m1thr0s
08-08-2006, 06:17 AM
To the best of my knowledge, the word *Trigrammaton* was coined by Aleister Crowley. It is my occasional misfortune to have to drag Crowley's work into things since he did a reasonably good job of pointing in a lot of very pivotal directions, yet in many cases did an absolutely abysmal job of presenting things correctly. This used to drive me to the point of homicidal rage, but somehow, over the years, I have come to appreciate that Aleister Crowley wasn't really a technician so much as he was a poet and a visionary and...well...a prolific meddler in things he very often knew almost nothing about. This may all be forgiveable so long as we do not expect him to be the final authority on anything at all, but rather someone invested with a powerful vision of where the future of magick and mysticism would be found. One learns, over time, to pay more attention to what he is looking at (and why) than his presentation specifics.
Trigrammaton, unfortunately, is one of those things. To begin this discussion properly, we need to take a look at Crowley's version: (http://www.rahoorkhuit.net/library/libers/lib_0027.html) It happens that there are a couple of typo's in this copy that actually made it to the printed version as well which makes matters even more confusing, but since I will be addressing things in general terms anyway, it doesn't really matter much. What we have here is a poetic rendition of something never intended as a poem, that feigns a logic it does not in fact possess and asserts a standard that is laughable at best, but potentially dangerous in that you can easily miss its greater significance by relying upon so poorly rendered a presentation of its principles. I have no doubt this may anger a few Thelemites but it will simply have to be accepted that I am first and foremost a Hermetic Alchemist (with a fairly high logic standards) and my commitment is to the Body of Light itself and to the establishing of a proper foundation for Mutational Alchemy, not to Aleister Crowley, his work, or whatever gods (or goals) he might happen to be partial to.
Before proceeding to dissect what is wrong with Crowley's conclusions, there are a couple of points of order that need to be clarified. The word *Trigrammaton* is a very *catchy* word (and one I think I shall probably keep), but other than the word itself, Aleister Crowley can hardly be credited with having devised a logic that was clearly developed in much greater depth than his own at least 2000 years before his birth (and probably much earlier than this). The 27 Ternary Trigrams are an integral part of the Tai Hsuan Ching, formally compiled by Yang Hsiung in about 2BCE, but we know that the ternary structures themselves were in use prior to this time and since they link to the mathematics of the Lo Shu Diagram itself, it's anyone's guess at this point just how old this system really is. A few scholars believe it may be at least as old as the I Ching and that the two systems co-evolved together, stretching back to the time of Nu Kua, or predynastic China.
Nowhere in Crowley's work is there even the slightest indication that he was ever consciously aware of this historical work. There were no english translations available to him in his own time, and even though a copy did exist in the British Museum of History (or so I am told), no translations of this work had yet been attempted and even today it is next to impossible to obtain an english copy of this work. Despite being recognized as one the principal canons of Chinese philosophy, only two contemporary scholars have made their work available to the general public: Derek Walters and Ms. Michael Nylan, neither of whom would have ever had any dealings with Aleister Crowley since he was long dead before they were even in grade school. The Tai Hsuan Ching is literally packed with all kinds of things that would have been of great interest to Crowley, yet he never makes any mention of it and all reasonable indications are that he was unaware of its existence entirely. To his credit, he managed to deduce its outline (apparently from thin air) and correctly positioned its relative importance in the scheme of things, having stated in several places that Trigrammaton ranked as the highest form of High Magick itself. Exactly why he asserts this is anyone's guess, since he does not appear to have had a very solid grasp of its properties. He understood its gematria to some extent but beyond this his technical knowledge is piecemeal and sketchy.
Crowley's errors fall into three principal categories:
(1). The nature of the lines themselves
(2). The ordering of the trigrammal structures
(3). The assigning of English letters (in the attempt to establish an *English Qabbalah*)
...the sum of which can only amount to a collosal *miss*, yet Liber Trigrammaton has been a hugely popular treatise owing primarily to the underscoring correctness of its heuristic combined with the fact that it does indeed have an important role to play in the formula of Abrahadabra, something we will be exploring in greater depth in route.
