A diagram can be studied for years without ever making a demand. You can know all ten spheres, all four worlds, every correspondence and every path. None of it obliges you to behave in any particular way on a Wednesday. That is a strange property for a spiritual system to have.
There's a rendering that closes that gap by turning each sphere into an obligation — ten clauses, each beginning that we should, covering everything from how you treat animals to how you handle the law. And it appears in the middle of an argument about people who use this tradition to curse their political enemies. So the question is worth asking without any mysticism attached. What would it mean to live by this diagram?
The list does not arrive as a devotional exercise. It arrives as a rebuke, and the target is named. Knowing that changes what the ten clauses are doing.
The pulsa denura curse was adopted by ultra-orthodox factions after the founding of the State of Israel, as a replacement for the rite of excommunication among groups struggling for religious supremacy in Jerusalem. Today it is worked exclusively by ultra-right political and religious activists.1 The reaction to that is unhedged: this mystical hate politics and racism of the ultra-right is called absolutely sickening.1
Then the sentence the ten points hang from. This deplorable situation among those of the ultra-right who call themselves kabbalists has absolutely nothing to do with true spiritual growth, or with Kabbalah. The principles of the tradition, as set forth on the sefirotic Tree, are then said to remind us of the following.1
So the code is not offered as inspiration. It is offered as evidence, inside an argument about who is entitled to the name. That changes how it should be read.
Here they are as given, one per sphere, in the order they run down the Tree.2
The grammar is uniform, and it is the first thing to notice. Every clause opens that we. Not you should, not the practitioner must, and not a description of what the sphere means.
That construction places the whole list somewhere specific. It is the grammar of a shared undertaking rather than an instruction to an individual. Closer to a vow taken in company than to a rule handed down, and it assumes other people are saying it too.
And there's a second uniformity worth registering. Each clause is a commitment to attempt rather than a standard to meet. That we attempt an actual arrangement, that we dedicate ourselves to such attainment, that we approach with true humility and hopes of reaching. Nobody is required to succeed.
One entry carries an obligation the others don't, and it's the fourth. Chesed asks that we mediate the Mercy of our Maker to mankind, and — in the same clause — care for our companion-creatures with compassion.2
Companion-creatures is doing work that animals would not. It is a relational term rather than a category, and it puts other living things alongside rather than below. In a ten-point code covering the whole of a life, this is the only clause that reaches outside the human at all.
It also sits in exactly the right sphere. Mercy is the expansive side of the diagram, and this entry expands the circle of who mercy is owed to. Nothing elsewhere in the code reaches outward like that.
The eighth is the one that makes the whole list unusual, and it belongs to the intellectual sphere. Hod asks that we study matters of our Mysteries with Respectful Rationality, and use reason as a means of making up our minds.2 Both halves of that are unexpected in a mystical code.
Both halves are pointed. Respectful rationality concedes that reason and reverence can be held together, and the pairing is offered without any suggestion that one must give way. Then reason as a means of making up our minds puts the deciding faculty in the practitioner. Not in a teacher, and not in a text.
Set that beside what this whole list is answering — men who work curses on their political opponents — and its placement stops looking incidental. A tradition whose eighth obligation is to reason your way to your own conclusions is not one that produces obedient participants in a hate campaign.
The last entry handles the relation between a practitioner and the world, and it does it in one sentence with a hinge in the middle. In this world we keep the laws of men intended for good government of all mundane affairs — yet live within the Light of our Inner Kingdom, as active and initiated members of these Mysteries.2 One clause, two jurisdictions.
The qualifier matters here. Not all laws, but those intended for good government of all mundane affairs. That leaves a distinction available without licensing much, and it stops the clause being simple civic obedience.
And the yet is the whole structure of the last sphere in miniature. Two jurisdictions, both real, and neither cancelling the other. You keep the ordinary rules, and you live somewhere else at the same time. The code's final word on how to be in the world is that you are answerable twice.
You want the diagram to make a claim on your conduct rather than on your reading time. Four moves, and the first is about the timescale.
Take the ten as a monthly review rather than a daily rule, because that's the scale they're written at. None of them describes an action — they describe orientations, and orientations are visible over weeks. Ask of each: has this been true of me since the last time I looked?
