopedic literature.

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 33

adduced above seems to have consolidated over a century later.5 In his

monumental catalogues, the great Bohemian bibliographer Moritz Stein-
schneider was wont to note the presence of an arboreal diagram in a
manuscript as a Porphyriusbaum.6 The kabbalists themselves gradually
adopted the term ilan— Hebrew for “tree.”7
The kabbalistic tree wedded the evocative mythopoetic resonances of
the biblical trees of knowledge and life to the primordial cosmic “Tree
That Is All” of the twelfth-century foundational kabbalistic text, the
Bahir.8 The emergence of the arboreal diagram as something more than a
structuring device, but rather as an ontic figure thought to reflect the
hidden structure of creation, would seem to have been borne of the con-
vergence of the prominent diagrammatic schema of the period and such
mythologomena. It should be stressed that in Christian no less than in
Jewish circles, tree diagrams could stray far away from immediately rec-

5. Following the seminal contributions of scholars including Anna Esmeijer,

Michael Evans, and Jeffrey Hamburger among many others, Adam Cohen has
recently argued for a diagrammatic turn in the twelfth century. See Adam S.
Cohen, “Diagramming the Diagrammatic: Twelfth-Century Europe,” in The Visu-
alization of Knowledge in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, ed. M. Kupfer,
A. Cohen, and J. H. Chajes (Turnhout, forthcoming). I discuss the gradual con-
flation of arboreal metaphor and schema in the late Middle Ages in an essay in
this same forthcoming volume titled “The Kabbalistic Tree.”
6. See, e.g., Moritz Steinschneider, Die Handschriften Verzeichnisse der König-
lichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin, 1879), 6–7; noted in Giulio Busi, Qabbalah visiva
(Turin, 2005), 78, n. 165. That Steinschneider even noted the presence of dia-
grams in manuscripts is laudable, as they were typically overlooked by catalogu-
ers and to this day remain largely unremarked.
7. Over the last few years, in the context of the Israel Science Foundation–
funded Ilanot Project, ilan-rotuli have been systematically identified and cata-
logued. Kabbalistic diagrams in codices have also been included in this basic
research. Although this project is the first to study the ilanot genre systematically,
for a pioneering survey of kabbalistic visual material more generally, see Giulio
Busi, Qabbalah visiva. For a monograph case study of Sefer yetsirah diagrams that
also explores interesting theoretical questions, see Marla Segol, Word and Image
in Medieval Kabbalah: The Texts, Commentaries, and Diagrams of the Sefer Yetsirah
(New York, 2012). See also Daniel Abrams, “Kabbalistic Paratext,” Kabbalah:
Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 26 (2012): 7–24.
8. See Daniel Abrams, Sefer ha-bahir (Los Angeles, 1994), 124–25 (§14),
154–57 (§64). On this figure, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Tree That Is All:
Jewish-Christian Roots of a Kabbalistic Symbol in Sefer ha-Bahir,” Journal of Jew-
ish Thought and Philosophy 3.1 (1994): 31–76. See also Gershom Scholem, Origins
of the Kabbalah (Philadelphia, 1987), 68–80. See also the forward in Saverio Cam-
panini, ed., The Book of Bahir: Flavius Mithridates’ Latin Translation, the Hebrew Text,
and an English Version, with a Forward by Giulio Busi (Turin, 2005), 20–22.

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34 JQR 110.1 (2020)

ognizable figurative images of trees,9 and eventually the term became a

metonym for the whole spectrum of diagrammatic schemata deployed by
kabbalists, including circles, tables, and, beginning in the seventeenth
century, anthropomorphic figures. By the fifteenth century, ilan became
the term used to refer to parchments upon which sefirotic diagrams were
inscribed—and a genre in its own right.10 Although the arboreal schema
was generally featured centrally in these parchments, by the sixteenth
century we find such rotuli ilanot combining different schemata with great
variation, with rich and often extensive embedded textual materials.
Concentric circle diagrams were hardly less common in kabbalistic
manuscripts over the centuries.11 This familiar schema was central to the
astronomical/astrological tradition going back to antiquity.12 The kabbal-
ists had merely to assert the continuity of this structural principle beyond
the heavenly bodies (the planets and constellations) to the realms beyond
them: the biblical firmaments (reki‘im), the philosophical intellects (se-
khalim), and the sefirot, the ten luminous divine emanations that kabbal-
ists took to be the DNA of creation.13 The arboreal schema had a very
different genealogy; unlike the concentric circles, the tree was not iconic
(in C. P. Sanders’s sense of resembling that which it signified).14 Tree

9. Annemieke R. Verboon, “The Medieval Tree of Porphyry: An Organic

Structure of Logic,” in The Tree, ed. Salonius and Worm, 95–116.
10. Moses Cordovero (1522–70) and Guillaume Postel (1510–81) both
referred to them as such in the sixteenth century. Robert Wilkinson, Orientalism,
Aramaic, and Kabbalah in the Catholic Reformation: The First Printing of the Syriac New
Testament (Leiden, 2007), 119, n. 82.
11. The metonymic usage of the term ilan to cover all manner of kabbalistic
schemata may be highlighted in the occasional reference to such figures as ilanot
‘igulim (circle trees). For an example of such usage, see Moshe Idel, “Visualiza-
tion of Colors, I: David Ben Yehudah He-Hasid’s Kabbalistic Diagram,” Ars
Judaica 11 (2015): 51.
12. See J. H. Chajes, “Spheres, Sefirot, and the Imaginal Astronomical Dis-
course of Classical Kabbalah,” Harvard Theological Review (forthcoming, 2020). See
also Barbara Obrist, “Wind Diagrams and Medieval Cosmology,” Speculum 72.1
(1997): 33–84; Barbara Obrist, “The Idea of a Spherical Universe and Its Visual-
ization in the Earlier Middle Ages: With Special Emphasis on (Pseudo) Māshāal-
lāh, William of Conches, and Adelard of Bath,” in The Visualization of Knowledge,
ed. Kupfer, Cohen, and Chajes.
13. For a brief definition of the term, see Gershom Scholem, “Sefirot,” Encyclo-
paedia Judaica, ed. M. Berenbaum and F. Skolnik (2nd ed.; New York, 2007),
18:244, Gale Virtual Reference Library, accessed February 23, 2018, https://
goo.gl/dXNjTm.
14. For a recent review of the art historical adoption of Peirce’s semiotic clas-
sifications, see Michael Hatt and Charlotte Klonk, Art History: A Critical Introduc-
tion to Its Methods (Manchester, 2006), 208–12.

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 35

diagrams were used to organize information, sometimes augmenting the

representation with rich pictorial imagery, including botanical elements
that symbolized fecundity and growth. The kabbalists seem to have
increasingly emphasized and developed the arboreal schema, eventually
conflating it with one of their central metaphors for the Godhead. In so
doing, they effectively ontologized and divinized the Arbor Porphyriana.
Like the concentric circles, it too now represented the actual structure of
the Godhead.15
If trees and concentric circles were the schemata that the kabbalists
most enthusiastically appropriated from the learned traditions of natural
philosophy and astronomy in order to visualize kabbalistic cosmology,
how did they work in their new contexts? How did these schemata func-
tion when they became the epistemic images deployed by kabbalists of
different schools, across cultures, over centuries and continents? Accord-
ing to Christoph Lüthy, an epistemic image is one that has been “crafted
expressly to accompany or even replace verbally transmitted explana-
tions.”16 The bewildering variety of epistemic images—as well as the
impossibility of establishing any sort of timeless taxonomy—means that
we can only meaningfully address them discretely, and in their specific
historical contexts. Why did the maker (or user) of a given epistemic
image think it useful, and how was it supposed to work? What was the
image to do that words alone could not? With such a diversity of cultures
and contexts, these questions are best posed with particular examples in
mind. What follows, then, is a case study of one diagram. My hope is that
its close examination will yield surprisingly broad insights.

