(urth) Hierogrammates, Briah and Yesod

[Lane Haygood]

This is where it gets tricky.

IF Wolfe really meant to appropriate more than Kabbalistic names for
the story, the higher/lower distinction does not easily parallel our
modern "better/worse" distinction.  Abaddon (Hebrew, "the abyss") has
connotations of an infernal nature due to its association thereto in
the Revelation, but in a Kabbalistic cosmology, a lower world is
merely further from the divine light.  It is more material and less
spiritual, baser, one could say, only if materiality is considered a
form of baseness.

Which was a big philosophical topic a few thousand years ago all
around the Mediterranean.  Eternal, unchanging, and "heavenly" things
were considered tops over base, material and earthly things.  This
view persisted until Aristotle sort of stood it on its head with his
theorizing about universals and particulars... which in turn
influenced the Scholastics, who influenced later Christian thought
(early Christian thought probably found a lot more in common with
Judaic/gnostic beliefs), which is where we get a lot of our cultural
references today.

I always interpreted what Severian saw as he traveled from Briah to
Yesod via the Ship as entering a black hole and emerging from a white
hole, which is consistent (with what I know; philosophy student, not a
physicist) with some of the many-worlds intepretations of quantum
theory:  every black hole is connected to a white hole in another
universe.  Now, as for what would happen to our individual perceptions
upon entering the event horizon of a black hole, that's a good
question.  How do basically spatiotemporal creatures deal with gravity
so strong it bends the fabric of space-time such that the
fastest-moving thing in the universe is too slow to escape?

The question of the ordering of the worlds then becomes a little
skewed.  For instance, Neal Stephenson deals with this "information
flow" between successions of universes in a one-way fashion:
information propagates from the ideal, Platonic world to loads of
inferior copies (or, as I call it, the Zelazny Model).  There is a
constant "signal degradation" the further one gets away from the
source (which, in this case, would be a hypothetical universe Keter,
containing the Increate himself).  But it looks like information can
repeatedly pass back and forth between Briah and Yesod via a number of
ways.  I am not sure why, exactly, Briah is "lower" than Yesod (on the
Tree of Life, only Malkhut is lower than Yesod, but Briah is the
second of the four cosmic worlds).  However, Briah is the domain of
men and angels (our world), which, at least to my mind, describes
Urth, some far-future version of our present-day Earth.  So Yesod,
being the place where our creations have evolved to a higher state
fits... but what is "below" us?  Certainly not our Creator, who is at
the top... unless by some strange cosmology "we humans" of Earth are
the creation of yet another non-Increate being (which fits with
Gnostic thinking, but not Kabbalistic).

LH