little girl not so lost. a primer on malkuth.
The lowest and most dense sphere on the Tree of Life is called Malkuth. Malkuth represents the Earth and everything on it that we can perceive with our five senses. Despite the fact that we all live here, Malkuth has a bad reputation among Qabalists. Crowley called it merely a “pendant” to the real Tree. Thelemic author Lon Milo Duquette calls Malkuth the “cosmic dingleberry.” In short, Malkuth represents the farthest outpost of God’s country.
The sphere of Malkuth is both all manifestation, and at the same time all unrealized potential. (This paradox perhaps provides a hint towards the riddle that Malkuth is in Kether and Kether is in Malkuth, but “after a different manner.”)
The chief symbol of Malkuth is the archetype of the imperiled virgin or, to quote Crowley from 777, “the unredeemed Soul.” The goddess Persephone is the most obvious mythical example. Persephone was herself the daughter of a powerful goddess. She wandered off and, depending on the source you read, smelled the wrong flower or tasted the wrong fruit. As often happens in myths and in life, her punishment was disproportionate to her crime.
Hades (the lord of the underworld, aka Pluto, who represents Kether on the Tree of Life) kidnapped Persephone and forced her into marriage. Fortunately, Persephone’s mother was able to negotiate a partial release. In the end, Persephone was allowed to visit above ground for six months of the year, which delighted her mother so much that she made the world blossom into summertime, but half the time Persephone has to stay below with Hades. For those dark months, winter reigns.
Just as Lewis Carroll was obsessed with the real-life Alice, we tend to fixate on the Persephone-like young women of pop culture, women who walk the boundary between this world and the next. Like the mythical Persephone, they toy with altered states of consciousness, with sex, and with death itself. Sometimes, like Natalee Holloway, they’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the Malkuthian girls who really hold our attention are the ones who push it, like Amy Winehouse cracking herself out, or the risk-taking girls from the movie Foxfire who walk on the railings of bridges.
Here’s the weird part. From the Qabalistic perspective, all of these dangers are only a metaphor for psychic sensitivity, for opening a portal to perceive the next world — i.e., the nine higher spheres on the Tree of Life. The metaphor of the young girl is used because of her innate vulnerability, but also because societally speaking, she is shunted aside. She is the stone the builders rejected that ends up being the capstone.
777 for 2011.
Lately I’ve been giving lectures on the ten Sephiroth of the Tree of Life. I’m doing this in part because I need the review myself and, as they say, “Those who can’t do, teach.”
While doing research for these classes, I refer a lot to 777, Crowley’s book of Qabalistic correspondences. This book was first published in 1909, when men and women alike were still holding up their stockings with garters and even radio technology was still in its infancy. Needless to say, a lot has changed and expanded since then. (That’s kind of the point of the New Aeon.) Yet 777 remains the go-to reference for magicians and hermetic Qabalists.
In part, the staying power of this book is a testament to Crowley’s genius. But, at the same time, it’s a book of lists. This is like using a hundred year old phone book. If the Tree of Life is supposed to be an ever-evolving filing system for the mind (and even that’s an antiquated metaphor — maybe a better term is wiki), where are all the new correspondences?
Where on the Tree of Life would you put DNA? Rocket ships? Lindsay Lohan? I’ve been thinking about these things. I’ll be back with more.
september 25.
Today was the birthday of artist Mark Rothko. He killed himself in 1970.
Rothko painted huge paintings, the size of cathedral doors. There’s nothing in them but broad, subtly vibrating fields of color. They waver on the verge of ecstasy or silent tears.
Rothko insisted that his paintings were not theoretical color experiments, like what many artists were into at the time. Influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, Rothko felt that his work was meant to be an emotional, mythological experience. This was an ambitious concept, considering there are no recognizable figures in Rothko’s paintings whatsoever.
If you stand up close to a Rothko (which was how he recommended they be viewed), it is easy to feel a relationship with his work. These are paintings you might learn from. When I saw one for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, I wanted to bring back a sleeping bag and live there for a few days. They feel sensitive. Alive.
Rothko felt misunderstood by the art world. He mistrusted his own fame. Just because he was going through a spiritual experience didn’t mean everyone else was.
His health, too, was beginning to fail. As Rothko’s life progressed, his paintings grew darker, as if he were having difficulty resolving his own stories. Toward the end of his life, Rothko worked on a chapel that was to be far from the art world, built to spec, filled with only his paintings. But he had become physically frail and needed assistants to do most of the painting. Rothko did not live to see the chapel completed.
The paintings came out an impenetrable shade of eggplant. They, too, had turned inward, but to say that Rothko’s late work lacked importance is missing the point. Rothko’s last paintings went to a place that not everyone can follow, a place of dangerous and saturated dark. As spiritual people, we are mandated to explore this boundary also.
“Silence is so accurate.” -Mark Rothko.