(1). On the nature of the lines:
It is a little difficult to tell from the online version linked above, but Crowley begins from the notion of Yin and Yang, conjoined with a third "force" which he has determined to be the Tao itself, represented by the Tao/Teh point. In this way we have a negative, a plus, and a neutral values, which is fine, so far as it goes. Unfortunately, the use of the Tao/Teh point in this capacity is completely inappopriate. Even the most cursory study of Taoism should be sufficient to inform us that the Tao is not a "thing" and cannot be used to express "thingness" on any level. A more careful study of the nature of line values will inform us that what stands between Heaven (yang) and Earth (yin) is not the Tao, but Man. Whatever symbol we elect to use to represent this "third force" must necessarily be synonymous with Man. This is precisely what we find occuring in the original "trigrammaton" as fashioned by the sages untold centuries ago. They also begin with The Yin and the Yang, called Ti and T'ien in the Ternary system. The "third force" is called "Jen", which is taken to have a three-fold value of Man, Intelligence, and Spirit. This is the proper way to express line values of the third kind, without exception. Crowley's failure to attend to this protocol is hardly a cosmetic issue, but displays a degree of ignorance of core taoist alchemical principles inexcusable in one professing to have mastered them. There are certainly parallels which can be drawn between the Tao and Man "forces", but at the end of the day, they are simply not the same "thing" and with line values we definitely require a "thing" valuation since lines give us particulate vibrational constances in the clockwork mechanism of mind and matter itself.
(2). On the ordering of the 27 ternary trigrams:
It is a well observed fact that the more popular "King Wen" version of the I Ching does not appear to be chronologically tight from beginning to end but follows a mysterious pattern of its own devising, one that is frequently the source of academic curiosity since there always seems to be an underscoring chronology at play of some kind or another, yet to this day no one has been able to successfully identify one to the general satisfaction of all. If it's there at all, it must necessarily be encrypted in some way and various scholars such as Lama Govinda and Terence McKenna and others have put forward differing theories as to what this might be. An even older version, called the Fu Hsi (or Inner World) arrangement is chronological however, as is the Tai Hsuan Ching arrangement of the 9 principal Bigrams, 27 Trigrams, 81 Tetragrams and 729 Ternary Hexagrams. Thus the original *trigrammaton* does, in fact, align chronologically from beginning to end, whereas Crowley's version clearly does not. How do we know this?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz) was a brilliant 17th Century philosopher and mathematician. He is credited for having invented binary mathematics in the west, though in fact it was invented 5000 years earlier by Chinese mathematicians. The notation he devised is nevertheless useful as a means of validating this. As with many remarkable discoveries, it's really very simple once you have spotted it to begin with. Leibniz began by assigning yins the value of 0 and yangs the value of 1. Since the Binary system of Hexagrams builds from bottom to top, we simply numerate line values accordingly and then lean them over horizontally so that their total reads out clearly. A hexagram consisting of six yins will thus have a binary value of 000000=0 whereas a hexagram consisting of six yangs will have a binary value of 111111=63, representing the first and last structures in the 64 Binary Hexagrams. All other combinations will line up somewhere between these two poles. When applied to the Fu Hsi Hexagrams we get an unbroken chronology from beginning to end as can be demonstrated in their binary sums. There is a handy flash tool available called the I Ching Sequencer (http://taolodge.com/flash/sequencer.html) which demonstrates this.
