Emanation (Latin emanare, “to flow out”), in philosophy and theology, an outflowing of the transcendentally divine that accounts for the origin of the universe.

The word emanation was first used to describe divine procreation in Hellenistic Jewish works of the 2nd and 1st centuries bc, especially the Wisdom of Solomon in the Apocrypha. The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus unsystematically employed emanational language in his cosmological speculation, a version of Platonism that was influenced by Pythagorean interpretation.

The systematic application of the concept of emanation in explaining universal origins was the product of Gnostic and Neoplatonic speculation. The originative process is understood in Gnostic works as the overflowing of the highest deity's superabundant greatness. In the succession of emanations such as Mind, Word, and Wisdom, a diminution of the divine essence occurs. In most Gnostic cosmologies, the last emanation, Wisdom, attempts to accomplish a creation on her own. This results in an inferior emanation, a demiurge who is ultimately responsible for the creation of the material world, which entraps the divine essence of humanity. This entrapped spirit (pneuma) must then be recalled and redeemed to the higher divine order.

Under the influence of Neoplatonic works, emanationist theories were elaborated by later Christian, Muslim, and medieval Jewish philosophers. Orthodox Christian and Jewish theologies, however, emphasize the clear distinction between the divine and the mundane in the creative, as opposed to the emanationist, process.