II.

The kabbalah based on the teachings of R. Isaac Luria (1534–72) in the

mid- to late sixteenth century isn’t easy. R. Hayyim Vital (1542–1620),
Luria’s most prominent student, was not exaggerating when he wrote

15. I discuss this gradual process of ontologization and its taxonomy in

Chajes, “The Kabbalistic Tree.”
16. Christoph Lüthy, “Not What, But Why and How,” in What Is an Image?, ed.
J. Elkins and M. Naef (University Park, Pa., 2011), 183. The aforementioned
reference is to a brief statement by Lüthy; his very important and insightful work
on these questions should be consulted in publications including Christoph Lüthy
and Alexis Smets, “Words, Lines, Diagrams, Images: Towards a History of Scien-
tific Imagery,” Early Science and Medicine 14.1 (2009): 398–439; Christoph Lüthy,
“Centre, Circle, Circumference: Giordano Bruno’s Astronomical Woodcuts,”
Journal for the History of Astronomy 41 (2010): 311–27. In his 2009 essay, he defined
the term as “any image that was made with the intention of expressing, demon-
strating or illustrating a theory” (399, n. 2).

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36 JQR 110.1 (2020)

that previous kabbalistic systems could be mastered in a few days,

whereas that of his master was of unprecedented complexity.17 And if a
kind of spatializing, objectivist discursive style was characteristic of much
of kabbalah going back to its origins, Lurianism took this to new heights.
Zoharic eros gave way to Lurianic anatomy, the beautiful maiden sub-
jected to dissection.18 The mechanistic turn in Lurianism—roughly in the
period when Leonardo da Vinci understood and graphically exposed the
body as the ultimate machine19—made the diagram an inevitable and
indispensable feature of its transmission. This is not to say that diagrams
are unique to, or ubiquitous in, Lurianic manuscripts. Particular works
may include abundant and even aesthetic images in copies produced in
one context, and none at all in those produced in another.20 The situation
is reminiscent of—and perhaps even culturally related to—the diversity
in medieval scientific manuscripts, with witnesses from the Latin West
providing far more images than their Byzantine and Arab counterparts.21
The language of Lurianism situated it squarely in the domain of early
modern natural philosophy; it was, from an early modern point of view,
scientific.22 It was aptly complemented by diagrams no less than text-

17. See Hayyim Vital, Sha‘ar ha-hakdamot (Jerusalem, 1865), 4a. This intro-
duction is also found in the standard editions of Ets h.ayim (e.g., Jerusalem, 2011),
1–11.
18. On zoharic eros, see Yehuda Liebes, “Zohar and Eros” (Hebrew), Alpayim
9 (1994): 67–119. On the mechanistic and anatomical discourse characteristic of
the Lurianic Kabbalah, see Roni Weinstein, Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity
(Oxford, 2016). The best treatment of Lurianic discourse to date is Assaf M.
Tamari, “The Body Discourse of Lurianic Kabbalah” (Hebrew; Ph.D. diss., Ben-
Gurion University of the Negev, 2017). The “maiden” is a reference to a famous
parable in the Zohar treated in Elliot R. Wolfson, “Beautiful Maiden without
Eyes: ‘Peshat’ and ‘Sod’ in Zoharic Hermeneutics,” in The Midrashic Imagination:
Jewish Exegesis, Thought, and History, ed. M. Fishbane (Albany, 1993), 155–203.
19. See Paolo Galluzzi, “Art and Artifice in the Depiction of Renaissance
Machines,” in The Power of Images in Early Modern Sciences, ed. W. Lefèvre, J.
Renn, and U. Schoepflin (Basel, 2003), 47–68.
20. A telling example is to be found in the manuscripts of Vital’s Otsrot h.ayim
that were copied in Italy (what might be called the R. Moses Zacuto trajectory)
versus those copied in North Africa (the R. Elisha Ashkenazi trajectory); the
former include diagrams, some of them quite substantial, whereas the latter do
not.
21. This point is stressed in Bruce Eastwood, “Review: Album of Science: Antiq-
uity and the Middle Ages by John E. Murdoch,” History of Science 24 (1986): 183–
208.
22. The perception of Kabbalah as a science may have intensified in the early
modern period but accompanied it from its emergence. For a fine overview and
discussion, see Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Kabbalah and Science in the Middle

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 37

books of astronomy or geometry. Indeed, like these two scientific disci-

plines, Kabbalah sought to visualize the invisible.23 The epistemological
issues that kabbalists were dealing with were closer to those faced by
geometricians than astronomers, despite the greater impact of the latter
on kabbalistic diagrammatic models. The geometricians struggled with
the question of the epistemological status of diagrams in the Euclidian
tradition; the choice of whether or not to diagram was tied to one’s philos-
ophy of mathematics.24 Some (from Leibniz to Russell) thought that
mathematics was best conveyed with no images whatsoever—which they
failed to argue, let alone prove, and even confused; others (from Plato to
Kant) believed that images could awaken an intuitive, a priori under-
standing, restore forgotten knowledge, and at the very least, allow the
student to see a concept clearly when a barrage of words would only
bewilder.

III.

Although the parallels are provocative, we are ultimately best served by

examining one Lurianic diagram, and by interrogating its epistemic
dimensions. A simple diagram of concentric circles pierced by a vertical
shaft, featured frequently in Lurianic manuscripts, is embedded within
Vital’s account of the beginning of emanation (fig. 2). Creation, he
explained, began with the emanation of circular/spherical lights (‘igulim)
into the space vacated by the withdrawal (tsimtsum) of the Infinite (Ein
Sof). Subsequently, linear lights (yosher) flowed into these nested spheres
from above (“above” being tautologically defined as their point of entry).
To help his reader visualize this, Vital sketched an elucidating diagram
with an introduction beside it: the integrated primordial cosmic structure
was something “like this drawing” (ke-tsiyur ha-zeh).25 This commonly

Ages,” in Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures, ed. G. Freudenthal (Cambridge,

2012), 476–510. See also Chajes, “Spheres, Sefirot,” as well as Chajes, “Kabbalah
and the Diagrammatic Phase of the Scientific Revolution,” in Jewish Culture in
Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of David B. Ruderman, ed. R. I. Cohen et al.
(Pittsburgh, 2014), 109–23.
23. I take this characterization from Martin Kemp’s discussion of astronomi-
cal diagrams. See Martin Kemp, “Vision and Visualisation in the Illustration of
Anatomy and Astronomy from Leonardo to Galileo,” in 1543 and All That, ed.
Freeland and Corones, 17–51.
24. See Jesse Norman, After Euclid: Visual Reasoning and the Epistemology of Dia-
grams (Stanford, Calif., 2006).
25. Cf. Jeffrey Hamburger, “Haec Figura Demonstrat: Diagrams in an Early
Thirteenth-Century Parisian Copy of Lothar De Segni’s ‘De Missarum Mysteriis,’ ”
Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 58 (2009): 7–75.

