Students of kabbalah have known David Chaim Smith for more than a decade, but a return to art as a vocational practice brought this work to a wider audience. The Sacrificial Universe draws upon his experience to present us with a devotional approach to ecstatic visionary mysticism. Ranging from intellectual treatises on sacred geometry, biomorphism and the symbol of the serpent in kabbalistic theory and practice, to a poetic twilight language of ecstatic devotion, The Sacrificial Universe is unlike any other book we have offered to date.

Produced as a lavish small folio with generous margins and a classic typographic style, The Sacrificial Universe presents David's key artworks of the last four years as full-page images, with the triptychs and quadriptych offered as folding plates. The complex and evocative iconographic symbolism is also explored through commentaries. And yet The Sacrificial Universe is more than a homage to those seventeenth century books of hermetic mysticism. Structured according to the classic kabbalistic text Sefer Yetzirah, The Sacrificial Universe may be approached on three levels (world, year, and soul) to offer the reader a view of gnostic surrender within a vision of the self-consuming nature of phenomena.
 
Out of print but you can still get a copy at JD Holmes.