What is the Tree of Sapphires?
 

• On this site, it represents a branch from the Toledano Tradition of Kabbalah. which pre-dates the Lurianic School of Kabbalah, commonly studied today, by about 3,500 years.
• This branch is a tree of 'golden sapphires'* dedicated to the Kabbalah of 30CE and investigating the mystical teachings of Jesus' time.

Legend** has it that when Adam and Eve went down into the lower worlds after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, Eve took a twig of the Tree and planted it outside Eden to show mankind the way back to God.

The young Tree of Knowledge outside Eden grew and flourished and the fruit of its offspring was said to be the source of food for Noah, his family and the animals after the great flood destroyed everything else.

From Eve's tree was cut a staff which was passed down through generations until it was given to Moses by his wife Zipporah, one of the lineage carriers of the female line. It was called the 'staff of sapphires.'

Nobody knows where that staff of sapphires is today but it still calls us back to the parent tree in the same way that the famous wardrobe of C. S. Lewis's story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was the doorway into the mystical world of Narnia. That wardrobe was made from wood from the Narnian Tree of Life which was also the Tree of Knowledge.

When Moses brought down the original Ten Commandments from Sinai they were written on sapphire. The Hebrew word for sapphire is the same as 'sephira.' Its plural 'sephirot' are the ten emanations of light on The Tree of Life that began the creation of the Universe. Each one relates to one of the Ten Commandments.

The Children of Israel were impatient and built themselves an idol—and Moses smashed the sapphires in a rather understandable fit of pique and had to go all the way back up Sinai. This time, he was given rules graven in stone for a humanity which was not ready to see the inner truth.
 

* Sapphires come in all the colours of the rainbow including red ones – which are better known as rubies. Golden sapphires are coloured by traces of iron ore. The most famous ones come from Sri Lanka.

**The Quest for the Holy Grail (attrib Walter Map, Archdeacon of Oxford 1200—but more likely to have been written by a student at a Cistercian monastery in the Champagne region of France—according to Penguin Classics edition 1969 translated and introduced by P. M. Matarasso)

NB. If you are looking for my friend and colleague, Dr. David Goddard, author of The Tree of Sapphires (Weiser) click here.