The Digital Ambler

My little side-business in selling my crafts and ebooks has gotten off to a modest start since opening up my Etsy shop earlier this year, which is awesome. Still, what I really want to focus more on is divination, and people haven’t sprung for that nearly as much as I’d like.

Yes, if you didn’t know, I provide divination services and have for some time now. Surprise! I also offer other ritual services and planning, too, but divination is something I want to focus on today. I’ve been offering two services up until this point:

A full geomancy reading. This reading focuses only on one question at a time, but fully explores all the relevant symbols in the chart, as well as offering advice on how to proceed in a particular matter and what actions one can take to induce a particular resolution. Was US$30, but is now at a lower price of US$20!
A horary-geomancy reading, combining horary astrology overlaid with a geomancy chart. This is preferred for natal queries, long-term situations, or similar deep and complex matters. This provides more detail than a geomancy reading, as it incorporates Renaissance astrological techniques woven into the standard geomantic interpretations offered. US$60.

That said, I’m now offering several new selections outside geomancy:

A minireading for US$10, combining a pared-down 2-figure geomancy reading and a single-letter grammatomancy reading to indicate a general progression of events as well as advice on what to expect and how to maintain yourself in your affairs. This is best for general questions to get a good feel for a situation at a high level, and you can go more in-depth with a follow-up reading if desired after this.
Skype sessions (voice or webcam) for US$50 for half an hour. We’ll go over as many questions as you have and how to resolve them. I’ll use a mixture of geomancy, shell divination, grammatomancy, and other methods as I see fit for the queries asked.

Some of you might be wondering, “o polyphanes, why don’t you just offer simple grammatomantic readings?” Well, back in the day, grammatomancy (drawing a random Greek letter) was a free service that you could do in any forum that had a post with oracles inscribed on it and a bowl with pebbles marked with the Greek letters. As far as I can ascertain, there was no fee nor charge for this, and it’s such a simple system that I don’t see the need to do what you can easily do for yourself. There are free resources online to study the art, but I also suggest buying my own ebook on grammatomancy for US$10 which covers all the basics and a number of advanced interpretive techniques.

If you select a Skype reading, please be aware that my most available times tend to be:

Wednesday afternoons
Friday afternoons
Saturday evenings
Sunday afternoons and evenings

I go by US Eastern time (observing daylight saving as is custom). Once I receive notification of payment, we’ll schedule a time slot and I’ll give you a call at the appointed time. I’ll also record the session (once I can figure that out) and send it to you for your records.

Also, let’s get something fancy going here. If you refer someone to my site for any divination service, have them let me know your email address. You’ll be entitled to one free minireading for every person you refer! Just make sure they tell me that so-and-so@blah.com referred them to me for a divination, and I’ll send you an email afterwards letting you know that you’re eligible for a free minireading. Of course, you’re under no obligation to refer me to anyone if you don’t want to, but if you like what you read here and what I write or make, consider nudging some business my way or consider donating. Any little bit helps, and after all, divination is why I’m a magician in the first place.

So what are you waiting for? Want to get a reading? Check out my Services page today, or send me an email!

I’m going to make a terrible, terrible admission to you all that may ruin my oh-so-high and noble standing in occulture: I don’t like H.P. Lovecraft or his universes, and it’s not for a lack of trying, either. At least half of my friends online and offline love the dude and his works, and all the works and worlds that he’s inspired, many of which actually working with the gods and entities from the Lovecraftian universe in an occult setting or dedicating some of their art and crafts to his world. I’ve even taken a Vacation Necronomicon School a few years ago, a structured introduction to Lovecraft and his universe and how to write Lovecraftian horror and fiction. I see Chthulhu this and Nyarlathotep that and Azazoth that other thing frequently and often. And despite all that, I cannot stand the dude and his works. I’ve known this for years now, but as my own spiritual life and practices have developed, I have a more solid understanding why.

The basic gist of his cosmos, as I understand it, is that the world is full of things. Especially people, and especially white people. And we as the logical, rational, material human race is responsible enough to abandon all but the most scientific of approaches to understanding the cosmos, especially white people. But there are also other things in the cosmos that are bigger, stronger, and older than people, and especially white people. And these things operate in a way that people cannot understand, especially white people. This is obviously grounds for going insane or causing mass chaos and hysteria, because people are supposed to be the best, especially white people.

Please tell me you see where I’m going with this.

Now, I credit the fact to Lovecraft that he grew up in a late Victorian/early modern society and was enamored of what we nowadays call “hard science”, disregarding anything superstitious or religious as BS. His family had a history of mental and psychosomatic illnesses. He was brought up sheltered and lived as a recluse. He held views that we’d consider racist in modern times, holding highest the Anglo-Norman people (from which he was descended), wanting to keep races distinct for the purpose of preserving cultural identity. He was a man of his times, and especially the nighttime, and I understand that.

But the whole premise of his universe and drama just clashes so directly and fundamentally that I derive no enjoyment nor satisfaction from his works. The way I see it, Lovecraft starts with the premise of a material cosmos and throws in the supernatural (magic, deities, etc.) almost as an afterthought, as if the metaphysical came from the physical and not the other way around. In this light, the “gods” of Lovecraft’s universe are no more than beings that have had longer and more resources to evolve than humanity has, with abilities and knowledge that they’ve had more time and practice to develop than we have. This makes them terrible, frightful, and deserving of crude and vulgar cults set up by the superstitious and unrespectable outcasts of the world. Just as the poor become sycophants to the rich to eke out an existence by using some of the rich’s power, these low and vulnerable people turn to entities of cosmic power and fright against the more civilized and structured world of civilization. But, because these mega-entities are so powerful, they stand to destroy all that civilization has made through the progress fueled by scientific advancement and industrialism. We can’t have that, now, can we?

Basically, Lovecraft started with the basic ideas of social Darwinism and human (especially white human) supremacy over the world and showed how vulnerable we are. This I agree with: there are things older than us and bigger than us and stronger than us in the cosmos. I call them theoi, angels, gods, ancestors, totems, whatever; he calls them the Old Ones and Outer Gods and Elder Gods. Where we split ways is that he finds the existence of these mega-entities incompatible with human understanding and outside our capacity to understand, inducing insanity, madness, and destruction. I basically read his works as saying “But we’re humans! We’re supposed to be the best! HOW CAN SOMETHING BE BETTER THAN US I CANNOT HANDLE THIS KNOWLEDGE AAAAAAH.” Note that this is what happens to the more civilized people, often scientists, while the lower classes of people tend to devolve and debase themselves into crude worship of these entities because they just don’t know any better. But then, they not only don’t know better, but if they knew any better they’d go crazy, so they’re surviving where the civilized scientists can’t and becoming more powerful than civilization, which makes them a constant threat to the existence of humanity’s progress and civilized future.

Lovecraft, in spite of the cultural, scientific, philosophical, and spiritual heritage of humanity that actually exists, disregards all that we’ve actually done and posits it all as worthless in the long run. Every story we’ve told, every building we’ve built, every discovery we’ve made, everything we’ve done and everything we’ve become is pointless and worthless in the cosmos, imprisoned as we are to this tiny rock in space, bound by our own limitations both physical and intellectual. This is especially in contrast to beings who transcend spacial limitations (physical or metaphysical), whose power and knowledge vastly exceeds our own, who have their own aims and ends that either don’t take humanity into account at all or uses us for their own ends without regard for our well-being or survival. All this boils down to, when we really think about it, everything we know and do is basically meaningless and there’s no point to anything. The man himself even admits that his works are all about the futility and nihilistic pseudo-existence of humanity in the grand scheme of things:

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

If your worldview puts the material, physical world first and the spiritual, metaphysical world as second, or that the spiritual developed from the material, then you’re assuming that there’s nothing really distinct from the physical, since all things ultimately come from it, and all spiritual stuff is just a physical process we haven’t understood yet. Everything that lives, going by Darwin’s theory of evolution, is merely accident and happenstance, and nothing is in control of anything except by sheer power alone. One human may control thousands with enough power, but no power of humanity can ever dominate the world we find ourselves locked into and trapped upon, especially the existence of other and more powerful (though by no means “higher”) entities whom we can only cravenly worship in the hope of having other powers not being used over us. The only thing that differentiates humanity from the Old/Outer/Elder Gods is the shitty and inexorable luck that we weren’t here first and weren’t strong enough to evolve fast enough.

But if your worldview puts the spiritual, metaphysical world first and the material, physical world second, or that the material developed from the spiritual, everything changes. Instead of humanity happening at the same time or by the same processes of other mega-entities, we developed after them or by their involvement. If the spiritual comes before the material, then no material process can begin to describe how the spiritual works, since it cannot apply; science is useless there, but only because science (as Lovecraft would have thought of it) operates only on the physical. In that case, we need other tools of humanity: religion, superstition, spirituality, the occult. These things, reserved for the poor and uncivilized in Lovecraft’s works, become the true tools of power and knowledge that can not only preserve our minds but expand them. Yes, we can go crazy, too (too much knowledge does that to anyone in any field), but it’s not because we’re incapable of knowing these things, only because we get too used to operating on a spiritual level and not on a material one. Insanity caused by knowledge isn’t a fundamental breaking down of comprehension, it’s expansion in a way that doesn’t mesh well with human custom and civilization. Even if there are other and bigger entities in the cosmos, and even if humanity is stuck on this little blue speck in the infinite black, we still hold the keys to our own gates to infinity and aether and power that can put us on the level of any Old One, if not far higher. Am I saying that spiritual entities always love and care for us? Nope; demons, angry spirits, hell-beings, and the like from any number of cultures would love nothing more than to see us burn. Am I saying that happenstance and accident didn’t create the cosmos, both spiritual and material? It’s impossible to know without being God, and even then, when you’re God, there’s really nothing you can do that can be completely understood by a lower being because of God’s infinite nature. And even if everything were an accident of creation, this doesn’t mean that a purely Epicurean, atomic-materialist cosmos is the only possible result where everything is random and nothing is ordered. The possibility of order, however temporary, and to reflect on the nature of order and chaos is an indication that, if the universe isn’t strictly ordered, then order (and, therefore, meaning) is an essential component of it.

Humans, even in my worldview and spiritual learning, are not the top of the foodchain. We may be powerful, but of course there are more powerful entities than us. We may be smart, but of course there are smarter entities than us. We don’t know everything, nor can we do everything. The only course of action we have available to us is to learn and do as much as we can and then more, growing in our own power and wisdom. We don’t need to get off this rock for that, nor do we need to understand the entirety of the physical cosmos, especially when power and origins lie in the metaphysical that physical laws cannot begin to describe. Not all spiritual entities may care for us, but we must have come from some of them, and some of them are by no means indifferent to us. Everything I describe is what Lovecraft refuted, and everything I believe is what Lovecraft denied. While I won’t go so far as to say he’s wrong in the grand scheme of things, it wouldn’t matter to him either way if I did; his universe and worldview is less than helpful and more of an impediment to anything I do and study.

Nihilism and meaninglessness may make for an entertaining read, but it’s no more than the flip side of the “catch-penny romanticism” Lovecraft himself decries.

Back in May, I moved into a beautiful new house with my fiancé and another of our friends, which is why there were no posts all during that month; it was a busy, busy time. The end of the month was celebrated with a housewarming party, which took up a good amount of energy and booze (yet oddly very little beer was drunk), and it was an awesome time all around. Amidst the generic housewarming gifts of booze, booze, alcohol, booze, and liquor, one of my magic friends and colleagues gave me something interesting: a bar of soap. Not that he was commenting on my standards of hygiene, but the soap was interesting in that it was a magical soap with Saint Cyprian’s image and name on the box. I was thoroughly curious about the thing, so I opened it up and found a dark purple, fragrant, oval bar of soap inside (“with pheromones!”), along with a little slip of paper with a long prayer written on it. Of course, the thing was in Spanish, so I had to put it off for a few days to translate it. I know that botanicas of all kinds sell a variety of magical goods, and I’ve seen some sell special soaps for magical purposes. After all, taking a spiritual bath is made much easier with a premade bar of soap rather than distilling all the oils and tinctures you need ahead of time, so it makes sense.

Turns out, the thing is a love spell, which isn’t surprising at all. Saint Cyprian got his main story from being a sorcerer in the matchmaking business, though his final target of Justina didn’t turn out as planned. Saint Cyprian is certainly called upon in many works of love-drawing and love-forcing, as a brief glance through the Book of Saint Cyprian will show, but I wasn’t aware that he was so commonly invoked that they were making bars of soap with his name. The prayer itself is pretty par for the course with love magic in the Western tradition; you see similar language in all kinds of love-making and sex-making spells going back two thousand years, which made me smile at how the little methods are still kept around after so long. The spell is written predictably for a woman to use on a male target, though of course the pronouns can be switched up to suit anybody’s needs:

Saint Cyprian, drive away from N. any woman, that he may look at me in every moment, today and now, wanting to be at my side; that he may know for certain that I am the perfect woman for him; that N. cannot live without me; and that N. may always have my image in his thoughts in every moment. Now, wherever he may be, with whomever he may be, he will look for me because of his thoughts are of me. And that at bedtime he may dream of me, and at rising he may think of me and desire me; that at eating he may think of me, that when walking he may think of me, that in every moment of his life he may think of me. That he may want to see me, sense my smell, touch me with love; that N. may want to hug me, kiss me, take care of me, protect me, love me 24 hours of every day, as well as loving me most of all and that he feel pleasure just to hear my voice.

