Churronzon
Active member
All at their strongest.
Round 1: Magic Gods take on God.
Round 2: They try to shatter God's top 3 vessels.
Round 1: Magic Gods take on God.
Round 2: They try to shatter God's top 3 vessels.
Malachi 3 describes God as “like a refiner’s fire”, but only because the ancient Hebrews didn’t know the word “H-bomb”. God is infinite energy, uncontrollable power, likely to scorch and burn anything He touches. If God even touched the Universe for a second with His little finger, it would shatter like a dropped egg. So how does God create the universe? How does He sustain it?
Ha’Ari proposes a system that my 21st century mind can’t help but compare to electrical transformers. If electricity went straight from a nuclear plant to the light bulb in your house, your light bulb would blow up. Instead, the electricity goes from the plant to a huge transformer that can handle it and make it a little less powerful, then from there to a smaller transformer that can handle that level of power and make it a little less powerful in turn, and so on to your lightbulb. God’s power, then, passed through the ten sephirot as “transformers” that converted it to a voltage capable of affecting the world.
Since Luria didn’t have that metaphor, he talked about “vessels” instead. Think of those artsy fountains where the water falls into one pot, fills it up, then overflows into another pot lower down, then into another even lower pot, and so on until it reaches the bottom. Luria imagined ten vessels, gently transferring the water from God all the way down the world, making the divine energy more finite at each level until finally it reached us.
That was the plan, anyway. The first pot worked as intended. The second and third also worked as intended. The fourth was just a little too weak, couldn’t handle the sheer nuclear blast of divinity, and exploded. That meant the full power of the third pot flowed down into the fifth pot, so the fifth also exploded, and so on all the way down to the last pot, which was at least as much “the bottom of the fountain” as a pot in itself and so didn’t explode. It just cracked open a little bit.
That last cracked pot was the material world, the universe we live in. It’s filled with the shards of the six broken sephirot above it, not to mention chunks of itself pried loose in the blast. Seven pots worth of debris. And remember, these pots were designed to control divine power, so they’re made of special God-resistant material; separated from their purpose they become the klipot, powers opposed to God. We’ve got all of this high-voltage divine energy flowing into us that we’re not supposed to be able to bear, shooting off huge streams of sparks in every direction, but it’s all so choked up with God-resistant klipot that we’re missing most of it. On the human level, all of this chaos and unfiltered light and god-resistant shards and brokenness manifests as disorder. The reason evil exists is that we’re living in the middle of a pot with a crack in it.
