​Chapter 21. The Other Kingdom

The powers of the Other Side stand outside the Tree's descent, and the tradition that feared them most is the one that gave them a court. In the first full account of the left emanation, Isaac ha-Kohen set Samael and Lilith as king and queen over the powers of the deep, a wedded pair answering the holy bride and groom, and Joseph Dan reads the myth as built on that correspondence, the dark couple laid against Adam and Eve and against the King and his Presence.

The sources never agree on Lilith's place in this order. Isaac sets her as the consort at Samael's side, the female half of a demonic pair, and Scholem marks this pairing with Samael as the properly Kabbalistic innovation, older legend having known her as the night-demon who kills infants and endangers women in childbirth. In that pairing Lilith is queen of the realm of the shells, filling the role the Shekhinah holds in the world of sanctity, mother of the impure as the Presence is mother of Israel, the dark answer to the indwelling Presence. Even so, her rank will not hold still. She is named the king's consort and the queen of a whole realm, and the two titles pull against each other, sovereign in her own domain yet given as one half of a pair.

Berman finds this instability at the root of the Zoharic split. The myth Rabbi Shimon reveals to the few is that the divine King, who should be joined to his Presence, is joined instead to a diabolical consort, and the terror of the disclosure is that divine and demonic can no longer be told apart, the holy marriage and its dark double grown indistinguishable at the very point the text works hardest to keep them separate. The Zohar draws the border and dissolves it in the drawing. It cannot drive Lilith past the wall, because the King it would purify is wed to her.

This unbinds the verdict. If the tradition's text cannot keep Lilith outside as a clean enemy, if she appears inside the holy marriage as its underside, no foe beyond a wall, then evil is the name unity presses on her out of its failure to be rid of her. She is the difference the One could neither gather in nor cut away completely. The Lehavah reached this, the stance that answers to neither the bright pole nor the dark and burns between them. Lilith is that stance given a throne, the difference held open where the Tree would have closed it.

The Tree is a deduction, and a deduction can be counted. Ten Sephiroth are set rank behind rank, each one reached by the one above and held in its place by the descent that derives it, and the count holds because deriving and being taken up are the work of unity, which lays its differences out as numbered stations and keeps them distinct. To number is to order, to fix a one and set the next against it. The Sitra Achra is what that work never reached.

The doctrine betrays this each time it reaches for the rank of Lilith. She is the queen of the deep, one sovereign over the shells, and she is the wife of Samael, one of a pair. Called single, she doubles into the couple; called double, she draws back into the one crown, and the sources never close the question because the question has no seat in her. The Draconian current that maps the shells stumbles at that place from the other side. It sets twin gods at the summit of the Qliphoth, Satan and Moloch, two faces turned opposite ways, and then unsays the two, making them the masks of a single hooded Lord whose true face is the Void, and yielding a three that is neither the two it shows nor the one it hides. Mason draws the crown as this shifting number, and the shifting is the truth of it, a count that slides the moment it is fixed. Call the summit one and the two rise through it; call it two and the one draws them back; the third names not a sum but the refusal to settle at either. Even the Christian Trinity carried this, held for centuries as a number no council could resolve without heresy on one side or the other, one substance that cannot be reduced to three and three persons that cannot be collapsed into one.

The Draconian current reads its sliding as an arrival. The three becomes a true face, the Void behind the hood, a one that has absorbed the two, and with that the shells become a ladder again and the summit a crown reached and kept. This is the counter-Tree in its reversed dress, a deduction climbing to a black apex after refusing to settle at every lower step. The number slides because nothing gathers its terms into a total, and to seat it at last in a hooded one is to do the crown's work on the Other Side.

To fix Lilith outside as a clean enemy would resolve the two sides into a sealed border, and to enthrone her as the one queen would set a single crown against Ain Soph, and both ask the count to hold still. A seal closes a result, a difference told and put to rest, and here there is no settled number to close upon. What cannot be counted as one or two cannot be sealed as either, and the sovereignty that holds by staying uncounted gives the sealing no purchase.

The count the Tree keeps and the Other Side refuses is drawn nowhere more plainly than in the act the tradition made its central image, the joining of male and female. On the Tree that joining resolves. The King couples with his Presence, the Shekhinah is drawn up out of her exile and gathered to her lord, and the two that stood apart close into the one flow the coupling restores. Idel describes the structure of the Tree as an anatomy of male and female powers working in pairs, joined to bring forth a fruit, the world and the souls in it, difference put to work and consummated in what it issues. Scholem finds the rite below lifted to sustain the marriage above, the human act stirring the sacred coupling and drawing the parted powers back into one. The eros of the Tree is zivug, the right pairing whose end is to shut the two into unity.