Then use the that we grammar as intended, which means saying them with somebody. The construction is collective, and reading a shared undertaking alone changes what it is. If you have no company for it, at least notice you are reading a vow in the wrong number.
Then watch the two entries that most people skip. Companion-creatures is a real obligation about the treatment of animals sitting inside a mystical code, and it is the easiest clause in the list to read past. Respectful Rationality requires you to reason your way to your own conclusions, which is uncomfortable in a tradition that also insists on primary meanings.
And apply the tenth clause where it bites. You are answerable to ordinary law and to something else, both at once — and the clause gives you no procedure for a conflict between them beyond the word intended for good government. Knowing that the code leaves you the judge of that is itself useful.
What this is can be stated exactly: a ten-point ethical code, one clause per sphere, presented as what the principles of the sefirotic Tree remind us of. It is reproduced here in full and it is short enough to check against itself.
Its strongest feature is where it sits. The list is deployed as evidence in a dispute about who may use the name, which means it is being asserted as what the tradition actually requires. Not offered as one possible reading among many.
Tension left open. The code is used to argue that curse-workers have nothing to do with Kabbalah. But the same body of material argues at length that Practical Kabbalah, including its magical operations, sits inside the tradition under the names of esteemed Rabbis. The line between a magical operation that belongs and one that disqualifies you is exactly what a code like this would need to draw, and it doesn't.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 The ten clauses are given without attribution on the page, in material that elsewhere credits William Gray by name for comparable renderings. 🚩 The vocabulary — our holy Mysteries, initiated members — is that of a specific initiatory order rather than of Traditional Kabbalah, so the code speaks from one school.
Take the code as a definition of the tradition and it does real work. Ten clauses, none of which any curse-worker could sincerely recite, deployed to show that a group calling itself kabbalist is doing something else entirely.
Now look at what kind of argument that is. It defines a tradition by its ethics rather than by its texts, its history or its symbols — which is precisely the move this same body of work refuses everywhere else. The standing rule is that authenticity is settled by primary meanings and primary literature, and that a great deal published under the name has little relation to the tradition because the symbols have been altered.
The two are different tests and they can disagree. A man could hold every primary meaning exactly right and violate all ten clauses; another could keep the code perfectly and misread the whole symbol set. The first is disqualified here and would pass the textual test; the second is the reverse.
What the material never does is say which test governs. Both are used, in the same chapter, against different opponents — the textual test against the new-age popularisers and this ethical one against the ultra-right — and no principle is offered for when each applies. That is an unusually revealing gap, because it suggests the criterion is being selected to fit the target.
Ptah-Hotep Precepts — The Oldest Book In The World — african-spirituality.
Around 2400 BCE a vizier at the end of a long career sits down with his son and writes thirty-seven maxims. He has served as second-in-command to Pharaoh for decades, watched several reigns from inside the palace, and arbitrated quarrels that still sound like the quarrels on your street. The result is the oldest known piece of ethical writing, and it is transmitted by reading single sentences aloud and unfolding what each one implies.
Both are codes and they are built in opposite directions, which is the useful thing about the pair. Ptah-Hotep's maxims are empirical — assembled upward from a hundred observed situations by a man who watched people rise and fall. The ten clauses here are derived — read downward off the structure of a diagram, one per sphere, with the number fixed in advance by the cosmology rather than by how many lessons a life produced.
Each method has a characteristic failure and they are not the same. An empirical code drifts into folk wisdom and eventually contradicts itself, because situations vary and nothing constrains the collection. A derived code can generate a clause for a position with no ethical content at all. Something like that has arguably happened at Keter, whose entry is about seeking the Light within oneself and asks nothing of anybody else.
Which gives a test worth applying to any code presented as complete. Ask whether the number of clauses was decided before or after the contents. Ten clauses because there are ten spheres is a structural commitment, and it guarantees the code will be exactly as long as the diagram regardless of how much there was to say. The Ptah-Hotep count of thirty-seven answers to nothing but the material.
Sharpest implication. If a tradition's ethical code is generated by its diagram, then the code inherits the diagram's shape rather than the world's — and the things a practitioner is obliged to care about are determined by how many positions the cosmology happens to contain, which is a strange basis for an ethics and an entirely normal one historically.
Generative questions.