​Chapter 7. The Sediment

A Sephirah, underneath the names of power and attribute, is a cut. It is the act by which one thing is held apart from another: mercy told from cruelty, the bounded from the boundless, this from that. To determine is to divide, and each station on the Tree is one such division fixed and given a name. The Tree is a sequence of cuts, one distinction laid after another, and to follow it is to follow the dividing down its length.

Begin where the Tree still divides its own interior. In the supernal three the cut runs through thought, and thought keeps its principles intact. Held in the abstract, mercy is the good of giving and justice the good of the due, and the ideal that would join them violates no principle: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, a formula that stands flawless while it is unapplied. Chokhmah leaves difference unthought beneath its unity; Binah, the dividing power, lets fall whatever will not part cleanly. What falls is a concept, the merciless set against the merciful, and a difference held in thought is a species a genus takes back, an antipode the synthesis reabsorbs. No real thing suffers. To occupy the head alone, Kether casts off multiplicity, and in that casting it lays down the law the descent will obey, that being answers to a single measure. With multiplicity gone from the crown the second root is struck from the map.

Were the world truly one, the single measure would hold. A unified field answers to a universal rule, every case an instance of the one, and the concept carried down would fit its object without remainder. The world below is different. The plurality the crown denied is the truth of the concrete: the manifold is manifold before any single measure is laid upon it, and no single standard covers what is plural. Each concept, brought down from Nous into act, meets cases the universal rule cannot manage. Where the supernal division left a predicate, the concrete act leaves a real remainder, the side of the case the act was forced to abandon, and that remainder never returns. This is the sediment, and it begins the moment thought has to act.

The ranking was taken as given. A principle is good as it serves unity and evil as it favors division and the many, the crown's law of the single measure turned now to rank the stations. The good was never found in mercy; the grade is read off the direction of the cut, holy for whatever bends toward the One and foul for whatever the sealing drops. Reverse which side the measure crowns and the grades reverse with it. The ranking is the will toward the One reading its seal back as the order of good and evil.

The One cannot act as one. To do anything in a world it must break into powers, into mercy, judgment and the rest, and the breaking is the defeat of the unity it was meant to serve, the single good scattered into many principles. Once scattered they tear against each other over the same field. More mercy is less restraint, hence more injustice; more justice is less giving and so more of the hardness mercy would relieve; the field grants neither its full demand. What one principle counts as its good the other drops as its remainder; no single measure holds them together. The conflict of the principles is the multiplicity the crown denied.

Chesed is loving-kindness, the giving that pours without measure, and its bare concept would reach all alike. An act of mercy reaches this one and passes the next. The gift laid on the latecomer denies the claim of the one who bore the heat of the day: the workers hired at the eleventh hour receive the wage of those who began at dawn, the lord calls it his goodness, and to the first the same act arrives as unjust (Matthew 20:1–16). Give all one has to the poor and one hand closes on the gift while the rest stay empty. What mercy drops is the injustice committed by its choice, the concern of severity shed inside the act of giving. Gevurah has no hand in this. Chesed alone, out of a single kindness, makes the wrong it cannot see.

Gevurah repeats the doubling. Severity is judgment, and its bare concept would render each case exactly its due. To sentence by the measure is to give the deed its due and deny the person his reprieve: one man draws the suspended term and the next the years, both by the rule, and the clemency that would have bent for the second is what the ruling casts off. The guest hauled in off the road is bound and cast into the dark for a garment he was given no hour to find, gathered by the same summons that seated the rest, and the plea his case held is struck from the record (Matthew 22:1–14). Judgment drops the pardon the law cannot grant.

In thought the sediment is the clean antipode, the merciful set against the merciless, the pardoned against the condemned, each contrary nameable and laid apart from its principle. Neither deed keeps that cleanness. The payment already described is open-handed mercy to the one who gave an hour and plain injustice to the one who bore the day; the single payment is all the lord did. Ask what the deed is, merciful or unjust, and it will not answer, holding both faces at once. The sediment is the underside of the single stroke, the face the principle will not read while it reads the deed as mercy or justice.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his need reads as one clean rule until an act must apply it, and then terms split. What counts as ability, the labor a man gives or the labor he holds back, the strength he spends or the strength he spares? What is a need, the want felt or the want a stranger judges real? Whose standard sets the line? The plural field answers each question in more than one way, and the rule seamless in Nous must take one reading and let the others fall. No line laid on the many keeps all of them.

