The day the sky cracked open and Archangel Uriel’s machinery was revealed to the world was a humbling day for most natural scientists. Suddenly, they were confronted with the fact that their descriptions of reality were but crude caricatures of the world.



There was, however, one notable exception.

String theory, whose connection to physical reality was tenuous at best, flourished in the kabbalistic era.

“YES, THAT’S DEFINITELY ON THE RIGHT TRACK.” the archangel boomed when asked about how gravitation was implemented consistently in his machinery. “TO BE HONEST, I JUST NEVER GOT THE PURELY BOSONIC CASE TO WORK.“ He gave pause, a crowd of disheveled physicists hanging on his words.

“But none of the anomaly and tachyon-free fermionic strings give us anything resembling particle physics! We want to describe the world!” a voice called out from the crowd. Uriel looked contemplative. “THE WORLD IS EMBODIED BY THE SEPHIRAH MALKUTH WHOSE GEMATRIA IS THE PERFECT NUMBER 496. IT IS ALSO THE REAL DIMENSION OF THE LARGEST EXCEPTIONAL LIE GROUP E8.” the angel’s voice boomed, fear and anticipation sweeping over the crowd. “IF YOU WISH TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD, YOU’LL HAVE TO TACK-E-ON!”

A string is not unlike a serpent. To ascend the body of Adam Kadmon from the foot of Malkuth it needs something to bind and couple to. This kabbalistic role is played by the Kalb-Ramond B field. Including it in the calculation is like remembering the force provided by the tree itself. But not all paths are permitted and not all strings are pure enough to ascend the Pillar of Mercy. In the end, the condition in which all sicknesses are cured, all anomalies cancelled, is exactly that the theory’s gauge group have dimension 496. Thus was born the Type I, HO, and E8 x E8 Heterotic strings. To many, however, this sudden multiplicity was a problem.

The physicists returned to the Archangel with this question. Uriel smiled, “ANSWER THIS: WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FACETS OF GOD?”. Unlike before, this comment was met with a wave of puzzled faces. Uriel looked around uncomfortably. “LOOK, I DON’T WANT TO JUST SPOIL THE WHOLE THING. JUST USE YOUR BRANES.”

The theories of superstrings must be formulated in ten dimensions, in correspondence with the ten sephirot. To understand them, because of their mathematical difficulty, requires great wit. Perhaps it was no surprise that Edward Witten was the one who pierced through the veil and just really clarified everything for us mortals.

“It’s always been somewhat of a mystery why we compactify on Calabi-Yau threefolds, six dimensional manifolds, but we know the shattering of the vessels involved seven sephirot.” he spoke, standing in front of a powerpoint with exactly those words on it and the equation “10=11?”

“Essentially, what I’d like to argue today, is that to understand the relation between the unshattered vessels and our four dimensional space-time, we should regard time as an aspect of the sephirah Da’at. The nature of Da’at is the unity of the sephirot and, though it is often conflated with Keter, for these purposes we should regard it as a distinct aspect of Divinity.”

“With that in place, I think it’s clear we should view our superstring theories as being various aspects, or limits, of a unified eleven dimensional theory.” he spoke and the slide changed to a crudely drawn Tree of Life with various mathematical procedures connecting each sephirah.

At the top of the Tree sat this new mystical theory, M-theory for short, in correspondence with the sephirah Keter. It is sublime and incomprehensible to man – and yet all other sephirot or theories flow from it. Further developments, such as the equivalence between M-theory and the Matrix Model with only a time direction, would only solidify the correctness of this picture.

To descend is to distort the theory, pulling and wrapping its parts in dizzying geometric arrangements. “Each connection is still a duality! Though it may be hard to see the true equivalence of these theories it is no harder than understanding the whole of God by any of His aspects.”

The true heart and mind of the superstring theories, type IIA, takes the seat of Binah. The feminine nature of Binah can be understood from its origin from the mother theory, M-theory, wrapped on a circle – the metaphorical ‘circle of life’.

By twisting, T-dualizing, the warmth of Binah we find the fiery judgement of Gevurah. This is the type IIB theory at its strongest coupling. However, to be consistent with God’s forgiving nature, we find a highly non-trivial constraint on the type IIB string; self-duality. By S-dualizing we find, again, the type IIB string, but this time at weak coupling and in correspondence with the sephirah of Hod, the foot of Adam Kadmon, which ensures good placement when using his hand.

The relation between Netzah – the other foot of Adam Kadmon, which represents conquering and victory over one’s problems – and the subdued and steady foot of Hod, is merely a change of orientation. Similarly, when one takes an “orientifold” of the type IIB theory, one obtains the type I theory, folded across the body.

At the heart of superstring theory, and the heart of Adam Kadmon, beats supergravity. Beneath the complexity and opacity of Keter lies simple beauty; the sephirah Tiferet. This explains the role of supergravity in capturing the beauty and lessons of M-theory, converting them to all the other superstring theories. It is a splendid image – a hologram, if you will – of the foundation Yesod from which God has made the world.

Yesod is the channel through which the light above is delivered to the world, Malkuth. It is the superstructure of the world and is thus a supersymmetric quantum field theory. Thus we arrive at perhaps the most powerful discovery yet; the kabbalistic connection to the (2,0) theory of M5-branes. In fact the connection runs deeper. Yesod represents Kabbalah. Or rather, it represents our understanding of Kabbalah. The meaning of Kabbalah is that, to understand God we must understand the world, and to understand God is to know his True Name. The rest, as they say, is just commentary.

Thus to understand the (2,0) theory is to know the Shem HaMephorash.

Perhaps it is not surprising then that the (2,0) theory has no known name; no Lagrangian description. There is still hope however! Other Names can be understood as simplifications, shortenings and rearrangements, of Shem HaMephorash. Thus by studying simplifications –compactifications, if you will – of the (2,0) theory we may discover other Holy Names. Hence we derive the kabbalistic correspondence between them and superconformal field theories. The most famous of which, the N=4 super Yang-Mills, is identified with the tetragrammaton.

For a while, this ‘string-string’ correspondence generated a lot of excitement within the applied kabbalah world and the first class of sacred theories, class S, were quickly enumerated. As it turns out, understanding supersymmetric gauge theories is considerably harder than simply speaking potential names.

Though interest has waned, it is believed that strings will play a role in the end of days. We should recall the Archangel’s words: to understand the world we must include E8. What this means remains a mystery.

-Prof. Juan Maldacena, Institute for Advanced Kabbalistic Study