Excerpt

Drawing a convincing parallel between the cabbalistic tree of the Sefirot and an automobile.

From Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco, C 1988 Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri Bompiani Sonzongo Etas S.p.A.; English translation C 1989 by Harcourt, Inc; 2007 First Harvest edition, pp. 366-168.

"Last night I happened to come across a driver's manual. Maybe it was the semidarkness, or what you had said to me, but I began to imagine that those pages were saying Something Else. Suppose the automobile existed only to serve as a metaphor of creation? ... It is the Tree of the Sefirot."
...
"... The drive shaft is the trunk of the tree. Count the parts: engine, two front wheels, clutch, transmission, two axles, differential, and two rear wheels. Ten parts, ten Sefirot."
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"...[I]n certain versions Tefiret isn't the sixth Sefirah, but the eighth, below Nezah and Hod. My axle-tree is the tree of Belboth."
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"But let's pursue the dialectic of the tree. At the summit is the engine, Omnia Movens, of which more later: this is the Creative Source. The engine communicates its creative energy to the two front or higher wheels: the Wheel of Intelligence and the Wheel of Knowledge."
"If the car has a front-wheel drive."
"The good thing about the Belboth tree is that it allows metaphysical alternatives. So we have the image of a spiritual cosmos with front-wheel drive, where the engine, in front, transmits its wishes to the higher wheels, whereas the materialistic version we have a degenerate cosmos in which motion is imparted by the engine to the two lower wheels: from the depths, the cosmic emanation releases the base forces of matter."
...
"... After the engine and the two wheels comes the clutch, the Sefirah of grace that establishes or interrupts the flow of love that binds the rest of the tree to the Supernatural Energy. A disk, a mandala that caresses another mandala. Then the coffer of change—the gear box, or transmission, as the positivists call it, which is the principle of Evil, because it allows human will to speed up or slow down the constant process of emanation. Fort his reason, the automatic transmission costs more, for there it is the tree itself that decides, in accordance with its own Sovereign Equilibrium. Then comes the universal joint, the axle, the drive shaft, the differential—note the opposition/repetition of the quaternion of cylinders in the engine, because the differential (Minor Keter) transmits motion to the earthly wheels. Here the function of the Sefirah of difference is obvious as, with a majestic sense of beauty, it distributes the cosmic forces of the Wheel of Glory and the Wheel of Victory, which in an unaborted universe (front-wheel drive) are subordinate to the motino imparted by the higher wheels."
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"You have but to look with the eyes of an initiate. The supreme engine lives by an alternation of intake and exhaust. A complex, divine respiration, a cycle initially based on two units called cylinders (an obvious geometric archetype), which then generated a third,, and finally gaze upon each other in mutual love and bring forth the glory of a fourth. In the cycle of the first cylinder (non is first hierarchically, but only through the miraculous alternation of position), the piston (etymology: Pistis Sophia) descends from the upper neutral position to the lower neutral position as the cylinder fills with energy in the pure state. I'm simplifying, because here angelic hierarchies come into play, the ditributor caps, which, as my handbook says, 'allow the opening and closing of the apertures that link the interior of the cylinders to the induction pipes leading out of the carburetor.' The inner seat of the engine can communicate with the rest of the cosmos only through the meditation, and here I believe is revealed—I am reluctant to utter heresy—the original limit of the One, which, in order to create, somehow depends on the Great Eccentrics. A closer reading of the text may be required here. The cylinders fill with energy, the piston returns to the upper neutral position and achieves maximum compression—the simsun. And lo, the glory of the Big Bang: combustion, expansion. A spark flies, the mixture of fuel flares and blazes, and this the handbook calls the active phase of the cycle. And woe, woe if in the mixture of fuel the Shells intrude, the qelippot, drops of impure matter like water or Coca-Cola. Then expansion does not take place or occurs in abortive starts. . . ."
"Then the meaning of Shell is qelippot? We'd better not use it any more. Fron now on, only Virgin's Milk . . ."
"We'll check. It could be a trick of the Seven Sisters, lower emanations trying to control the process of creation. . . . In any case, after expansion, behold the great divine release, the exhaust. The piston rises again to the upper neutral postition and expels the formless matter, now combusted. Only if this process of purification succeeds can the new cycle begin. Which, if you think about it, is also the Neoplatonic mechanism of Exodus and Parodus, miraculous lialectic of the Way Up and the Way Down."