The Book of Concealed Mystery (Siphra Dtzenioutha)

The Siphra Dtzenioutha ("Book of Concealed Mystery"), a short and famously cryptic treatise embedded in the Zohar, the central book of Kabbalah. Tradition ascribes the Zohar to the second-century sage Shimon bar Yochai; most modern scholars place its composition in late thirteenth-century Spain, largely by Moses de Leon. This is S.L. MacGregor Mathers's English of 1887 (The Kabbalah Unveiled), made from Knorr von Rosenroth's Latin version rather than directly from the Aramaic. It describes the divine as two "Countenances", the Vast Countenance (Macroprosopus) and the Lesser Countenance (Microprosopus), through imagery of a head, hair and beard. The parenthetical glosses come with the translation (many from Rosenroth's Latin, citing the Mantuan codex); Mathers's own bracketed commentary is not reproduced. Not scripture in any tradition. The diagrams of Mathers's edition (and the Tree of Life in his Introduction, which is not included) are not reproduced here.