Saint Cyprian, make N. feel for me a desire beyond what is normal, as he has never felt nor never feel for another person; that he may find pleasure only with me, that he may feel desire only for me, and that his body may belong only to me, that he may only have peace if he be with me.

I am thankful to you, Saint Cyprian, that you work in my favor, and I will divulge your name in payment of taming N. and bringing them in love, caring, devoted, faithful, and full of desire into my arms.

To use the spell with the soap, the instructions with the prayer are that one should use the soap for six consecutive days in a bath taken at nighttime. On the seventh day, the rest of the soap is to be disposed of. I’d tweak the spell and use of the soap a bit like this: once a day in the evening before retiring, take a bath/shower using the soap and recite the prayer, bearing in mind the target and focusing on one’s desire, lust, love, etc. After the seven days have finished, bury the soap on the land of the target’s home. Alternatively, dissolve the rest of the soap in water and pour it on their doorstep. As the spell itself mentions, the “payment” to Saint Cyprian would be to popularize him and thank him publicly, telling others about the powers of the good saint, setting up a public shrine for him, or otherwise bringing honor to Saint Cyprian.

The soap itself smells delicious (must be those pheromones it has, obvi). However, there are no ingredients listed on the soap, and it’s hard to place the smell; it has a light smell, mostly floral with a hint of musk in it. I’m no expert in soap-making, though I assume it’s not too difficult. The herbs I’d use for a similar wash would be jasmine, sandalwood, rose, cinnamon, allspice, myrrh, and acacia, all of which are associated with love and lust or have other Cyprianic associations. If one just had herbs on hand, you could make a bath with that and save the water to throw onto the target’s doorstep. Likewise, one could make a tincture and use it as a perfume after the bath proper.

I’ve also found this same spell in at least one place on the internet where the prayer is done as a proper novena, too, so the spell can work as a prayer for request instead of a spell of command. All depends on how you want to use it, of course.

As many of my readers in the United States might be aware, June of every year is commonly held to be Pride Month, in the same way that February is African American History Month. This a month when the now famous Pride Parades (which started out as riots) are held, along with any number of LGBTQ-oriented events: cookouts and parties, memorials and commemoration services, as well as any number of workplace events, such as how to understand and cope with LGBTQ diversity and the like. I recently attended such a seminar in my own office, organized by the District of Columbia’s Office of GLBT Affairs, which was awesome. There was little new information to me, seeing that I’m more versed in the legal miasma that affects the demographic I fall into, but it was helpful all the same.

Now, I work for the United States federal government. At the time of this writing, the federal government does not yet have a nondiscrimination law that encompasses sexual orientation (LGB) or gender identity/expression (TQ, sometimes I), though certain branches of the government include this in their own branch-specific manner. My own branch, for instance, prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity/expression, which is awesome, because it’s one fewer thing I can be fired for. And, despite what you may think, many states and localities still don’t yet have their own employment nondiscrimination acts (ENDAs), so in many parts of the US, I can still be fired, not hired, or denied a promotion for being who and what I am. I’m glad I can work where I am openly and freely, but not everyone is aware of the rights and restrictions on LGBTQ people.

It wasn’t a large seminar, and about half the people in attendance were supervisors or other employees in some managerial position. One of the more important bits of discussion we had was on the topic of homophobia (fear and intolerance of non-normative sexual orientations) and transphobia (ditto but for people with non-normative gender identity or expression). Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) offices have to deal with this more and more as more people feel confident and safe enough to report harassment fueled by homophobia and transphobia, but it can sometimes be a sticky situation for managers and EEO personnel. Sadly, the topic was cut off due to time constraints and we had to move onto other topics, but it did bring up important aspects of how to respect the needs of LGBTQ employees.

Specifically, how should we balance the needs of LGBTQ employees with those of religious employees?

In many ENDAs, religion is a protected attribute that one cannot be penalized for; I cannot fire you, not hire you, deny you a promotion, or cause a hostile work environment against you due to your exercise and practice of religion or the lack thereof. In my office, the same thing goes for your sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. However, due to the ever-increasing polarization and social aggression between certain (by no means all!) religious groups and people and those who identify as LGBTQ, supervisors sometimes feel the need to balance the needs of both groups and see if there’s any middle ground to take. After all, we have freedom of speech and of religion as enshrined in our Constitution, so it’s not fair to penalize someone for their speech or views as promoted by someone’s religion, nor is it fair to penalize someone for their sexual orientation or gender identity/expression.

If you’re going to resort to the First Amendment to defend your views, well, I’ll let Randall Monroe of XKCD say it better than I can:

Not only that, but he says in the alt-text that

I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.

Don’t get me wrong: I hold the free exercise of religion and the lack thereof to be one of the most important fundamental concepts required for a democracy or civilized community on any level, and interfering with that is chipping away at a society that can peacefully coexist as a societal unit. If you want to worship Christ as the Son of God, do so; if you want to worship God by honoring his prophet Muhammad, do so; if you want to venerate the Flying Spaghetti Monster, do so. I will never tell you what to worship or practice, or how to worship or practice.

That, however, is not the point of the talk. While I understand the need to live a prayerful, worshipful, religious life, unless you live as a monk, you need to balance it with the life you live outside your scripture and outside your prayer room. This isn’t to say you should compromise your religion by societal needs and expectations, but that you need to pick where in society you should go based on how you choose to practice (or not practice) religion. If your social agreements and contracts conflict with your religious covenant and commitments, and if you’re not willing to change one, you need to change the other. When you work in a public capacity that serves the public and makes use of public resources, either as an employee or a business owner, you are bound to serve the public in whatever way the public needs. If you cannot fulfill those needs due to your private beliefs, then you should not work to serve them since you’re unable to serve them. You have freedom of speech, but not freedom from your own speech; what you say and do are going to have consequences, and if your speech leads to harm and hostility in the public, you’re going to have to exercise your freedom of speech elsewhere.

Consider a hypothetical (at least in my case) situation where an out queer person (in any sense) works under a rather evangelical team leader. The team leader refuses to meet one-on-one with the queer person or give them work fitting for their capacity and capability, and the team leader has dropped repeated comments about saving the soul of the queer person, how the queer person can find grace if only they would convert to being straight and normative, and the like. The evangelical person feels like that’s their religious duty, after all, and they cannot be penalized for having that religious duty, but the queer employee also has the right to a non-hostile work environment. If the evangelical person finds that their duty is motivated by scripture, and they cannot reconcile that with leaving the queer employee alone, then they cannot maintain a non-hostile work environment and is obligated to leave. To me, it’s that simple.

Compare that with the recent drama about the cake bakery over in Colorado who was sued by a gay couple who wanted them to make them a wedding cake. The owners of the bakery felt that their religion prevented them from supporting gay marriage in any way, and that includes making a cake for a gay wedding. The gay coupled sued for discrimination and won, and rightly so, since this had violated Colorado’s anti-discrimination clause, which prohibits business from discriminating against its customers based on sexual orientation. Many evangelicals and those on the homophobic far right feel that this state law discriminates against religious freedom, but it doesn’t. You can practice whatever you want, but if you operate in a public capacity, you have to abide by public respect and law for those who don’t follow what you follow, or believe what you believe. That bakery was open to the public, made use of public resources (roads, etc.), and received public assistant (tax breaks, etc.). If they were privately owned or open only to people who paid a membership fee where the members had to agree to the bakery’s terms, then they could do whatever they want and would no longer be a public service; as it was, they were open to the public and could not discriminate against the public by means of sexual orientation.

Compare that, further, with the notion of certain pharmacologists and pharmacy employees who refuse to sell Plan B or contraceptive medicine to those who need it because they’re anti-abortion. They feel that, by selling these drugs to people who got pregnant early on but want to prevent pregnancy, they’re encouraging abortion and promiscuity, which they find offensive. However, as a medical professional, they’re obligated to help those who need it in the way the patient determines, and if that’s through the use of an emergency contraceptive, it’s not their place to deny them that without a legitimate medical reason. In nearly all these cases, the only reason is religious, which is not a strong enough basis to deny someone this medical coverage and assistance when it’s not illegal and when they’re entitled to it. If a pharmacologist cannot prescribe certain medicines to the public because their religion says so, then they should not be a pharmacologist serving the public. Simple as that.

Your religion can be whatever you want it to be or not be. It’s really up to you. But when you interact with other people, you have to understand how to interact with people in a way that neither violates their sanctity of life nor human rights, nor in a way that violates your own religious beliefs. You can’t have it both ways. If you work in the public, you have to deal with the public, and if your religion prevents you from dealing with the public in certain ways and your job expects you to deal with the public in those same ways, you either need to change your religion or change your job. Your beliefs are an onus on you, not on me, and your beliefs should not affect me if I don’t want them to affect me. The moment they do, we have a problem, and it’s up to you to fix it or have it fixed for you. The only balance that needs to be struck is that which preserves the freedom of religion and speech for everyone, and if your religion and speech is trying to impede the freedom of others, then your religion and speech will be shown the door. You can still say the things you want to say, but nobody has to listen to it; you can still worship how you want to worship, but nobody has to be affected by it.

This applies to all of us, not just to evangelical Christians who want to turn every country into a Dominionist theocracy. Many of us in occulture are bound to certain rules and regulations of behavior, sometimes instituted by our traditions, sometimes directly from our gods. For the vast majority of us, we cannot live in a world where we’re recluses who focus solely on our spiritual path; we have a world to live in and interact with, and all the people, events, and drama that goes on in it. If we find ourselves in a situation where we’re faced with breaking a greater law and a lesser law, we need to avoid breaking the greater law at the expense of the lesser law or simply abort the situation we’re in and find a way out as gracefully as we can. Getting involved in situations that would cause you to deny your spirituality or gods is a lack of forethought, but sometimes it happens, and when it does, you need to make a choice as to whether you can please your gods while upholding the laws of the situation, whether pleasing your gods is worth it, and whether you need to continue denying your gods to continue another path in the world. Learning to walk between the worlds in the sense of balancing your spiritual and mundane lives is a crucial lesson we all have to learn. You can’t always have it both ways.

This has been a PSA. Now, back to magic.

I get a lot of hits on my blog from across the realm of the Internet, many of which are from links on Facebook, Twitter, or RSS readers. To you guys who follow me: thank you! You give me many happies. However, I also get a huge number of new visitors daily to my blog from people who search around the Internet for various search terms. As part of a monthly project, here are some short replies to some of the search terms people have used to arrive here at the Digital Ambler. This focuses on some search terms that caught my eye during the month of June 2014.

“what does it mean to trace the grid from the center crystal to each other crystal using a wand or your fingers show picture” — …I mean, I feel like the idea is pretty explanatory. Center to crystal 1 to center to crystal 2…to center. Do you really need more guidance than this? You already described the method.

“saint cyprian wand” — I’ve never seen something like this, save for maybe the blasting rod of the Grimoirum Verum that forms part of the Book of Saint Cyprian. The good saint himself is usually pictured with a crosier and a book, though as a magician himself he was likely familiar with the use of wands in the classical and early medieval Mediterranean. Heck, his crosier itself could be seen as a type of wand, being associated with wisdom, spiritual authority, and guidance, all attributes commonly given to the wand. Still, a modern wand for use in Cyprianic workings isn’t a bad idea. Necromantic materials would be of use: an ebony or iron wand packed with graveyard dirt and capped with smoky quartz or jet, engraved with holy symbols and names, perhaps buried for a week at the head of the grave of a priest or magician during the New Moon, fed with the blood of a black chicken or goat. Not a bad idea at all.

“how to use saturn seals in “key of Solomon”” — If you merely read the book (book I, chapter 19), many sections tell you how to use it. Generally, you show a pentacle unto a particular spirit like how the FBI flashes a suspect their badge (Saturn pentacles I, II, III, IV, V). Some of them cause some change in the world by their mere existence and construction and should be kept for future use as a ritual tool, similar to a wand but used to “fire off” work into the cosmos generally (pentacles II, IV, VI, VII). When a pentacle is not being used, it should be kept hidden and safe, or it should be enshrined on an altar with other magical tools, perhaps reconsecrated every week or so with candle and oil and incense.

“stones in sash black magic santeria” — …do people still consider Santeria to be “black magic”? Really? It means “way of the saints”. It’s about as far you can get from “black magic”, and I’ve written about my thoughts on the term itself elsewhere. As far as I’m aware, Santeria doesn’t really use sashes, though I’ve seen some massive elekes and collares that are used in limited ritual purposes, but those are all nearly entirely colored glass beads. Also, I’ve seen sashes of fruit for newly made iyawos. Beyond that, I can’t think of a Santeria sash, though I’m admittedly no expert in Santeria. Sashes are sometimes used in other traditions, like the bandera of Palo Mayombe, but that’s a different thing and, again, is nearly entirely glass beads. Stones might just be a personal flourish.

“h0w t0 consecrate oil with psalm 72″ — I wasn’t familiar with this psalm before I wrote this post, but I like it! Take some good, clean oil and pray over it fervently; that’s all you need to do to consecrate anything, really; the incense, candles, and hoopla of ritual can help but aren’t strictly necessary. Psalm 72, specifically, sounds beautiful for blessing, dominating, and prosperity work.

