The Four Worlds

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A pomegranate cut open shows its seeds packed in distinct chambers, each cell whole and self-contained, yet all of them one fruit. Moses Cordovero gave his great systematization of Kabbalah the title Pardes Rimonim — Orchard of Pomegranates — and the image is apt for the doctrine at its center. Reality, on this account, is not one flat expanse but a graded series of enclosures, each a complete world in itself, each nested within the one above it, all of them filled from a single source. Between the unknowable Infinite and the dust under a person’s feet there are, the Kabbalists came to say, four such worlds. The light that animates a blade of grass is the same light that the highest emanations carry undimmed; what differs is how many veils it has passed through to arrive.

The four are named, in order of descent, Atzilut (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation), and Assiah (Action or Making). Together they compose the master cosmological grid of later Jewish mysticism: a staircase of being down which the divine vitality steps, and up which the soul and its prayer climb. The scheme is deceptively tidy. Its four rungs carry the weight of a whole metaphysics — the structure of the Godhead, the architecture of the soul, the letters of the divine Name, the population of the angelic ranks, and the meaning of every act a person performs below.

Genealogy: how the four worlds were assembled

The vocabulary came before the system. The three lower names are lifted directly from a single verse of scripture. Isaiah 43:7 speaks of those “called by My name, whom I have created [berati] for My glory, whom I have formed [yetzartiv], whom I have made [asitiv].” The medieval Kabbalists read this triad of verbs — created, formed, made — not as Hebrew poetry’s habit of restatement but as a precise ascending sequence, three distinct acts naming three distinct realms: Beriah, Yetzirah, Asiyah. Above them they set a fourth, Atzilut, from the root meaning to emanate or to set aside, the world of pure outflow nearest the source. The exegesis is tradition-internal, and the tradition knows it is doing exegesis: the verse furnished the names, and the doctrine furnished the verse with its hidden order.

The component terms are old. Yetzirah is the title of the Sefer Yetzirah, the terse Book of Formation that scholars date somewhere between the second and sixth centuries, in which the cosmos is woven from the ten sefirot and the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. That book speaks of forming and of formation, but it does not lay out four ranked worlds; the framework that would arrange Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, and Assiah into a single descending ladder is a later construction built over its language. The same caution applies to the Zohar, the vast thirteenth-century body of Aramaic homilies that became the canonical text of Kabbalah. Tradition ascribes it to the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai; scholarship, following Scholem, places its composition in late-thirteenth-century Castile. Either way, the four-worlds doctrine as a fixed quartet is not a settled teaching of the Zohar itself — a point the reference literature is careful to register.

Where the four worlds first appear as an explicit, named principle is in a small anonymous treatise, the Masseket Azilut (“Tractate of Emanation”), composed in the early fourteenth century. It is, by the reckoning of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, the earliest literary product of speculative Kabbalah to contain the doctrine of the four worlds together with the teaching of the divine contraction — and notably it presents a scheme the Zohar does not. Around the same period the kabbalist Isaac of Acre worked the four worlds into the letters of the divine Name. The correlation that resulted has held ever since: the yod of the Tetragrammaton belongs to Atzilut, the first heh to Beriah, the vav to Yetzirah, and the final heh to Assiah. The four-letter Name, read top to bottom, spells the four worlds; the descent of the light and the spelling of the Name became the same gesture.

The first printed image of the sefirotic Tree: the title woodcut of the Latin Portae Lucis (1516), a translation of Joseph Gikatilla’s Sha’arei Orah. A single Tree like this was held to repeat in each of the four worlds. — Augsburg, 1516, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

The decisive systematizers worked in sixteenth-century Safed, in the hills of the Galilee. Moses Cordovero (1522–1570), known by the acronym Ramak, composed the Pardes Rimonim in 1548 — the first comprehensive rational synthesis of medieval Kabbalah, thirty-two gates long. One of those gates is devoted to the lower worlds, Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, and Asiyah, treated for the first time as a structural axis of the whole. A generation later Isaac Luria (1534–1572), the Ari, recast the entire cosmology. In the Lurianic system the four worlds are preceded by the tzimtzum, the divine self-withdrawal that opens a vacant space in which finitude can exist, and by the shevirah, the shattering of the primordial vessels whose sparks fall and lodge in the lower worlds. Luria’s teaching on the three lower worlds is, in Scholem’s estimate, almost wholly new, devised to multiply the stages through which contemplative ascent must pass. After the Ari the four worlds were no longer one motif among many. They were the frame.