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38 JQR 110.1 (2020)

Figure 2. New York Jewish Theological Seminary MS 1985, 1b.

reproduced diagram was known simply as ‘igulim ve-yosher, circles and

linear [channel].”26 In contrast, the diagram I will explore in what follows
is more graphically complex and is not introduced in a manner that sug-
gests that it was intended to clarify the textual discussion in its immediate
vicinity.
This modest diagram (fig. 3) was inscribed in a manuscript of Vital’s
Sefer ha-drushim copied during his lifetime—and in his Damascus
neighborhood—around 1600.27 Other copies were made and will be dis-
cussed, but I will focus on the version found in MS Jerusalem R. Yaakov
Moshe Hillel 572 (54a).28 The scribe was R. Efraim Penzieri (or his assis-

26. For a history of this motif in Kabbalah, see Mordechai Pachter, Roots of
Faith and Devequt: Studies in the History of Kabbalistic Ideas (Los Angeles, 2004),
131–85.
27. Sefer ha-drushim was published for the first time in 1996. On the various
versions of Sefer ha-drushim redacted in Damascus and Palestine around 1600, see
Yosef Avivi, Kabbalat ha-Ari (Jerusalem, 2008), 1:346–58. Avivi points out that
the Penzieri-edited Lurianic materials were based on a combination of Vital’s
draft-notes on Luria’s lectures and materials from R. Israel Saruq and R. Mena-
hem Azariah da Fano. On the early draft-notes, see Avivi, Kabbalat ha-Ari, 1:102–
10. R. Menahem Azariah da Fano was an editor of these early drafts as well; see
Avivi, Kabbalat ha-Ari, 1:292–93.
28. I am grateful to Rav Moshe Hillel for having given me permission to pub-
lish the diagram from this manuscript, for providing high resolution images, and
for his ongoing support of the Ilanot Project.

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PAGE 38
 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 39

Figure 3. Jerusalem Rabbi Y. M. Hillel Library, MS 572, 54a.

tant), who may even have copied the autograph manuscript under Vital’s
personal supervision. It is an important example of a Lurianic diagram
for several reasons. Lurianic Kabbalah is a diagrammatic system par
excellence and this diagram exhibits Lurianic complexity, but within the
manageable confines of a single, dedicated page. By midcentury, intricate
diagrammatic rotuli—Lurianic ilanot, in the sense of the genre—become
increasingly important, but their complexity makes the already daunting
task of succinct analysis effectively impossible. Our case-study diagram

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PAGE 39
40 JQR 110.1 (2020)

also has the benefit of being able to shed light on the place of the diagram
in the new Kabbalah that would soon achieve near hegemony in the Jew-
ish world.
We begin with what we can see: six bottom-weighted and asymmetri-
cally arrayed concentric circles are pierced from above by a tripartite
channel. The broad central channel is dotted with tiny circles, hollowed
points of two sizes. After traversing three outer circles, the channel is
intersected and divided by three inner circles. A number of zones or
spaces are constituted by these tracings—six between the circles, and a
seventh above and around them; the area of the channel, its lower half
thrice partitioned; and the hollows of the points filling the channel.
Thirty-four such points fill the channel: two in each of the two outer
rings, ten in the large space of the third, and twenty smaller ones below,
divided by the fourth and fifth circles into two sets of ten. In an odd
left-leaning asymmetry, the innermost circle reveals a narrow horizontal
channel. The diagram has no internal texts, inscriptions, or labels.
If it is critical to begin with what we can see, it is no less crucial to
emphasize the methodological error of presuming that diagrams bear any
intrinsic meaning that can be inferred from their forms alone. Concentric
circles can literally mean anything, and the only way we can know what
they mean in a specific instance is by exploring their adjacent texts and
broader contexts.29 Our diagram, for example, bears a striking resem-
blance to one that appeared in the 1661 work Harmonia macrocosmica by
Andreas Cellarius (fig. 4).30 Although we have yet to interrogate the Luri-
anic image, the reader may be assured that, unlike Cellarius’s diagram, it
does not show the relative sizes of celestial objects. Cellarius’s bottom-
weighted, asymmetrically arrayed concentric circles represent bodies
ranging from tiny Mercury to the enormous sun. Piercing them from
above is . . . a thermometer. Formal resemblance, however striking, is an
unreliable indictor of shared meaning—as we have already seen above.31
This point is worth stressing and is in fact the weakness of Michael
Evans’s seminal essay on premodern diagrams.32 Thus, although sche-
mata were appropriated by kabbalists from fields including natural phi-
losophy and astronomy, the resemblance of kabbalistic and scientific

29. Lüthy and Smets, “Words, Lines, Diagrams, Images,” 407. Compare the
approach of Idel, “Visualization of Colors, I,” 46–47.
30. Andreas Cellarius, Harmonia macrocosmica. (Amsterdam, 1661).
31. See fig. 1.
32. Michael Evans, “The Geometry of the Mind: Scientific Diagrams and
Medieval Thought,” Architectural Association Quarterly 12.4 (1980): 32–55.

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 41

Figure 4. Andreas Cellarius, Harmonia Macrocosmica, plate 10.

diagrams belies their markedly different significations and functions.33 To

understand these, we need text and context.

I V.

What, then, is the text and context of our image? The diagram is embed-
ded in a succinct teaching (drush) on Adam Kadmon (lit. “Primordial
Adam”) but here denoting the highest world and first expression of posi-
tive creation—or emanation, to be more precise—differentiated from
(philosophically) simple Infinity. Adam Kadmon (hereafter, as in the
sources, to be shortened to A”K), at once the first creation and its locus,
is depicted as a complex hierarchy of lights that generate and permeate

33. Even within a discipline, formal resemblance is no reliable indicator of

shared meaning. Iconographical tradition can also lead to continuity of represen-
tation despite dramatic changes in the understanding of that which is repre-
sented. See Christoph Lüthy, “The Invention of Atomist Iconography,” in The
Power of Images, ed. Lefèvre, Renn, and Schoepflin, 117–38.

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42 JQR 110.1 (2020)

lower levels of existence. Its lights are named with truly diverse, eclectic
references drawn from a broad range of sources, imbued with novel signi-
fications. There are the four elements of Hebrew writing (cantillation
marks, vowel signs, crowns, and letters). There are the lights named for
the sheep in Jacob’s dream, “ringstraked, speckled, and grisled” (in the
King James, ‘akudim, nikudim, u’brudim).34 There are the lights that flow
from the three principle orifices of the face (ears, nose, and mouth), to
which are added the eyes and the forehead, as well as the pores of the
skin and the navel. The lower levels are expressed as worlds—the four
worlds of Emanation (Atsilut), Creation (Bri’ah), Formation (Yetsirah),
and Action (‘Asiyah)—though interest here is chiefly in the first,
Emanation—and as “faces” (partsufim), configurations of the sefirot after
the primordial cosmic shattering (shevirat ha-kelim), that progressively
mediate and attenuate the flux as it proceeds down the emanatory chain.
The divine is also stratified by name, as four expansions of the Tetragram-
maton of distinct vocalization and numerology corresponding to those
four worlds. Finally, at least for the purposes of this adumbration, anthro-
pological hierarchies are overlaid as five soul-strata. Vital’s task was not
simply to lay out these various systems but also to explore and explicate
their correspondences. Thus an expanded form of the Tetragrammaton
may correspond to a particular limb of A”K; to the sefirot as ringstraked,
speckled, or grisled lights; to an element of script; to a world, a stratum
of the soul, and so on.
The lights of A”K, their founts and flow, and their patterns of inter-
action, of overlapping integrations and correlations, are governed by an
overarching dualism of a distinctly geometric character: there are circular
lights and linear lights. The originary circular lights took this form as
they approached convergence with the spherical threshold of the post-
tsimtsum vacuum. The initial pulses of creation progressively nested
spheres of primordial light within one another, spheres within spheres;
the outermost, nearly touching the Infinite, was most divine, and the
innermost, at greatest remove. The point at which the vacuum sphere
opened to the Infinite to receive its flow, called the “window,” was also
the top or head of the hair-fine channel through which the linear emana-
tion shone. The light of the Infinite flowing through this channel meant
that, from the linear perspective, the innermost was most divine and
the outermost at greatest remove. The linear emanation is described

34. To get slightly ahead of ourselves, the hollowed points in its central col-
umn are the rare graphical feature in the diagram that can be unequivocally iden-
tified with one of these elements, the speckled lights, or nikudim.