In truth, we could assign values the other way around and still get the same results save that our poles would be reversed, which is essentially what happens in the ternary system. Here T'ien gets the value of 0, Jen the value of 1 and Ti the value of 2 and we run our counts from top-to-bottom instead of bottom-to-top. Other methods of counting are possible as well and it only really matters that we are consistent with whatever system we employ in order to get the benefit of a numerical validation system. The chart I am including below will serve to illustrate the correct chronological order of the 27 ternary trigrams, or *trigrammaton* as it can rightly be called. It should be mentioned in passing that there is some debate still lingering regarding the correct notation of the *Jen*, primarily introduced by Ms. Michael Nylan as near as I can tell. She maintains that the twice-broken line at the bottom end of the series should be the Jen in fact, though in all other respects this runs hard against the grain of Trigrammal Doctrine as it has been expressed from the earliest times, which always stipulates that the Man Line seats between the poles of Heaven and Earth. Such is the nature of academia and there are many factors that might account for whatever incidental documentation she may have uncovered, not the least of which being deliberate tampering in an attempt to appease the more powerful proponents of the Binary system who would not have been pleased to see the Yin notation being suddenly usurped by the Jen principle. This, however, is a matter for future discussion.
Whatever his reasons may have been, Crowley abandons the proper chronological order of the 27 Trigrams and in so doing has missed a huge opportunity to synchronize logically with the Qaballah of Nine Chambers, a point I will come to in a moment.
(3). On the nature of English Letters (ie, "English Qabbalah"):
The assigning of 26 English letters to the 27 ternary trigrams was apparently an afterthought on Crowley's part and was not included in his original Class A publication of Liber Trigrammaton. His reasoning for including these assignments was presumably to resolve the matter of an English Qabbalah. Unfortunately, a random assigning of 26 letters upon an also random arrangement of trigrams hardly resolves anything logically and we are rather left with a presumptuous sort of "father knows best" argument in the final analysis...something I am not only not persuaded by, but find starkly embarrassing coming from someone who clearly should have known better to begin with. It is difficult to defend the man's work at all when he is predisposed to imbecilic stunts of this nature...yet...having said that, it is my belief that he was actually onto something but as was so often the case with him, found the worst possible way to express it.
Before I attempt to explain this I have to take a moment to point out that I am not an expert qabbalist. There are people right here on this forum who can probably run me right into the ground with their own levels of expertise and this doesn't bother or intimidate me. I know what my strengths are and I am not concerned about having a few areas left that still need reinforcing. With this in mind, I am going to attempt to put forward an observation that I think needs to be expressed.
The problem I have with the term "English Qabbalah" is that it is an oxymoron, owing to the nature of Modern English itself. English, as we know it, is a language already stripped to the bone and borrowed from bits and pieces of nearly every other language on earth...bleached clean...wrung tight...and put to whatever utilitarian tasks we may assign it. Qabbalah is not just about assigning words and numbers. It is about whole harmonic archetypal and elemental constitutions embedded within words and numbers and in order to negotiate these you need a body of language that is already embued with these "traditions" to begin with. That simply isn't how Modern English works. People have been confusing the ideas of Numerology and Qabbalah, yet even at the level of numerology, English has no inherent capacity to this because English letters have no unique relationship to numbers, save through the agency of other languages which do. Yet, despite that, English does have its virtues. It has fairly recently overtaken Latin as the official language of science owing largely to its homogeneous qualities. It is vaguely possible that English could ultimately evolve a kind of Qabbalah built upon these inherent qualities, but to achieve this it would have to reinvent itself at the level of its own letters because what we have in place already is a language system devoid of any particular "soul" so far as that kind of connectivity is concerned.
Trigrammaton might actually be the ticket that makes a meaningful English Qabbalah possible because here we have a dynamic system of "letters" that have all kinds of built in associations going on already and it might be possible to develop an especially "elemental" sort of language from such an amazing lineup of letter values. But in order to achieve this we would have to start from scratch in terms of whatever names and qualities we finally assign these letters. We can't just call this one A and that one B and mark it good to go. That just isn't what Qabbalah is, and even if numerology itself can work this way, it won't have any real meaning to anybody if that's as far as it goes. I am of the opinion that Crowley may have seen something of this potential owing to his own degree of expertise with language, but I think he very much missed his mark in the way he attempted to render it. The end result is a kind of alpha-numeric gibberish slathered on a chronological garble. What he has come up with has no practical merits at all other than being something puzzling to gawk at. An example of a more appropriate English Qabbalah might be to develop a harmonic language system that could be partitioned evenly across the 27 Trigrams in which the properties therein bore some elemental or numerical resemblance to the trigrammal letters assigned. In this way the resulting language system would come to serve some useful purpose not already served better by another toungue.
