"In brief, the Tree of Life is a compendium of science, psychology, philosophy and theology."
~ Dion Fortune
"The Tree of Life, that simple yet all-comprehending diagram, is devised with so profound a philosophy that it represents the subjective as well as the objective worlds and serves to indicate the relationship between them. The Ten Holy Sephiroth sum up the objective world on all its levels and in all its aspects, together with its different phases of evolution; and when we remember that the different aspects, according to the Doctrine of Emanations, correspond to the successive phases of evolution, just as do the various stages of animal organisation from the single-celled organism to the vertebrate, we shall see how comprehensive is this glyph which can be applied horizontally to time and vertically to type, epitomising, in fact, the whole of the evolutionary theory of life and form. By its use the Qabalists built up an evolutionary philosophy in the darkest of the Dark Ages of the mind; and by its use the modern philosophical mystic is enabled to transcend the limitations of a materialistic science and forecast developments of knowledge that have not yet dawned above the horizon.
The Ten Holy Sephiroth themselves are conceived of as linked one to another by the zigzag course of the Lightning-Flash, which represents the line of the course of evolution, descending from Kether to Malkuth; the Twenty-two Paths, however, are united by the coils of the Serpent Nechushtan, the Serpent of Wisdom, which loops one to another, laboriously upward, till its crowned head rests upon Kether, thus indicating the evolution and initiation of the soul of man."
~ Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah
