Creation a Revelation of the Hidden World of God

The mysterious relationship between the invisible, transcendent God and visible world of creation haunted medieval Jewish mysticism and most especially that form of it known as the Kabbalah. The Kabbalalists understood creation to be the outward manifestation of the inner world of God and they used the image of the inverted tree to exemplify this idea. For just as the seed contains the tree and the tree the seed, so the hidden world of God contains all creation, and creation is in turn a revelation of the hidden world of God. And so we find, in the book of Bahir, the oldest known Kabbalistic text, written around 1180 in southern France: "All the divine powers form a succession of layers and are like a tree." And in the most influential Kabbalistic text of all, the 13th century Book of Zohar (by Moses of Leon) one finds: "How the Tree of Life extends from above downwards, and is the sun which illuminates all.

To describe God's latency the Kabbalists use the combined images of the seed (hidden seed), the root (root of all roots), and the mathematical point (primordial or smooth point). This is how the Book of Zohar describes the beginning of creation: "When the Concealed of the Concealed wished to reveal himself, he first made a single point: the infinite was entirely unknown, and diffused no light before this luminous point broke through into vision."

Sephirotic Tree, engraving from Robert Fludd, Philosophia sacra, 1626.