“top 10 conjuring rituals real” — What, as if there’s a Buzzfeed list of magic rituals full of spooky GIFs? C’mon, dude, get your act together. There’s no such top-ten list of “real” rituals; any ritual that works is real, and different people often get different rituals to work for them. Once you get the experience of a few conjuration rituals, you can start doing them on the fly with spirits you have a good connection with.

“seal of sealtiel angel” — Unfortunately, even though I’ve been making weekly offerings to Sealtiel the Archangel for a brief time now, I haven’t done much more than that and engaged the archangels in conversation, like I would in a conjuration. I mean to in the near future, but I haven’t yet. I don’t know of a seal for the angel, so you might want to stick with making a sigil based off the letters in his name a la chaos magic or by using my Greek Sigil Wheel idea. Sealtiel often bears a thurible as his badge of office, so you might start with that if you want an image.

“how to use saturn to create prosperity” — Er, that’s not usually Saturn’s job. Prosperity is usually in line with Mercury and Jupiter, the planets of exchange and expansion generally,

“autobiography of st. jehudiel”, “biography of saint sealtiel”, etc. — Seeing how these are angels who have never technically lived, it’s hard to have a biography of them, since a biography is an account of, you know, a life. They’re immortal beings who serve the will of God directly; they don’t have lives like we think of them, and they don’t exist apart from God. Also, an “autobiography”? Not only does that assume a life of an angel, it also assumes they write and can communicate to us in language.

“horus demon god of sun sygils” — Much of this makes no sense to me on a conceptual level. First, to spell the word as “sygils” means you’re probably in Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (or however it’s misspelled) or just some middle-schooler who wants to be all dark and powerful. That isn’t done with extra “y”s and the metal umlaut, you know. As for Horus, yes, he’s a god of the Sun, but in no sense is he malefic or demonic.

“locating lost thing by star power” — What, are you Sailor Moon? There are astrological and geomantic methods of finding lost objects, but unless you’re a Sailor Scout or one of the Three Wise Men, you’re not going to find anything directly through the stars themselves.

“most deadly buddhist mantras” — …I don’t think you understand the point of Buddhist mantras. There might indeed be powerful spells and mantra-like charms in some distant and extant traditions of magic and applied Buddhism, but none I know that would kill a target or the user. That tends to go against the Precepts, anyway, but you know, expedient means and all that shit.

“effects of reading saint cyprian book” — In my case, you’ll’ve learned Spanish and published a translation in English (hint: go buy my cheap ebook on Etsy!). Supposedly, if you read the Book of Saint Cyprian, either front to back or back to front (I forget which), you end up summoning the Devil. That didn’t happen in my case, and he might’ve just gotten confused with my flipping around randomly through the book.

“how to aproach the abramelin ritual if you already know your guardian angel” — Honestly, if you have contact with your HGA, why do the Abramelin ritual? The meat of the matter is getting contact with your HGA, after which you go through and bind evil spirits from messing with you in the future. Once you have your HGA, you can do anything, basically. I know some friends who are going through the Abramelin as an initiation requirement in some groups, but that’s not the real use of the Abramelin, as I see it.

“is the word geomancy in the bible” — Nope. Geomancy likely kicked off in the Sahara Desert around 900 or 1000 AD, well after the Bible was written (especially the Old Testament). However, if you read that the Bible has a prohibition on divinatory arts generally, then that would include geomancy; if you read the Bible supporting the act of divination, then that also includes geomancy. The word itself is coined more recently than the Bible, as is the art, so you won’t find biblical references to it, although some traditions hold that geomancy was given to the prophet Hermes Trismegistus, Adam, Idris, Daniel, Jesus, or Mohamed to discover more of the secrets of God, so it depends on what you consider meaningful.

A few weeks ago, I made a post about an idea about working with a Greek style of Hermetic qabbalah, tentatively calling it kambala (Greek way to write out qabbalah from Hebrew) or to Paradedomenon (lit. “that which is handed down”). The idea, I claim, is an interesting one: in the absence of Hebrew kabbalah, is it possible to make a Hellenic style of emanationist cosmological magic and theology that works with the Greek letters as magical units and entities in their own right? Asked another way, could there conceivably be such a thing as a Greek qabbalah? So I started thinking about it, and I first went and looked up translations of the names of the sephiroth and the like from Hebrew into Greek, and started translating other names into Greek as well, and also rewriting the magic number squares of the planets using Greek letter-numerals to develop new planetary spirit names.

Now I’m thinking I was going down the wrong path and need to start fresh without using the Tree of Life, or even using Jewish kabbalah at all.

I mean, what is Jewish kabbalah? It is a deep, powerful, multifaceted, beautiful system of Jewish mysticism that can deliver one great, perhaps infinite, knowledge and power through the proper use of its system, but it’s still at its heart a Jewish system. Thus, it is Jewish, and geared towards those who are Jewish: not only by blood (as tradition would have it), but also by culture (having the means and faculties available to a proper Jew) and definitely by religion and religious studies. Kabbalah is really only meant for those who are prepared to study it, which requires a deep and thorough study of the Tanakh, Talmud, Midrash, Mishnah, and so many other aspects of Jewish religion and how it ties into Jewish life. For all intents and purposes, to get the most out of kabbalah, you have to be Jewish. You don’t necessarily have to be a Jew (unless you’re so hard-core traditionalist that only the first-born son of a kabbalist can learn it from his rabbi father), but you definitely have to be Jewish in order to properly study kabbalah. Anything less, and you’re not going to be able to use it as much as it can or ought to be.

As for me? Sure, I can claim descent as a Jew, but I’m about as Jewish as an Olive Garden is Italian, which is to say “hahaha not really”. Sure, I can say the berakhah for Chanukah, and that’s about it. I’ve never had my bar mitzvah (even though my father has idly wondered that we should probably get ours done eventually at the same time), and it’s more likely that I’ll be baptized into Christianity before having a bar mitzvah. I’ve only read the Old Testament in English, not even in the proper order of the books that the Tanakh would have; I don’t maintain kosher standards of purity or cleanliness (especially not with the occasional use of blood rum), and I can’t even read or speak Hebrew. In all honesty, for me to properly study kabbalah, I’d need to learn Hebrew, get bar mitzvah’d, and undergo what’s likely to be many years of studying before I even read properly about the sephiroth. Which is why I’m not, nor will I ever, learn about Jewish kabbalah outside a few books by Aryeh Kaplan.

But of course, that’s not the only way to study the Tradition. What about Hermetic qabbalah (this time with a Q)? I’ve been making good use of that, to be sure, as have many others in the Golden Dawn, Thelemite, and other modern Hermetic movements, and heck, even in a good number of neopagan movements I’ve seen that are influenced by Gardnerian Wicca and the Golden Dawn. While I’d argue that the heart of Hermetic qabbalah and Jewish kabbalah is the same (it provides a means to understand the source of an emanationist panentheist cosmos by means of a cosmological Abrahamic structure), the study of the two nearly couldn’t be further apart. And, to be honest, after mulling it over some, I’m not sure Hermetic qabbalah is even recognizably able to achieve the same goal as Jewish kabbalah. My good friend the Rev. Michael Strojan has compared Jewish kabbalah to a beautiful rose garden maze leading to a unique spiritual experience of the mind of God in creation, while Hermetic qabbalah is a far more rational, utilitarian cosmological mapping.

In fact, when a Hermeticist tends to refer to “qabbalah”, they’re usually referring to the specific teaching of the Tree of Life, the linking of the ten sephiroth with 22 paths in a particular geometric array. In Hebrew, this is known as the upright arrangement of the sephiroth, or “yosher”, which is one way to view the sephiroth; the other is “iggulim”, or “circles”, viewing the cosmos as a series of nested circles with God on the outside and Malkuth in the innermost circle. I’ve seen a similar way to represent the sephiroth before in Hermetic qabbalah, but only as an introduction to emanationist principles and never for serious magic or prolonged study. While the paths of the Tree of Life are important, they’re usually grossly understudied in favor of the sephiroth themselves; I’ve seen plenty of people talking about scrying the spheres but next to nobody about scrying the paths, and I admit that I’m guilty of this, too! It’s nearly all about corresponding things to the ten spheres, and that’s about it. Consider Yesod, the ninth sephirah: Yesod is associated with the first heaven, which coincides with the sphere of the Moon, so anything lunar can be corresponded to Yesod. That’s nearly about it in Hermetic qabbalistic framework, it’d seem, unless I’m missing a large amount of the cultural movement and study of the thing. I’m aware that many Hermeticists have gone in much deeper study of the sephiroth and the paths, but I wouldn’t call them a majority. To most magicians who use Hermetic qabbalah, they only use it as a system of correspondences.

More than that, however, for a non-Jew, even a learned Neoplatonic theosopher and magician, to attempt their own study of kabbalah can come off as something insincere. I mean, as non-Jews (and I’m including myself de facto in that group), we’re not raised Jewish, we celebrate different holidays, we’re not studied in the traditions and text that Jewish kabbalah builds upon. While it’s certainly possible to get a lot out of the system, we won’t be able to fully plumb the depths of the system without having all those other things under our belt. And while it’s certainly allowed to study any and all knowledge and teachings out there on the subject, it’s still a subject that’s pretty much not meant for most of us. Even in traditional kabbalistic teachings, many Jews couldn’t learn it, which is why we have the Sacred Magic of Abramelin, since (chapter 9, my emphasis):

This wisdom hath its foundation in the high and holy Qabalah which is not granted unto any other than unto the first-born, even as God hath ordained, and as it was observed by our predecessors. Thence arose the difference, and the truck or exchange between Jacob and Esau; the primogeniture being the Qabalah, which is much nobler and greater than the Sacred Magic. And by the Qabalah we can arrive at the Sacred Magic, but by the latter we cannot have the Qabalah. Unto the child of a servant, or of an adulterer, the Qabalah is not granted, but only unto a legitimate child; as occurred in the case of Isaac and Ishmael; but the sacred wisdom through the mercy of God all can acquire, provided that they walk in the right path; and each one should content himself with the gift and grace of the Lord. And this must not be done out of curiosity, and with extravagant and ridiculous scruples, wishing to know and understand more than is right; seeing that temerity is certainly punished by God, who then permitteth him who is presumptuous not only to be turned aside out of the true way by the Second Causes, but also the demon hath power over him, and he ruineth and exterminateth him in such a manner, that we can only say that he himself is the sole cause of his own ruin and misery. It is certain that the Old Serpent will attempt to contaminate the present book with his venom, and even to destroy and lose it utterly, but O Lamech! as a faithful father I entreat thee by the true God who hath created thee and all things, and I entreat every other person who by thy means shall receive this method of operating, not to be induced or persuaded to have any other sentiment or opinion, or to believe the contrary. Pray unto God and ask him for his assistance, and place all thy confidence in him alone. And although thou canst not have the understanding of the Qabalah, nevertheless the holy guardian angels at the end of the six Moons or months will manifest unto thee that which is sufficient for the possession of this Sacred Magic.

Is there a means for us to study divinity and obtain power and knowledge thereby? Of course! The Word of God is something all humans with ears can hear (as much of my 49 Days of Definitions project indicated), but not every word is meant for us. There are many words out there for us to understand the Word; they are all the Word, but not using the same words. In a Hermetic sense, kabbalah is a form of Logos for the Jews who are able and allowed to study it. So, while a Hermetic qabbalah with roots and liberal borrowing from the Hebrew kabbalah is not improper, strictly speaking, it does seem like trying to borrow a prayer in another language to another divinity and speaking it aloud with a bad accent to your own. To be terse, the more I look at it, the more Hermetic qabbalah looks like cultural appropriation, and knowing how rife much of the Golden Dawn material was with culturally appropriated techniques and technology, this isn’t too surprising.

Besides, while Jewish kabbalah is definitely Jewish, it’s not entirely Jewish. It’s apparent that there was much cross-pollination between Jewish and Neoplatonic thought back in the days of the Roman Empire, especially after the Jewish Diaspora after the destruction of the Second Temple, and it was only then did the Hebrew alphabet begin to be used as numbers in addition to letters, a notably Greek practice that had already been in place for centuries, along with the Greek practice of isopsephic exegesis in interpreting words as numerical strings and linking them to numerological concepts and other words by means of isopsephy. Heck, even the Hebrew word “gematria” has its origins in Greek “geometria”. It might reasonably be said that what is today Jewish kabbalah is a combination of Greek Neoplatonist philosophy and isopsephic techniques combined with the native Jewish Merkava and Hekhalot mystic techniques. This was used, then merged again with other European thought as the centuries passed, so that kabbalah borrowed and reborrowed other philosophies just as it was borrowed and reborrowed from. As a magician in the vein of Neoplatonism, I can definitely see much that I resonate with in kabbalistic thought and practice, but the system takes place in a context that is sufficiently different from my own that it’s difficult for me to penetrate it without my entering into that context itself.

