The Four Adams of the Kabbalah

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Secret Doctrine's Third Proposition Series · 7 pages

Seven pages from The Secret Doctrine volume II, pages 457 to 458, under a running heading that names the theme: how Sophia returned to Adam and Eve their light-power. *It answers a question a reader of the Bible would not think to ask* — how many Adams there are — and the answer turns out to explain a good deal.

The Kabbalists, it says, teach the existence of four distinct Adams, or rather the transformation of four consecutive ones, each an emanation from the Dyōqnā — the divine phantom — of the Heavenly Man. The first is described as an ethereal combination of Neshāmāh, the highest soul or spirit, having neither a gross human body nor a body of desire; and this Adam is the prototype, the tsūrāh, of the second. The sequence continues downward, each Adam denser than the last, until the fourth is the one of Genesis. What that scheme does is dissolve a familiar difficulty: the Adam who is made in the image of God and the Adam who is formed of the dust of the ground are not the same being described twice but two of four distinct stages — which is the same argument that "The first chapter of Genesis" makes about the two creation accounts, arrived at from the other direction. The title of the running heading points to the redemptive half of the story, in which Sophia, Divine Wisdom, restores to Adam and Eve the light-power they lost in descending. Read beside "Pygmalion-Galatea" and "Sons of the Fire-Mist" in this same batch, it is the Kabbalistic version of the one event this whole section is about.

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