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 43

anthropomorphically—A”K as macanthropos.35 In geometric terms, the

linear channel now exhibits right, left, and center, and of course up/down
and front/back. The qualities, direction, and sequence of emissions ema-
nating from the various apertures of A”K give rise to the successive atten-
uated expressions of divinity—the partsufim, the lower worlds, and
ultimately the planetary spheres, the elements, and the earth.36 The proc-
ess proceeds with the systematic regularity of natural law, according to
established principles.37

V.
What better way to expose the layered correspondences of these net-
works than by means of a diagram?38 These could have been made plain
to see had they been presented in tabular form, as they often are in
today’s printed editions (fig. 5). Vital did not deploy such a clarifying
schema, however, and instead chose one that likely confounded or even

35. MS Lon British Library Or. 12354 (F 8298) has an interesting alternative
preceding its version of the diagram: “And within the circles (‘igulim) there is also
linearity (yosher), the likeness of man, with a head, arms, and thighs. Not that
God forbid there is any likeness of a face (dimyon partsuf) but in order to under-
stand these things we must speak in the language of men, so that we creatures of
form (ba‘ale tsurah) will be able to form an image of these matters, however fleet-
ing (lit., ‘running out and returning’),” 8d (i.e., the 2nd column of the verso). The
human body was one of two leading metaphors for the mystical shape of the
Godhead from the medieval emergence of Kabbalah; the tree was the other. In
the later diagrammatic history of Lurianic Kabbalah, the arboreal schema would
be increasingly deployed to represent the linear emanation.
36. Some of these elements, e.g., the elements and the earth, are only implicit
in the diagram in its first instantiation but are made explicit in later versions.
On cosmological structural continuity in classical (pre-Lurianic) Kabbalah, see
Chajes, “Spheres, Sefirot.”
37. For all its inner logic, the system is not without its anomalies, and these
leave Vital with not infrequent doubts about its particulars. The great kabbalist
did not hide these doubts from his readers but stated frankly when a detail was
forgotten by him or left untreated by his master, Luria. In these cases, the appli-
cation of the regular principles did not produce unequivocal results and the doubt
was left unresolved. Ronit Meroz regards Vital’s doubts as characteristic of his
early period of writing, as is the case here. See her “Redemption in the Lurianic
Teaching” (Hebrew; Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1988), 32. As
a particularly avid reader of his egodocument known as Sefer ha-h.ezyonot, I am
less confident that Vital ever overcame his doubts—though perhaps they are of a
different order in his later work. I regard this as an open question meriting fur-
ther research.
38. Anna C. Esmeijer, Divina Quaternitas: A Preliminary Study in the Method and
Application of Visual Exegesis (Assen, 1978).

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44 JQR 110.1 (2020)

Figure 5. Otsrot h.ayim, (Jerusalem 2008), 13.

mystified his reader.39 The cumulative impact of the narrative—what today

might be called “information overload”—was not to be blunted by a help-
ful infographic but marshalled as a kind of mental marinade to prime the
subsequent work of the contemplative.
Had Vital lined up the correspondences with a tidy table, the real work
would hardly have been eased significantly. He did not even label the
various parts of our diagram. It would, however, be misleading to give
the impression that Vital merely left the labeling up to his reader. The
real challenge, and the purpose of what we might call “the thinking with
the diagram,” was to move the reader to an understanding of, and even
participation in, the living, developmental dynamism of the Godhead.
Laying out the patterned systems is merely Vital’s first step; they come to
life as the Godhead becomes animated. Vital’s discussion is chiefly
devoted to narrating the dynamics of its emanatory unfolding in an ongo-
ing process that is highly responsive to human activity.
More math than myth, Lurianic discourse is so technical than it resists
popularization. We must nevertheless examine the texts that surround
our diagram in order to establish its meaning. Their overarching message
is that no matter how high the expression of divinity, beginning with A”K

39. In doing so, Vital was hardly unique. Faith Wallis has shown how clarity
was often sacrificed in the pursuit of other values when tables were iconographi-
cally reconfigured in medieval manuscripts. See Wallis, “What a Medieval Dia-
gram Shows.”

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 45

and continuing through the partsufim configurations, each extends to the

nethermost sefirah of Kingdom (Malkhut) in a series of transpositions
known as “enclothings” (hitlabshuyot). In these transpositions, a higher
configuration is enclothed in one below it, with lower facets of the former
aligned with higher facets of the latter. Our diagram visually adumbrates
this archetypal sequence. Questions, however, remain: can we provide
the “missing labels” on the basis of the surrounding texts? Can we under-
stand what Vital hoped his reader would get from the diagram, and how?
Answering the first question will put us in a position to take up the
second.
Some elements in the diagram can be identified simply on the basis of
general principles invoked in the discussion. The outermost circle—its
very circularity—is determined by the perfect sphericity of the vacuum
in the wake of the primordial divine withdrawal (tsimtsum). The channel
of the linear emanation is also clearly visible. Without directly referring
to the diagram, a number of passages have a locative specificity. The
linear emanation is thus likened to a man (Adam),

with head, arms, legs [. . .] spanning edge to edge, his head beginning
from the channel through which the light of Ein Sof is drawn into the
emanation in the vacuum. It extends in the linear [emanation] to the
bottom, and traverses all of the circles in the likeness of a single column
[. . .] However the linear [aspect] of this man does not extend to the
bottom of all the circles [. . .] but extends only to the beginning of the
bottom of the circles of the nefesh [bottom soul-level] of ‘Atik [the high-
est partsuf configuration]. This means that his feet do not extend lin-
early into the circles of ‘Atik beneath his feet, but he obviously traverses
the top of the circles of ‘Atik.40

Heads, arms, and legs are nowhere to be seen in our diagram, and indeed
anthropomorphic representations of A”K would emerge in Lurianic cir-
cles only in the mid-seventeenth century. We do see the channel spanning
from the opening at the top of the outermost circle to the bottom shared
by the four inner circles. The two rings that the channel does not traverse
would, then, be the “circle of ‘Atik,” surrounded by the circle of A”K.
Vital goes on to treat the circular lights radiating from the eyes of
A”K; these are called nikudim, an odd locution that recalls the terms for
geometrical points (nekudot) as well as Hebrew vowels (nikud). These
nikudim are the primordial sefirot that emerged in the linear channel.

40. Hayyim Vital, Sefer ha-drushim (Jerusalem, 1996), 50a–b.

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46 JQR 110.1 (2020)

These circles of nikudim separate the encompassing light from the inter-
nal light within the linear [channel], in the secret of linearity, with the
vessels of this Adam. Thus the [concentric] circles entirely encompass
the vessels of this Adam. The encompassing [light] of the linear [emana-
tion] of this Adam then encompasses and surrounds these nikudim cir-
cles. Within these circles, there is the linearity of the nikudim, like the
linearity of A”K within his [concentric] circles [. . .]. [These nikudim
emerge] from Netsah., Hod, Yesod and the middle of Tifer’et of this Adam
downward.

