Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law

This website is devoted to the study of the Trigrammaton Qabalah, or TQ.

The basis of the TQ can be found in the book called Liber Trigrammaton sub figura XXVII, Being the Book of the Mutations of the Tao with the Yin and the Yang.

This brief document was penned by Aleister Crowley in 1907, and called by him "the foundation of the highest theoretical qabalah." The Key to unlocking the intricacies of this work is the realization that the 27 Trigrams of this Holy Book comprise all the numbers from 0 to 26, written in Base 3 notation.

Most of us are familiar with Base 2, or binary, mathematics. Most computers are based on this principle of counting using only 0’s and 1’s. In Base 3, there is a third possible digit, so that all numbers are written with 0’s, 1’s, and 2’s. In Liber XXVII, these digits are represented as Tao, Yang, and Yin. By taking these three principles, or digits, three at a time, there are 27 possible ‘Trigrams’, or figures of three lines.

The first principle of the TQ is that Tao = 0, Yang = 1, and Yin = 2.

The next principle is that Tao is Neutral, while Yang and Yin are opposites.

In line with these two axioms, there is a single Trigram that is completely neutral: the Zero, which is composed of three Tao lines, or 000. The other result of these axioms is that the remaining 26 Trigrams form 13 pairs of ‘opposites’. These opposites are known as Antigrams. Antigrams are any two Trigrams where one has a set of lines which are opposite the other’s lines; i.e., each has a Tao line, (if any), in the same place, and wherever there is a Yang in one Trigram, there is a Yin in the other, and vice versa. For example, 102 and 201 are Antigrams.

One of the revelations of the TQ comes in the form of geometry. It turns out that the 26 Trigrams that represent the numbers from 1 to 26 can be aligned with the 26 components of the Cube of Space, with each number being used once, and only once. The Cube of Space has long been considered a grid for understanding the underlying structure of the Universe, and by use of the Trigrams, a perfect decoding of this Cube can occur.

The 6 sides of the Cube are aligned with the 6 Trigrams that have two Tao-lines in them. The 12 Edges of the Cube are aligned with the 12 Trigrams that have 1 Tao-line in them. The 8 corners of the Cube are aligned with the 8 Trigrams that have no Tao line in them. As the diagrams on the site will make clear, all of these Trigrams are arrayed as Antigrams on the cube. The physically opposite sides, corners and edges of the Cube are aligned with Antigrams. By aligning the Trigrams in this way, it becomes clear that simple addition of Trigrams can account for the placement of each of them on the Cube: each edge is the sum of the two sides that meet at that edge; each corner is the sum of the three sides that meet at that corner. See below for more details.

Not only can the Trigrams be attributed to the Cube, (and the Octahedron and Tetrahedron), they can also be used as a classification scheme, to provide a framework for the symbolism of both the Eastern and Western ‘occult’ traditions. Astrology and magic squares, the Tarot and runes, divination and arithmology, the Tree of Life and Sacred Geometry, Taoism and the I Ching, are all absorbed into the TQ system, and explored by the use of the Trigrams.

All of this activity derives from the abandonment of the old paradigm of decimal mathematics, in favor of the new paradigm of Base 3 mathematics. Simply put, Base 3 is the foundation for the mathematical mysticism, or qabalah, of the New Aeon.

Within the study of number mysticism, there is a large component devoted to the ‘literal qabalah’. This aspect of the qabalah scrutinizes sacred texts in terms of their numerical value. Traditionally, this is done with the use of three tools: Temurah, Notariqon, and Gematria.

Temurah is simply the rearrangement or replacement of letters in a word, based on some formula. Notariqon is the use of letters in a word as Anagrams. Neither of these plays much of a role in the TQ. The last category is Gematria, which is the replacement of letters with numbers so that words might be given a numerical value, generally by simply adding up the value of all the letters of a word. This art plays a very large role in the TQ, under the heading of the Trigrammaton English Gematria, or TEG.

Trigrammaton English Gematria has its basis in the assignment of English Alphabet letters to the Trigrams by Aleister Crowley, in his commentary to Liber XXVII, published in his journal The Equinox, in 1912. In this work, Crowley assigned the 26 English letters to all of the 27 Trigrams except for the last one in the series, which represents a return into silence, or ‘the absence of letter.’ To determine the value of each of the letters, one simply takes the Base 3 value of the Trigram to which that letter is attributed.

In Cairo Egypt, April 1904, Aleister Crowley penned his most important work, known as The Book Of The Law. This work was dictated to him by a discarnate intelligence known as Aiwass. In the second chapter of this work Aiwass says, “Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto.” In order to fulfill this prophecy, (as he stated in his ‘Old Comment’ to this verse), Crowley assigned the English letters to the Trigrams of his other book, Liber XXVII, making this work the Key to the literal qabalah of the Book of the Law.

