Entry Search Sort Alphabetize Clear Newest

The Tree



אבל המפתח לעיר
הוא בשמש שמצמידה את הענפים לשמים
- דיוויד רוברט ג'ונס



The Tree 528, the Baphometric Tree, came about as sort of an afterthought - an experiment in Gematria really - about ten or so years ago. I had been going through a perennial re-reading of some works by Crowley, as I am wont to do every now and then (not that I follow any Golden Dawn or Crowley based systems, more that I find him funny and even, despite everything else, occasionally profound and insightful). The impetus for the experiment was a few throwaway lines in Magic and Theory and Practice - from Chapter 0, "The Magical Theory of The Universe". First was a brief comparison of the Magical Hierarchy - the Tree of Life and the Hebrew Alphabet as comprising a complete symbolic representation of the Universe - to an empty filing cabinet. That the symbols of the Tree and Alphabet were there, without meaning of their own, until filled by the study and experience of the practioner.


Second, was the observation that an acquaintence of his, "an excellent man of great intelligence, a learned Qabalist" firmly averred that the Tree of Life in fact was in reality the framework of the Universe. A position Crowley ridiculed as being tantamount to saying that a cat is actually comprised of the letters C.A.T., in violation of the most basic common sense.


Third, and perhaps most strangely in light of the previous two positions, was a rather snarky aside in a footnote that, even more ridiculous than our learned Qabalist, was an attempted rearrangement of the Tree of Life, by one who "ought to have known better". That this futile and imbecilic action reduced "the whole Magical Alphabet to nonsense". That any rearrangement of letters, and their attendent correspondences, Tarot attributions and the like would render the entire formulation meaningless.


It was this third one that got me thinking. Why? I thought to myself. Why would rearranging what one had just termed an empty filing cabinet (or in a somehow even more dated reference by Phil Hine, a "cosmic filofax") formed of symbols bereft of any inherent meaning - in literally the directly proceeding paragraph - why would that render the entire formulation meaningless? Either it's an empty framework waiting to be filled, or it's not. You cannot have it both ways. What the fuck, Aleister?


It was right then that I realized that I simply did not know the answer to that question. I didn't know enough about either the Tree of Life itself, or anything of the Hebrew Alphabet at all, or even why or why not any given correspondence was even a correspondence in the first place, nor whether or not where they were placed in relation to other correspondences mattered (or not). I knew nothing. Bupkis. Zilch.


So I decided to teach myself everything. From scratch.


No longer would I gaze blankly at the endless tables of 777 and wonder where the fuck all of that was coming from! No more would the numeric lists of arcane Hebrew in Sepher Sephiroth confound me! I would know all! And in Knowing All, I Would Triumph!


What I finally determined however, was that 1. It's Not, 2. It Depends on how you look at it, but it might be, and 3. That It Wouldn't (assuming your system is in fact a robust one).


I also learned an inordinate amount about the history of the Tree of Life and of Kabbalah, and Magic as a whole, taught myself to read enough Hebrew to fully work Gematria and to (reasonably successfully) make my way through a trove of source materials, researched origins (ancient and not) of uncounted dozens of magical tropes and truisms, correspondences and correlations, started developing an overall theory of not only Magick, but of reality itself, and learned a lot about myself and my background and history and the history of my peoples. And made a few friends along the way. And that maybe, just maybe, the Magick was really in me the whole time.


I made the Tree.


The following articles and essays will hopefully shed light on how I came to those conclusions. Eventually this will all be structured in some sort of coherent form, but for the moment please accept the following in a somewhat random order.


The Tree 528 Series

Ilanot - The History of the Hebrew Tree of Life

The Tree Unclassified