In that light, recontextualizing kabbalah into Hermetic qabbalah wholesale just isn’t the best way to go about it, and to develop an even further-detached system as a Hellenic or Greek kabbalah based on the Hermetic qabbalah would be even less effective. While such a Greek kabbalah would be great for my own practice and context, being much more familiar with Neoplatonic, Stoic, and even some Pythagorean philosophy (which is really the root of much of this, anyway), trying to base it on the already “debased” (to exaggerate the sense) Hermetic qabbalah would be like a game of Translation Party. And, just like with proper English-to-Japanese translation, you need to have a good sense of the language, structure, and system you’re trying to build things into based on the ideas and thoughts you already have instead of trying to go through a predetermined middleman system with its own rules already in place. In order to create a Greek kabbalah, I’d need to start fresh from first principles. Scrying the Tree of Life in a Greek framework isn’t the only work that has to be done, but the creation of a new map of the cosmos and new paths, developing an understanding more fitting to my own context instead of that of a different religion and tradition, is all necessary.

In other words, I hope you stay tuned as I work towards a Greek kabbalah. This will be a series of posts over the coming month exploring all the aspects I consider necessary to build such a system, so I hope you follow along.

So, let’s clear up some naming terminology before we continue this thread of thought. Because there are different traditions of qabbalah depending on religion, I’m going to differentiate between them all using the following spellings:

Kabbalah (with “k”): Jewish
Qabbalah (with “q”): Hermetic
Cabala (with “c”): Christian
Kampala (with “k” but “mp” instead of “b”): my new Greek framework

Alright. If I want to end up with what’s effectively a Greek kabbalah, the system of kampala is going to need to fulfill several requirements:

Provide a cosmological framework that allows for the ten spheres of the cosmos (Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Fixed Stars, Divinity)
Provide a cosmological map that allows for traversing the spheres of the cosmos with paths that connect them together
Provide a mapping between the paths of the map with the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet
Provide a means of starting from awareness on the Earth sphere (where the majority of us live and operate on a day-to-day basis) and reaching any other sphere by means of the paths, especially that of Divinity
Provide a description of the creation of the cosmos by means of the cosmological framework and mapping
Provide a means of correspondence to link other forces, concepts, objects, etc. to the paths and spheres on the framework and map
Be rooted primarily in Neoplatonic and Pythagorean thought, referencing Hermeticism as necessary without relying on explicitly Jewish principles that are not also present in Hermeticism

I’m sure there will be other requirements as we come along, but so far, so good.

The whole business with wanting to work with a Greek kabbalah started when I found the Rosicrucian Archives site, which contains a series of posts describing a Greek kabbalah with a Tree of Life with 24 paths. The spheres themselves are the same as those of the sephiroth on the Jewish Tree, just with their names in Greek. Most of the paths are the same as on the standard Hermetic qabbalah tree, except that two paths were removed (between spheres 2/6 and 3/6) and four paths were added (between spheres 3/4, 2/5, 1/5, and 1/4). The paths were numbered in a different way than the Golden Dawn did with their Kircher tree, with the first letter of the Greek alphabet Alpha being assigned to the path between spheres 9/10 and working upward from there. The picture they use is highly similar to the one given in Stephen Flowers’ Hermetic Magic: The Postmodern Papyrus of Abaris, where he gives the image as “the form of the Kabbalistic ‘Tree of Life’ as it might have been framed by the Hellenistic cosmologists” when giving an overview of Neoplatonic cosmology. Both trees are presented below; the paths are the same, as far as I can tell, while the names differ slightly for the spheres.

It’s an interesting Tree, and the analysis the Rosicrucian Archives gives to describe the internal logic of the Tree is a fascinating read, though with a sometimes purposely obtuse and obnoxiously mysterious style. They also use the same stoicheic associations I do when assigning the Greek letters to the planets, elements, and Zodiac signs, which is a nice addition, and make use of those distinctions an important part in their analysis. As might be expected from a Rosicrucian organization, the analysis is steeped in Christian theology, which is appropriate and not that much a stretch; after all, if Hebrew is the language of the Jews, Greek can arguably be said to be the language of the early Christians, especially since that’s the original script of the New Testament. Stephen Flowers, on the other hand, leaves much more wanting when it comes to describing the Tree and kabbalah generally; he claims that “it has long been suspected that the cosmology of the Hebrew Kabbalah—as outlined in the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar—was based on a now lost Greek original”. Mentally, I’m just throwing in [citation needed] tags all over his book nowadays, though it was useful to get started with as a basic, though fanciful, primer. He claims that the “restored [Neoplatonic kabbalah] is based on simple principles using the classic cosmological pattern inherited by the Hebrew Kabbalah together with what we know of the Hellenistic philosophical tradition”.

If anything in this world is simple, the cosmology and patterns present in Jewish kabbalah aren’t it.

At any rate, I liked this schema, since it already fit nicely with what I already do and simply changed a few of the paths near the top of the Tree around. Nothing big, right? Well, as my ponderings from last time indicated, the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to work with this system. What was substantially different? Different numbering of the paths? Big deal, plenty of Trees have been used by different traditions with different success. Different associations of stoicheia on the paths? Crowley himself changed the Star and Emperor, and thus their stoicheia, around on the Golden Dawn Tree. Different paths towards the top? Even the Golden Dawn had the use of several Trees, as did the Jewish kabbalists before them. Even with the different coating of Greek bark, the Tree was still kabbalah, and relies on connections and culture that don’t fit quite right for me. Even though it’s used by most modern Western magicians nowadays, what (maybe) works for them doesn’t dictate what will work for me.

Besides, even as a matter of correctness, there’s no real evidence to show that this Alexandrian Tree of Life is anything more than a fanciful mental exercise in what I was going to get myself engaged with. Kieren Barry in his “The Greek Qabalah” describes many uses of the Greek letters in understanding the forces of the cosmos, but (chapter 6):

On the evidence we have seen, it is plainly incorrect to state that there are only a few correspondences to the letters of the Greek alphabet along the lines of those found much later in the Hebrew Qabalah.* It is also anachronistic, as well as completely pointless, to attempt to project Hebrew Qabalistic symbolism onto the Greek alphabet, or to imagine anything so historically impossible as an “Alexandrian Tree of Life,” as has been done.** It is hoped that the extensive Greek letter symbolism examined above is enough to put an end to any perceived need for this unnecessary practice by those with a background in Hebrew Qabalah.

* (47) See for example, D. Godwin, Light in Extension—Greek Magic from Modern to Homeric Times (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1992), pp. 197-198. Through historical error, Godwin also unfortunately alleges that the Milesian system “which seems to have originated around 400 B.C., more or less copies the Hebrew/Phoenician system”; all of which is quite wrong.
** (48) See for example, S. Flowers, Hermetic Magic (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1995), a forgettable mixture of historical fact and personal fantasy.

In other words, Barry is of the opinion that the Greek letters are alive and well with their own internal symbolism and meaning, as well as those of the stoicheia behind them linking them to the elements and astrology, but nothing in the classical world along the lines of today’s kabbalah with the Hebrew script. Like Greek letters, Hebrew letters have their own symbolism and biographies, with whole personalities and worlds within each letter. Greek letters have the same, tailored just for themselves and not borrowed from another script. To borrow the meanings of Hebrew kabbalistic practice, though, into Greek wholesale is folly.

Barry says that “the extensive Greek letter symbolism examined above is enough to put an end to any perceived need for this unnecessary practice [of making an Alexandrian Tree] by those with a background in Hebrew Qabalah”, and I agree with him. However, where we may diverge (he’s not explicit with this) is that I think a method of understanding a creation of the world by letters, which are numbers, in a systematic and coherent way is worthy of our attention. Thus, if the Alexandrian Tree of Life won’t do, something else needs to be made in its place that not only achieves the same ends but in a way more faithful to the Greek philosophic tradition.

A full geomancy reading. This reading focuses only on one question at a time, but fully explores all the relevant symbols in the chart, as well as offering advice on how to proceed in a particular matter and what actions one can take to induce a particular resolution. Was US$30, but is now at a lower price of US$20!
A horary-geomancy reading, combining horary astrology overlaid with a geomancy chart. This is preferred for natal queries, long-term situations, or similar deep and complex matters. This provides more detail than a geomancy reading, as it incorporates Renaissance astrological techniques woven into the standard geomantic interpretations offered. US$60.

That said, I’m now offering several new selections outside geomancy:

A minireading for US$10, combining a pared-down 2-figure geomancy reading and a single-letter grammatomancy reading to indicate a general progression of events as well as advice on what to expect and how to maintain yourself in your affairs. This is best for general questions to get a good feel for a situation at a high level, and you can go more in-depth with a follow-up reading if desired after this.
Skype sessions (voice or webcam) for US$50 for half an hour. We’ll go over as many questions as you have and how to resolve them. I’ll use a mixture of geomancy, shell divination, grammatomancy, and other methods as I see fit for the queries asked.

If you select a Skype reading, please be aware that my most available times tend to be:

Wednesday afternoons
Friday afternoons
Saturday evenings
Sunday afternoons and evenings

So what are you waiting for? Want to get a reading? Check out my Services page today, or send me an email!

Please tell me you see where I’m going with this.

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form—and the local human passions and conditions and standards—are depicted as native to other worlds or other universes. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. Only the human scenes and characters must have human qualities. These must be handled with unsparing realism, (not catch-penny romanticism) but when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown—the shadow-haunted Outside—we must remember to leave our humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold.

Nihilism and meaninglessness may make for an entertaining read, but it’s no more than the flip side of the “catch-penny romanticism” Lovecraft himself decries.

Saint Cyprian, drive away from N. any woman, that he may look at me in every moment, today and now, wanting to be at my side; that he may know for certain that I am the perfect woman for him; that N. cannot live without me; and that N. may always have my image in his thoughts in every moment. Now, wherever he may be, with whomever he may be, he will look for me because of his thoughts are of me. And that at bedtime he may dream of me, and at rising he may think of me and desire me; that at eating he may think of me, that when walking he may think of me, that in every moment of his life he may think of me. That he may want to see me, sense my smell, touch me with love; that N. may want to hug me, kiss me, take care of me, protect me, love me 24 hours of every day, as well as loving me most of all and that he feel pleasure just to hear my voice.

Saint Cyprian, make N. feel for me a desire beyond what is normal, as he has never felt nor never feel for another person; that he may find pleasure only with me, that he may feel desire only for me, and that his body may belong only to me, that he may only have peace if he be with me.

I am thankful to you, Saint Cyprian, that you work in my favor, and I will divulge your name in payment of taming N. and bringing them in love, caring, devoted, faithful, and full of desire into my arms.

Specifically, how should we balance the needs of LGBTQ employees with those of religious employees?

If you’re going to resort to the First Amendment to defend your views, well, I’ll let Randall Monroe of XKCD say it better than I can:

Not only that, but he says in the alt-text that

I can’t remember where I heard this, but someone once said that defending a position by citing free speech is sort of the ultimate concession; you’re saying that the most compelling thing you can say for your position is that it’s not literally illegal to express.

This has been a PSA. Now, back to magic.

“how to use saturn to create prosperity” — Er, that’s not usually Saturn’s job. Prosperity is usually in line with Mercury and Jupiter, the planets of exchange and expansion generally,

Now I’m thinking I was going down the wrong path and need to start fresh without using the Tree of Life, or even using Jewish kabbalah at all.

This wisdom hath its foundation in the high and holy Qabalah which is not granted unto any other than unto the first-born, even as God hath ordained, and as it was observed by our predecessors. Thence arose the difference, and the truck or exchange between Jacob and Esau; the primogeniture being the Qabalah, which is much nobler and greater than the Sacred Magic. And by the Qabalah we can arrive at the Sacred Magic, but by the latter we cannot have the Qabalah. Unto the child of a servant, or of an adulterer, the Qabalah is not granted, but only unto a legitimate child; as occurred in the case of Isaac and Ishmael; but the sacred wisdom through the mercy of God all can acquire, provided that they walk in the right path; and each one should content himself with the gift and grace of the Lord. And this must not be done out of curiosity, and with extravagant and ridiculous scruples, wishing to know and understand more than is right; seeing that temerity is certainly punished by God, who then permitteth him who is presumptuous not only to be turned aside out of the true way by the Second Causes, but also the demon hath power over him, and he ruineth and exterminateth him in such a manner, that we can only say that he himself is the sole cause of his own ruin and misery. It is certain that the Old Serpent will attempt to contaminate the present book with his venom, and even to destroy and lose it utterly, but O Lamech! as a faithful father I entreat thee by the true God who hath created thee and all things, and I entreat every other person who by thy means shall receive this method of operating, not to be induced or persuaded to have any other sentiment or opinion, or to believe the contrary. Pray unto God and ask him for his assistance, and place all thy confidence in him alone. And although thou canst not have the understanding of the Qabalah, nevertheless the holy guardian angels at the end of the six Moons or months will manifest unto thee that which is sufficient for the possession of this Sacred Magic.