Teaching: the descent of the light

Above all four worlds, in the Lurianic reckoning, stands Adam Kadmon, the Primordial Human — the first configuration of light to emerge after the contraction, identified with the divine will of Keter, the crown. Adam Kadmon is sometimes counted as a fifth world and sometimes set above the count entirely, the transcendent cusp from which the four unfold. Below it the first and highest world begins.

Atzilut, the world of Emanation, lies nearest the Ein Sof, the Infinite without end. Here the ten sefirot — the divine attributes through which the hidden God acts — are not yet creatures distinct from their source. They are the emanation itself, utterly transparent to the light that fills them, so wholly given over to it that the tradition speaks of Atzilut as a realm of bittul, self-nullification, where nothing stands apart from God to call itself an “I.” Whatever exists in Atzilut exists as the divine, the way a flame’s light is not other than the flame. This is the world the Zohar’s most exalted passages reach toward and the world the rest of the ladder steps down from.

Beriah, the world of Creation, is the first realm in which something genuinely other than God comes to be — creatio in the strong sense, existence set at a distance from its source. It is the world of the Throne. The merkavah, the divine chariot-throne glimpsed by the prophet Ezekiel and meditated upon by the Hekhalot mystics centuries before classical Kabbalah, belongs here, and so do the highest of the angels and the disembodied intellects. In the mapping of the sefirot across the worlds, Beriah is governed by Binah, Understanding — the supernal mother in whom the undivided light first takes on differentiation. It is a world of contemplation and pure intellect, the seat of the souls of the righteous and of the orders closest to the divine presence.

A second state of the Portae Lucis woodcut. The image gave Renaissance Europe its first printed picture of the Kabbalistic Tree, the figure later read in Hermetic circles as repeating across all four worlds. — Augsburg, 1516, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Yetzirah, the world of Formation, proceeds from Beriah as shaping proceeds from creation: the raw fact of a thing’s existence is given form, character, and movement. This is the angelic and emotional world. In the distribution of the sefirot it is ruled by the six attributes from Chesed (lovingkindness) through Yesod (foundation) — the divine emotions, the qualities by which God relates to what God has made. Its angels, ranged in their hosts, worship through feeling rather than through the cold light of pure understanding. Yetzirah is the psychic world, the register of desire and dread and devotion, and in the cosmology of prayer it is the level at which the human heart most directly meets the heavenly orders.

Assiah, the world of Action or Making, is the last and lowest, the ground all the higher worlds require in order to become real. Its name means doing, and it is the world of matter and of deed — the physical cosmos and, at its base, the human world of choice and labor. Here the sefirah Malchut, kingship, the receptive vessel that gathers all the light above it, predominates. Assiah is the most contracted of the four, the place where the divine vitality is most thoroughly clothed and concealed, where it is possible for a creature to look at the world and see no God in it at all. In the Lurianic account it is also the world most thickly strewn with fallen sparks, and therefore the world in which the work of repair must actually be done.

The four worlds are not stacked like floors of a building so much as folded into one another. A favored image, developed in modern Kabbalah into the figure called Jacob’s Ladder, sets a complete Tree of Life — a full set of ten sefirot — in each of the four worlds, the lowest sefirah of one Tree overlapping the highest of the Tree below, so that the whole ladder is a chain of interpenetrating worlds rather than four sealed boxes. Each world contains the entire pattern; what changes from rung to rung is density, not design. The grass blade, again: the same Tree stands in it as stands in the Throne.

The soul on the ladder, and the ascent of prayer

The four worlds are not only a map of the cosmos. They are a map of the person. The Kabbalists distinguished graded levels of soul, and aligned them, one to one, with the worlds — so that to climb the ladder of being is also to wake the higher faculties of one’s own self. The lowest level is nefesh, the vital soul that animates the body and acts; it is rooted in Assiah, the world of action. Above it is ruach, the spirit, the seat of the emotions, rooted in Yetzirah. Higher still is neshamah, the rational and contemplative soul, rooted in Beriah, the world of the intellect and the Throne. And the highest reach of the soul, chayah — with yechidah, the singular point of union, above or within it — belongs to Atzilut, the world where the soul is no longer distinct from the divine light that is its source. A human being, on this reading, is a creature spanning all four worlds at once, a thread strung through every level of the cosmos.

