Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod

Lee Berman · 10 Aug 2010, 00:31 · from 2010-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2010 20:31:10 -0400
Subject: (urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod
Message-ID: <SNT123-W60183BFA61A75B36D0FF82CF950 at phx.gbl>



>Wouldn't this contradict the notion of simultaneously-existing
>universes that are "ranked' in order of ascension, a la the Kabbalah?
>I agree that it is difficult to compare Briah and Yesod as they
>represent different Kabbalastic concepts, but I've always thought of
>one "ascending" (literally/figuratively) through Briah and coming out
>in Yesod, and vice-versa, as though the two can coexist temporally but
>not spatially.
>Which is not to say that Wolfe might not have intended the Kabbalistic
>parallels to actually run so parallel.  He may have just thought,
>"wow, these names sound neat.  I think I'll use them."
 
I did suspect that literal interpretation of Kabballah terms might be
behind some of what I think is confusion regarding Yesod and Briah, but
I didn't want to bring it up.
 
Normally, I'd expect Gene Wolfe's choice of names to have deep significance
(except for most of the saint names). But his own words eerily echo your
last speculation, Lane.
 
 
>From the James Jordan interview:
 
>JJ: You didn't make up any words?
 
>GW: No, but some of them are typos. Ushas is not one of them though. Okay, 
>that is Cabalistic term for one of the circles of the cabala and as I say I 
>don't want to try to answer questions on the cabala. I never knew a great deal 
>about it and I have forgotten most of what I knew. But to find out what it is 
>that is the place to look. Read cabalic literature. I have the great disadvantage 
>of not believing in it and so I can't get so caught up in it as cabalist really do. 
>To me it was someplace that I could steal ideas and names from.
 
 
I guess Gene doesn't wear the red string bracelet then...;- ).

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net