Kabbalah (with “k”): Jewish
Qabbalah (with “q”): Hermetic
Cabala (with “c”): Christian
Kampala (with “k” but “mp” instead of “b”): my new Greek framework

Alright. If I want to end up with what’s effectively a Greek kabbalah, the system of kampala is going to need to fulfill several requirements:

Provide a cosmological framework that allows for the ten spheres of the cosmos (Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Fixed Stars, Divinity)
Provide a cosmological map that allows for traversing the spheres of the cosmos with paths that connect them together
Provide a mapping between the paths of the map with the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet
Provide a means of starting from awareness on the Earth sphere (where the majority of us live and operate on a day-to-day basis) and reaching any other sphere by means of the paths, especially that of Divinity
Provide a description of the creation of the cosmos by means of the cosmological framework and mapping
Provide a means of correspondence to link other forces, concepts, objects, etc. to the paths and spheres on the framework and map
Be rooted primarily in Neoplatonic and Pythagorean thought, referencing Hermeticism as necessary without relying on explicitly Jewish principles that are not also present in Hermeticism

I’m sure there will be other requirements as we come along, but so far, so good.

If anything in this world is simple, the cosmology and patterns present in Jewish kabbalah aren’t it.

On the evidence we have seen, it is plainly incorrect to state that there are only a few correspondences to the letters of the Greek alphabet along the lines of those found much later in the Hebrew Qabalah.* It is also anachronistic, as well as completely pointless, to attempt to project Hebrew Qabalistic symbolism onto the Greek alphabet, or to imagine anything so historically impossible as an “Alexandrian Tree of Life,” as has been done.** It is hoped that the extensive Greek letter symbolism examined above is enough to put an end to any perceived need for this unnecessary practice by those with a background in Hebrew Qabalah.

* (47) See for example, D. Godwin, Light in Extension—Greek Magic from Modern to Homeric Times (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1992), pp. 197-198. Through historical error, Godwin also unfortunately alleges that the Milesian system “which seems to have originated around 400 B.C., more or less copies the Hebrew/Phoenician system”; all of which is quite wrong.
** (48) See for example, S. Flowers, Hermetic Magic (York Beach, ME: Samuel Weiser, 1995), a forgettable mixture of historical fact and personal fantasy.

If we’re to really get anywhere with this Greek kabbalah, or kampala, then we need to start from the basics. And, as an engineer, for me the basics often consist of the tools I’m going to use in order to build myself up more. Theory and theology are great and all, but it’s hard to read a book if you don’t know how to read. I claim that, in pursuing the goal of creating a system of kampala, it’s important to start out from the basics if we want to start from first principles. Put bluntly, if the universe is made from number as Pythagoras claims, than it’s possible to gain an understanding of the universe by means of number. And, if Greek letters stand for numbers, then it’s likewise possible to understand the universe by means of Greek letters. Add to it, the number of numbers is, well, infinite (infinitely and uncountably infinite, to be exact), while the Greek letters are finite; yet, the Greek letters can represent all numbers. Since we’re finite beings ourselves, it helps us to use a finite set of symbols to gain understanding, not least infinity itself.

So, the Greek alphabet. I claim it’s a useful tool, and not just for the purposes of grammatomancy and isopsephy, either. I won’t harp on those topics just yet, though, nor do I want to talk about what the letters are or how to pronounce them or how they developed from Phoenician or how they developed as numbers. You can read all that on your own without much context or debate. What I really want to talk about is the mythology behind the letters, where they came from in a divine sense according to what we already know. According to Hyginus in his Fabulae, #277:

The Parcae, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos invented seven Greek letters – A B H T I Y.
Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes, which, when they fly, form letters.
Palamedes, too, son of Nauplius, invented eleven letters; Simonides, too, invented four letters – Ó E Z PH; Epicharmus of Sicily, two – P and PS.
The Greek letters Mercury is said to have brought to Egypt, and from Egypt Cadmus took them to Greece. Cadmus in exile from Arcadia, took them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them to Latin to the number of 15.
Apollo on the lyre added the rest.

Thus, we have several groups of letters along with who invented them:

Moirai (7): Α, Β, Η, Τ, Ι, Υ, ?
Palamedes (11): Γ, Δ, Θ, Κ, Λ, Μ, Ν, Ξ, Ο, Ρ, Σ, Χ
Simonides (4): Ω, Ε, Ζ, Φ
Epicharmus of Sicily (2): Π, Ψ

The list is somewhat confusing, since the translation (and a Latin copy of Hyginus) give variations depending on the source of who invented what letters or how many. The list above has the Moirai inventing seven letters but only listing six. Something’s not adding up here, but that’s what crappy penmanship and scribery will get you over the centuries. Besides, this is only one myth, and there are many; Herodotus in his Histories claims that Cadmus, a Phoenician prince, brought a Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks. Herodotus and others note that ancient Greek (and this was ancient even for them) was written using identical letters to those of Phoenician scripts of the time, though over time the Greek alphabet had diverged and grown unique in its own use. Other historians cast doubt on Herodotus, claiming the Greek script had a Euboean, Eretrian, or other Greek origin; others yet claimed that calling them “Phoenician letters” was a misnomer since, even if the Phoenicians brought them to Greece, they themselves got their letters from other nations, specifically Syria according to Diodorus Siculus. As it would turn out, Herodotus was closest to the factual history of the matter. This is why Hebrew and Greek share a common origin, because they both pull their alphabets from Phoenician, though their mythologies may say differently on the matter.

Unlike Egyptian or Hebrew mythology, the Greeks as a whole didn’t have that many myths for where their alphabet came from; either Cadmus the Phoenician gave it to Greece, or the Fates and Hermes contributed to the alphabet along with mortals. That doesn’t change the fact that the Greeks had and appreciated their writing system, though, and if any mythological non-mortal origin must be traced to the letters, then it’s from two sources: the Moirai, goddesses of fate, as well as Hermes, communicator and messenger of the gods. The Moirai were Klōthō, Lakhesis, and Atropos, the three white-robed goddesses who, respectively, spun the thread of life from her distaff onto her spindle to begin life, measured the thread to determine how long a life should be, and cut the thread of life to end it once it was fully measured out. Their name itself refers to “part” or “lot”, similar to one’s fate or destiny or the allotment of length of life. However, their collective name can be more broadly interpreted to refer to everything that fell as one’s lot in life: glory, happiness, grief, death, and the like, which are all unexpected and fall to chance and fate. Sometimes, even, the three Moirai are represented as the single goddess Moira, who subsumes all their functions into an abstract concept, of whom Zeus is the occasional personification. In terms of writing, however, that the Moirai developed several letters for our use indicates that the ability to write gives us the ability to understand and work with what falls to us; writing not only comes from the divine but allows us to learn more about them.

As for Hermes, well, what needs be said about him that many of us don’t already know? He’s the communicator and messenger between the gods, traveling across all worlds doing their bidding, and especially from our world to the heavens to communicate our desires and prayers and sacrifices to the gods themselves. He’s the god of all communication and the post, and thus over writing and many of its related arts such as mathematics, science, engineering, programming, and so forth. However, his association with this is not given in his Homeric hymn, but developed as a result of his function as messenger and courier. The myths do associate him with divination through signs, such as birdflight and other chance omens, which themselves are messages. In this light, letters are messages from the gods always telling us more about the world as well as of the gods themselves. Letters, coming from the shapes of birds and other omens, all have their own messages to speak in addition to the message they spell out as a whole.

Unlike in Hebrew, where the world was literally created by means of the Hebrew script (which the Jews think God gave to mankind in exactly the same curvy square-script form they use today, which I find…odd), the Greeks had no such conception; there are plenty of other cosmogonies in Greek mythology, but none involve language per se or even as an important tool; abstract gods generate other gods either by themselves or in copulation with another. Instead, the use of writing is a constant transaction between us and the cosmos; every letter of every message is significant in always communicating to us the will and desire of the gods, as well as correlating all the things in our life to what happens to and because of us. This is a huge idea; this means that if the will of the gods are in their messages, and their messages are in the letters, then they are effectively within and staring at us from the letters. As we write letters, we communicate the will of the gods by means of the things we write since they use each letter independently and in tandem with each other to communicate their will to the rest of the cosmos. While the letters may not be the building blocks of the world, they are vital to its constant functioning and maintenance.

So, if the gods reveal themselves by signs and omens, and those signs are the basis of the Greek letters, then the gods reveal themselves by means of the Greek letters. This isn’t that big a stretch; after all, there is grammatomancy, that awesome divination system (which I strongly recommend buying the ebook I put out for it for more information on the Greek letters in magic, hint hint) where the Greek letters themselves are messages. Plus, the Greek letters are also associated with number, which is the foundation for the creation of the cosmos according to Pythagoras, so if the gods didn’t make the universe by means of the Greek letters, then the Greek letters can certainly indicate how they did so by means of number. Even if we don’t worship the gods or engage in explicit theurgy (which we really should be doing anyway), even coming to a deep understanding of the Greek letters themselves, on their own terms, as their own entities, will still help us achieve a deep understanding of the cosmos approximating or equalling a full theurgic understanding of the cosmos.

The question then becomes “how should we go about understanding the Greek letters”? Well, let’s say that there are four parts to a letter:

Name, the word by which we refer to a letter, such as “alpha”, “beta”, etc.
Glyph, the graphical sign that refers to a letter, such as Α/α, Β/β, etc.
Sound, the sound the letter produces, such as [a], [b], etc. (Knowing IPA is helpful for this part.)
Meaning, the occult and esoteric meaning of the letter

The first three parts are fairly straightforward, barring regional and temporal variants in the Greek script. For the purposes of kampala, I’m going to be using what’s been considered the Greek alphabet in use for the past 2400 years, the classical Ionian script, adopted by the archon Eucleides in 403 BC in Athens and quickly standardized across the rest of Greece shortly thereafter. This script has the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet we’re all familiar with in the same forms we’re all familiar with, and has been roughly unchanged since their adoption. Their pronunciation has shifted slightly in accordance with basic phonological laws over the millennia, but this is to be expected and isn’t that great an issue.

So, with that, let’s take a look at the Greek alphabet. There are 24 letters, which are:

Letter		Name		Sound
Greek	Roman	Greek	English	Classical	Modern
Α	A	αλφα	alpha	a, aː	a
Β	B	βητα	bēta	b	v
Γ	G	γαμμα	gamma	g	ɣ ~ ʝ
Δ	D	δελτα	delta	d	ð
Ε	E	εψιλον	epsilon	e	e
Ζ	Z	ζητα	zēta	zd, dz, z	z
Η	Ē	ητα	ēta	ɛː	i
Θ	TH	θητα	thēta	tʰ	θ
Ι	I	ιωτα	iōta	i, iː	i
Κ	K	καππα	kappa	k	k, c
Λ	L	λαμβδα	lambda	l	l, ʎ
Μ	M	μυ	mu	m	m
Ν	N	νυ	nu	n	n
Ξ	X	ξει	xi	ks	ks
Ο	O	ομικρον	omicron	o	o
Π	P	πει	pi	p	p
Ρ	R	ρω	rhō	r	r
Σ	S	σιγμα	sigma	s	s
Τ	T	ταυ	tau	t	t
Υ	U, Y	υψιλον	upsilon	y, yː	i, f ~ v
Φ	PH, F	φει	phi	pʰ	f
Χ	KH, CH	χει	chi	kʰ	χ ~ ç
Ψ	PS	ψει	psi	ps	ps
Ω	Ō	ωμεγα	ōmega	ɔː	p

Note that some of the English names for the Greek letters simplify the vowels a bit, such that Π is “pi” in English, not the more accurate classical “pei”, though in Modern Greek it’s “pi”. Also, where there’re different possible ways to write the letter out, those are given in the table; for instance, Χ can be written as “ch” or “kh” (I prefer the latter, personally).

The thing about the number 24 is that it has a lot of factors and a lot of ways to be split up or multiplied by equally convenient numbers, which makes it mathematically appealing; for instance, 24 × 15 = 360, or 4 × 6 = 24. Since there are 24 Greek letters, there are different ways to split them up in different ways. I personally prefer a 7/12/5 schema: seven vowels, twelve “simple” consonants (which themselves are broken into seven stop and five continuing consonants), and five “complex” consonants. This schema has important symbolic meaning, but let’s focus on the phonetic parts for now:

The seven vowels (letters that produce a clear vocal sound) are pretty straightforward: Α, Ε, Η, Ι, Ο, Υ, Ω
Simple stop consonants are those which are produced from one action in the mouth and stop the airflow completely: Β, Γ, Δ, Κ, Π, Τ
Simple continuing consonants are those which are produced from one action in the mouth but can be vocally continued: Ζ, Λ, Μ, Ν, Ρ
Complex consonants are those which are produced from two actions in the mouth: Θ, Ξ, Φ, Χ, Ψ

Pronouncing the vowels can be a little tricky for some people, but it’s still easy. Alpha, Epsilon, Iōta, and Omicron produce the same sounds you’d expect in English: “ah”, “eh”, “ee”, “oh”. Upsilon is a little tricky; it’s like the combination of “ee” and “oo”, but a good example of the sound is the French “u” or German “ü”. Ēta and Ōmega, to make the distinction simple, is that they were lengthened versions of Epsilon and Omicron. I don’t mean that the sound changed (though it did in later varieties of Greek) except in how long you pronounced it. So an Epsilon is “eh”, and Ēta is “ehhhh”. That’s really basically it, though it ended up where Ēta had a sound only slightly closer to “ei” (between “bed” and “bait”) than “eh”, and Ōmega was more like a deeper “auh” (“thought”) than “oh”.

