Fes Festival and the Kabbalah's Tree of Life

The View from Fez recently announced the theme of this year's Fes Festival of World Sacred Music: The Tree of Life. Here's why it's a particularly apt symbol for this event.

The Kabbalah Tree of Life

"It would be hard to think of a more appropriate symbol for the Fes Festival", says our Kabbalah expert, Draco Draconis.

"The Tree of Life is found in every major mythology. It is one of the few universal symbols of humankind. That is certainly a valid reason for its use as a symbol by the Festival - as well as its embodiment in the Batha Museum's Barbary oak, under which discussions and concerts take place.

Cantus Colln perform under the tree at the Batha Museum, Fes Festival 2008

But there is also one esoteric tradition in which the Tree of Life has the central place: the Kabbalah, the esoteric tradition within Judaism; and the kabbalah produced its most extraordinary work in Moorish Spain, in the short era of cohabitation of Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Like Sufism, kabbalah claims to be as ancient as the religion it inhabits: kabbalists claim the original teachings were handed down from Abraham in unbroken lineage. Like sufis, kabbalists were and are frequently at odds with the orthodox. And like sufis, kabbalists claim to have keys to the secret meanings contained within scripture.

Most interestingly, from the viewpoint of Fez, the kabbalah contains notions of the divine that integrate male and female. Adam Kadmon, primordial man, existed in archetypal form before creation took place - creation as a whole is in his image. But the perfection of creation cannot take place without the integration of male and female.

The Tree of Life consists of the ten sephiroth, which are 'emanations' from Ain Sof (nothingness), and the paths between them. Each sephira represents a force or quality in the creation, the downward movement from Keter (the Crown) to Malkut (the Kingdom), and also a station in the ascent of the soul towards Unity.

The androgenous teaching of the kabbalah can be traced to the Zohar, the great, obscure kabbalistic treatise published in Spain in the thirteenth century, during a time when Jews, Christians and Muslims not only lived side by side but mingled in esoteric groups. Moses de Leon, author of the Zohar, claimed the text came from Shimon ben Yoshai, a famous rabbi of Roman times. Modern scholars say Moses de Leon wrote it, but drew on an immense resource of old texts and orally-transmitted material.

While the details of the processes it describes are obscure, the Zohar makes it clear that male and female must be joined to sustain the harmony of the cosmos. For this reason alone the kabbalah would remain suspect in the eyes of the patriarchal orthodox.

The kabbalah had remained a secret teaching until the middle ages, and its first great flowering was in 13th century Spain. Later, the revisionist kabbalah of Isaac Luria - adopted by the Hasidim - would prevail as the face of Judaic kabbalah, but it was through the Zohar that kabbalah entered the Christian world during the Renaissance, thanks to Pico della Mirandola and other students of esoteric knowledge. Through them and later Knorr von Rosenroth, the kabbalah became part of the great swell of mystical and esoteric learning in the West - the philosopher-mages Bruno, Fludd and Dee, the mystics Reuchlin, Ruysbroek and Boehme, the poet William Blake all drew heavily on the kabbalah - and became incorporated into the perennial philosophy.

One reason for the Tree of Life's continuing central role in Western esotericism is its multi-level, multi-layered symbolism. Each sephira contains a whole Tree within it; there are four Worlds (Archetypal, Creative, Formative and Active) and the whole Tree can be viewed as existing in each of these worlds, or all can be viewed as interconnecting. Almost any process or schema can be mapped onto the Tree.

From a Judaic viewpoint, the kabbalah (which means tradition) has been primarily a means of understanding scripture. Within the Western esoteric tradition, it has been and remains a means of exploring the laws of creation and the processes of reintegration with the divine outside the frameworks of orthodox religion."


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