Da'at
Da'at (Hebrew: דעת "knowledge") is considered in Jewish Kabbalah to be the invisible or mystical Sefira on the Tree of Life of Kabbalah.
The term first appears in the Bible in connection with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Hebrew: עץ הדעת טוב ורע °ez had-da°ath tôb wâ-râ), which, according to the Genesis account, stands together with the tree of life in the middle of the Garden of Eden. Evil is also mentioned here for the first time. The tree of knowledge is, in the language of the Elohim, which they had already developed on the Old Sun, the physical body of man. The tree of life, on the other hand, means the etheric body (Lit.:GA 253, p. 58ff).
In the 16th century, Isaac Luria drew up a slightly different scheme of the 10 sefirot, removing Keter and replacing it with the sefira Da'ath in the third place as the conscious manifestation of the still unconscious, unformed Keter, which thus moved up into the realm of unlimited light (Ain Soph Aur) and was no longer conceived of as a sefira poured into a shaped vessel[1]. In Da'at, the powers of wisdom (Chokmah) and intellect (Binah) unite into conscious knowledge in the form of moulded thought. Da'at is thus the highest and finest manifestation of the world of forms on the Tree of Life of the Kabbalah. This results in the following scheme of the Lurianic Kabbalah:
- Chokmah (wisdom, prudence, skill)
- Binah (insight,understanding; analytical intelligence)
- Da'at (knowledge, science)
- Chesed (love, grace, favour); also called Gedulla (greatness) called
- Gevurah (strength, power, victory, justice); also called Din (the punishing and judging power of God)
- Tiferet (glorification, glory, splendour, beauty); also referred to as Rachamim (the balancing mercy of God) or shalom (peace).
- Netzach (duration, permanence, victory; glory, splendour, blood, sap).
- Hod (splendour, splendour, majesty)
- Yesod (foundation, ground, cornerstone, basis, foundation)
- Malkuth (realm, kingdom, dominion, royal dignity, government)
Occasionally Da'at is also mistakenly understood as the 11th sefirah, but this contradicts the Sefer Yetzirah, the oldest surviving work of Kabbalah, where it is emphatically said:
„Ten numbers out of nothing, ten and not nine, ten and not eleven, comprehend this wisdom, understand this knowledge, search for it and ponder it, grasp it in clarity and follow the Creator back to His throne.“
Often, however, Da'at is not considered an independent sefira, but rather the mystical state in which all 10 sefirot unite in a holistic experience in the sense of unio mystica. Daath is also considered the bridge that leads across the Abyssus (Hebrew: תהום Tehom), the depth of the sea spoken of in Genesis on the first day of creation) from the archetypal spiritual world (Atziluth) into the phenomenal world. Da'ath is a higher analogue of Paroketh (Hebrew: פָּרֹ֫כֶת "curtain, veil"), the veil of illusion that separates the soul world from the physical-etheric world respectively from the world of the four elements below the sefira tiferet (beauty).
Literature
- Rudolf Steiner: Probleme des Zusammenlebens in der Anthroposophischen Gesellschaft. Zur Dornacher Krise vom Jahre 1915, GA 253 (1989), ISBN 3-7274-2530-X English: rsarchive.org German: pdf pdf(2) html mobi epub archive.org
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