Kabbalistic Diagram and Calendar

Unknown

1507

These pages come from the same manuscript of a midrashic commentary. The first image depicts the inner processes of the divine emanations (the sefirot). Visualization plays an important part in kabbalah, and these diagrams provided a divine cartography, mapping out the sefirot via text and images, with the godhead at the top. The second image is an astrological calendar containing a zodiac rota, divided into twelve astrological signs. The rota was one of the authoritative schemata that kabbalists used to map the structure of the sefirot.

Credits

  1. © The British Library Board, Add MS 27089. From the collection of The British Library, The Polonsky Foundation Catalogue of Digitised Hebrew Manuscripts.
  2. © The British Library Board, Add MS 27089. From the collection of The British Library, The Polonsky Foundation Catalogue of Digitised Hebrew Manuscripts.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 5.

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