About

The Tree of Life planted in the Soul and seen in the Eye of the Mind (and Heart) is worthy of attention. With some effort it can also be understood to the degree that honest work is applied. The fruits are many and may blessing find those who first saw and understood the branches, the leaves, the trunk, the roots.

Roots and Branches

These pages were initially created on a Google site as a bit of an experiment in 2011. That followed naturally from a project that started with colour work for only two of the Sephiroth on the Middle Pillar (Da’ath and Yesod), along with the Gimel/Teth and Samech/Peh crossings. After some months with this fairly tight focus, the work expanded and ultimately resulted in the creation of fully coloured Trees reproduced as accurately as possible using the Golden Dawn colour scales as shown on Servants of the Light (SOL) website — and now presented here. With this work, two things became clear:

1) Reproductions of the colours of the Etz Chaim in all the Worlds may be available in some books or personal collections, but they are not commonly seen in quite this way; and

2) The Trees in various colour combinations are beautiful and evoked a response that made me want to investigate and understand more. 

I am not a member of the Golden Dawn (GD), but making the coloured Trees and reproducing the colours on a screen required research into the GD systems of learning which then brought up further questions about the history of the Golden Dawn Colour Scales; the perception and naming of colour in the late 1800s or earlier; colour in Medieval Jewish Kabbalah; prismatic colours vs pigments; how colours are reproduced today for the web; further attributes of colour on the Tree and the uses of colour in general.     

This site is: 
A work of ongoing research into colours on the Tree of Life. After I constructed coloured Trees for each of the Four Worlds using the available resources, it was their beauty that prompted the creation of this site — that and a still growing fascination with colour in general. Although the project has grown over the years and now includes much more than originally intended, the resulting pages are presented here as personal research in progress, rather than as an exploration that has run its course.

This site is not: 
A detailed examination of the many layers of symbolism and meaning deeply underpinning the Tree. This researcher has studied and worked with the Qabalah and the Tree of Life in one way or another for more than 40 years but is no expert and would not claim to be such.  In that spirit, and in the hope that the images and content might be useful to others doing work along similar lines, they are shared.

However, studying the Etz Chaim is a bit like peeling an onion. At each layer (through the tears 🙂 ) there is very much to be gained by learning more about the Tree of Life from inception and through subsequent adaptations over the years.  This site is not really the best place to start such studies, but it points the way to some excellent resources. For instance, please note the SOL Practical Course on the Mystical Qabalah by W.E. Butler, Gareth Knight’s A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism, the works of W.E. Butler, Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, Dion Fortune, Israel Regardie, William G. Gray, R.J. Stewart and Robert Wang. Colin Low’s excellent Digital Brilliance website, books and websites by Nick Farrell and Chic and Sandra Tabatha Cicero will also steer you onto fertile ground.

Personally, the most useful source of trusted information on the web — and the one site that has most inspired the investigations presented here — has been the interactive Tree of Life on the Servants of the Light (SOL) site. Many thanks are extended for its creation and continued availability.

Deep thanks go to Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki who has been a teacher and guide for the past 20 years, and who helped encourage me to head down this particular path.  Also to Dr. Steven Critchley, Director of Studies at SOL, and the Servants of the Light in general for ongoing support and inspiration. Errors, omissions and misunderstandings presented on this site are mine alone, however, corrections, additional insights and other colour resources are most welcome. 

Special thanks are due to Tehuti, Seshat and the Opener of the Ways. Moran Taing is also due to Odhran. He’s more about the Celtic Tree of Life but never lets me forget that “The way you think it is may not be the way it is at all,” which is pretty much always true.

David S. Riggle
(Dairiel)