Thanks for the link, Steve. I read the part on the Sefer Yetzirah as closely as I could. It was nice to see someone using the SY's own language instead of interpreting it in terms of something else that was much later.
But I was disappointed that the presentation skipped over the zodiac and the order of constellations, which seems like an essential part to integrate. Your own presentation at least mentioned them, although in a way that didn't fit the SY. Probably it would integrate the zodiac in the same way you did, interpreting "northeast", "northwest" etc., as "north to east", "north to west", etc., which seems like a distortion of the text, as well as not producing the order of the zodiac at all. The SY is quite specifically following the usual order from Aries to Pisces.
The flat circular diagram has an interesting way of integrating the horizontals in with the diagonals, and with the sefirot that seem to have the same names. The major problem is that the aleph line, Air, isn't horizontal, it's vertical, or perhaps the projection into a flat plane of a 4th dimension, representing time (beginning to end, another unintegrated aspect). I will have to think some more about it.
Also, when the link talks about the verticals, suddenly the Bahir tree pops out of nowhere. It shouldn't do that, but rather be a natural extension of what came before. How do you get from the figure with the diagonals to the figure with the verticals?
I had forgotten that "sefira" means "sphere". [Added a month later: in further checking, I see that it did not mean "sphere" at all; it meant "enumeraton" or "counting", as one of the authors on Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephirot, says. So there is no necessity of the octohedron model after all. The octohedron is merely what is needed if you think of the sefiroth as spheres.] If so, the sefirot are not faces of a cube, but little spheres either inside the faces, or on the other side of them, outside the cube and outside the spherical universe. Otherwise my preferred pictured of what is going on remains unchanged. It explains more, and since it simpler, it is more what one would expect from a people in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean and Near East whose mathematics is a practical kind tied to architecture (as opposed to say, surveying or engines of war).
Huck wrote
These SY versions seem to relate to the zodiac Aries-Pisces
Yes, that was the main thing I was trying to understand, how the zodiac worked in these three presentations. In the Long Version, the order of directions doesn't preserve the order of the zodiac. In the Short Version it works well.
Huck wrote
From the Bahir version it's not clear, if it relates to the zodiac. The row contradicts the both other versions.
True. I was assuming that it did relate to the zodiac, since all the others do, and in exactly the same way, but somehow that part got omitted from what we have of the Bahir. Yes, this sequence of directions contradicts the others. Each contradicts the other two. The Bahir version, assuming it doesn't change the zodiac assignments from the others (which are all the same, Aries to Pisces), is intermediary between the Short and the Long. That's what I was trying to say, anyway. I see it as a transition from a visual and architecture-making culture, with words as records of pictures, to a verbal culture whose architecture is formed from words (as in that "wall"), just the reverse of the preceding, losing the idea that letters are abbreviations for things in space. I tend to think of the SY as a set of architectural drawings put into words, and overlaid onto it architectural drawings made from words. I wonder if there are any architectural drawings of the Jerusalem Temple. Or maybe I should visit a synagogue.
Huck wrote,
The zodiac of I-Ching should look like ...
2-3, 2-4, 3-4, 3-5, 4-5, 4-6, 5-6, 5-1, 6-1, 6-2, 1-2, 1-3
Naturally it depends now on the own definitions, which numbers should mean the directions east, south, west, north, upper and lower.
Independent from this definition each of the directions direction should have in the zodiac sequence ...
Is the Chinese zodiac the same as the Western? Is this a problem for comparing the two systems? Also, I don't understand much of what I just quoted from you.
