Alright, alright, I can hear some of my readers mutter in the distance. “Yes, polyphanes, we know you like the Tetractys. We get it. You’re on a huge Pythagorean kick lately. You’ve been on this kick for over a month and a half now. Yes, it’s awesome. But what about magic? What about conjurations and talismans and shit? When are you going to talk about those things again?” Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten. Yes, I admit I’ve been taken with the Tetractys and this new field of occult mathesis as of late, but to be fair, it’s a huge new thing for me that I didn’t expect to develop. I honestly feel like I should be spending more time on it, more meditation, more scrying, since it’s all so new and, thus, unexplored. And, to make proper use of it, I feel like more exploration is definitely needed. Otherwise I’d just be stumbling around with a wand in the dark, and I like to do my research before jumping into anything.
Though, I also have to wonder: what substantially changes if I use the Tetractys of Life instead of the Tree of Life as my core magical framework? The best answer I have for that is, well, not terribly much. I mean, the only real kabbalistic thing I use in my work is the use of particular godnames to conjure the planetary and elemental angels under; maybe I rap several times on the altar to open up a ritual, the number corresponding to the spirit’s sephirah; I might occasionally use a number square to charge something upon. But, really, that’s about it. The planets, stars, and elements would exist regardless whether I used the Tree, the Tetractys, or neither, as they have for countless other cultures and magicians before me.
The heavens still remain in their usual order, which is probably one thing that neither the Tetractys nor the Tree of Life really affect. I mean, Saturn is still the next heaven in line under that of the stars, and Jupiter is the next one under Saturn. In this scheme, there are still ten heavens, with the first one being that of God (Monad) and the last one being that of the Earth (Decad). Thus, the sphere of the fixed stars is still recognized as the Dyad (2), that of Saturn as the Triad (3), that of Jupiter as the Tetrad (4), and so forth until that of the Moon as the Ennead (9). The sephiroth are not the planets, and the planets are not the sephiroth; the Tree of Life assimilated the planets into its structure as a later development of the Tree itself, corresponding to the planets without identifying with them. The planets are still a representation of number, and numeric representations of the planets are still important tools independent of whether they’re placed on the Tetractys or the Tree. In that light, the magic number squares of the planets can still be used as important tools, and the use of numbers to associate with the planets as well.
In this view, perhaps my idea-in-passing from a ways ago about using a Greek version of the magic number squares could still be used. After all, the planets are a different realization of number and are associated with the sephiroth, but are not themselves the sephiroth; the number squares are also representations of number in the same way as the planets are. The magic squares are not kabbalistic in and of themselves in the same way we’d reckon kabbalah; they’re a tool used to understand the kabbalah, but they are not themselves kabbalah. The only real change to be made here would be to create a set of Greek number squares and find a new set of spirit names to make sigils with; that idea is one I’ll have to pursue for sure. The hangup I had with that, to be honest, was the fact that I couldn’t easily assign a simple 1-to-10 numbering to each of the dots in the Tetractys. It’s easier to see the planets or other forces as distinct groups working in tandem with each other on different levels in a conceptual way apart from the nested-spheres view. The planets are number, too, and with a bit of clever rearrangement can be put into a tetractys of their own. While I like my arrangement of the planets onto the Tetractys, it’s surely not the only way to do so, though I have good reasons for going with the model I have.
Say some reader says “well, I think the number squares should stick to kabbalah, so we should use another model of numerical mediation”. Okay, good! I like making new models and tools. However, what could be used in their stead? The regular polygons of a particular number, say? Well, if you exclude the Monad (which is a simple point) and the Dyad (which is an infinite line or a circle, neither of which are polygons), we run into an issue. The “true” Greek way of developing a polygon is to use a compass and straightedge, neither of which are marked for degree or length. While the triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, and decagon can be constructed by a compass and straightedge, the heptagon and enneagon cannot. They can be approximated, sure, but these numbers cannot be made into regular polygons by compass and straightedge alone, similar to the ancient Greek geometrical problems of squaring the circle or doubling the cube. It’d be like trying to make a magic number square of rank 2, which cannot be done. While their ideal forms might be good for meditation, it’d be hard to apply those forms in reality or construction of forms. This itself can be considered a mystery worthy of meditation, but in terms of applying or constructing numbers, I’d prefer number squares myself if the rank of the square is going to be the same as the number of sides of the polygon.
Beyond numbers, what else might have to change? Colors? I’ve gotten good enough results with the colors as used in the Golden Dawn Queen and King scales, so I may as well stick to those (though seeing what else the spheres themselves can show me is useful). Names of spirits? Obviously, since Greek names and spelling follow radically different rules than Hebrew, but again, those would just have to be obtained through scrying and numerological research. The associations of other tools, symbols, and the like with the planets is pretty firmly established and I see no reason to change all those. So, if by and large the major tools of my work aren’t going to change by switching over to the Tetractys from the Tree, what really changes?
