An old text hands you a rule with no reasoning attached. Green means you failed. Red means you passed. Whoever wrote it knew why, did not say, and has been dead for five hundred years.
What happens next is the interesting part, and it is unusually visible here. Somebody admits he does not know, goes to a different system for the vocabulary, builds a reading out of it, and then tells you his reading is worth no more than yours. All of that is set down in order, which is rare. So the question is worth asking as a working problem. How do you interpret a sign nobody explained?
The starting point is a straightforward confession of ignorance. It is a mystery to me why seeing a green figure above the water should signify uncleanness, or why the vision of a red figure should be equated with purity.1 No attempt is made to cover the gap.
That is a better opening than most interpretation gets. The convention is not defended, not naturalised, and not treated as obvious. It gets named as unexplained and left that way.
And the route out is offered as a possibility rather than a solution. There are perhaps some clues in one of the earliest colour systems.1 Perhaps, and clues. The hedging is doing real work, and it is worth keeping in mind when the reading arrives.
The derivation runs off Cordovero's attributions, and the first move is to note the shape they make. The spheres of the Middle Pillar are white, and red and green are connected to certain spheres on the Outer Pillars.2 So the whole reading is going to be about the sides.
Green lands in one column. Binah — Understanding — and Hod — Splendour or Glory — represent the top and the bottom of the Left Pillar, and both are green.2
Red does not. Gevurah is red, representing the forces of Din, Judgment, also considered Discipline and Pachad, Fear. And Netzach is red, also considered Endurance and Determination.2 Those two sit on opposite columns, so red spans the Tree while green stays on one side.
Which is the whole mechanism, and it is worth having plainly. Green is one pillar. Red is both. So a sign that comes up green is a sign about lopsidedness, and that is settled before anybody has said a word about purity.
One interpretive principle gets inserted before the reading, and it is not derived from the colours at all. One is often confronted with that which one needs most in one's life.2
That is a substantial assumption and it does a great deal of the work here. It converts a sign about your state into a sign about your deficiency. The message ends up addressed to what is missing, never to what is present.
It is also unfalsifiable, and worth marking as such. Any sign at all can be read as naming a lack once that rule is in place, including the passing one.
The failing sign then gets translated, with every colour term keyed back to its sphere. Nothing in it is left to atmosphere:
"While you perceive the splendour [Hod — green] of comprehension [Binah — green], you are in a state of imbalance [Left Pillar only]. You have not used self-discipline [Gevurah — red] in order to conquer [Netzach — red] lower desires [Netzach — red] and your fears [Gevurah — red]."2
Read the bracketed terms and the argument is entirely structural. Green is Binah and Hod, both on the left, so the diagnosis is imbalance rather than impurity. You have understanding and splendour, and nothing at all from the other column.
And the remedy named is exactly what the red spheres carry. Discipline, and the conquering of fear. That is precisely what the Mantle operation's second week asks for when it adds charitable deeds to the fast.
The passing sign is the same method run the other way. Every bracket in it lands on one colour:
"Your fears [Gevurah — red] have been conquered [Netzach — red]. Having proceeded with determination [Netzach — red], you were brought by your discipline [Gevurah — red] of self to a state of victory [Netzach — red] which will endure [Netzach — red]."2
Six bracketed terms, and all of them are red. The reading works because red covers both outer pillars. A red sign therefore reports that both sides have been engaged, which is exactly what the green sign said was missing.
Which makes the pair coherent in a way the original rule was not. Green and red are not purity and impurity at all on this reading. They are one column against two, and the fail state is not being dirty but being half-built.
Then the reading gets withdrawn, or at least demoted, almost in the same breath it was offered. Two sentences do it:
"However, there are many different ways in which such indicators can be read, as many as there are people to interpret them. Everyone will always comprehend in accordance with his or her level of perception, this being determined by a great variety of factors."3
And the closing line arrives as a joke that is not entirely a joke. Truly, each one of us perceives the world through me-coloured glasses.3 The pun is on the colour system that has just been used. It is also the most honest sentence in the section.