In the interim, the Qabbalah of Nine Chambers itself already follows a natural chronological numerical order, so if you want to know what traditional letter values best correspond to each of the trigrammal structures, look to the numbers first, and look to all those existing qabbalistic standards that already conform to the numbers...notably Hebrew and Greek and perhaps a handful of other systems I am not as intimately familiar with. The chart below should serve to demonstrate how and why this method will work, though in this instance I am limiting my example to Hebrew.
http://abrahadabra.com/images/trigrammaton01.gif
This chart serves to demonstrate that the 27 Ternary Trigrams follows the so-called Qabbalah of Nine Chambers perfectly, both to the Letter and the Number. It does this because the Qabbalah of Nine Chambers itself is actually an arrangement of 27 Numbers grouped together in Nine "Chambers" following the pattern: 1, 10, 100 / 2, 20, 200 / 3, 30, 300...all the way to 9, 90, 900. As a matter of closure, the Number 1000 is typically expressed as a large Aleph but this is not essential to the chambers themselves and is something we could just as easily accomplish in trigrams. All kinds of things are possible once you begin using the natural chronological attributes of the trigrams and there really is no rational explanation why Crowley would have abandoned this advantage unless he never actually made the connection to begin with.
What this chart does not tell us is that the 27 Ternary Trigrams are necessarily synonymous with the 22 Hebrew Letters, which, in fact, they are not. It also does not tell us that we should trash our minds attempting to fit Trigrammaton onto the 22 paths of the Tree of Life, even though the temptation is fairly obvious. But in attempting this, we run into certain contradictions with the Trigrams that we might not encounter with the letters in themselves, which are first and foremost an arrangement of 22 letters that has simply been extended in this instance to accomodate a preferred numeration system. This is achieved by way of the 5 "Final" letter values that come at the end of the sequence and push the numerical total to 27 instead of 22. So it is worth cautioning that the two systems are not the same thing but rather they share a certain chronological symmetry with respect to the 9 Chambers system itself. The chart I have layed out above contains a number of hidden mysteries emphasizing the appropriateness of this comparison, but this is beyond the scope of this particular chapter. I will say in passing to pay close attention to the top line (sometimes referred to as the *gender line*) of the trigrams in their descending order. Notice that the 1st 9 trigrams follow the Yang (or T'ien), the 2nd 9 the Jen and the 3rd 9 the Yin (or Ti). What happens in the Nine Chambers is that each of these sets is also earmarked by a shift in digits 1-9, 10-90 and 100-900, neatly corresponding to the shift in gender lines. This is an important feature of the Nine Chanbers that I will return to at a later time.
The purpose of this immediate article is essentially to slap a few sacred cows silly and try at length to make it plain that Trigrammaton is hardly a foregone conclusion by any stretch of the imagination. We have a highly technical sort of enginery to sort out here and it simply will not do to rest on any half-baked assertions that either cannot or will not address the practicalities of the matter. Someday I will discover for sure who it was that made the statement "To be mystified is not to be edified". I might consider carving the phrase on Crowley's tomb on some auspicious moonless night, though I suppose that would probably be taking scholarly criticism a bit too far.
m1thr0s
Trigrammaton, unfortunately, is one of those things. To begin this discussion properly, we need to take a look at Crowley's version: (http://www.rahoorkhuit.net/library/libers/lib_0027.html) It happens that there are a couple of typo's in this copy that actually made it to the printed version as well which makes matters even more confusing, but since I will be addressing things in general terms anyway, it doesn't really matter much. What we have here is a poetic rendition of something never intended as a poem, that feigns a logic it does not in fact possess and asserts a standard that is laughable at best, but potentially dangerous in that you can easily miss its greater significance by relying upon so poorly rendered a presentation of its principles. I have no doubt this may anger a few Thelemites but it will simply have to be accepted that I am first and foremost a Hermetic Alchemist (with a fairly high logic standards) and my commitment is to the Body of Light itself and to the establishing of a proper foundation for Mutational Alchemy, not to Aleister Crowley, his work, or whatever gods (or goals) he might happen to be partial to.
