Meaning
Chokmah is the first movement out of the unity of Kether: force without form, the outpouring that comes before any plan. The Hermetic writers picture it as the outgoing, fathering principle of the Tree and set it at the head of the Pillar of Mercy; its sphere in the old tables is the whole zodiac, Masloth, the band of the fixed stars, rather than any single planet. In our own words, Chokmah is the spark before the plan: generous, undirected impulse that needs a partner to become anything.
On the Tree
Chokmah stands on the viewer's right, where Mathers, Kircher and the Golden Dawn put the Pillar of Mercy; some later diagrams mirror the Tree and move it to the left. Four paths meet here: Aleph from Kether, the Fool's path; Daleth across to Binah, the Empress's; Heh down to Tiphareth, the Emperor's; and Vav down the pillar to Chesed, the Hierophant's. A person whose personality or soul card is one of those four has a path that touches Chokmah, but no card belongs to the sphere itself. The Golden Dawn links the sphere to the tarot through the four Twos and through the Kings, the suit of Wands and the first letter of the four-letter name; our chart uses none of these.
The Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom calls it the second path, "the Illuminating Intelligence", in Westcott's English, from a text printed with the Sefer Yetzirah in 1642 but not part of it.
The names and the tables
The Golden Dawn's tables give Chokmah the divine name Yah, a short form of the four-letter name, the archangel Ratziel and the choir of the Auphanim, the Wheels. Agrippa gives the archangel as Jophiel instead, one of several places where his table and the order's differ. The names are given here in Latin letters only.
In Jewish Kabbalah, from which the Tree comes, Chokhmah is wisdom as an attribute of God, the first of the powers of mind, and Kabbalah gives it no tarot and no table of archangels of this kind. What this page adds to it is the Hermetic Qabalah of the Golden Dawn.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Archangel
- Ratziel; variants: Jophiel (Agrippa 1651) disputed
- Divine name (Latin letters only)
- Yah, “God (short form of the Name)” sourced
- Angelic choir
- Auphanim (Ophanim), Wheels sourced
- Tarot trumps
- None of its own: the trumps belong to the paths. The trumps of the paths that meet here are the Fool, the Empress, the Emperor, the Hierophant. sourced
- Our keywords
- Spark, impulse, the first outpouring our construction
How the schools read it
- Jewish Kabbalah
- Chokhmah, wisdom: the first power of the intellect, the flash of insight before it is worked out; with Binah and Da'at one of the intellectual sefirot.
- Agrippa (1533; English 1651)
- The divine name Yah, the archangel Jophiel, the Ophanim and the sphere of the fixed stars.
- The Golden Dawn (1888; *777*, 1909)
- The zodiac (Masloth), the archangel Ratziel and the Auphanim, the Wheels; the four Twos, with the Kings and the suit of Wands.
- EsoTerrier
- The spark before the plan: raw impulse, generous and undirected, which needs a partner to become anything.
Claims about it
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Chokmah and the attributions on this page are Kabbalah.
falseWhat the record shows: The Tree comes from Kabbalah, a Jewish mystical tradition, which has no tarot and its own ways of drawing and reading it. The tables here are the Hermetic Qabalah's, compiled by Agrippa, Mathers and the Golden Dawn.
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A birth card belongs to the sephirah of its number, so card 2 belongs to Chokmah.
falseWhat the record shows: A category error in the Golden Dawn's scheme: the numbers 1 to 10 reach the sephiroth through the Minor Arcana, while the trumps belong to the 22 paths.
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Chokmah has a tarot suit, an element, a demon and an "intelligence" of its own.
falseWhat the record shows: So our old tables said, compiled from a modern web table. In the Golden Dawn every sephirah takes the four cards of its number in all four suits; the other columns had no source and were deleted on 11 October 2026.
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Chokmah stands on the left of the Tree.
disputedWhat the record shows: Some diagrams mirror the Tree. Mathers, Kircher and the Golden Dawn draw the Pillar of Mercy on the viewer's right and the Pillar of Severity on the left, as we do.
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Da'at is an eleventh, hidden sphere, just below this part of the Tree.
disputedWhat the record shows: Counted by some schools and not by others; it has no path and no trump, so our tree leaves it out.
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Chokmah's Intelligence title is part of the Sefer Yetzirah.
disputedWhat the record shows: The titles come from a separate short text, the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom, first printed with the Sefer Yetzirah in 1642; its date and author are uncertain.