Which is an unusual thing to do to your own work. A reading has just been built carefully out of a named system, and it is immediately placed level with any other reading anybody might produce. Including one produced by somebody who has never heard of Cordovero.
You have a sign, a symbol or a dream image, and no explanation attached to it. Four moves, and the first is an admission.
Start by saying you do not know, because that is what makes the rest honest. The move that opens this passage is it is a mystery to me — and an interpretation that begins by admitting the convention is unexplained will not later be mistaken for the convention's meaning.
Then go to a named system for the vocabulary, rather than to your own associations. The reading here is built from a published colour scheme with derivations attached, which is why it can be checked, disagreed with and traced. An interpretation drawn from what the colour makes you feel cannot be any of those.
Then read the structure before you read the symbolism. The useful finding here is not that green means anything. It is that green sits on one pillar and red on two. So the sign is reporting a shape, and the shape was visible before any meaning was assigned to it.
And apply the me-coloured warning to your own reading in particular. The principle that one meets what one needs most makes every sign a diagnosis of a lack. So the reading will always find something you are short of, and that is a property of the method rather than a finding about you.
The honesty here is the strongest thing on the page and it should be said plainly. An admission of ignorance, a hedged source for the clues, a worked reading, and then a statement that the reading is one of many — that is a better sequence than most interpretation ever offers.
The reading itself is genuinely derived rather than asserted. Every term in both quoted passages is keyed to a sphere and a colour from a system stated earlier. Anybody who disagrees can point at the exact step where they part company, which is what a derivation is for.
Tension left open. The me-coloured glasses line does more damage than it appears to. If every reading is level with every other because each reflects the reader's perception, then the careful derivation from Cordovero has no more standing than a guess — and nothing here says why one would bother with the system at all.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 The interpretive principle that one is often confronted with what one needs most is asserted with no support and makes the reading unfalsifiable. 🚩 The colour scheme used to decode the sign postdates the operation being decoded, so a fifteenth-century instruction is being read through a sixteenth-century system.
Two standards for reading sit side by side here and they do not fit together. One is the careful method: go to a named author, use his stated derivations, key every term to a sphere, and produce something checkable.
The other is as many ways as there are people to interpret them. On that standard the careful method buys nothing, since a reading produced by somebody with no system at all is equally the product of their level of perception.
The reconciliation available is that the systems differ in traceability rather than in truth, and that is probably what is meant. A derived reading can be argued with; a felt one cannot. But that distinction is never drawn, and the two get left level — which strands a reader who has just been shown how to do the work with no reason given for doing it.
Adisa as Research Instrument — african-spirituality.
The Akan framing takes exactly the opposite position, and it takes it deliberately. You ask the divination instrument a question and receive an answer. Then you go out into the physical world, and within days or weeks you encounter the person, the plant, the situation that confirms the answer in tangible form. You did not believe and then look for confirmation. You inquired, received, and found the inquiry corroborated by something external to your wanting it to be true.
Which is stated as the whole point: in other words, it's not a belief system. It is a research instrument — a device for generating claims that then get checked against physical reality.
Set that against me-coloured glasses and the difference is not about which tradition is right. It is about where the check lives. Here the sign is read, and the reading is validated by nothing except the reader's level of perception, which is why every reading ends up level with every other. There the reading is a claim that gets tested outside the reader afterwards.
And the Mantle operation shows this tradition already knows how to do the second thing, which is what makes the concession on this page a loss rather than a limit. Its own failure remedy is charitable deeds, which is the one element in that whole procedure somebody else could witness. A tradition with an external check sitting inside its own protocol has just told you that interpretation is a private matter. The instrument is the answer to the glasses, and it was already in the room.
Sharpest implication. Once the colours are placed on the Tree, the pass/fail test stops being about purity altogether. Green is one pillar, red is two, and the sign reports whether a person is lopsided. So a five-hundred-year-old test for uncleanness decodes into a test for imbalance, and nothing about dirt survives the translation.
Generative questions.