Foundation

Yesod, Foundation, is the ninth sefirah, positioned on the central Pillar of Equilibrium directly below Tiphareth and directly above Malkuth, and it is the channel through which all the energies of the sefirot above are gathered and transmitted into the material world of the tenth sphere. It is the foundation in the sense of the base on which the created world rests, the reservoir and conduit of the divine influences, and it is traditionally associated with the Moon, with the astral or etheric level, with imagination, dream and the generative and sexual powers.

Yesod collects the flow of the whole Tree and focuses it downward, so that nothing reaches Malkuth except through it. Its divine name is Shaddai El Chai, the Almighty Living God. In the Kabbalistic scheme Yesod is the vital foundation and the sphere of the tzaddik, the righteous one who channels blessing into the world; it takes its place in the doctrine of the ten emanations named in the Sefer Yetzirah and developed through the Zohar, where its mediating and generative role between the divine and the created is a recurring theme.

Sources The ZoharTraditionally attributed to Moses de Leon with Sefer Yetzirah: The Book of Creation in Theory and PracticeAryeh Kaplan

Yesod is assigned the Moon, and the attribution is central to its symbolism: as the moon receives the light of the sun and reflects it to the earth, so Yesod receives the influences of the whole Tree, concentrated through the solar centre of Tiphareth, and transmits them to Malkuth, the material world. In the Golden Dawn system of 1888 and in Liber 777, Yesod's colour is violet, and it corresponds to the four Nines of the tarot suits, the nines being cards of fullness and completion just before the final tens.

The lunar pairing underlies the Western-esoteric reading of Yesod as the sphere of the astral light, of dream, imagination and the subconscious, the subtle level nearest the physical. As throughout, the sefirah Yesod, its name Shaddai El Chai, and its role as the foundation and channel of the divine flow are Jewish Kabbalah, whereas the mapping onto the Moon, a tarot rank and a magical colour scale is Hermetic Qabalah, the Victorian adaptation. The distinction is not pedantry: it separates a theology of divine emanation from a Western system of magical correspondence.