Before proceeding to dissect what is wrong with Crowley's conclusions, there are a couple of points of order that need to be clarified. The word *Trigrammaton* is a very *catchy* word (and one I think I shall probably keep), but other than the word itself, Aleister Crowley can hardly be credited with having devised a logic that was clearly developed in much greater depth than his own at least 2000 years before his birth (and probably much earlier than this). The 27 Ternary Trigrams are an integral part of the Tai Hsuan Ching, formally compiled by Yang Hsiung in about 2BCE, but we know that the ternary structures themselves were in use prior to this time and since they link to the mathematics of the Lo Shu Diagram itself, it's anyone's guess at this point just how old this system really is. A few scholars believe it may be at least as old as the I Ching and that the two systems co-evolved together, stretching back to the time of Nu Kua, or predynastic China.
Nowhere in Crowley's work is there even the slightest indication that he was ever consciously aware of this historical work. There were no english translations available to him in his own time, and even though a copy did exist in the British Museum of History (or so I am told), no translations of this work had yet been attempted and even today it is next to impossible to obtain an english copy of this work. Despite being recognized as one the principal canons of Chinese philosophy, only two contemporary scholars have made their work available to the general public: Derek Walters and Ms. Michael Nylan, neither of whom would have ever had any dealings with Aleister Crowley since he was long dead before they were even in grade school. The Tai Hsuan Ching is literally packed with all kinds of things that would have been of great interest to Crowley, yet he never makes any mention of it and all reasonable indications are that he was unaware of its existence entirely. To his credit, he managed to deduce its outline (apparently from thin air) and correctly positioned its relative importance in the scheme of things, having stated in several places that Trigrammaton ranked as the highest form of High Magick itself. Exactly why he asserts this is anyone's guess, since he does not appear to have had a very solid grasp of its properties. He understood its gematria to some extent but beyond this his technical knowledge is piecemeal and sketchy.
Crowley's errors fall into three principal categories:
(1). The nature of the lines themselves
(2). The ordering of the trigrammal structures
(3). The assigning of English letters (in the attempt to establish an *English Qabbalah*)
...the sum of which can only amount to a collosal *miss*, yet Liber Trigrammaton has been a hugely popular treatise owing primarily to the underscoring correctness of its heuristic combined with the fact that it does indeed have an important role to play in the formula of Abrahadabra, something we will be exploring in greater depth in route.
(1). On the nature of the lines:
It is a little difficult to tell from the online version linked above, but Crowley begins from the notion of Yin and Yang, conjoined with a third "force" which he has determined to be the Tao itself, represented by the Tao/Teh point. In this way we have a negative, a plus, and a neutral values, which is fine, so far as it goes. Unfortunately, the use of the Tao/Teh point in this capacity is completely inappopriate. Even the most cursory study of Taoism should be sufficient to inform us that the Tao is not a "thing" and cannot be used to express "thingness" on any level. A more careful study of the nature of line values will inform us that what stands between Heaven (yang) and Earth (yin) is not the Tao, but Man. Whatever symbol we elect to use to represent this "third force" must necessarily be synonymous with Man. This is precisely what we find occuring in the original "trigrammaton" as fashioned by the sages untold centuries ago. They also begin with The Yin and the Yang, called Ti and T'ien in the Ternary system. The "third force" is called "Jen", which is taken to have a three-fold value of Man, Intelligence, and Spirit. This is the proper way to express line values of the third kind, without exception. Crowley's failure to attend to this protocol is hardly a cosmetic issue, but displays a degree of ignorance of core taoist alchemical principles inexcusable in one professing to have mastered them. There are certainly parallels which can be drawn between the Tao and Man "forces", but at the end of the day, they are simply not the same "thing" and with line values we definitely require a "thing" valuation since lines give us particulate vibrational constances in the clockwork mechanism of mind and matter itself.
