The cardinal doctrines of the Kabbalah embrace the nature of the Deity, the Divine emanations or _Sephiroth_, the cosmogony, the creation of angels and man, their destiny, and the import of the revealed law. According to this esoteric doctrine, God, who is boundless, and above everything, even above being and thinking, is called _En Soph_ ([Greek: apeiros]); He is the space of the universe containing [Greek: to pan], but the universe is not his space. In this boundlessness He could not be comprehended by the intellect or described in words, and as such the En Soph was in a certain sense _Ayin_, non-existent (_Zohar_, iii. 283).[2] To make his existence known and comprehensible, the En Soph had to become active and creative. As creation involves intention, desire, thought and work, and as these are properties which imply limit and belong to a finite being, and moreover as the imperfect and circumscribed nature of this creation precludes the idea of its being the direct work of the infinite and perfect, the En Soph had to become creative, through the medium of ten Sephiroth or intelligences, which emanated from him like rays proceeding from a luminary. Now the wish to become manifest and known, and hence the idea of creation, is co-eternal with the inscrutable Deity, and the first manifestation of this primordial will is called the first _Sephirah_ or emanation. This first Sephirah, this spiritual substance which existed in the En Soph from all eternity, contained nine other intelligences or _Sephiroth_. These again emanated one from the other, the second from the first, the third from the second, and so on up to ten. The ten Sephiroth, which form among themselves and with the En Soph a strict unity, and which simply represent different aspects of one and the same being, are respectively denominated (1) the Crown, (2) Wisdom, (3) Intelligence, (4) Love, (5) Justice, (6) Beauty, (7) Firmness, (8) Splendour, (9) Foundation, and (10) Kingdom. Their evolution was as follows: "When the Holy Aged, the concealed of all concealed, assumed a form, he produced everything in the form of male and female, as things could not continue in any other form. Hence Wisdom, the second Sephirah, and the beginning of development, when it proceeded from the Holy Aged (another name of the first Sephirah) emanated in male and female, for Wisdom expanded, and Intelligence, the third Sephirah, proceeded from it, and thus were obtained male and female, viz. Wisdom the father and Intelligence the mother, from whose union the other pairs of Sephiroth successively emanated" (_Zohar_, iii. 290). These two opposite potencies, viz. the masculine Wisdom or Sephirah No. 2 and the feminine Intelligence or Sephirah No. 3 are joined together by the first potency, the Crown or Sephirah No. 1; they yield the first triad of the Sephiric decade, and constitute the divine head of the archetypal man.