Kabbalah

The Four Worlds — Atzilut, Beriah, Yetzirah, Assiyah

The Lurianic framework describing four descending planes of reality, each further from Ein Sof than the last, through which divine light steps down into physical existence.

Atzilut (Emanation), Beriah (Creation), Yetzirah (Formation), and Assiyah (Action) name four successive 'worlds' in Lurianic cosmology, each one a coarser, more distant refraction of divine light than the one above it. Atzilut is closest to Ein Sof and still essentially divine; by the time light reaches Assiyah, the world of concrete physical action, it has descended through enough filtering that it appears as ordinary matter, seemingly separate from its source. Crucially, each of the Four Worlds contains its own complete configuration of the ten sefirot — so the structure repeats fractally at every level rather than the sefirot existing only once, at the top. This model gives Lurianic Kabbalah a way to explain how something as intensely spiritual as Ein Sof's light could end up governing something as mundane as a stone or a meal, without claiming the two are simply identical.

The Four Worlds scheme is Luria's systemization of an idea only loosely present in the Zohar, an example of how much of popularly-called 'Kabbalah' is specifically the 16th-century Safed synthesis.