Most of us are probably accustomed to usage of Hebrew gematria or Greek isopsephy to build personal Qabalah. It seems that Qabalah based on Liber Trigrammaton is less popular, even if this book is the ultimate foundation of the highest theoretical Qabalah1, according to Crowley.
What is Liber Trigrammaton?
Liber XXVII vel Trigrammaton is one of the Holy Books of Thelema received by the Prophet between 12th-14th December 1908 E.V., along with Libri X and CD2. It contains 27 trigrams showing mutations of the Tao with Yin and Yang accompanied with verses describing each of them.
“LIBER TRIGRAMMATON.” Thelema (1909): 39-48.
In the A∴A∴ system this book is given to Practicus, who is expected to complete his/her intellectual training, and in particular to study the Qabalah3.
As you may see, figures resemble trigrams of I-Ching, but with additional dot symbol referring to Tao. 27 is number of combinations of 3 elements in 3 possible places, so 33.
Trigrammaton Qabalah and English Alphabet
The Book of the Law acquired in 1904 E.V. contained instruction and prophecy regarding possible qabalah based purely on English alphabet.
Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto. – Liber AL II:55
Usually you would take Latin script and try to convert it into Hebrew and then acquire value of the word, similarly doing transcription into Greek script. It can work, but the results can be ambiguous.
Crowley’s commentaries on Liber XXVII are a bit cryptic, but he worked out relation between 26 trigrams and letters. You can find comment in “Commentaries on the Holy Books and Other Papers”, which is practically unavailable, but someone added it on https://archive.org/. Looks like Prophet is connecting letters and trigrams by visual and sound analogy.
Last trigram does not have letter attribute, but as J. Daniel Gunther noticed, “&” was 27th English letter still in 1800s and introduced such correspondence.
It seems to be valid observation, as “&” frequently appears in Liber AL also. Regarding the value, we could of course divine it somehow and try to connect trigrams and values in mystical way, but there is simpler solution. Namely, ternary (or base 3) numeral system. As in trigrams, it uses only 0, 1, 2 digits and can represent all numbers with them.
For an example, 111 (ternary) is 13 (decimal), because 1*32 + 1*31+1*30 = 9 + 3 + 1 = 13. Same 201 (ternary) is 19 (decimal), as 2*32+0*31+1*30= 18 + 0 + 1 = 19. Simple as that.
Trigrammaton’s connection with other symbols
Further considerations were made to create map between trigrams and other symbols recognized by occult practitioners.
I am aware of works of R. Leo Gillis, especially “Book of Mutations“. Book contains probably all the “crazy” ideas and things we could do with the trigrams. Below table from his lecture “Trigrammaton Qabalah” from “Manifest Thy Glory. Proceedings of NOTOCON VIII” containing basic attributions:
Regarding editor’s note, I wonder what are letter-trigram attributions from recently recovered Crowley-Windram copy of Thelema, because I am not aware of any publication or news about those findings!
More recently I came across J. Daniel Gunther lectures “Mutations of the TAO: Mysteries of Liber Trigrammaton”. I had a pleasure to be in Rome on that whole day lecture and I remember that it was really interesting to hear. I hope material will be published posthumously someday, I am almost sure that it was said that book was already in preparation. Probably someone will continue that Work.
Nevertheless, in his book “The Angel and The Abyss” there is appendix containing different attributions than those attached above:
We can see adding “&” to the last trigram. Also very different Tarot correspondences and Yetziratic attributes.
What’s in it for me?
As you can see, there are different approaches to the Trigrammaton based numerology and Qabalah. For me it is doubtful that any numerological system contains any truth in itself. And it is not for intellectual reasoning, but developing connections between Intuition and reason to gain some degree of Understanding.
And Adonai said: The strong brown reaper swept his swathe and rejoiced. The wise man counted his muscles, and pondered, and understood not, and was sad. Reap thou, and rejoice! – Liber LXV I:56
Thing is to stick with one if you feel it works. This tool should be simple, to construct personal narrative and find unseen connections. Reason cannot pass through the Abyss, so we need poetry, other kinds of art and symbols.
Trigrammaton Qabalah calculators and dictionaries
As in cases of gematria and isopsephy, you can build dictionaries and compare values, especially using words from Holy Books.
Some time ago I made simple dictionary with the words of Holy Books of Thelema and common English words:
English Qabalah Dictionary – The Apes of Thoth
Later I found other nice site providing similar calculator and dictionary, along with some book analysis:
Trigrammaton · Gematria Calculator
That gematria site got also Hebrew and Greek calculators.
Let’s have some Qabalistic fun!
Just to show an example how we can play with TQ (Trigrammaton Qabalah).
Let’s use some Thelemic word or name to check. Babalon. It’s value is 85.
Interestingly, it has same value as Baphomet. We can notice that so called “Sign of Babalon” and “Attitude of Baphomet” is the same NOX sign. Also 85 is a Hierophant, who was Aleister Crowley, who used name Baphomet in the OTO at some point. Master of the Temple as spiritual leader is corresponding to Binah, so also Babalon.
We could think that Christian Mary figure is somehow averse to the Babalon, yet the same in the essence. Let’s check. Mary is 58, so the mirrored 85. There is also Nuit under 58, where Babalon can be a secret name of Nuit, as per Liber AL I:22 verse.
If we reduce 58 and 85, we can find 13, so Love and Unity. Further reduction, or maybe synthesis(!), is 4, which is number of Daleth, the Door – The Gate of God ON!
Everything makes perfect sense!
I wish you much fun with it! 🙂
- Aleister Crowley, Θελημα. The Holy Books of Thelema (Weiser, 1983), xxix-xxx in Preface by Grady L. McMurtry ↩︎
- Aleister Crowley, Θελημα. The Holy Books of Thelema (Weiser, 1983), xix in Preface by Grady L. McMurtry ↩︎
- “ONE STAR IN SIGHT.” MAGICK IN THEORY AND PRACTICE (1929): 229-244. 232 ↩︎