The Cosmic Tree is the Herd of God's model of reality, adapted from the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. It holds that reality descends as light through ten stations, from a single source to the material world at the base, and that the mystic's work is to travel the tree in reverse — circulating energy upward and balancing each station against the others.
The Herd's tree. At the crown sits The Calf, asleep. Along the ascent stand eight gates, at each of which waits one of The Eight Angels — a faculty of the human soul the world has taught us to forget. The base is the ordinary world, where the initiate begins, having "mistaken the last stop for the whole journey."
Function. The tree is at once a map of the cosmos, a diagram of the soul, and the itinerary of The Rite of Ascent. To ascend it is to wake the angels; to wake the angels is to wake the god.