If Keter is the crown, Binah and Hokhmah are king and queen—the primary complementary opposites. Binah, the queen, represents the ‘head’ of the ‘pillar of severity’; Hokhmah, the king, the pillar of Mercy. The higher three Sephirot—or the supernal triad—stand outside all manifestation as the source of manifestation as Father, Mother, and Crown.
Hokhmahh, as the masculine principle, is an expansive release of unbound luminosity and penetration—the phallic explosion, if you like. Binah is the dark Matrix, the queen of the pillar of severity. Why severe? Because birth and death appear to be severe reductions and compressions of limitless energy (of course, ultimately, they are not).
We could think of Hokhmahh as prajna in the Buddhist tradition—penetrating insight that cuts through solidity. Hokhmahh is merciful because it releases the tension of containment and birth; Binah is the birth contraction. Hokhmahh penetrates and impregnates like sunlight, giving energy to everything; Binah holds and shapes the world. Hokhmahh is the primary energy drive; Binah is the cave of birth, which holds and contains the child of appearance.
Why use sexual imagery to represent primordial complementarity? As Dion Fortune puts it: “Manifestation is sexual insomuch as it takes place always in terms of the pairs of opposites; sex is cosmic and spiritual because it has its roots in the Three Supernals.” The entire tree is a dance between the expansive (masculine) and contractive (feminine) forces and the mediating forces in the central channel.
Interestingly, the Sefirot also maps onto recent brain studies, as Binah and Hokhmahh are sometimes thought of as left and right brains, mapping on to Ilan McGilchrist’s discoveries. McGilchrist's right brain hemisphere navigates the unknown; the left is a mapmaker. The penetrating and the receiving, luminosity and space, and potential and manifestation are analogies in the body and the nervous system. Note: Men and women have different degrees of masculine and feminine energy, so this isn’t a fixed polarity but a range of potentials and possibilities.
Binah is the great mother and the terrible mother who oversees birth and death—in other words, the creation and destruction of forms. Western religion tends to sanitize her as the pure virgin or compassionate mother—yet she emerges as the whore of Babylon in popular culture. Religion tries to veil and cover over the bloody towels of birth, but the great devouring mother keeps raising her head. In ancient Crete, there were castration cults where the great mother ruled. Her job is to keep the boundaries, contain the overflow, and keep boyish enthusiasm from becoming the tyrant.
Interestingly, Sophia, another version of the great mother, represents wisdom. She also represents the reduction of energy to concepts, the filter of the intellect. Wisdom or experience is also the beginning of death, just as a concept is a reified form of the fluid imagination. With embodiment is death, a death that free-flowing pure energy doesn’t know. This is why even eating the apple means the beginning of ‘form,’ and form is subject to decomposition, no matter how eternal it seems. And form is ultimately compost, falling again into formlessness.
Perhaps this is why religions that propagate eternalism, like Christianity and Islam, have such a hard time representing the feminine principle. They must either demonize or sanitize embodiment. Today, we must be wiser and understand that embodiment is not evil—that both Binah and Hokhmah, the fleshy mother of form and fiery father of formlessness, matter equally. That the two are interdependent and fully equal—emptiness is form, and form is emptiness, as the Buddhists say.
The supernal triangle is different than the yin/yang: it is not a closed circle, and there are three main principles; the third is Keter, which is unbounded and cannot be circumscribed. Keter is like Meister Eckhart's Godhead: a pregnant no-thing-ness—the apophatic nothingness of the mystical realization. This crown is above the head because it is not part of the ‘thingness’ of existence, yet it is the source of all things. Without Keter, Binah and Hokhmah would be caught in an eternal dialectic without resolution, a war of all against all.
On another level, if Binah is severe judgment, and Hokhman is unconditional love, then Keter is ultimately compassionate, navigating the two extremes. (Source: See Rabbi Mannis Friedman). We could also use the metaphor of the breath to describe this complementarity. When you breathe out, the body contracts as your breath expands; when you breathe in, your belly expands, but your body and breath contract. In that sense, the Binah is the in-breath of creation, the tendency of contraction, and Hokhmah is the out-breath.
In biblical mythology, the “first Adam” had two faces, the male and the female—facing outwards, Janus-like. This is why God is said to have spit the two faces to see each other; there had to be a split, a differentiation. It is not good for man to be alone, as the biblical injunction has it. The first Adam is undifferentiated, like Keter. In contrast, Adam and Eve are like Binah and Hokhmah, seemingly separate. This is the divine dualism, which is the creation of appearance itself. Of course, the male and female are never ultimately separate, for there is a non-duality of the sex duality. The play of the dualities appears for the creative and erotic sheer play of it. The Tree is a map of creative principles, above all.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Parallax to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.