As for consonants, when I say “simple” versus “complex”, compare Tau and Thēta. They both classically made a “t” sound, but the difference was that Tau was a simple unaspirated and nonbreathy “t”, while Thēta produced an aspirated (breathy) “t”. It’s the difference between “water” (a nonbreathy “t”) and “tin” (a breathy “t”). Thēta, Phi, and Khi are all aspirated, while their unaspirated versions are Tau, Pi, and Kappa. The other complex letters, Xi and Psi, are combinations of two simple consonants: Kappa and Sigma for Xi, and Pi and Sigma for Psi. The other simple consonants are pronounced the same way you’d pronounce them in English, bearing in mind the difference between aspirated and unaspirated consonants (try being aware of when you’re producing a breathy sound in the future).

Why am I spending so much time over the basics of Greek pronunciation? Because this is going to be key for understanding the meaning of the letters in a meditative and contemplative way. Sure, the letters have their own symbolism based on their shape and meaning, which we’ll talk about more another time, but I want to offer a method to meditate on the letters by means of their sounds. This is similar to the use of seed syllables in varieties of Tantric Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as the use of speaking certain names of God with different vowels in Jewish kabbalah. By truly, deeply vibrating, intoning, and focusing all of the body and mind on pronouncing the sounds of the Greek letters, we attune ourselves to them and begin to open up deeper mysteries of the letters. However, there are many different ways to start this, so I propose the following methods:

For vowels:

Intoning a single vowel. Example: ΑΑΑΑΑΑ
Intoning a sequence of vowels with a breath between each. Example: ΑΑΑΑΑΑ ΕΕΕΕΕΕ
Intoning a sequence of vowels once. Example: ΑΑΑΑΑΑΕΕΕΕΕΕ
Intoning a sequence of vowels, cycling through the vowels themselves. Example: ΑΑΑΕΕΕΑΑΑΕΕΕ
Any of the above at different vocal pitches, such as at a high pitch then a low pitch

For simple stop consonants:

Making the consonant once, breathing out afterwards. Example: B
Making the consonant multiple times within a single breath with no sound. Example: B B B B B
Making the consonant multiple times within a single breath with an unstressed vowel. Example: B B B B B (buh buh buh buh buh)

For simple continuing consonants:

Making the consonant once, breathing out afterwards. Example: Λ
Making the consonant once, prolonging it within a single breath. Example: ΛΛΛΛΛΛΛ
Making the consonant multiple times within a single breath. Example: Λ Λ Λ Λ Λ Λ
Making the consonant multiple times over several breaths, continuing it on a single breath. Example: ΛΛΛ ΛΛΛ ΛΛΛ ΛΛΛΛ
Any of the above at different vocal pitches, such as at a high pitch then a low pitch

For a complex consonant, any of the making the consonant once but prolonging the complexity. Example, ΞΣΣΣΣΣΣΣ, or Θ breathing out completely. The other simple continuing consonant meditations should also be done with these, as well.

For vowels and consonants:

Making the consonant with one vowel to prolong it. Example: ΒΑΑΑΑΑΑΑ
Making the consonant several times with different vowels with a breath between each. Example: ΒΑΑΑΑΑΑ ΒΕΕΕΕΕΕΕ ΒΗΗΗΗΗΗΗ
Making the consonant several times with different vowels within a single breath. Example: ΒΑΑΑΒΕΕΕΒΗΗΗ
For simple continuing consonants or complex consonants, prolonging the consonant followed by the vowel. Example: ΞΣΣΣΣΣΑΑΑΑ or Θ…ΑΑΑΑ (exhaling halfway before making the vowel with a weak unstressed vowel, like “t-hhhuhhh-ahhh”)
Any of the above with vowels coming to a stop with a consonant with no sound following. Example: ΑΑΑΑΑΑΒ
Any of the above with vowels coming to a stop with a consonant with an unstressed vowel following. Example: ΑΑΑΑΑΑΒ (ahhhhhbuh)
Any of the above at different vocal pitches, such as at a high pitch then a low pitch

And, perhaps it’s understated, but even intoning the name of a single letter (e.g. “ΑΛΦΑ”) is worthwhile, too, and I’d consider it to be the most complex of these basic meditative exercises. Once one becomes comfortable with all the meditations on all the letters (and a good combination of consonants and vowels), the next logical step is to meditate on whole words in the same way. This method produces mantras out of each and every letter in the Greek alphabet, as well as every combination of them, in a variety of ways to acclimate one to their pronunciation and use later in the study of kampala. At the beginning, it might be preferred to use combinations of vowels and consonants in order (so alpha-bēta, alpha-gamma, alpha-delta, etc.) before jumping around the alphabet.

While pronouncing the letter, it also helps to give the mind something to focus on; I suggest the shape of the letter itself. Either the capital or lowercase letter could be used; for the purposes of kampala, they’re treated the same, though all analyses are given based on the capital letter. Visualizing the letter itself is simple, since none of the letters are particularly complex glyphs, and visualization exercises abound on the Internet. As you breath in, let the mind clear; as the letter is pronounced, let the letter shine brightly in the mind; as the letter’s sound goes away or is breathed out, let the letter dim until only an afterimage or thought-echo is left in the mind until the breath is emptied out.

How much time should be spent on this? As with anything, as much as you want to, and as much as you can. I personally find it useful to sync up daily letter meditations, doing different letters and letter combinations based on the grammatomantic letter of the day of the lunar month, so I meditate on Kappa on Kappa-day, Omicron on Omicron-day, and so forth. (I’ll be making increasing use of that grammatomantic lunar calendar throughout this kampala project, since it spreads things out nicely and regularly for me.) This is a good way to get introduced to basic meditation on the letters, but you’ll notice that we haven’t talked about the meaning of the letters yet at all. That’s coming up soon, and it’ll give us more things to meditate on when we do letter meditation in the future, but for now, keep it basic and get busy, since now we begin working our way into the emerging mysteries of kampala.

From before, a letter has four parts: a name, a glyph, a sound, and a meaning. The first three were discussed last time, along with a basic set of meditations to get us familiar with the first three of these parts. We didn’t discuss the final part of the letters, however, which is the meaning of the letters. Unlike the name, glyph, and sound for a letter, of which there tends to be only one of each, there are many layers of meaning for each letter: numerical, astrological, divine, oracular, Phoenician, Greek, and more. This is what makes the divination system of grammatomancy so powerful, in that a whole world of knowledge can be unlocked with a single letter. So, even though the meaning of a letter is the fourth part, there are many parts to the meaning of a letter.

What are some of those meanings? Honestly, if I had to indicate all the meanings of the letters, this blog post would become a whole blog in and of itself, so I’ll simply list a few sets of meanings along with links or links to books for further reading, though my ebook on grammatomancy lists many of them:

Numerical: my page on isopsephy and gematria, Kieran Barry’s The Greek Qabalah
Astrological: my page on stoicheia, Agrippa’s table of letters (book I, chapter 74, though I reverse how he arranges the planets to the Greek vowels)
Oracular: Apollonius Sophistes’ Greek Alphabet Oracle
Divine: a post linking the Greek gods to the letters for purposes of a lunar grammatomantic ritual calendar

Honestly, with all that down, we already have a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, but there’s another way to give meanings to the Greek letters: their original Phoenician names, and Greek words related to the letters. Even the Greeks were aware, to an extent, of the Phoenician origin of their alphabet, which doesn’t diminish its importance in the least for our purposes. After all, the Phoenician script was the origin of many of the world’s writing systems (especially if you buy the argument, as I do, that it formed the origin of the Brahmic script in India, which connects it even to the Far Eastern Korean). The diagram below shows Phoenician in the center column, Hebrew to the right of Phoenician and Arabic to the right of that, and Greek to the left of Phoenician and Latin to the left of that. Letters of different scripts in the same color boxes show the origin of the letter, while arrows show derivations of other letters.

Phoenician script has 22 letters, the same 22 as modern Hebrew; there’s a 1-to-1 mapping between those two scripts. The Ionian Greek script, however, got rid of three of the letters (digamma/waw, qoppa, san/sampi), added four (phi, khi, psi, omega), and moved the position of the derived form of Waw (which became Upsilon) further back in the alphabet. Each of the Phoenician letters had their own name, many of which provided the names for their corresponding Greek letters. These names referred to, in many cases, earlier Egyptian hieroglyphs or related words that provided a basis for what the letter looked like. Many of these names were maintained in Greek, often in derived forms, such as Alpha from ʾĀlp, Bēta from Bet, Gamma from Gimel, and so forth. For the Greek letters that have Phoenician origins, either in name of the letter or its form, their Phoenician meanings might include the following:

Letter	Phoenician	Meaning
Α	ʾĀlp	Ox
Β	Bet	House
Γ	Gimel	Throwing stick weapon, camel
Δ	Dāleth	Door
Ε	He	Window
Ζ	Zayin	Weapon, sword
Η	Ḥeth	Wall, courtyard, thread
Θ	Ṭēth	Wheel, good
Ι	Yōdh	Hand, finger
Κ	Kaph	Hand, palm of a hand
Λ	Lāmedh	Goad
Μ	Mēm	Water
Ν	Nun	Fish, serpent, whale
Ξ	Simketh or Sāmekh	Fish, tent peg, prop support
Ο	ʿAyin	Eye
Π	Pē	Mouth
Ρ	Rēš	Head
Σ	Form from Šin Name from Simketh	Tooth
Τ	Tāw	Mark, cross
Υ	Wāw	Hook
Φ	Form from Qōph	Back of the head, sewing needle, eye of a needle, monkey
Χ
Ψ
Ω	Form from Omicron

Of course, by the time the Ionian Greek script was adopted and spread throughout Greece, many of the letter forms were so far removed from their Phoenician counterparts (if any existed) that many of these meanings became meaningless or detached from the letters. However, the Greeks themselves often found new symbolism for the names, often from a variety of sources.

Words or names that started with the letter itself
Images or concepts that bear a resemblance to the shape of the letter
Words that bear a strong resemblance or things that have a connection to the name of the letter
Assigning a letter to parts of the body, starting with Alpha at the head and going down to Mu at the feet, then starting again from Nu at the feet and going back up to Ōmega at the head (cf. the Body of Sophia)

Letter	Meaning
Letter	Initial letter	Graphical	Importance	Body
Α	Man, air, Apollo		Beginning, invention, source, God	Head
Β	King, help		Duality	Neck
Γ	Earth, birth			Shoulders and hands
Δ	God, ten			Breast
Ε	Build		Justice, Apollo	Diaphragm
Ζ	Life, Zeus			Back
Η	Hera			Belly
Θ	God, death, Mars	The world/universe		Thighs
Ι	Jesus, jot, single	Line, perfection, Rod of Moses		Knees
Κ	Lord, Caesar			Lower legs
Λ	Lion	Ratio, progression		Ankles
Μ	Mary, myriad		Middle	Feet
Ν				Feet
Ξ				Ankles
Ο		Circle, heaven		Lower legs
Π	Father, fire, five, Mars			Knees
Ρ				Thighs
Σ	Savior			Belly
Τ		Cross, crucifix		Back
Υ	Son	Moral choice, dilemma		Diaphragm
Φ	Voice, sound			Breast
Χ	Time, Christ	World soul, cross		Shoulders and hands
Ψ	Psyche, soul		Holy Spirit	Neck
Ω	Ocean, Orion		End	Head

You’ll note that I’ve started to include Abrahamic and Christian references; this is intentional, and not simply me copying entries blind from Kieran Barry’s “The Greek Qabalah”. After all, as a Hermeticist, I’m not opposed to including Christian or Jewish references here (despite my trying to distance myself from Jewish kabbalah); rather, including them reaches back and allows for more access to much of Renaissance and Medieval development of Hermeticism as well as its classical and pagan origins.

So, where does all this leave us? Between the graphical shapes and names of the letters, along with their oracular meanings, divine connections, numerical and isopsephic connections, and astrological or planetary or elemental connections, we have whole worlds of meaning for each of the letters. These can all be incorporated into the meditations on the letters by visualizing or contemplating on them while intoning or repeating the letters. The images and symbolism of the letters, coupled with their pronunciation, will further open up more doors in exploring the worlds and meanings of the letters and how they affect the world through their presence and, by their presence, the will and presence of the gods and God.

In fact, speaking of doors, let me share a method of scrying I like to use for deeply exploring a particular symbol. Once the meanings and symbolism of the letters in all their complexity and layers have been learned and reviewed, and after meditating briefly to calm and clear the mind but before leaving the meditative state, I visualize a doorway with a particular symbol inscribed on it. In our case, that symbol would be one of the letters of the Greek alphabet. Knock on the door, mentally intoning the letter itself, and open it up. Everything inside is a representation and symbol connected to that original symbol; explore the world, perhaps calling on the genius or spirit of the symbol to guide you or to send you a guide, or calling on your own HGA or personal tutelary spirit to guide you through it. Explore the world as deeply as you care to, and when you’ve decided you’ve had enough, take the same route back through the world, passing by all the things you passed by before, and exit the same way you came. Close the door, clear the mind again, and exit the meditative state. I’ve used this skill to great efficacy before, notably on my meditations on the geomantic figures and the elemental archangelic kings, and it can be adapted to any number of symbols. Using this method with the Greek letters can increase one’s deeper knowledge of them by exploring the deeper symbolism and worlds behind the letters which wouldn’t be apparent from simply reading up on their symbolism, and can indicate other symbols not listed above as well as connections to other letters that might not be apparent. Further, the technique can be augmented by having it take place in one’s astral temple, or astrally projecting into the world itself.

