Peter Ludwig Kammerer

How Many Trees of Life? Peter Ludwig Kammerer

An exam of all the models found online and in books, in search of the one which is inspired by the oldest source of kabbalistic wisdom, Sepher Yetzirah. The Tree of Life (Etz Hayim or Eitz Chaim in Hebrew) is, for most Westerners, the preeminent object of interest and study of Kabbalah. We can easily say that most of Kabbalah's expositions start and end with the Tree of Life doctrine in the West. Unfortunately, all this interest happens to address a total misunderstanding of the underlying model. In times when the pretense of having been initiated by a mysterious German adept was not subjected to excessive skepticism, an embarrassing number of magical lodges and esoteric orders, based on documents equally faithfully accepted as sacred, flourished in Europe. This way, an approximated model of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life became the foundational stone of a successful branch of Western Esotericism.