Hypocrites

The term hypocrites (ὑποκριτής, hypokritēs) in its original Greek means "one who answers" or "actor," and later came to signify a dissembler—one who wears a mask in a play. In the qabalistic framework of Liber 777, it denotes a specific class of beings or inhabitants assigned to the highest sephirah, Keter, reflecting the paradoxical state of seeming to be what one is not.

Position on the Tree of Life

Keter, the Crown, is the first sephirah on the Tree of Life, the point of pure unity and undifferentiated consciousness. The placement of Hypocrites at this step (1) is the most concealed of the series; it represents the root of all seeming, the primal split between the divine will and its expression. Unlike the same named subject appearing at Chokmah and Binah, at Keter the concept is wholly abstract—a mask that is not yet separated from the face.

Historical context

The association of Hypocrites with the highest sephirah draws on several overlapping traditions. In Christian polemics (particularly the Gospels), the term is used by Jesus to denounce those who perform piety for public approval. The Greek theater further informs this: an actor speaks the playwright's words, revealing the gap between intention and appearance. In the Zohar and later qabalistic texts, Keter is described as the "most hidden of hidden." The descent of divine light requires a series of veils (parzufim), and at the Crown the first veil of existence is itself a kind of dissimulation. Mathers and Crowley, synthesizing these threads, placed Hypocrites at Keter to emphasize that even the highest principle contains, in potential, the entire drama of concealment and revelation that characterizes the lower sephiroth.

In the table row "Their Inhabitants" (CXXVI.), Hypocrites only appear at Keter, Chokmah, and Binah. At Chesed the inhabitants are Pagans or Idolaters; at Geburah, Guebres (Zoroastrians); at Tiphereth, Sabians; at Netzach, Jews; at Hod, Christians; and at Yesod and Malkuth, Moslems. Thus the three highest steps are characterized by a type of inner opposition or split—each a different face of the same underlying principle of masking.

At step 1, Keter, Hypocrites therefore represent the pure form of dissimulation: the actor not yet embodied, the mask that precedes the role. They are not a moral failing but a primordial category of being, the necessary shadow cast by the first light of manifestation.