Alright, so now we understand the Greek letters as symbols of many things: zodiac signs, planets, elements, numbers, body parts, and any number of gods, images, and other concepts. All this is in addition to their use as instruments of written language as glyphs and of spoken language as sounds and names. While we’ve come a long way, we’re still only setting out our basic tools for further analysis. We know of the Greek letters as units, single entities representing a single set of symbols. To use them, we have to start seeing these letters as relationships, transferring and communicating information and power between other units. It’s like a single word, such as “my” or “the”, being understood, but without meaning until it’s used in a sentence when it indicates relationships and distance between and among other concepts. Within a word, letters act as relationships between the letters before and after it, but is there anything else bigger that we might have the letters act as a relationship between?

This is where we start thinking about things cosmically and from an emanationist perspective, and, to be honest, I have some catching up to do on Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophical language to describe it accurately. Suffice to say that, like Jewish kabbalah and Hermetic qabbalah, Greek kampala also describes the creation of the cosmos in a series of stages, but not necessarily in a clearly-ordered and sequential manner like the sephiroth do. Rather, it is through providing multiple levels of understanding of the cosmos that we can better understand it. The Greeks loved to divvy up stuff into smaller stuff, the foundation of the problem-solving technique “divide and conquer”, and that continues here. With that, I propose we use the geometric diagram of the tetractys, the holy diagram of Pythagoras: The tetractys is a diagram consisting of four rows of points, each row having an increasing number of points starting at one and ending at four, arranged in an equilateral triangle. This was considered to be the foundational blueprint for all of creation according to that mathematical and mystic hero of Greek thought, and was mathematically significant: it combined the Monad (unity), Dyad (two), Triad (three), and Tetrad (four) into a single unit. These four numbers, representing the One, Power or Differentiation, Harmony, and Cosmos, compose all the things of the universe, as 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10, the unity of a higher order, or the Decad. All of these numbers were holy to the Pythagoreans, but ten most of all; given its fourfold structure, this diagram was called the Tetractys, and sometimes referred to by the Greek letter Delta (Δ). The Pythagoreans saw it as so holy that they prayed to it and glorified it:

Bless us, divine number, thou who generated gods and men! O holy, holy Tetractys, thou that containest the root and source of the eternally flowing creation! For the divine number begins with the profound, pure unity until it comes to the holy four; then it begets the mother of all, the all-comprising, all-bounding, the first-born, the never-swerving, the never-tiring holy ten, the keyholder of all.

And, further, the Pythagoreans swore by the tetractys itself:

By that pure, holy, four lettered name on high,nature’s eternal fountain and supply,the parent of all souls that living be,by him, with faith find oath, I swear to thee.

The tetractys was considered to represent the fourfold nature of creation in eleven different ways, according to Iamblichus in his “Life of Pythagoras”. Essentially, a single Monad (God, the Good, etc.) created a Duality of Two, which then created a Harmony of Three, which then created an Ordering of Four; by the interaction of these different forces, both within their own groups and across other groups, all other things are made. In fact, by interpreting each row (with its difference) in different ways, we obtain something resembling Cornelius Agrippa’s Scale of Four (book II, chapter 7):

According to the composition of numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4
According to the multiplication of numbers: a point (0-dimensions), a side (1-dimension), a square (2-dimensions), a cube (3-dimensions)
According to magnitude: a point (0D), a line (1D), a plane (2D), a solid (3D)
According to simple bodies: fire, air, water, earth
According to figures: pyramid, octahedron, icosahedron, cube
According to things rising into existence through vegetative life: seed, length (shoot), breadth (leaf), depth (trunk)
According to communities to form nations: individual, household, street, city
According to judicial power: intellect, science, opinion, sense
According to parts of the animal: rational, irascible, epithymetic (that which desires good), physical body
According to the seasons of the year: spring, summer, autumn, winter
According to the ages of man: infancy, youth, adulthood, senescence

The tetractys even helped to guide the Pythagorean musical system by taking ratios of the rows of dots:

Rows 4 and 3, 4:3, perfect fourth
Rows 3 and 2, 3:2, perfect fifth
Rows 2 and 1, 2:1, octave
Rows 1 and 1, 1:1, unison

In fact, so influential was the use of the Tetractys in Greek thought that it even influenced philosophical schools hundreds of years afterwards, even Jewish kabbalah and Hermeticism. This can even be seen in one representation of the Tetragrammaton, the four-lettered name of God, represented in a tetractys-like form: Plus, having ten units inside, parallels can be drawn between the tetractys and the Tree of Life, or ten sephiroth. Dion Fortune in her “The Mystical Qabalah” even drew a comparison between the fourfold Tetractys and the first four sephiroth on the Tree of Life, especially with regards to the tetractys as demonstrator of physical space:

The point is assigned to Kether; the line to Chokmah; the two-dimensional plane to Binah; consequently the three-dimensional solid naturally falls to Chesed.

In terms of the four parts of the body, it might be better to restate tetractys #9 above (according to the parts of the human) in Agrippan terms as the Mind, Spirit, Soul, and Body. These four parts of the human are that which links us to the divine (Mind, row 1), that which allows us to reason and intellectually understand the world (Spirit, row 2), that which feels and moves (Soul, row 3), and that which is moved and is felt (Body, row 4). It is by the unification and purification of these four parts of the body do we practice ascension through and beyond ourselves back to the One, but that’s another topic for another day. Suffice it to say that, through the cultivation and increasing of virtues in the four parts of ourselves, we ascend the Tetractys and the multiple parts of the world we find ourselves connected to. If you want, give the excellent Summary of Pythagorean Theology by Apollonius Sophistes a read in the meantime, since that’ll be a huge thing for us later on.

The study and meditation of the Tetractys will become bigger and bigger later on, especially once we view it as a kampalic cosmic map much in the way that the Tree of Life functions for kabbalah and qabbalah. As yet, we’ll leave the individual units of the tetractys unnumbered and unmarked, letting the structure speak for itself. To let it do so, meditate on the structure and form of the tetractys, offering it the same devotion and glory the old Pythagoreans themselves would have done so. Hold the image in your mind, and relate all the parts of the cosmos to its structure: the fourfold nature of things resulting from a threefold harmony resulting from a twofold differentiation resulting from a single Source. To say much about the tetractys at this point would be premature, so I’ll leave it as an introduction on its own as a symbolic representation of what’s to come: first a seed, then a shoot, then a leaf, then a trunk.

Realizing that the tetractys is pretty much the glyph I want to use for kampala wasn’t an immediate realization. I know I wanted something like the Tree of Life from kabbalah with its ten sephiroth so nicely arranged, but of course I didn’t want to appropriate it either without making sure it was what I needed. However, I recalled that the tetractys was another glyph of ten units that could easily describe the creation of the world, so I immediately switched to that. One part of the problem was solved; the next was how to arrange the emanations of creation on the tetractys itself. If the tetractys is a combination of ten units arranged into four rows, then there should be a way to describe the emanation of creation to each unit on the tetractys in an ordered way. Since the system of emanation I’m most familiar with involves the ten heavens (Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Stars, and the Source-God-Good), I decided to try my hand at arranging them in a way similar to how they’re arranged on the Tree of Life, in a top down and ordered manner. Thus, if we assign the spheres of the cosmos to the units of the tetractys starting at the top and going down, left-to-right within a row, we get an image like this:

Simple and straightforward. However, there are significant problems with this. Sure, God is at the top, which fits the nature of God as Monad or Unity. The sphere of the fixed stars and that of Saturn are directly below, which is much like the positioning of their respective sephiroth of Chokmah and Binah on the Tree of Life. Beyond that, though, things get weird; the Sun is off to one side instead of in the center where it probably should be in this system, and Earth is way over in the bottom right corner of the tetractys. Honestly, nothing on this setup looked appealing to me, especially since it conflicted with other planetary relationships I had already known and studied, or even allowed for the possibility of. This was too bizarre to feel “right” in any sense.

Okay, so maybe that wasn’t the method I should’ve used. Let’s try another way, starting from a different perspective. Part of the tetractys’ appeal was due to its mathematical applications, one of which is known as Plato’s Lambda, or the Lambdoma, so named because it takes the form of a lambda (Λ). In Plato’s Timaeus, which is his treatise on Pythagorean cosmology, he describes the creation of the cosmos by a Demiurge by taking “strips” of creation and applying two mathematical sequences to it, the geometrical series based on 2 and the geometrical series based on 3.

If we start at 1 at the top and go left to 2, we keep doubling the next number in the sequence, so 1 becomes 2, 2 becomes 4, and 4 becomes 8. If we start at 1 at the top and go right to 3, we keep tripling the next number in the sequence, so 1 becomes 3, 3 becomes 9, and 9 becomes 27. The left side is a sequence of even numbers, and the right a sequence of odd numbers. The Pythagoreans considered even numbers female or passive and odd numbers male or active, which we can still see vestiges of in modern numerology (cf. the Tarot, where trump I is the Magician and II the High Priestess). However, 1 was neither odd nor even, so 2 was the first even number and 3 the first odd number, hence their use in starting their progressions. If we fill in the blanks, so to speak, in the Lambdoma with extra numbers based on the Tetractys, where a new number is the product of the two numbers above it, we get 6 in the third row (being the product of 2 × 3), and 12 and 18 in the fourth row (2 × 6 and 6 × 3, respectively):

The original lambdoma has seven numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 8, and 27. Three of these are odd, three are even, and one is neither odd nor even. The number seven recalls the seven planets, and I’ve seen a system of dividing the planets where three are in one category, three are in another, and one is in neither group. This is called sect, which refers to whether a planet is more powerful in the sky or under the earth either in the daytime or at nighttime. This is a type of polarity much like femininity or masculinity of a planet, and the planets are divided into three groups like this:

Diurnal: Sun, Jupiter, Saturn
Nocturnal: Moon, Venus, Mars
Hermaphroditic: Mercury

If diurnality is equitable to masculinity and nocturnality to femininity, then diurnal planets can be ascribed to odd numbers and nocturnal planets to even numbers. The Sun and Moon are the most diurnal and nocturnal, respectively, with Jupiter and Venus following them, and Saturn and Mars following them. Mercury, being neither diurnal nor nocturnal, adapts to either; it can be given a value of 1 in the lambdoma. Thus, if we use the original lambdoma to plot the seven planets, we get a figure like this:

However, that still leaves three slots in the tetractys to be filled in, and having everything come from Mercury at the top isn’t quite true, especially when Mercury can obtain a sect depending on whether it rises just before or just after the Sun. Thus, if we move Mercury down to where 6 is in the completed lambdoma (the combination of an even and an odd number, suitable for Mercury), we have an empty slot at the top for the Monad. This leaves two more slots at the bottom, which can be reserved for the Earth in slot 12 (2 × 2 × 3, more female than male) and the Stars in slot 18 (2 × 3 × 3, more male than female):

While this arrangement makes sense, having the Earth and Stars in the same row as Saturn and Mars still didn’t feel right, and trying to draw connections between everything felt wrong. Mercury being in the middle, being the communicator of the gods and a middling connecting force, felt right, as did the Moon on the left side and Sun on the right, but this doesn’t agree with the standard emanationist models I’m used to. After all, shouldn’t the sphere of the fixed stars, the ultimate barrier between this world and God, be higher than the Sun and Moon? Should the Sun and Moon, luminaries though they might be, be representative of the two principles of Duality? I was stumped, honestly. Further, Plato in the Timaeus groups the planets into two groups based on their relative speed: three that move roughly together (Sun, Venus, Mercury) and four that move with unequal motion to the first three and amongst themselves (Moon, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn). This was in the same section as the use of the lambdoma and mathematical progressions of 2 and 3, so surely a better grouping could be made that would exemplify this.

It was at this point that I started getting a headache and an odd itch on my back, and not just any itch, but something that didn’t feel too physical. I recalled what I had on my back: the Golden Chain of Homer, a tattoo that symbolically describes Man’s creation from and evolution to God using alchemy. It was when I realized that the Chain is a sequence of ten stages that I facepalmed and reinspected this tattoo I got a while back and thought it so important to be inscribed onto my mortal coil. I reread the book available to me on the Golden Chain, and that’s when I found this description of principles:

Would you look at that? It’s an organization of different alchemical principles: four elements, three reagents, two principles, and one source. Arranged in a one-two-three-four pattern, a tetractys. Who’d’ve thunk it, really. The realization that my tattoo was a key to the system I’m working on gave me a sort of nauseating tremble, but that’s revelation for you, I suppose.