Throughout his life, Crowley always insisted that he did not author The Book of the Law, also known as Liber CCXX. He was merely the scribe for the words uttered by Aiwass. In order to prove this, he found many strands of esoteric knowledge hidden in the text, and expected more to be found in the future, once the full Key had been discovered. It would be fair to say that he thought the super-human intellect responsible for the book would be proven by the mathematical perfection of the text. In other words, he thought that this Book contained a message too complex and perfect for a human to have authored it.

The TEG is an attempt to show that this complexity does exist, and is too perfect to simply pass off as a coincidence.

To begin a qabalistic exegesis of the text of the Book of the Law, one can start with the value of the whole Book. In doing so, we use Buckminster Fuller’s Principle of Synergetic Advantage; to begin the study of a whole system, start with the whole. The advantage is synergetic, because he defines Synergy as: “the behavior of whole systems, unpredicted by the behavior of any of its parts considered separately.” In this case the behavior of the Whole can be described as the sum of all of its parts, the limit that can be reached by the simplest operation of Gematria.

The baseline of the study of the Book of the Law is the official, typescript version known as Liber AL vel legis sub figura CCXX, or simply Liber CCXX.

By the use of the Trigrammaton English Gematria, the entire contents of Liber CCXX, including all the English, numerals, verse-numbers and foreign letters, is 267,696. This number turns out to have some interesting properties. It can be found hidden in the sequence of Trigrams in Liber XXVII.

The 27 Trigrams of Liber XXVII, in the order in which they appear, have the following decimal equivalents:

0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 18, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 19, 20, 12, 15, 21, 24, 13, 14, 16, 22, 17, 23, 25, 26.

The first three of these numbers are the Trigrams of 0, 1, 2, or Tao, Yang, Yin. These are the three fundamental digits of the base 3 system, and form the first set. This initial set will not be used in the calculation that follows. The next set are the four Trigrams that follow, each with only one Yang or Yin line; these are the four elements of Air Earth Fire Water: 3, 6, 9, 18. The next set are the following 19 Trigrams, representing the 12 zodiac signs and the 7 sacred planets of astrology. And last is the final Trigram, the one that has no English letter or other attribute, the number 26.

Summing up the members of these sets, we have:

3, 6, 9, 18 = 36

4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 19, 20, 12, 15, 21, 24, 13, 14, 16, 22, 17, 23, 25 = 286

26 = 26

We can then multiply these numbers and get an amazing result:

36 x 286 x 26 = 267,696

This number, derived only from the sequence of the Trigrams in Liber XXVII is EXACTLY the same number as the gematria total of the contents of Liber CCXX, which is derived by the TEG. There is no reason whatsoever that these numbers should be precisely the same. It is either a result of deliberate design, or a staggering coincidence.

The use of the Trigrams to get this special number provides an independent verification of the gematria system, unrelated to the letters themselves. In effect, it sets a ‘target-value’ that is reached by employing the TEG on the text of Liber CCXX.

Another important number that is independent of Liber CCXX and its gematria is 1,872,000. This is the total number of days in the Long Count of the Maya Calendar, set to end in December of 2012. To the Maya, this number resolved many of their intricate cycles of time-keeping. Notice the relationship of this number to the ‘target-value’ given by the Trigrams, which is also the grand total of Liber CCXX:

267,696 / 1,872,000 = 0.143

The answer has no repeating decimal. It is exactly .143

By the Trigrammaton English Gematria:

TRIGRAMMATON = 143 = THE BOOK OF THE LAW

So by using the Trigram sequence, or the gematria of CCXX, one arrives at a number that is in a ratio of .143 to 1 to the famous Long Count of the Maya, a number independent of either Trigrams or gematria. Considering the significance of 143, this indicates a deep mystery.

Within the text of CCXX itself is another verification of the gematria used upon it. The first 27 characters of the Book, (echoing the 27 Trigrams found in Liber XXVII), are:

1 Had the manifestation of Nuit 2

Note that the 25 letters of the first verse are sandwiched between the numbers 1 and 2, which represent Yang and Yin. The sum of all 27 characters is 286. These characters occur as seven words, and the number of letters in each word, including the verse-numbers, is:

1 Had the manifestation of Nuit 2

1, 3, 3, 13, 2, 4, 1

When multiplied, these numbers are 1 x 3 x 3 x 13 x 2 x 4 x 1 = 936.

The two derived numbers are then multiplied together: 286 x 936 = 267,696

And thus the grand total of the whole Book is encoded in this Formula of the First Verse. The sum of the first 27 characters, times the product of the number of letters in the first seven words equals the grand total of the whole Book.

