Samizdat

“We thus encounter pell-mell the names of sefiroth, a new light-mysticism, notions of the Merkabah, and cosmological powers. Moses of Burgos had before him a later redaction of this list, which exhibited significant variants and which apparently strove to identify the first ten potencies with the ten sefiroth of the tradition that had meanwhile become canonical.

In these potencies the unknowable God gives the appearance of assuming a body, and his kabhod is, just as in the old Shi’ur Qomah, the “body of the Shekhinah.” God Himself is, in a Neoplatonic image (which likewise must have come from ibn Gabirol’s poem “The Royal Crown”) “the soul of souls.”

Below the kabhod there extend, in the form of the primordial man, the four “camps of the Shekhinah,” which are also the four primordial elements and the four realms of the archangels. Here the “body of the Shekhinah” is inexplicably separated from the primordial man.

In an equally inexplicable manner the elements are correlated with four of the aforementioned thirteen potencies, which apparently also correspond to the four principal sefiroth.

These are the hashmal (corresponding to hesed), the cloud (corresponding to Stern Judgment), the Throne of Splendor (corresponding to tif’ereth), as well as the ‘ofan of greatness (corresponding to malkhuth). This is not directly stated but implicitly understood.”

Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, p. 317.