This passage allows us to identify the points within the central channel
as nikudim, and that they emerge from the midsection of A”K. We can also
understand why some of the points are hollowed: like the linear channel
surround by circles, the hollowed points represent the sefirot-vessels that
divided the light within them from the light surrounding them within the
yosher channel.
Vital then tells us that there are nine of these nikudim, consisting of “the
nine vowels (nekudot), [these being] five kings and four servants, as is
known.41 The two upper vowels, kamats patah., are [the sefirot] keter and
h.okhmah that did not die, and the remaining seven died.”42 The nine may
thus be divided into five and four, or into two and seven, invoking the
seven kings who died according to Genesis 36.31–39. The latter were cast
in Lurianic cosmogony as the shattered vessels, that is, the seven lower
primordial sefirot.43 The hollowed points in the top half of the diagram
thus represent the preshattering state. Counting them, however, we
encounter a problem: not only does our diagram contain a different num-
ber of nikudim, but other early copies—including one made by the same
scribe44—have still more differences at variance with the adjacent text.
The impossibility of precisely correlating text and image has arisen. As

41. A reference to terminology in works of Hebrew grammar. See, for exam-

ple, the influential work of Abraham de Balmes, Mikneh Avram (Venice, 1523), in
the unpaginated treatise on the Hebrew vowels. See also Brian Ogren, “Sefirotic
Depiction, Divine Noesis, and Aristotelian Kabbalah: Abraham Ben Meir De
Balmes and Italian Renaissance Thought,” JQR 104.4 (2014): 580–81. De Bal-
mes’s work was well-known to kabbalists. See, e.g., Jacob Zemah, Tif’eret Adam
(Benei Brak, 1982), 52a.
42. Vital, Sefer ha-drushim, 52a.
43. Vital expresses some doubt regarding the number nine, having expected
ten sefirot (a kabbalistic axiom based on Sefer yetsirah), but resolves the issue by
asserting that the upper two could be understood as three. For the axiomatic
passage, see A. Peter Hayman, Sefer Yes.ira: Edition, Translation and Text-Critical
Commentary (Tübingen, 2004), 69–70.
44. MS Bar Ilan 1068.

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 47

we will see, accepting this dissonance will be vital to understanding how

one was to engage with the diagram.
The diagram and Vital’s texts that most proximately surround it were
transmitted exclusively in manuscripts (until the 1996 printing of Sefer
ha-drushim) that included (a version of) this diagram, testifying to their
intrinsic connection; they constitute an integrated unit. The text that is
indivisible from our diagram begins by announcing the author’s inten-
tions: “And now, with great brevity, I will clarify how the worlds
enclothe; understand all this well.” The subject of the unit is, therefore,
these hitlabshuyot/enclothings:

Know that . . . Ein Sof is enclothed in A”K, which is then enclothed in

‘Atika Kadisha, and ‘Atika Kadisha is enclothed in Arikh Anpin, known as
Nothing (Ayin). And this is the sequence of the enclothing: H.okhmah
and Binah of Arikh are garments of H.esed and Gevurah of Atika Kadisha,
and Tif’eret of Arikh Anpin is the garment of Da‘at of ‘Atika Kadisha, and
Netsah., Hod, Yesod of A”K are the garments of H.esed, Gevurah, Tif’eret of
Arikh Anpin, and H.esed and Gevurah of Arikh Anpin dress Aba and Ima,
and Tif’eret of Arikh Anpin is enclothed in Ze’ir, and Yesod and Malkhut
that are Yesod and ‘Atarah of Arikh Anpin are enclothed in Nukba of
Ze’ir. . .
A”K: ten encompassing, ten circles. Ten circles of ‘Atik with Malkhut.
To here, the navel of A”K. Ten circles [of A”A] to Malkhut. Ten circles
of Aba to Malkhut. Ten circles of Ima to Malkhut. Ten circles of Z”A to
Malkhut. To here, the feet of Aba, Ima, and Ze’ir. Ten circles of Nukba
to Malkhut. To here, the torso of Ze’ir.45

Knowing that our diagram is a schematic visualization of this process, we

can attempt to add some labels. The blank page upon which the diagram
has been inscribed is Ein Sof. The zones within the diagram correspond
to A”K and the partsufim. Yet critical components of the system are not
represented graphically. The sefirot internal to each of the partsufim,
which govern the alignments of the transpositions, are nowhere to be
found.46 Neither do we see the ten circles of each of the partsufim.47 This

45. Vital, Sefer ha-drushim, 53b–54a.

46. The representation of these sefirotic alignments using kaleidoscopically
arrayed arboreal figures is a feature of the poster-size ilanot produced by R.
Jacob Zemah and R. Meir Poppers in the mid-seventeenth century.
47. These are found either graphically (as ten fine circles) or captioned in an
otherwise empty zone in other Lurianic diagrams. See, e.g., MS JM NLI 8815
49b–50a (fig. 6 below). The diagram on 49b draws them; the diagram on the
facing page labels them.

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PAGE 47
48 JQR 110.1 (2020)

second section does, however, provide relative positions for the various
partsufim. Assigning them to the various zones of the diagram nevertheless
remains problematic. Put simply, we see six zones demarcated by six
circles, and these should correspond to six partsufim. The text, however,
gives us positions for A”K, ‘Atik, Arikh, Aba, Ima, Ze’ir, and Nukba. If there
are fixed positions for the partsufim in our diagram, my best guess is that
the two outermost bands are those of A”K and ‘Atik, followed by the large
top-heavy zone of Arikh. Perhaps Aba and Ima share the first of the three
smaller circles, containing Ze’ir and Nukba respectively. The navel of A”K
might then be aligned with the top of Arikh, an understanding that may
be read into the text but that is hardly self-evident. Vital has not made
the task of correlation between text and diagram an easy one.
Vital is at his most laconic in the fragmentary phrases that immediately
precede our diagram. In these lines, he simply lists the correspondences
between A”K, the worlds, and the five soul strata (human no less than
divine). A”K embraces and permeates all levels of reality, conflating
anthropology and cosmology. This conflation, I will suggest, is the theo-
retical basis for the identification between the contemplative and the
object of contemplation that is key to its performance.
The internal logic of the transpositions from level to level is indisput-
able, but so too is the arcane complexity—even confusion—of the system.
If only Vital had made this diagram more detailed and added a few labels!
But Vital did not sketch this diagram to clarify the ideas in his text, as he
did in the case of ‘igulim ve-yosher. In his last words before presenting the
diagram, he tells his reader something altogether different: the image itself
will generate the requisite understanding. “And now,” he writes, “I will
draw you a circle; from it, you will understand what you need to under-
stand.” Immediately after the diagram, the text resumes, with the only
direct reference to a specific graphical element anywhere in his discus-
sion: “The straight channel on the bottom is the feet of all, clothed one
within the other, expanding to the end of the emanation below, and the
light of Ein Sof is within them and illuminating there below as well; for the
opening is only above.”48 The straight horizontal channel is immediately
recognizable in the diagram in MS Jerusalem Hillel 572 in the innermost
circle that resembles a magnifying glass hovering over the lower limit of
the partsufim. Given the direct reference to a diagrammatic element, we
might assume that copyists would have made sure to include it, but in

48. The text continues with references to three partitions (sing. masakh) that
would seem to map to the three places where the lower circles traverse the central
channel. Vital, Sefer ha-drushim, 54a.

