A Cosmogony Kippah

(Written several years ago.)

Like this kippah when I take it out of the drawer, creation is constantly unfolding, and sometimes both its splendor and its subtlety can escape our limited attention.

In the case of this kippah, which uses single-crotchet with string-substitutions to depict some of the biblical creation story, I chose a color scheme that would make the images quite understated. The two foreground colors, purple and blue, are set against a background of dark blue. (These images use exaggerated brightness and contrast to help display the kippah.)

In the central area of the kippah we have the primal, initial energies of day and night, yin and yang. They also indicate the interplay of divine immanence with divine transcendance. In their outward-swirling they also suggest k'lipot, the shards of the primordial Divine Light, as well as the differentiation and ramification of matter as a result of Creation...

Moving outward from the central area, the energies coalesce for a while into the evolving week of creation. We have light and dark for the first day; sky, clouds and ocean for day two; and separation of water from land, as well as vegetation, on the third day. The next three days build respectively on the first three. Day four focuses the light into stars, the sun and moon. On the fifth day, fish and birds populate the ocean and the sky. Humans, along with other beasts, arrive on day six. For Shabbat, we have some key symbols of our traditional Friday evening, including candles, a wine goblet, and a hallah.

Moving outward beyond the images of the week, the cosmic energies continue to ramify and multiply, fractally elaborating those first, bold strokes of Creation and Becoming. There are 36 small swirls of emanation just beyond the images of the week, possibly suggesting the subtle metaphysical necessity of the 36 hidden Tsadikim. Since the 36 swirls consist of 18 blue and 18 purple, we also have a reference to double-chai. This could denote our lives at night and during the day, or our lives in our usual, habitual world versus life in the World To Come, or the world of continual Becoming, etc. In any case, the 36 small swirls, together with the 14 initial swirls, make a total of 50, corresponding to the Jubilee notion of large-cycle rejuvenation, the buildup of days from Passover through Shavuot, and so on...
Towards the edge of the kippah are very small pieces of color. In part these suggest a further refinement and subtle emanation of the divine sparks. These sparks start large; then refine somewhat into the world of creation as we know it; but then continue to swirl ad infinitum, spreading further and further throughout the universe and also into smaller and smaller manifestations. If you look very closely, you will see that these bits of color form two successive concentric rows where there is a small but distinct gap consisting of just the background color, and then a C-shaped line of mixed foreground and background colors. The two Cs, 'CC' as one says in an email or memo, suggest that the creative energies keep propagating and replicating. In Hebrew they are two Kafs, spelling the cosmic, zen exhortation, 'Like This!'.

Looking even more deeply, these two Kafs of color micrographically honor the biblical language that celebrates the culmination of creation. In fact, they are a letter by letter encoding of the full Hebrew text of the familiar Va-y'khulu paragraph. For the encoding, I used a text-specific, minimal-stitch mapping of letters to stitches, where more-frequent letters map to shorter sequences of stitches. The mapping is given in the Appendix, below. Note that several Hebrew letters do not appear in the Va-y'khulu paragraph, and so mappings for these letters are omitted. Note also that in order to avoid issues about going into the bathroom while wearing this kippah, I followed the usual convention of changing a Heh to a Kuf in some divine names, resulting in the use of the word 'elokim'.

Harking back to our numerological musings, the 35 words of Va-y'khulu, plus the 36 swirls, add up to 71, just one shy of the length of one of the more obscure, mystical divine names. That last, missing one could be you, the observer, or perhaps the kippah as a whole...

There is some nice symbolism even in the nature of the crocheting of the kippah. Except for a special technique which makes the two Cs of Va-y'khulu come out in concentric circles, the apparently concentric rows of the kippah are in fact slowly unwinding spirals. This can symbolize some of the cycles of our tradition and of our lives and history. If we're mindful, holy, and perhaps a bit graced, then we don't keep coming back to precisely the same place each year, week, decade. Rather we deepen and further our experience, even as we come back again and again to similar situations or seasons...

I opted for loose strings on the underside of the kippah. An alternative would have been to carry all the locally unused strings inside the other stitches. I chose to avoid the esthetic tradeoff of colors peeking through when they are being so 'carried'. These loose strings are perhaps also an allusion to the possibility of cosmic string-theory, or even the Philotic strands of cosmic love and connection in the works of Orson Scott Card.

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Appendix: Mapping for text-encoding.

'P' denotes one purple stitch
'B' denotes one blue stitch 

There is one background (dark blue) stitch after
each 'letter', except that there are two background
stitches at the end of each word.

Note that the letters gimel, zayin, het, tet, nun,
samech and peh do not occur in the Va-y'khulu paragraph.

Aleph    PP
Bet      BBB
Gimel
Dalet    BBBB (this letter occurred rarely in our text)
Heh      PBB
Vav      P    (a very frequent letter in the text)
Zayin
Het
Tet
Yod      B
Kaf      PPP
Lamed    PB
Mem      BB
Nun
Samech
Ayin     PPB
Peh
Tsadi    PBP
Kuf      BPB
Resh     BPP
Shin     BP
Tav      BBP