The set of paths I have on the Tetractys really don’t work for the Tree of Life; if you try to take the standard ten sephiroth and apply the same paths I have on here, you end up with something resembling metaphysical spaghetti. While the paths on the Tetractys make sense to me, they cannot be separated from the Tetractys. The Tetractys offers a radically new meditation and theurgic model of manifestation and understanding how the Divine interacts with all that exists. That’s the big thing that the mathetic Tetractys provides: a modern Neoplatonic/Neopythagorean model of emanation and divine flow from high to low and back up again. Unlike the Tree of Life with its neatly-defined start and end points that are so diametrically opposed to each other (due to the Jewish conception of the mortal world being so far removed from the divine), the Tetractys shows how everything is involved in a balanced way in the evolution of everything. The Monad exists as much as it does down here as it does up there, after all; there’s no need of a God to “recede” from itself to allow for creation within-yet-apart from the rest of its own infinity. There’s no clean start point for us to use the Tetractys, because not only are we composed of all the forces in the Tetractys, but all of the Tetractys is within us equally and directly. It might make good sense for us to start with the four elements that compose our bodies and senses of self, but we could easily start with ourselves as a unified whole, or a Monad unto ourselves, and see how we quickly devolve/evolve into a Dyad between ourselves and the rest of the cosmos.
What does the Tetractys really represent? If the Tetractys is fully present within each of ourselves, then that means we can start anywhere and go anywhere on our personal Tetractyes; we can start at Earth and work our way up through the elements, then the reagents, then the principles, all the way up to the Monad and back down to Earth; we can start at Fire and sublimate ourselves to Nothingness and back down to pure matter once more. The Tetractys of Life is less about state than it is about process, less about what we are and more about how we come to be in every passing moment. It’s the connections that we should study, I claim, since that’s where the real beauty and action happens. Once we understand how we work internally, then we can start expanding outwards and relating ourselves to the rest of the cosmos. I mean, if each of us is an individual Tetractys in the world, then we’re each our own monads, each taking part in an even larger Tetractys that connects and binds us all together. Once we can understand the grander connections, we can scale back down and back up in a neverending Tetractys fractal, understanding how the cosmos as a whole is based on the same principles we are, and how we can use the same processes with different materia at different levels. After all, ten monads does not a decad make; it’s the connections and processes between them that link them together into an ordering, a kosmos of its own.
While the Tree of Life in Jewish kabbalah was originally intended to be used as a mediation model to indicate the interaction of the Creator with Creation, and eventually picked up associations and correspondences to further those meditations, Hermeticists and occultists generally took qabbalah into their own hands as a model of magic and system of correspondences as a cosmological framework. I don’t consider this an abuse of kabbalah, but I do consider it (at worst) a misuse of the system generally, especially when many people don’t have the required background to fully explore kabbalah as it’s meant to be studied and used. In the same way, I don’t intend for this Tetractys of Life to be used as a system of correspondences but, again, as a meditative and theurgic blueprint for understanding how things come to be. Tables of correspondence exist aplenty; good meditative models are harder to come by.
Magically, the use of the letters on the Tetractys’ paths deserves exploration. For instance, the path between Venus/Water and Jupiter/Air is connected by Nu/Scorpio. And, while the exact correspondences between the signs of the Zodiac and alchemy differ from tradition to tradition, the most common association I’ve seen with Scorpio is the process of Separation, where a mixture of two or more substances into distinct groups, usually with one of the components of the original mixture enriched in one of its resulting groups. Air and Water are closely related, both being moist and easily blended with other substances, but it’s by their separation that we can see warm air rising and cool water falling, as in the Poemander’s description of the creation of the world. Alchemically, we can understand separation in this sense of refining a particular lump of mass within a mixture, but we can also see it in other occult ways, too, such as whittling down extraneous forces to get to the heart of a particular matter or spirit. We know that the path of Nu is a “lower register” in the Tetrad as the single path is directly above it in the Dyad is, or the path of Nu compared with the path of Xi, which we know is associated with Water, that which permits change and flow. While Air connects and diffuses itself, Water flows and changes things, cutting certain areas off from others or whisking things away from one place to another. Water is a form of separation, as separation is a representation of Water.
So now that I’ve thought about the place of the Tetractys of Life in magic a bit more, it doesn’t really have as big an effect on my magical practice as I thought it might have (or worried it might have). Kabbalah was famous for crossing religions and traditions and incorporating more and more tools into its own toolbox; why not let mathesis do the same a bit, especially from those parts that themselves came from Neoplatonism or Pythagoreanism? My day to day magical practice and religious offerings are going to be maintained, and the colors and materials of my talismans won’t change much if at all. I will need to make versions of the magic squares using Greek letters and go through the planets and start getting new spirit names (as well as to figure out why there’s a “spirit of spirits” and “intelligence of intelligences” for the Moon and the like from the spirits themselves), but that’s something that we could all make do with, after all.
Oh, and names of God? I haven’t forgotten about those, either. Making use of my names of God from my first foray into making a Greek kabbalah, let’s see what we have. First, recall that the Tetractys is composed of four ranks: a Monad, Dyad, Triad, and Tetrad. I temporarily propose these names of God for these ranks, all based on Revelation 1:8, which contains all these names of God (attributes, really, but eh):
- ho Kyrios, “the Lord”
- hē Arkhē kai to Telos, “the First and the Last”
- ho Ēn kai ho Ōn kai ho Erkhomenos, “He who Was and Is and Is to Come”.
- ho Pantokratōr, “the All-Ruler”
All are God, of course, and the overall monadic name could easily be God (ho Theos), the Aeon (ho Aiōn), the Whole (to Holon), and so forth. Personally, I’m getting into the habit of using Aiōn or Iaō as my primary go-to names of God, though my old Stoic inclinations always keeps the Whole nearby in my mind. So, in conjurations, I’ll test how the use of these specific names work, though I’ll also shoot for other names to see whether other appellations or descriptors of God work better, or whether there are more secret names of God to be used. Who knows? As this Tetractys model of magic develops, maybe these names’ll be obsoleted in favor of others, or another method can be used entirely.