This is why prayer, in the developed Kabbalah, is an ascent. The worshiper does not address a distant heaven; the worshiper rises, in kavvanah — directed inward intention — through the worlds in sequence, each phrase of the liturgy keyed to a rung. The morning service was charted by the Lurianic masters as a graded climb: the preliminary readings belonging to Assiah, the verses of praise to Yetzirah, the blessings around the Shema to Beriah, and the standing prayer, the Amidah, to Atzilut itself, where the worshiper stands silent in the world of emanation with the bittul proper to that place. The descent of the light and the ascent of prayer run on the same staircase in opposite directions. What flows down as creation is sent back up as worship, and the worshiper, by raising the fallen sparks lodged in the lowest world, completes the circuit. The cosmology is also a liturgy, and the liturgy is also a repair.

Reception and afterlife

After Luria, the four worlds became the standing grammar of Jewish mysticism. They are everywhere in the literature that radiates out of Safed: in the ethical-mystical works of Elijah de Vidas and Isaiah Horowitz, in the Italian Kabbalah of Menahem Azariah da Fano, and above all in Hasidism, the eighteenth-century revival movement that took the Lurianic worlds and pressed them inward. For the Hasidic masters the four worlds were less a chart of the heavens than a description of states of consciousness available to a person here and now — Atzilut as the consciousness of bittul, in which the self dissolves into the divine, descending through Beriah and Yetzirah to the ordinary mind of Assiah, the everyday awareness in which God is hidden. To pray, to study, to serve was to move among the worlds within one’s own mind. The cosmological ladder of the kabbalists had become a psychology of devotion.

The scheme also crossed out of Judaism. Christian Hebraists of the Renaissance learned the Tree and the worlds; the Christian Kabbalah that grew from their study carried the four-worlds vocabulary into European esotericism, where the famous engravings of the sefirotic Tree by Robert Fludd and Athanasius Kircher fixed its image for later readers. From that stream the four worlds entered the modern Hermetic Qabalah of the Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888. Here the register shifts, and shifts decisively: this is a modern adoption, not a continuation of the Jewish tradition’s own self-understanding. The Golden Dawn renamed the worlds — Atziluth as the Archetypal World, Briah as the Creative, Yetzirah as the Formative, Assiah as the Material — and folded them into a system of correspondences foreign to their origin, assigning each world to a letter of the Tetragrammaton, an element, and a suit of the tarot: wands to Atziluth and fire, cups to Briah and water, swords to Yetzirah and air, pentacles to Assiah and earth. Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah (1935) made this fourfold Tree the common property of twentieth-century occultism. It is a genuine descendant of the kabbalists’ four worlds and an unmistakable transformation of them, the same architecture put to a different use by readers outside the frame that first built it.

A single doctrine, then, doing many kinds of work across seven centuries: a reading of one prophetic verse, a chart of the cosmos, a spelling of the divine Name, an anatomy of the soul, a score for the liturgy, a Hasidic map of the mind, and an occult table of correspondences. The four worlds hold because they answer the question every emanationist cosmology must answer — how the One becomes the many without ceasing to be One — and they answer it not with a single leap but with a stair, four steps wide enough to set a whole Tree on each.

→ Related: Kabbalah · Doctrine Of The Ten Sefirot · Ein Sof · Lurianic Kabbalah · Sefer Yetzirah · Hermetic Qabalah · Emanation · Isaac Luria · Moses Cordovero · Jewish Mysticism Zohar · Jewish Mysticism Pre Zoharic · Early Kabbalah · Hasidism · Soul · Adam Kadmon · Shimon Bar Yochai · Nachmanides · Henosis · Golden Dawn London · Golden Dawn Lineage · Hekhalot Merkavah Mysticism · Pre Lurianic Safed Kabbalah · Christian Kabbalah