Which side falls is not fixed with the principle. Read need one way and the idle-but-able are dropped; read it another and the willing-but-weak go instead; the remainder moves as the reading varies. What a Sephirah casts out is settled by its boundary, and that boundary could have fallen elsewhere, for the plural field holds no single seam the measure was bound to follow. The sediment is positional. That some remainder falls is necessary, forced by one measure meeting the many; which remainder falls is contingent, resting on a cut that had other places to fall.

There is a reason the many resist, and it is not malice. To be an individual is to stand apart and maintain oneself, and a principle of unity asks that this be surrendered. Mercy says give all you have away, and the individual would keep something; the state says die for me, and the citizen would live. Why give what one could keep? Why submit to a ruling that costs one everything? The single will that wants to be and to hold itself has real weight, and the unifying measure meets that weight as resistance and brands it wicked.

Tipheret is harmony, the proportion that would hold mercy and judgment in the ratio a world can rest on. Nothing in harmony says where the ratio falls. So much mercy, so much severity: the measure names no number, and the same firm hand that forms one child breaks the next, because the child upon whom it falls is never the abstract case for which the measure was made. What will not sit at the mark is the sediment of Beauty, the disproportionate cast out to let proportion stand.

The ideal Tipheret sets is a compound of mercy and judgment, and whoever meets it remains intact while whoever falls beneath it is wanting. The lack the world runs on is struck here, the shortfall from a standard no one was asked to accept. That shortfall is the afflicted and the incomplete, the object of atelophilia, and it is what Chesed and Gevurah require to have anything to work upon. The measure opens the wound; mercy and severity are the relations that feed on it. Beauty, seated at the center of the Tree and named its harmony, is where the Tree manufactures the deficiency the rest of it lives by.

Below the center this fall runs in the register of the deed done. Netzach is the press that carries a form forward against resistance, and to carry forward is to overrun. Struck by an aggressor, does one turn the cheek or strike him down? To take the blow may leave the next victim exposed; to stop the attacker makes him the body struck. Either deed leaves one side as a real loss, and no rule of endurance settles beforehand which body falls. Hod is the yielding that takes form, and its deed sheds the one who will not yield, the unbroken branded as bare stubbornness. Yesod is the bond that gathers and passes on, and to bind these is to sever those; what it drops is the tie refused so the chosen tie can hold. Each deed lets go the side of the case it cannot carry into the world.

This deposit needs its name, and the name is given. Qliphah, the shell: the inherited reading took it as a husk wrapped around a core from outside, impurity that begins where the pure leaves off. The reading is wrong at the root. The structure of the principles precipitates it, the remainder that falls from within the ordering. Mercy pours off the injustice its gift commits and stays mercy by the need it answers; judgment pours off the mercy it must deny and stays judgment by the deed it weighs. The lees are not waste. They are what the principle rests on, the deposit that secures its determination. A Qliphah is simultaneously what is cast off and what sustains the principle that cast it: what falls out of the act, not a foreign covering. The renaming is the first disowning: what was produced within is called something that clung from without, and the Tree keeps its hands clean.

Azriel of Gerona, who first called the power of evil the kelippah, chose the bark of the tree of emanation, and bark is not fastened on from outside; it is pushed out from within by the living wood and hardened at the rim, the tree's substance turned to rind. The hermetic art gave the deposit a body. Every purification in the alchemist's vessel threw down dead and blackened matter at the bottom of the flask, the caput mortuum, the part cast off by refinement. The masters held that the blackening could not be skipped, that there is no whitening without the prior nigredo, the rot below being the condition of the light drawn off the top. Both images say the residue is produced by the working.

The imperfection is the lawful underside of any principle. The many the principles broke apart to reach, and tore against each other over, is at root individuality, the single will that holds its own, and the resistance seen above is what the sediment is. These remainders differ in content, but each preserves the claim of the particular against the measure that would absorb it. Under all its station-names the deposit is one thing: the individual the unifying measure cannot admit, the singular pressed out because the Tree kept only the pole that bends to unity and struck out the pole of plurality. The Sephiroth are this operation retailed, each in its domain expelling the individuality that will not fit its measure, and what the tradition heaps below as foul is the sovereign individual will the One had no room for.