3:70b
The Holy One, blessed be He, has produced ten holy crowns above wherewith He crowns and invests Himself, and He is they and they are He, being linked together like the flame and the coal.
(Zohar 3:70b)
These ten crowns are the ten sefirot. This passage of the Zohar recalls a passage from the Sefer Yetzirah:
עשר ספירות בלימה נעוץ סופן בתחלתן ותחלתן בסופן כשלהבת קשורה בנחלת שאדון יחיד ואין לו שני ולפני אחד מה אתה סופר
Ten Sefirot of Nothingness. Their end is embedded in their beginning and their beginning in their end, like a flame in a burning coal. For Adon is singular, He has no second. And before one, what do you count?”
(Sefer Yetzirah 1:7)
Aryeh Kaplan explains this passage of the Sefer Yetzirah this way:
The Sepher Yetzirah likens this to a “flame bound to a burning coal”. A flame cannot exist without the coal, and the burning coal cannot exist without the flame. Although the coal is the cause of the flame, the flame is also the cause of the burning coal. Without the flame there would not be a burning coal. Since cause cannot exist without effect, effect is also the cause of cause.”
(Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Creation; Aryeh Kaplan, p. 57)
Gersom Scholem writes of this Zohar passage:
“Most of the early kabbalists were more inclined to accept the view that the Sefirot were actually identical with God’s substance or essence. This is stated in many documents from the 13th century, and stressed later in the school of R. Solomon b. Adret, and particularly in the Ma’arekhet ha-Elohut, which was followed in the 16th century by David Messer Leon, Meir ibn Gabbai, and Joseph Caro. According to this view, the Sefirot do not constitute “intermediary beings” but are God Himself. “The Emanation is the Divinity,” while Ein-Sof cannot be subject to religious investigation, which can conceive of God only in His external aspect. The main part of the Zohar also tends largely toward this opinion, expressing it emphatically in the interchangeable identity of God with His Names or His Powers: “He is They, and They are He” (Zohar, 3, 11b, 70a).”
(Kabbalah; Gersom Scholem; p. 101)