On the Other Side the same pair remains and the shutting is withheld. Samael and Lilith couple and come to no single crown, and Lilith does not thin into a transparent Presence spent in her lord. She holds as consort and queen, the receiving side that is never taken up, the female the union cannot exhaust. Berman reads a passage where a spirit of seduction settles from Lilith over Yesod, the Foundation, and covers it, so that the holy power gathered there does not pass into act. A turban veils the divine phallus, a foreskin drawn over the source, and the flow the Tree's marriage exists to loose is stopped at its issue. What comes of this is a brood of destroyers and the ruin of the worlds above and below, as the tradition weighs the act by the union it failed to complete. Weighed from the difference the act keeps open, the blockage is a coupling that declines to resolve: an eros that joins without fusing and divides without parting, one flesh that stays a two that never settles into two separate ones. Where the Tree's union raises the Shekhinah and closes the breach, this joining holds the union open in the difference, neither sinking the two into one nor letting them fall back into two, and keeps Lilith sovereign within it, a queen no marriage absorbs.

The act falls under law wherever unity rules, and the law bends one way. It licenses the coupling that issues in unity and forbids the rest, confining eros into the single sanctioned channel where two are made into one flesh and one household, the seed loosed toward its fruit and the difference spent in the joining. Christian law carries this bend to its end. Continence is set above the licensed union, the unparted state held nearer the One than any coupling can reach, and at the last a risen world is drawn in which they neither marry nor are given in marriage, the pairing undone and the difference between them annulled. That summit is sexless, the body's division wiped away, the pull toward the One carried onto the flesh with nothing left to check it, and it marks the far pole.

Kabbalah bends eros toward the One by another route, for in it sex reaches into the godhead and outlasts the body. Berman reads the Sephiroth as gendered persons coupling in pairs, with the Supernal Father and Mother above in Chokhmah and Binah, and the parting and rejoining of the lower pair as the central drama the whole mythology turns on. Sex belongs to the constitution of the divine.

At death the body drops the division and leaves sex standing. Scholem finds in the Zohar a soul composed of male and female at its root, split into masculine and feminine only in the descent into a human frame, and he reads the world of souls to which it returns as the recovery of the state it held before that descent. There the soul keeps its own standing and is not gathered into the Divine. It comes home to the undivided form, male and female folded in one and not yet drawn apart, an androgyne that has shed the split the body imposed and holds within it everything the body had divided.

This homecoming is still a gathering into one. The androgyne restores the wholeness in which male and female have not hardened into separate beings, while the Sitra Achra preserves their division. The law that governs eros is the descent written onto the body, and the ways beyond the body it holds out, the sexless summit and the undivided root alike, are the descent's last claim upon the flesh.

The One is a seal over a difference it did not make. The world is many, and the Sephiroth are many, so the unity it displays is worked upon a manifold it can neither author nor do without. This is the dependence Daath already named, the difference the One would have to seat as its own condition and cannot seat without ceasing to be one. What it cannot own it cannot lay to rest, and the verdict on the shells will not hold still: they are refuse cast below the floor, then a guard the holiness needs, then the very powers the divine clothes itself to rule through. The wavering is the shape of a need that cannot be confessed. Each judgment tries to be rid of what the next judgment reaches back for.

The coupling the Other Side enthrones holds the two before the sealing draws them into one, and a kingdom raised on it stands where the first cut has not yet closed. The tradition cannot grant this and keep the Tree first, so it fastens the Other Side to the Tree at the one seam within reach, the slime on the Shekhinah's fingernail, the outermost rim of the lowest Sephirah. Berman marks how little sense the fastening makes, a whole realm hung on so slight a remnant. The slightness is the confession. The thread is thin because the kingdom has nothing to hang from: what is prior to the first sealing owes the Tree no descent and cannot be lowered from a floor it never stood beneath. The fingernail is the Tree reaching under itself to claim what came before it, and the claim holds by a smear.

The difference unity failed to admit could be kept as a nameless lack, the loss carried in grief and never given a face, and that apophatic way with the irreducible is not the one taken here. Seated, Lilith is the difference affirmed, real and ruling, and the impurity read into her marks the will the One could not absorb, her sovereignty the very failure the order indicted as a crime.