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 49

Figure 6. Ramat Gan Bar Ilan University MS 1068, 22a.

fact the opposite is the case. MS 572 is the only manuscript bearing this
feature, and even MS Bar Ilan 1068 (fig. 6)—which was copied in the
same period, by the same copyist, and includes the same textual reference
to the horizontal channel—does not.
Why? We have repeatedly seen the difficulty of correlating text and
image with confidence, let alone precision. Every element of the diagram
surely signifies something in Vital’s teaching, but for many, the signifier is
unclear. Expert kabbalist-copyists also modified the diagram, effectively
ruling out the possibility of establishing strict correlations with the text.
Were this not enough, we are dealing with a text that delivers a torren-
tial rain of dynamic parallel systems with references at once quasi-
Pythagorean and quasi-biblical. Were it to be diagrammed, a circle would
not do. And a circle is what Vital drew.
What is the implication of this incontrovertible disparity between text
and image? Of the text being unable to explain or account for the image?
The text is indispensable, but rarely susceptible to unequivocal correla-
tion with the image. Vital was capable of making very detailed and metic-
ulously labeled diagrams, as we know from manuscripts of Mavo she‘arim.
R. Jacob Zemah, who studied with Vital’s son Samuel, copied them faith-
fully alongside his own diagrammatic efforts, distinguishing them accord-

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50 JQR 110.1 (2020)

Figure 7. The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel, Ms. Heb.

8815⬚28, 49b–50a.

ingly (fig. 7).49 The austerity of our image seems, then, to have been
deliberate. If it was, however, Vital did not say why.
In my estimation, the detailed text was intended to provide the student
with a rich background for the contemplation demanded by Vital. The
text cannot be atomized into labels to be inscribed on a “mute” map.50 A
“mute” map requires the student to find a place for every item in his or
her list; the map is static. In our diagram, there is no self-evident place
for many elements we might wish to label, and the image itself is unstable,
capturing different states in a single glyph. Rather than see it as a “mute”
map, I would suggest that our diagram provided a flexible framework
within which the contemplative was to operate, a field in which to play
mentally and spiritually. The text provides vocabulary and grammar, but
the diagram asks that one begin to converse. It must be set in motion,
animated as successive, interlaced cosmogonic images. The animation of
the diagram in the mind’s eye of the contemplative rehearses the move-

49. Zemah played a key role in the transmission and development of Lurianic
diagrams. He evinces serious engagement with Vital’s diagrams, copying and
commenting on them and proudly fashioning his own, poster-size charts. I hope
to analyze his role in the history of visual Kabbalah in a separate study.
50. See Peter Jordan, “Some Considerations on the Function of Place Names
on Maps,” Proceedings of the 24th International Cartographic Conference (2009; online
open access at https://goo.gl/xRsqJ7).

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 51

ment from Infinity to the vacuum and into it, the shattering of lights, and
their restitution. I will return to this performative engagement with the
diagram below.
Bearing this hypothesis in mind, it is interesting to compare the manu-
scripts that include the texts I have so far summarized alongside some
form of our diagram.51 We have already seen that on as clear an issue as
the horizontal channel mentioned in the adjacent text, a kabbalist work-
ing in Vital’s backyard omitted it in one of two he copies he made, ostensi-
bly of Vital’s autograph. And indeed, if my hypothesis is correct, this
imprecision would not have been of concern, because the diagram did not
require precision to provide a framework for speculation. The fact
that our diagram is to be found only in rare, unpublished manuscripts
copied by leading kabbalists—who saw fit to modify it liberally—is also
significant. They evidently thought it legitimate—and perhaps even
desirable—to do so. That said, the reception history of this diagram
shows that my understanding was not shared by all kabbalists.
There were, in fact, kabbalists who expected this diagram to be a
“mute” map. For them, tinkering with its details was insufficient. There
were two options: replace it with a much more detailed diagram with rich
inscriptions, or erase it, at least to a degree. Both approaches were taken
by R. Menachem de Lonzano in manuscripts he copied. De Lonzano was
a contemporary of Vital’s known as a kabbalistic scholar of biblical maso-
rah and midrashic literature.52 An independent thinker, de Lonzano did
not hesitate to be critical of Vital, notwithstanding his great interest in
Lurianic Kabbalah from its inception. De Lonzano never copied the dia-
gram the same way twice. He thought it his task to improve upon it and
made repeated efforts to do so. In MS Columbia X 893 K 11 (28a) we
find him attempting to replace it with an annotated diagram containing
unique graphical features (fig. 8).53 The text had noted that each partsuf

51. If Lurianic Kabbalah is notoriously difficult and complex, one of the few
subjects that perhaps out-complicates it is Lurianic bibliography. Vital himself
wrote multiple versions of Luria’s teachings, and these texts were repeatedly sub-
jected to reediting and recombination. For this reason, we cannot simply compare
different manuscripts of a given work to find parallels to the text-diagram unit at
the heart of our case-study. For the approximately 1,500-page guide to Lurianic
bibliography, see Avivi, Kabbalat ha-Ari.
52. His dates are unknown. On his biblical scholarship and more broadly, see
Jordan S. Penkower, Masorah and Text Criticism in the Early Modern Mediterranean:
Moses ibn Zabara and Menahem de Lonzano (Jerusalem, 2014).
53. The diagrams in Columbia MS X 893 K 11 are part of Drush Adam Kadmon,
which was copied twice in this manuscript by the copyist. The first copy is based
on Vital’s original and has a complete diagram on page 35 (original Hebrew pagi-
nation 28a). The second is based on Joseph ibn Tabul’s adaptation of the work

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52 JQR 110.1 (2020)

Figure 8. Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University

MS X893 K11, 28a.

and has only the outlined perimeter of what was to be the diagram on page 111
(original Hebrew pagination 150a). See Avivi, Kabbalat ha-Ari, 1:274.

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 53

was divided in two; de Lonzano accordingly sketched a horizon line in

each of his partsufim. In the end, the critic was unsatisfied with his own
work and pledged, in a now faded comment on the perimeter of the outer
circle, “all of this I must redo from scratch.” Later in the same manuscript,
de Lonzano copied a slightly different version of the text; it too included
some form of the diagram. There, however, de Lonzano simply sketched
the perimeter of the circle and left its interior completely blank (fig. 9).
A second effort to “fix” the diagram would come later, in a manuscript
preserved as NLI MS Heb. 287991. There too we find two versions of
the text, and two more opportunities to present a version of the diagram.
On a dedicated page, de Lonzano offered an entirely new schematic
approach, now capable of illustrating the hitlabshuyot-transpositions (fig.
10). This new diagram allowed him to represent more details, and he
allowed himself to annotate the page with his interpretation of Vital’s
teaching, taking a stand, for example, on the contested question of the
location of A”K’s navel. In this manuscript, as in the earlier Columbia
witness, the second diagram (fig. 11) was minimalistic.
This time, however, de Lonzano inscribed only the upper half of the
circle, its arc broken by a centered downward channel. Within the chan-
nel he drew ten hollowed points. De Lonzano’s graphic adumbration suf-
ficed to make the point he thought salient: the contested location of the
emergence of the nikudim was established. In contrast to the empty circle
of MS Columbia X 803 K11, here de Lonzano used the space for text.
This was, perhaps, a compromise between his desire to respect Vital’s
diagram and his desire not to waste paper. De Lonzano was of the very
understandable and widely held opinion that diagrams served to clarify
texts. When they failed to do so, they were to be improved or erased.