So, maybe my trying to base a Tetractys of Life on planetary principles right off the bat was misguided; perhaps I should start from here, since this pretty much points out the path ahead. If, instead of using planetary principles to describe sequential emanation through the tetractys, I use the notion of different stages of development in different levels of manifestation, perhaps a more reasonable tetractys layout could be found. The diagram above needed some tweaking, however; Nitrum (Male, Light) and Fire were on the left side, while Salt (Female, Darkness) and Earth were on the right, and the Lambdoma has the two sides switched so that the left side was feminine and the right side masculine. Further, Mercury was on the male side when I feel it would more properly be in the middle, since (to me) Sulfur speaks more forcefully than Mercury, and mercury more than Salt. I’ve also seen other diagrams presenting Mercury to be completely feminine and Salt to be in the middle, so it would seem like these principles are still up for debate in alchemical terminology. To my mind and for my analysis, I’m establishing Mercury as between the purely active reagent and purely passive reagent. So, taking these alchemical principles together, I developed the following alchemical tetractys:

Note that in this diagram, the Sun symbol stands for Light, Activity, or Masculinity, and the Moon symbol stands for Darkness, Passivity, or Femininity, not their corresponding planets. Mercury stands for the alchemical reagent of Mercury, but we’ll get to more on that in a bit.

Okay, so now it might be more possible to assign the planetary spheres of the cosmos to the tetractys based on their corresponding alchemical forces. Obviously, the Monad would stay the Monad, and alchemical Mercury would likely best remain planetary Mercury. I didn’t like having the Sun and Moon remain representatives of the two principles of Light and Dark, but instead decided that they’d fit better as the alchemical reagents of Sulfur and Salt, respectively. In this way, we have the most Light of the planets, the most Dark of the planets, and the hermaphroditic Median of the planets, all together in the same row. This left six spheres left: the four Planets, Earth (or Mundus, to differentiate it from the element Earth), and the Stars. To me, having Mundus and the Stars represent the principles of Darkness and Light, or Female and Male, made more sense than using the Moon and the Sun; there’d be the lowest and passive receptacle of creation, compared to the highest and most ethereal initiator of creation. Thus, Mundus and Stars became the two principles at top.

This left the last four nonluminary planets to be given to the four elements. Saturn, being the darkest and coldest of the planets, seems fitting to be the natural progression from the Moon on the left (more feminine), so Saturn would be attributed to the element Earth. Likewise, Mars would be given to Fire, since Mars is the hottest of the planets and befits a more masculine progression from the Sun. This leaves Venus and Jupiter, the former of which is cooler than Jupiter according to Agrippa (book I, chapter 26 and chapter 28), even though they’re both airy planets (book II, chapter 7). Assigning Jupiter, a diurnal and masculine planet, and Venus, a nocturnal and feminine planet, to either Water or Air was something of a sticking point for me, since I could argue for either arrangement with a variety of reasons. I originally put Venus as Air to be paired with Mars as Fire, and likewise gave Jupiter to Water to be paired with Saturn as Earth. However, I realized that it’d be a better arrangement to have Venus as Water and Jupiter as Air, since although they’re equally moist in elemental terms, Venus is cooler than Jupiter, and since Venus is nocturnal, it had more in common with the Moon than the Sun; the converse case applied with diurnal Jupiter and the Sun.

So, in the end, after assigning the spheres of the cosmos to the tetractys based on alchemical principles, the Tetractys of Life is starting to have actual form:

(Note that, in this diagram, the alchemical representation of a sphere is in the upper-right half, and the planetary representation is in the lower-left half. The Mercury symbol, however, stands for both alchemical and planetary Mercury, and “Monad” represents, well, the Monad. The pentagram represents the sphere of the fixed stars, because typing takes up too much space, like my blog.)

It’s an interesting layout, but I like it. It represents another view of emanation that isn’t necessarily sequential but, in a sense, simultaneous; in the beginning, there is only God (Monad), but as soon as there’s Differentiation (Heaven and Mundus), there’s Process (Sulfur, Mercury, Salt) as well as Substance (Fire, Air, Water, Earth). Each of these forces can be related to a planetary sphere, but it’s not in a sequential order as in the Tree of Life. For instance, in kabbalah, the Lightning Bolt Path descends from God to the Fixed Stars to Saturn to Jupiter all the way down to Earth. On this tetractys, the Monad could descend into the Fixed Stars, but then into the Moon, Mercury, Sun, or maybe even Saturn or Jupiter, or even directly to Earth. It’s hard to assign a type of sequence to this tetractys, and indeed, even considering all possible paths that could be drawn on this setup between the spheres, it’d be impossible to draw a path that connects all the spheres in a direct sequence without passing through other spheres disrupting the order. Perhaps that’s a good thing, depending on the paths we assign and take and what the paths themselves mean.

Speaking of sequences, is there a way to sequentially number the spheres on the tetractys? In a simple way of ordering them from 1 to 10, not really; for convenience, I number them from top to bottom, left to right, such that the Monad is 1, Mundus is 2, Stars is 3, and so forth to Mars being 10. It makes more sense to use the Lambdoma numbering, personally, which is what I plan to base further exegesis and analysis on in the future, but for now, we’ll refer to the spheres on the tetractys by their alchemical or planetary assignment.

So, with all this at our fingertips and our disposal, what can we meditate on now? Plenty more, as if we needed more (we always do). Between the relationships that the tetractys indicates to all other things in existence, or the process of coming into existence, we now also have processes and principles that guide our meditations. We have relationships between principles, reagents, and elements with the planets, as well as with notions of masculinity/activity/light and femininity/passivity/darkness as well as with number and mathematics. Most importantly, we now have destinations between which we can start creating paths, and assigning to them the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet to tie those into our process of emanation and creation. We’ll talk about paths on the Tetractys of Life next.

So now we have a basic map of creation based on the tetractys, using a combination of Pythagorean numerology, Neoplatonic cosmology, and Renaissance alchemy to describe how things come to be. In the beginning, there is the undifferentiated, divinely simple Monad, from which all things ultimately come. From this Monad comes a Dyad, the Differentiation between Light and Dark, or Heaven and Mundus. From these two principles comes a Triad, the three Alchemical Reagents of Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt. From these three reagents come the four Elements of Fire, Air, Water, and Earth. Collectively, they form the basic building blocks, processes, and guiding principles of all creation, starting from a simple and complete One to a myriad of forms through differentiation, change, and substance. It’s through the unification of these substances by means of alchemical processes and knowledge, or better, gnosis of principles that we reverse the process of creation to reattain Union, to ascend back to the Monad and Source. However, these units on the tetractys tell only half the story; they’re centers and ideas unto themselves, but on their own they can’t do much. They’re cut off from each other and don’t describe how things actually become, just that they do.

This is where the other half of the Tetractys of Life comes from: we have the stages themselves, now we just need the processes that allow things to progress or regress from stage to stage. These paths, much as the paths on the Tree of Life in Jewish kabbalah or Hermetic qabbalah, describe how power and essence flows from one stage to the next in order to produce creation or guide henosis, and this is where we combine our meditations on the Greek alphabet with those on the tetractys of emanations. However, in order to make use of them, we first need to actually figure out what the paths themselves should be and what spheres they should connect on the tetractys. Also, as a side note, let’s start calling the individual units of the tetractys, when using them as alchemical/planetary concepts, as spheres. Just to make that clear.

So, we have our unconnected Tetractys of Life. For simplicity, I’ll use the alchemical version:

We know that all things are ultimately connected to and come from the Monad. However, we run into a problem that’s similar to one on the Tree of Life in kabbalah; we can’t reach many of the spheres directly from the Monad since they’re blocked by other spheres. For instance, although we might want to connect the sphere of Light with that of Fire, we must first travel through the sphere of Sulfur. Thus, without trying to “skip” the spheres that block its way, the Monad can only connect to the two spheres immediately below it (Light and Darkness) as well as Mercury in the third row (since that way isn’t blocked by another sphere.

In fact, if we simply take an abstract tetractys and plot all possible paths on it, we end up with a set of paths like this:

While it looks nice and is as fully connected as we can get, it contains 33 paths, which is nine paths too many for our needs. Remember, we need to aim for a set of 24, one for each of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet, which themselves encompass all number. Honestly, I dwelled on this for a good few days, trying to figure out how to best create a set of paths with a coherent logic; some made sense in some ways but felt jarringly off, and others just couldn’t add up to 24 even though the logic was nice. Eventually, I settled on a way that made sense and had the right number of paths, as well as feeling “right”.

So, let’s start with something simpler than a fully connected set of paths and trying to delete off the tetractys. First, consider the tetractys itself:

We know that, in the process of generation, the Monad (the single dot in the first row) first produces a Dyad; from a divinely simple and undifferentiated Source comes a distinction, an observer and observed, a Mind and a Word, a Creator and Creature, an active and a passive, a positive and a negative. This gives us our first two paths on the tetractys:

Since all things contain the Monad within themselves and emulate the actions of the Monad in their own limited way, every point on the tetractys that has a lower level can be given the same two paths. This is the same as in the generation of Plato’s Lambda (based on geometric series of 2 and 3 and their intermingled products), or Pascal’s Triangle (which is based on the addition of units). This, then, gives us a set of 12 paths. We’re halfway done!

Next, we assign horizontal paths between the units within the same row. This connects the diversity into a whole order, a cosmos, within each row, reflecting the indivisibility of the Monad when differentiation and division are present in the world. This gives us another six paths for a total of 18:

At this point, it’s hard to say what next needs to be connected. Do we add in paths from the outermost points of the tetractys to the center? Do we fully connect the points of the fourth row to the third? Do we connect the second row to the fourth with vertical lines? This is where we need to start thinking about the relationships between the things that the tetractys represents. So, let’s take a look at what our alchemical tetractys looks like at this partially-connected stage:

One option for adding on a set of three paths would be to connect the spheres of the Monad, of Earth, and of Fire to the center sphere of Mercury. After all, Mercury is common to all things and is present in all substance, right? While it’s a convenient reason, it doesn’t actually hold up. First, the Monad doesn’t actually have to connect to anything except the two spheres right below it; as an undifferentiated One, the only thing it can possibly do to become anything more complex is to become Two, after which Two can become Three. So, the Monad shouldn’t connect to Mercury, although we might consider Mercury to be a “lower register” of the Monad in a more manifest way, being a hermaphroditic Reagent between the polarities of Salt and Sulfur. For a similar reason, Earth and Fire shouldn’t connect to Mercury, either, since Mercury isn’t actually in them; Earth is the most passive of all the elements, being something like the caput mortuum, or the worthless remains or “dead head” without any Spirit left in them; likewise, Fire is already too hot for Mercury, and is what takes spirit out; there’s no volatile Mercury in Fire because Fire is the action of Spirit.

Another option to add a set of six paths, which would bring us up to 24, would be to connect the Monad to the fourth row to Water and Air, Earth to Light and Sulfur, and Fire to Darkness and Salt. However, if anything, this is worse than the previous attempt, since all these forces are even more distantly connected and different from each other. So it’d seem like the outermost points of the tetractys are too “extreme” to be connected any further than the two paths they each already have. These nine possible paths, connecting each extreme point to the center point as well as to the two center points on far side of the tetractys, aren’t going to work for our purposes.

So, what do we know? We know of 18 paths we should definitely have, and of nine we shouldn’t. We have 18 + 9 = 27 paths we’ve considered so far, and 33 – 27 = 6 paths we haven’t yet. What are those leftover six paths?

Six paths revolving around the center from the median two points on each side of the tetractys, altogether forming a hexagram. Cute, isn’t it? These last six paths are going to serve us well, but they’re also going to take a much different role in future analyses of the Tetractys of Life. So, if we fully connect our alchemical Tetractys of Life with these extra six paths, we get the following:

Here, we have the median two spheres of every side of the tetractys connected to six other spheres, making these spheres all fully connected while leaving the extreme spheres connected only to their most closely associated concepts, both on their own row as well as to their neighbors. This allows anything “middling” and not extreme (pure unmanifest, base passivity, base activity) to become anything else, including on a different level of manifestation. For instance, Darkness is able to descend into the purely dark reagent Salt or the hermaphroditic reagent Mercury, but can also be involved in the creation of the dark (feminine) element Water as well as the active reagent Sulfur. Darkness becoming Water makes sense, as does its corresponding opposite of Light becoming Air, since based on the structure of the tetractys we can claim that Water and Air are “lower registers” of Darkness and Light, much as Mercury is of the Monad itself. Darkness becoming Sulfur, though? It seems a little odd, but I claim that this works because the Three Reagents come from both the Two Principles, as a balance needs to be struck within each instead of solely by means of Mercury. Similar reasons apply for Light being connected to Salt, Salt to Air, and Sulfur to Water.

So, with all of this done, we now have 24 paths on our Tetractys of Life. Each path represents an ability to shift or change, a process between the stages or ingredients that the individual spheres on the Tetractys represents. Some spheres cannot be connected to each other because of the need for intermediate stages (a path is interrupted by another sphere between the ultimate origin and destination spheres), or because a sphere is too extreme to be connected to another (a path cannot connect the outermost points of the Tetractys except to its two closest neighbors). Now that we know of the possible means of transitioning between spheres on the Tetractys, we now have an even stronger tool at our disposal for meditation: the ability to meditatively or contemplatively explore the transitions themselves as processes of change between the stages indicated by the spheres. While we haven’t gotten into the assignment of letters to the paths just yet, there’s still more analysis to be done on the different ways to divide the paths based on geometry and position, which will help to inform us on how to assign the letters to the paths as well as to guide us in meditation of divine concepts and divine names.

Oh, and if you’d like a more complete Tetractys of Life map that combines both alchemical and astrological symbols, here you go:

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