Another section of the Book of the Law that garners much attention is the infamous ‘cipher’ found in verse 2:76. Many attempts have been made to crack this code, in hopes of finding the English gematria of the text. While not claiming that there is only one solution to this cipher, the TEG has a very simple and elegant formula with regard to it.

Here is the cipher:

4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y

X 24 89 R P S T O V A L

In the Cipher there are 28 characters occurring on two lines of the manuscript. These can be broken into 9 words of consecutive numbers or letters.

The sum of the numbers is 143. The sum of the letters by the TEG is 208.

These two numbers represent the Book and the three Gods that are the speakers of the three chapters:

143 = THE BOOK OF THE LAW

208 = NUIT HADIT RA-HOOR-KHUIT

Going further, one can take the number of words, times the value of the letters and numbers and get the grand total of the text of CCXX:

9 x 143 x 208 = 267,696

One might also derive the 9 in this formula from the number of numerals in the Cipher, as I have done elsewhere.

There is another important section of the Book of the Law that hides this grand total within it. Verses 1:46-47 state

“Nothing is a secret key of this Law. Sixty-one the Jews call it; I call it eight, eighty, four hundred & eighteen. But they have the half; unite by thine art so that all disappear.”

The TEG produces the following values: NOTHING = 81; SIXTY-ONE = 95

(81 + 95 ) + ( 8 x 80 x 418) = 176 + 267,520 = 267,696 = grand total of the contents of Liber CCXX.

So in the first half of the verse, the gematria of the number words is used; in the second half, the numerical value of the number-words is used.

These are ‘united by thine art’ and together they provide the grand total of the whole Book, in a verse that specifically says it contains a key to the Law.

There are many other mathematical curiosities in this Book, far too numerous to list here; they can be found throughout these pages, especially in the Trigrammaton Commentary on the Book of the Law. The use of the TEG upon the text of this document has revealed a wealth of esoteric information, and these results show conclusively that Trigrammaton is the English gematria intended by Aiwass to decode the text of this mysterious Book. To what purpose this text was encoded is a question that remains un-answered.

Many other attempts have been made at an English gematria. What sets the TEG apart from most others is that it is not a gematria based on either the received order of our Alphabet, or some permutation of that order. The sequence of letters in the TQ is completely random, relative to the normal alphabet. This is as it should be, since gematria is based on the spelling of words, and words are NOT spelled based on alphabetical order, otherwise the word Alphabet would be AABEHLPT.

The order of the English Alphabet is merely a convenience. It holds no special properties in and of itself, and relying on it, or any permutation of it, for a gematria is not necessary. Rather, I propose that the only real basis of a gematria of English has to be one that is completely random, chosen by an author such as Aiwass for purposes of encoding a message in the most effective manner possible, with a high proportion of words having important esoteric meaning, and a small proportion being either coincidence or uninteresting, as an unintended side-effect.

Unlike traditional gematria, the TQ uses some new methodologies that expand the associations of words beyond those that simply have the same numerical value. Any number has two other numbers directly related to it: the Antigram and the Reversal. In the Antigram, the types of lines in a hexagram are switched from Yang to Yin or vice versa. In the Reversal, the order of the lines in a hexagram is reversed, thus giving in most cases a new value for that hexagram. (This method is also used in the I Ching, where hexagrams are paired up as Reversals). So any given number has its Equivalent, its Antigram and it Reversal that can be considered for purposes of gematria, as well as other number patterns in general.

Trigrammaton Qabalah is, first and foremost, about number. Use of the system does not depend on the gematria values; they are but one extension of the concepts allied with the Trigrams. One must be careful not to overstate the importance of gematria. It is a major tool of the literal qabalah, but still only a part of a larger picture.

This website also contains the results of ongoing research on the application of the Trigrams to astrology, magic squares, divination, geometry, and all the rest of the subject matter of the Qabalah. It is not confined to the use of gematria, nor can it be compared to any previous attempts at an English Qabalah, because it establishes a new paradigm. One can take the best ideas of the old aeon and implement them in the new; one can refine their understanding of the Universe, but the laws of mathematics never change. What does change is what mathematical model is used. It is the contention of the TQ that the model to use is Base 3, the great trinity of Tao, Yang, and Yin.

The essence of what TQ is trying to do is to get at what Buckminster Fuller called the ‘irreducible aspects of pattern’. In an effort to accomplish this, the TQ remains an ongoing enterprise of discovery and experiment. Within these pages you can find the results of a great deal of the research conducted so far. Hopefully more will be added in the future as this knowledge expands.

Love is the law, love under will.