Research Workshop: Maps of the Divine

It is with great interest that I noted the recent "research workshop" titled "Text & Image in Religious Cosmography: Reading Ilanot and Parallel Artifacts" which was held over the last three days under the auspices of the University of Haifa. This one is of great personal interest since it dealt with the "Kabbalistic Divinity Maps," i.e. the diagrams of the sefirotic tree found in Kabbalistic literature, which is commonly called the "Tree of Life."

As it is there are two interesting video links on this workshop website. The first titled "It's good to see the King" offers a brief overview into the history of the sefirotic tree by Dr. Yossi Chajes, whilst the second is a YouTube video in which Dr. Chajes discusses "the divinity maps in the seventeenth-century Latin work Kabbalah Denudata" by Knorr von Rosenroth. At the bottom of the webpage there is also a link to "selected images of Ilanot (Kabbalistic divinity maps)" which is worth perusing. You can access the site directly at:

http://research.haifa.ac.il/~chajes/chajes/maps.html

Members interested in this topic might also want to peruse Dr. Chajes' collection of photographic images of the "Musayef Ilanot" which can be viewed on:

http://picasaweb.google.com/chajes11/MusayefIlanot#