Quixotic Sephirot on Cybertron
It’s been a good long while since I’ve done anything for the Transformers Wiki, so this labor day I started pecking out a bit on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life in Transformers. It’s only appeared in 1 text story in 2003, and the fandom has marginalized the concept because, frankly, it was a bit rubbish and badly done. But it has some deep-universe connections and really ought to be documented.
Basically, in Transformers, the Tree of Life looks like this; a reasonably traditional color-name arrangement with the seemingly-always-present problem in ‘overview’ stories like this; traversing directly from Hessed (Mercy) to Binah (Understanding.) No such path actually exists, it’s an abyss which cannot be traversed in a linear fashion.
That’s all pretty straightforward… until one discovers it’s not the first time the Tree of Life appeared in Transformers.
Five Faces of Darkness, part 4. 1986. 17 years earlier. Rodimus Prime deliberately undergoes a near death experience and has a vision chronicling the eras of Cybertronian history. 8 narrators, one per era. Each era correlates to a Sephirot in its Mercurial of Balked (Quilopic) form.
The reason I went back to re-view the sequence was because an earlier, shorter vision-sequence 2 episodes prior included the ‘exploding mathematical formula’ visual also featured in the 2003 title. I found out that it also had Rodimus traversing within amethyst pillars as he dove deeper into the vision- again just like the 2003 story.
I’m now convinced that Robert Skir (author of the 2003 story) deliberately went back and matched the 17 year old story’s visuals, retroactively tying the two together.
This first vision is a jumble of discordant imagery- one of which is a funny-looking green corridor which, I think, had it’s negative’s color proscessed backwards. If it was orange, it would correspond to Hod, and be in the correct order. I think the shots of this surreal sequence got jumbled in the edit (“anihilation of the self” is in the wrong place, for one) and if restored to their original order you’d get a proper Sephirot journey out of them too.
There’s one more “journey to the Godhead” in the original Transformers cartoon, this one from 1987. I also happen to know it was part of a script that was heavily cut down when the story was cut from 5 episodes to 3. A journey inward was presumably scripted here but cut for time. Nonetheless, the hero recieves counsel from his deceased mentor (identified with Chokhmah, or” Wisdom”) from opposite sides of an infinite abyss of swirling clouds. That would be the Abyss which divides the upper and lower Sephirot, Da’at.
It doesn’t surprise me to learn that Skir referenced an older story, retroactively making these vision-quests part of the Tree of Life… Transformers is heavily in-referenced that way.
What surprised me was the growing realization that these visions were always supposed to correspond to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and were almost certainly written that way… and no one noticed for 25 years.
…except Bob Skir. I’m guessing Bob noticed.
Cool.