V I.
After the richly detailed, multilayered developmental exposition of the
primordial Godhead-cosmos, Vital drew a circle. That circle, he told his
readers, would enable them to understand what they needed to under-
stand. The text, implicitly, could not provide the whole picture. And how
could it? Elsewhere, in introducing A”K, Vital would write, “Know that
within this Emanation are endless worlds [. . .] but we may begin by clarify-
ing one element that includes the entire reality of this space from which
emerge all the worlds [. . .] and this is the reality of the primordial A”K.”54
The reality to be understood was an infinite, inexhaustible theme and

54. This passage may be found in the “canonical” Ets h.ayim I, I, 2, as well as
in the opening chapter of Otsrot h.ayim.

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54 JQR 110.1 (2020)

Figure 9. Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University

MS X893 K11, 150a.

variations. A”K was its fractal metonym, a prism through which this
ungraspable whole might be refracted. Much could be suggested, of
course, by the text, especially given Vital’s effective discursive strategies.
But at the end of the day, it is better to peer through the kaleidoscope
than to describe it. This transition from one mode of communicating this

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 55

Figure 10. The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel, Ms. Heb.
7991⬚28, 10a.

infinite reality to another entailed something other than missing details,

but a shift in the reader’s orientation. In demanding of his reader to
understand from the image, Vital was asking his reader to do something
with it.
To reiterate, Vital was not averse to drafting diagrams that served his

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56 JQR 110.1 (2020)

Figure 11. The National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel, Ms. Heb.
7991⬚28, 86a.

texts, whether simple or complex. His appreciation of the potential of the

diagrammatic image did not, however, end there. In our case study, we
find Vital interested not so much in the visualization of knowledge but in
visualization as knowledge. The key term in this regard is the Hebrew

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 57

z–y–r, which Vital uses in the sense of draw to introduce the diagram.55
Vital elsewhere uses the infinitive of this root to denote “carving out the
form of the fetus” (Sefer ha-drushim 21b, 106a, 121b) and as a synonym
for the verb to create (Sefer ha-drushim 67b). This latter sense was the one
typically used by the classical rabbinic sages when imagining God as the
architect of the world.56 In a passage that treats much of the same material
I have discussed we find the most immediately relevant usage: Vital tells
his reader that by visualizing four houses stacked one upon the other,
they will understand the four worlds. “To draw the matter in your heart”
is the literal translation of this call to visualize (Sefer ha-drushim 177a).
Without using the word, Vital was asking his reader to imagine. Imagina-
tion was thought to work primarily by means of images conjured in the
mind’s eye.
In his “Lurianic writings” Vital seldom wrote explicitly about the role
of the imagination in achieving an understanding of the higher worlds
and acting on them. In his “Gates of Holiness” (Sha‘are kedushah), how-
ever, the imagination figured as central to this process.57

The matter of divesting one’s materiality (hitpashtut) is to divest oneself

of one’s thoughts entirely, and to stop using the imaginative faculty
(that is the faculty drawn from the elemental vital soul) to imagine,
think about, and ponder anything related to this world—as if his soul
has left him. Then the imaginative faculty will use the mind to imagine
and to draw (ledamot u-letsayer) as though he were ascending to the
source of his soul roots in the upper worlds, from one to the next, until
the image of his imagining (tsiyur dimyono) reaches its supernal source.
There, he will engrave images of all the lights in his mind, as if they
were drawn, and see them with the power of his imagination to draw

55. See Idel, “Visualization of Colors, I,” 41–45. Idel there shows an early
kabbalistic usage of the verb letsayer in the sense of “to visualize” and understood
as “a certain kind of mental operation mentioned in an explicit context of a circle
and the details found in it.” See also Fabrizio Lelli, “Osservazioni sull’uso del
termine siyyur in alcuni trattati cabbalistici dell’Italia rinascimentale,” Materia giu-
daica 15/16 (2010): 331–38.
56. See Idel, “Visualization of Colors, I.”
57. See generally the seminal treatment of this subject in Elliot R. Wolfson,
Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism
(Princeton, N.J., 1994). Especially salient is chapter 6, “Visionary Gnosis and
the Role of the Imagination in Theosophic Kabbalah: Ontology of Light and
Mystical Vision,” 270–325 and esp. 320–24, where Vital’s Sha‘are kedushah text is
discussed.

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58 JQR 110.1 (2020)

in his mind matters of this world that he doesn’t actually see, as is

known in natural philosophy (be-h.okhmat ha-teva‘ ). Then he will think
and intend to receive light from the ten sefirot, from the point to which
his soul root is attached. And he should intend to raise ten sefirot, one
to the next, to Ein Sof, and then to draw to them illumination from there
all the way down to their end. When he causes the light to descend to
them, they rejoice from it and shine from that light that he attracted to
his soul root attached to them in accordance with its rightful portion.
And he should intend to bring down from level to level until that light
and abundance reach the intellective soul (nafsho ha-sikhlit) in his body,
and from there to his vital soul and its imagination. There, these mat-
ters will be drawn in a physical image in his imaginative faculty, and
he will understand them as if he had truly seen them with his own
eyes.58

Something like this exercise is almost certainly what Vital would have
expected his reader to undertake, with the diagram providing a frame-
work. Medieval and early modern works rarely shared explicit directions
for how their diagrams were to be used. Vital’s as-if-self-understood demand
that one use the diagram to generate understanding other than what the
text alone could provide put the burden on his readers to figure out just
how that was to be enacted. Mary Carruthers, for example, has shown
that medieval inscriptions on the crossed wings of angelic figures became
intelligible only when uncrossed in the mind’s eye.59 This manipulation
was a prerequisite to undertaking further creative activity with the fig-
ures but was left unexplained; “one who understands will understand”
(ha-mevin yavin).60
What kind of manipulations did our diagram demand? We recall
that the diagram is a visualization of structures-in-process. Successive
moments are juxtaposed, both before and after the “shattering of the ves-
sels.” If the simultaneous before and after images suggest the need to

58. Hayyim Vital, Sha‘are kedushah (Istanbul [Kushta], 1734), 31a (III, Gate
5). Cf. the discussion of a parallel passage in Michael Fishbane, The Kiss of God:
Spiritual and Mystical Death in Judaism (Seattle, 1993), 44.
59. Mary Carruthers, “Ars Oblivionalis, Ars Inveniendi: The Cherub Figure and
the Arts of Memory,” Gesta 48.2 (2009): 99–117. See also Mary Carruthers,
“Moving Images in the Mind’s Eye,” in The Mind’s Eye: Art and Theological Argu-
ment in the Middle Ages, ed. J. F. Hamburger and A.-M. Bouché (Princeton, N.J.,
2006), 287–305.
60. This apt tautology was used frequently in medieval Hebrew sources, par-
ticularly in esoteric contexts.

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 59

think temporally with the diagram, the simple structures of circles and
lines are hardly less suggestive. The circles evoke their origin, like ripples
on a pond. The lines too tell a story, of lights streaming in a cosmogonic
jet-flow. More broadly, of course, the diagram is devoted to the spatio-
temporal mapping of the hitlabshuyot/enclothings, the structural transposi-
tions that simultaneously produce and govern creation from top to
bottom. And although internally text-free, the structures outlined in the
diagram are redolent with associations to the content found in the sur-
rounding texts. The ambiguity or uncertainty of the correlations invites
speculative layering and correlation.
At an even more basic level, working with the diagram required imagi-
native visualization. Fundamentally, the two-dimensional circles and lines
were to be contemplated as three-dimensional spheres and channels.61 It
may also be apposite in this context to raise the question of the limits of
diagrammatic representation. A recurring trope in these Lurianic treat-
ments of the circular-linear emanation is their inverse properties. In the
circular—actually spherical—dimension, the outer is “higher” (closer to
the divine) than the inner; in the linear, the inner is “higher” than the
outer. If this paradox was a challenge to visualize, let alone diagram,
there was the very basic difficulty of establishing the precise interface of
the two modes, circular and linear. How did they match up? Vital con-
fessed that he himself wasn’t sure: “And I have another doubt,” he wrote,
“with regard to the circles of A”K and its linear [channel]. How they
connect was not clarified for me by my master [Luria].”62 Certainty
would not necessarily have sufficed to overcome the difficulties of visual-
izing, let alone diagramming, these relations. Vital may have hoped that
readers might use the spare outlines of his diagram to explore the possi-
bilities. The ambitious efforts of an eighteenth-century kabbalist-artist in
Amsterdam to establish the connections in a single ilan image (fig. 12)
may not have succeeded in overcoming the uncertainty, but they certainly
testify to the scale of the challenge.63
Thinking about the limits of diagrammatic representation also brings
to mind the question of just what we are looking at when we look at this

61. Contemporary works were often sloppy with regard to two- and three-
dimensional terminology. For a fascinating discussion of Giordano Bruno’s
Pythagorean reasoning, “which so recklessly drifts from three-dimensional
spheres to two-dimensional circles,” see Christoph Lüthy, “Bruno’s Area Democriti
and the Origins of Atomist Imagery,” Bruniana and Campanelliana 1 (1998): 74.
62. Vital, Sha‘ar ha-hakdamot, 9a.
63. Note that in this ilan, the linear emanation makes extensive use of the
arboreal schema.

