Adam Kadmon, the primordial or supernal man, is the great anthropos of Kabbalistic cosmogony. In the Zohar he is the archetypal human pattern upon which both the divine emanations and the material world are modelled; in the Lurianic system he is the first configuration to arise within the void left by the tzimtzum, God's self-contraction, the initial vessel through which the light of Ein Sof, the Infinite, flows into being. From the lights that issue from his features the sefirot and the worlds take shape, and the catastrophe of the shattering of the vessels unfolds within him. He is carefully distinguished from Adam ha-Rishon, the first earthly man, being a metaphysical rather than a bodily being.