A Candle Flame Shows How the Soul Leaves the Body

A candle flame looks small until the Tikkunei Zohar opens it and finds five colors of the soul.

The flame with five colors

Tikkunei Zohar 99:12, a later Zoharic work often dated to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, reads a candle as a mystical diagram. The candle is tied to the letter hei (ה), and within it shine five colors: white, red, green, black, and blue. The letter vav (ו) is described as the inner light of the candle. This is not decoration. Kabbalah treats letters, colors, and flame as signs of how divine life moves through the worlds. A candle becomes a classroom where light and darkness are close enough to touch without becoming the same thing.

Where does darkness enter?

The passage brings in Samael, understood in Jewish tradition as an angelic force associated with accusation, death, and darkness while still remaining under God's authority. It describes darkness and blackening as garments that can cover the soul. The warning is fierce: woe to the soul when it is clothed in that blackness. The point is not dualism. Darkness is not an independent power equal to God. It is a condition of concealment, a garment that blocks vision and vitality. In the site's 3,601 Kabbalah texts and soul traditions, the most frightening images are often images of covering: husks, garments, veils, and dimmed eyes.

Why mention Isaac's dim eyes?

The text immediately recalls (Genesis 27:1), where Isaac's eyes are dimmed from seeing. The connection is not simple biography. Isaac becomes a sign of vision clouded by concealment. When the soul is dressed in spiritual blackness, perception weakens. A person can look and fail to see what matters. That is why the candle matters. It gives a visible contrast. The flame holds colors, movement, and inner light. Darkness dulls and covers. The soul's work is to remain attached to the inner vav, the living line of light, rather than become wrapped in the blackening that narrows sight.

How is death present in the flame?

The candle is often present where Jews remember the dead, but this passage makes the association more than custom. Flame is a border image. It clings to the wick and rises away from it. It needs material and also seems to reach beyond material. That is why it can become a map of the soul leaving the body. The soul is not wax, and the body is not merely wick, but the comparison works because flame reveals dependence and ascent at the same time. A human life burns in matter and is not exhausted by matter.

What should a person see in a candle?

The Tikkunei Zohar asks a person to see more carefully. A candle is not only light in a room. It is a warning, a ladder, and a mirror. The colors of the flame show complexity inside holiness. The blackness around it shows how easily vision can be covered. Samael's darkness warns that death and accusation are real, but they do not own the flame. The inner light remains. The candle teaches that the soul must be guarded from garments that make it forget its source.

So the next candle is not small. It is a tiny map of ascent, danger, concealment, and the stubborn thread of light still burning inside the dark.

The five colors also keep the soul from becoming a flat idea. White, red, green, black, and blue suggest layers, movements, and states. The soul can be bright, heated, growing, obscured, or deepened. A person watching a flame sees colors changing without the flame ceasing to be one flame. That is a useful image for inner life. Contradictory states can move inside one soul without destroying its unity.

The letter imagery matters too. Hei and vav are not ornamental symbols in this reading. They are channels of relation. Hei opens like breath. Vav connects like a hook or line. A candle, then, becomes breath held by connection. The soul needs both: openness to divine life and attachment to a line that keeps it from dispersing into darkness.

This is why Jewish mourning candles carry more than memory. A flame beside a name says the person is not reducible to the body that died. The flame trembles, depends on fuel, and rises. It is fragile and upward at once. That is a truthful image for grief.

The warning about blackness also has an ethical edge. A soul becomes covered not by accident alone, but through choices, habits, and attachments that dim perception. The candle asks a person to notice what kind of garment the soul is wearing. Is it clothed in light, or has it accepted a covering that makes truth harder to see?

That question belongs at a bedside, at a memorial candle, and in the middle of ordinary life. Death reveals the soul's mystery, but every day decides how clearly the flame can burn.