Saturn in Da'ath

Struck as anyone by the missing harmony of planetary attributions on the Tree of Life, I sat to pondering. Saturn has long been attributed to the Sephirah of Binah and hold closely to it's associations of void, darkness, the-sea-as-mother-of-creation, the Old Order of Things, etc. Even so, I've always wondered what it would be like to shuffle Saturn into Da'ath. I assumed that such a thing would require me to sit down and make that shuffle, figure out something to put in Binah (once I'd emptied it) then check the paths to see if any of their attributions have been terribly violated thereby. This I did, and here is my report.

Below, we have attached the Tree of Life glyph in a simple form, sephira numbered and planets asigned.

One of our goals was to restore Saturn to the rest of the family of planets while neatly retaining its "special" status by placing it in the Greater Abyss where it can exercise its function as the great "gatekeeper", for that is an important aspect of that planet. This leaves us with a small dilemma and a large one as well. The small problem is what to do with the now "empty" sephira of Binah. The larger bugaboo is figuring out what to do with the numbering scheme, for one could not pry the number 3 away from Saturn, nor attribute some waggery like 3.5 to it. The proposed solution to the first problem lies in the way the uppermost sephiroth have long been treated. Kether has always been the home of the One, of God, the Unity and there's no certainly point in changing that. Chokmah though, is often attributed to "the zodiac", and this made us wonder if we couldn't stretch that analogy out a bit.

We moved the Zodiac over to Binah and filled Chokmah in with the idea of "the Visible Universe", that chaos of stars and whirling galaxies that is the backdrop of all our little artificial games of place and order that lie below. Upon the entrance of these concepts of "Chaos" and of "Order" it became obvious that the tree could be divided quite neatly up into areas representing these aspects of the universe, as well as a third, that of "Balance". We see then that Kether is the primal Perfection of God, wherein things like Chaos and Order are conceptually irrelevant, and the first thing that descends from this is the polarity of the intrinsically Chaotic and the essentially Orderly. It's no surprise then that Chaos and order trade sides on their way down the Tree, striking important balances in the central column. It is precisely these kinds of cosmological games that make the study of Qabalah the fascination that it is.

In the matter of the numbering of this new scheme, we can only offer ideas, none of which seem perfectly satisfactory. One concept might be to retain the number 3 for both Da'ath and for Binah, which seems a bit awkward. Historically, we have found no special number is assigned to Da'ath and that might be a thing worth passing on to the symbols we've now placed there, but wouldn't suit our purposes so very well either. Another, rather attractive proposal would assign the number 2 to both Chokmah and Binah, as they both contain this idea to a degree. After much discussion, we chose a modification of the first case stated above, where Da'ath has no particular number associated with the sephira but Saturn, as a planet would retain its numeric association. This would also serve to remind one of the deep kinship it has with Binah and, for that matter, with the whole triad above the Greater Abyss.

This particular arrangement of the tree looks like this, then:

Curious how the Chaos-Order relationships pop up, eh? How do the paths fare in this changeover? The following are my notes on the subject, made when first I worked it out: