Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

The Flammarion engraving captures the human soul operating within Assiah (the physical earth), while simultaneously peering through the veil into the mechanical and spiritual workings of the higher worlds. The Culmination of the Descent: An Introduction to Assiah At the absolute bottom of the Kabbalistic descent, where the divine light reaches its maximum density and crystallization, we find the fourth and final world: Assiah , the World of Action. The word Assiah comes from the Hebrew root asah , meaning "to do" or "to make." This is the realm of the tangible, the visible, and the strictly physical. If Atziluth is the spark, Briah the blueprint, and Yetzirah the forging process, Assiah is the finished, heavy stone building. It corresponds to the element of Earth , the suit of Pentacles (or Coins) in the Tarot, and the final letter He in the Tetragrammaton. To conceptualize Assiah is to look around you. It is the universe of matter, gravity, time, and physi...

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, "The Soul Carried to Heaven" (1878) — the human soul borne upward by angelic beings captures the threshold that the Ishim inhabit: the boundary between the human and the celestial, between the created world of matter and the higher orders of divine reality. At the very bottom of the angelic hierarchy — the lowest rung of the celestial ladder, closest to the earth, closest to humanity — stand the Ishim . Their name reveals everything about their nature and their position. Ishim (אִישִׁים) is the plural of ish (אִישׁ) — the Hebrew word for man , for human being . The lowest class of angels in the Jewish mystical tradition is named not for fire, not for wheels, not for wings or faces or cosmic powers, but for humanity . They are the man-like ones: the angelic beings who stand at the point where the celestial order meets the human, who appear in human-like form, who carry the qualities most immediately comprehensible to human consciousness. Th...