Sephirot in popular culture
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The following is a list of the appearances of the Sephirot in popular culture. It is separated from the main article to avoid clutter.
- A diagram of the Tree of Life appears in the introduction to each episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Pools of the fluid LCL, arranged in the shape of the tree, are shown late in the series. It should also be noted that in the office of Gendo Ikari, a Tree of Life is carved/drawn on the ceiling, and Gendo is seated at Keter. The movie The End of Evangelion has visuals of both the traditional form and an original representation, and both are important to the plot.
- In the manga series Fullmetal Alchemist, the mystical gate which Edward Elric sees includes the image of the Tree of Life carved on it.
- The anime feature film Ghost in the Shell features an action sequence inside a room of a floating museum, involving a particularly large mural sculpture, within which the Tree of Life is a dominant feature.
- The anime X(1999) mentions the 'Sephiroth' as a difficult computer program that antagonist Satsuki hacks into by linking her brain with a computer
- Madonna used the Tree of Life extensively as both a symbol and prop on her 2001 Drowned World tour and her 2004 Re-Invention tour.
- Alan Moore traces the Tree of Life in the third and fourth volumes of his comic book series "Promethea".
- Chris Claremont used the Tree of Life analogy in his run on the X-Men, and in issue #108 named each character's place on the tree as Jean Grey restored a crystal that was destroying the universe as it collapsed.
- Bernard Werber uses the tree of life as the underlying structure of some of his narrations.
- Squaresoft´s video game Final Fantasy VII has several references to the Tree of Life in the name of the characters: The main antagonist's name is Sephiroth.
- Also from the Squaresoft game Xenogears, a non-standard diagram of the Tree of Life is used as the emblem of the Holy Empire of Solaris. Additionally, the name of the path the Wave Existence used to descend to our dimension is referred to as the Path of Sephirot.
- The movie The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz by Ben Hopkins shows the Tree of Life (placed horizontally) in the London Underground control room, apparently used as a map of the underground system. The building where the control room is located is also shown from outside and there is a David star on it. (Needless to say, all this is not real.)
- Rentrer en Soi, a Visual Kei band from Japan, has a song called 'Sephirot'.
- On one of Mudvayne's T-Shirts promoting their album "L.D. 50", there appears the diagram of the Tree of Life on the back. The Tree of Life is also depicted on the backpage of the booklet for the album "L.D. 50".
- On the Slip cover to Tool's "Salival" boxset the Tree of Life can be seen only when the box is inserted. It is also lined up with a humanoid figure.
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy has ten chapters, titled after the Sephirot.
- The book Foucault's Pendulum is divided into ten sections, each named for one of the Sephirot.
- David Bowie's song Station to Station includes the line "Here are we, one magical movement from Kether to Malkuth".
- In Super Robot Wars Alpha 3, an original mecha called the Dis Astranagant has several attacks with names inspired by the Kabbalah.
- In Digimon, there is a digimon known as Sephirotmon (Sakkakumon in the English dub), the Beast Spirit of Metal for Mercurymon from Digimon Frontier. True to its name, the digimon is modelled after the Kabbalah.
- In the video game Tales of the Abyss, the Sephiroth hold the outer lands up over Qliphoth. There are many location names taken from the Sephirot as well.
