venicebard said:
What is evidently not known modernly is that the Name 'accesses' the four worlds in the order Atzilut(fire)-Yetzirah(water)-B'riyah(air)-Asiyah(earth), as is easily seen once the link between the worlds and the wheels of Ezekiel's vision is made clear.
I have since refined my understanding of the Name a bit. Based on data rabbis, may they be bless'd, evidently no-longer possess, my current theory is this.
In its
creative (procreative) context, meaning used to wield power, the Name evokes fire-water-air-earth: this is based on the 'mystery of the three mothers'
Sefer Yetzirah says the three letters yod-heh-vav were chosen in accordance with (or in accordance with which they were chosen). In shorthand: yod, the Light, is attached by desire, heh, to an object of nature, thus placing in vav's hands the gestation till physical exteriorization, heh, of the thought created by desire's attachment of the Light.
In the context of Lurianic
tikkun or restoration, however, it is analysed according to how man can improve himself (and thus the world) by the process. In shorthand: the first heh
appears in conjunction with yod (conjoined by the name Yah), so the world immediately affected is B'riyah, where the thought so-created lives. The descent towards exteriorization is a weight hanging over desire, so man must prepare, in Yetzirah--the world of forms, of
mitzvot--for the exteriorization in Asiyah (second heh), so that our reaction to it is to acknowledge it as our own just destiny. This way, we can learn from the experience and free some of the Light bound up in the thought (to enlighten
us, for
it is self-contained and not lessened in the least by being so bound).
This is Gnostic thinking: freeing Light 'enslaved' by matter. It may sound strange to moderns, though.
...a male half (yod-heh) and a female half (vav-heh). This polarity...
An interesting aspect of this I discovered recently is that the heh in each half of the Name is the hand of the other given in the
covenant of marriage, just as it was given to Abraham as a sign of the Covenant of circumcision. The especially ironic aspect of this is that the heh in the second half, which is evidently the female part of that half (as per the part of the tradition that
did survive), is the hand of the male
given her! This means it is his submission to the covenant of marriage--her hold over him (pleasant, it is to be hoped)--that is female to vav, and vav (this is a secret evidently not known for centuries) is the space
for the male
in the female (being
six, the 'number of directions' of space).