Wisdom

Chokmah, Wisdom, is the second sefirah and the first of the active emanations, the point at which the undifferentiated potential of Kether bursts into dynamic, outflowing force. In the imagery of the Tree of Life it heads the right-hand pillar, the Pillar of Mercy, and is the supernal masculine, the primordial father, Abba, whose creative impulse is received and given form by Binah, the supernal mother, across the abyss. Its divine name is Yah, a short form of the ineffable name of God.

Chokmah is wisdom not in the sense of accumulated knowledge but of the first flash of pure creative energy, the lightning-stroke of insight before it is shaped into understanding. As with all the sefirot, its place in the scheme is fixed by the Sefer Yetzirah and developed in the medieval Kabbalah of the Zohar; Chokmah and Binah together with Kether form the three supernal sefirot, set apart from the lower seven by the abyss, the gulf that separates the divine ideal from the created world below.

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

In the correspondence system of the Golden Dawn and Liber 777, Chokmah is traditionally assigned not to a single planet but to the sphere of the Zodiac or the fixed stars, the Mazloth, fitting for the sefirah of primal outgoing force just below the Primum Mobile of Kether; its colour is grey, and it corresponds to the four Twos and the four Kings or Knights of the tarot suits. This atlas, following a common twentieth-century modernisation, assigns the outer planet Uranus to Chokmah, an overlay later than the original 1888 scheme, made once the planets discovered after the eighteenth century were fitted into a system built for the seven classical planets. Both attributions are Hermetic rather than Jewish.

The distinction matters throughout the Tree: the sefirah Chokmah, its name Yah, and its role as supernal father belong to Jewish Kabbalah, developed over centuries from the Sefer Yetzirah through the Zohar to the Lurianic system of sixteenth-century Safed, whereas the planetary, colour and tarot correspondences are the work of the Victorian Hermetic Qabalah and its later revisers.