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60 JQR 110.1 (2020)

Figure 12. Gross Family Trust MS 028.012.024.

(or any) kabbalistic diagram. What is the implied perspective, and to

what extent must awareness of that perspective inform the contemplation
of, or thinking with, the diagram? Classical kabbalists had asked whether
the right and left of the kabbalistic tree were God’s right and left (the
“heraldic view,”) or the onlooker’s?64 Another question might be whether
the diagram is presenting an elevation or plan view, in other words,

64. See Chajes, “Spheres, Sefirot.”

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 LURIANIC DIAGRAMS—CHAJES 61

whether it is depicting its object from the side or from the top? The iconic
arboreal sefirotic diagram clearly presents an elevation view; concentric
circles, however, seem more like a plan view. (Vertical cut lumber vs.
horizontal tree-ring-cuts might be a more apt analogy in our case.) A
curious feature of our diagram and its cousin, the ‘igulim ve-yosher dia-
gram, is that they seem to be attempting to present both simultaneously.
Indeed, Zemah commented that the simple ‘igulim ve-yosher diagram itself
constituted evidence of the simultaneity of circular and linear emana-
tions.65
And this brings me to my final point: the diagram as epistemic image,
understood in terms of the early modern Foucauldian episteme, would
have been enacted through identification: cosmos was anthropos.66 Tell-
ingly, as I pointed out, the text proximate to the diagram correlates the
grades of the soul to the worlds mapped in those circles and lines. Know-
ing from this diagram, as Vital demands of his reader, thus requires some-
thing quite different from the mastery of text alone. It is performative
knowledge.67 To emphasize yet another word in Vital’s pregnant introduc-
tory phrase, such performative knowledge is what the adept needs to
understand; it is what the image offers beyond the text.68 Active, imagina-
tive “thinking with” the diagram would engage the contemplative in the
dynamic process of creation. We recall that the diagram represents the
cosmogonic reality both before and after the breaking of the vessels, from
chaos (tohu) to reparation (tikun). By following this trajectory, the con-
templative would participate in, and contribute to, the reparation of the

65. See Ets h.ayim (Jerusalem, 2011), 12d.

66. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York, 1970), 178. A sug-
gestive expression of this principle may be found in the division of Luria’s stu-
dents in Safed according to soul-root “locations.” These paralleled the mapping
of the time of day they studied with Luria and ostensibly informed the content of
their sessions. Thus the system being taught was “sympathetically” tailored to fit
specific individuals at fixed times. Vital’s description may be found in Sefer ha-
h.ezyonot (Jerusalem, 1954), 210–19. See also Avivi, Kabbalat ha-Ari, 1:32–33. On
the “personal” nature of Luria’s Kabbalah, see Yehuda Liebes, “New Directions
in the Study of Kabbalah” (Hebrew), Pe‘amim 50 (1992): 163–66. For another
approach to this issue, see Rachel Elior, “The Metaphorical Relation between
God and Man and the Significance of the Visionary Reality in Lurianic Kabba-
lah” (Hebrew), in Meh.kere Yerushalayim be-mah.shevet Yisra’el (10), ed. R. Elior and
Y. Liebes (Jerusalem, 1992), 47–57.
67. See Moshe Hallamish, “Kabbalah as Praxis” (Hebrew), Daat: A Journal of
Jewish Philosophy & Kabbalah 70 (2011): 5–33.
68. For an explicitly stated precedent, see Moses Cordovero, Pardes rimonim
(Cracow: 1592), 43b, last 24 lines.

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62 JQR 110.1 (2020)

Godhead. And just as Vital was generally circumspect with regard to the
deployment of the imagination in this work, so too he rarely expounded
on its ultimate goal: cleaving to the divine (devekut be-ma‘atsil).69 The
image was an invitation to pursue this cleaving, a knowledge beyond
words.
Knowledge is not information.70 The texts we read again and again are not
informational. As Elvis Costello once sang, “Yesterday’s news is tomor-
row’s fish and chip paper.” Vital invited his reader to understand through
imaginal exploration. And although our diagram was inscribed on a sim-
ple codex page, kabbalists both before and after Vital regarded the parch-
ment rotulus as the ideal medium for an ilan. By doing so, they implicitly
associated it with the only other scrolls in regular use by late medieval
and early modern Jews: Torah and Esther scrolls, tefillin, and mezuzot.71
All were used ritually, all performed, and, in a sense, all inexhaustible.
Much of the subsequent history of Lurianic diagramming could be
written as epilogue to and elaboration upon Vital’s rather modest sketch.
In the first half of the seventeenth century, two of the leading exponents
and editors of Lurianic lore, R. Jacob Zemah and his student, R. Meir
Poppers (1624–62), attempted much more ambitious diagrams of the hit-
labshuyot. Their efforts produced the first grand kabbalistic scrolls since
the Italian Renaissance parchments of the early Cinquecento, and they
became the building blocks of later and even lengthier compound scrolls.
In so doing, they expanded the repertoire of images that could be used
by adepts to recall, analyze, organize, improvise, and visualize this com-
plex lore. As Mary Carruthers continuously reminds us, these images
were not only repositories of knowledge but indeed engines of production
of new knowledge.72 To perform, to enact, to activate a diagram was to
participate in the potential for creative recombination, and, no doubt—if
I may mix Carruthers and Harold Bloom—creative misunderstanding.
For all their variety and complexity, Lurianic diagrams preserve, pres-
ent, and produce knowledge predicated upon the identification of cosmos
and anthropos. Sometime around 200 C.E., Rabbi taught, “Look upon
three things to avoid sin: Know what is above you—a seeing eye, a hear-
ing ear, and your deeds inscribed in a book” (mAvot 2.1). 1400 years

69. See Joseph Avivi, ed., Kitsur seder ha-atsilut (Jerusalem, 2010), 78–79.
70. See Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by
Description,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 (1910): 108–128.
71. See J. H. Chajes, “Kabbalah Practices/Practical Kabbalah: The Magic of
Kabbalistic Trees,” Aries 19 (2019): 112–45.
72. Her classic study is Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhet-
oric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200 (Cambridge, 2000).

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later, in a place not far away but in a different world, Luria would teach
his own version: “Three things one must have: one must know and receive
from that which is above oneself, one must know oneself, and one must
give to what is below oneself.”73 Vital’s diagram was an epistemological
tool that bore this telos in mind: reflecting and refracting knowledge of
God and self, and modeling an ideal of being at the nexus of the nourish-
ing flow, at once receiving and giving.

J. H. (Y OSSI ) C HAJES is the Wolfson Professor of Jewish Thought at

the University of Haifa.

73. Vital, Sefer ha-drushim, 1a.

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