(2). On the ordering of the 27 ternary trigrams:
It is a well observed fact that the more popular "King Wen" version of the I Ching does not appear to be chronologically tight from beginning to end but follows a mysterious pattern of its own devising, one that is frequently the source of academic curiosity since there always seems to be an underscoring chronology at play of some kind or another, yet to this day no one has been able to successfully identify one to the general satisfaction of all. If it's there at all, it must necessarily be encrypted in some way and various scholars such as Lama Govinda and Terence McKenna and others have put forward differing theories as to what this might be. An even older version, called the Fu Hsi (or Inner World) arrangement is chronological however, as is the Tai Hsuan Ching arrangement of the 9 principal Bigrams, 27 Trigrams, 81 Tetragrams and 729 Ternary Hexagrams. Thus the original *trigrammaton* does, in fact, align chronologically from beginning to end, whereas Crowley's version clearly does not. How do we know this?
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leibniz) was a brilliant 17th Century philosopher and mathematician. He is credited for having invented binary mathematics in the west, though in fact it was invented 5000 years earlier by Chinese mathematicians. The notation he devised is nevertheless useful as a means of validating this. As with many remarkable discoveries, it's really very simple once you have spotted it to begin with. Leibniz began by assigning yins the value of 0 and yangs the value of 1. Since the Binary system of Hexagrams builds from bottom to top, we simply numerate line values accordingly and then lean them over horizontally so that their total reads out clearly. A hexagram consisting of six yins will thus have a binary value of 000000=0 whereas a hexagram consisting of six yangs will have a binary value of 111111=63, representing the first and last structures in the 64 Binary Hexagrams. All other combinations will line up somewhere between these two poles. When applied to the Fu Hsi Hexagrams we get an unbroken chronology from beginning to end as can be demonstrated in their binary sums. There is a handy flash tool available called the I Ching Sequencer (http://taolodge.com/flash/sequencer.html) which demonstrates this.
In truth, we could assign values the other way around and still get the same results save that our poles would be reversed, which is essentially what happens in the ternary system. Here T'ien gets the value of 0, Jen the value of 1 and Ti the value of 2 and we run our counts from top-to-bottom instead of bottom-to-top. Other methods of counting are possible as well and it only really matters that we are consistent with whatever system we employ in order to get the benefit of a numerical validation system. The chart I am including below will serve to illustrate the correct chronological order of the 27 ternary trigrams, or *trigrammaton* as it can rightly be called. It should be mentioned in passing that there is some debate still lingering regarding the correct notation of the *Jen*, primarily introduced by Ms. Michael Nylan as near as I can tell. She maintains that the twice-broken line at the bottom end of the series should be the Jen in fact, though in all other respects this runs hard against the grain of Trigrammal Doctrine as it has been expressed from the earliest times, which always stipulates that the Man Line seats between the poles of Heaven and Earth. Such is the nature of academia and there are many factors that might account for whatever incidental documentation she may have uncovered, not the least of which being deliberate tampering in an attempt to appease the more powerful proponents of the Binary system who would not have been pleased to see the Yin notation being suddenly usurped by the Jen principle. This, however, is a matter for future discussion.
Whatever his reasons may have been, Crowley abandons the proper chronological order of the 27 Trigrams and in so doing has missed a huge opportunity to synchronize logically with the Qaballah of Nine Chambers, a point I will come to in a moment.
(3). On the nature of English Letters (ie, "English Qabbalah"):
The assigning of 26 English letters to the 27 ternary trigrams was apparently an afterthought on Crowley's part and was not included in his original Class A publication of Liber Trigrammaton. His reasoning for including these assignments was presumably to resolve the matter of an English Qabbalah. Unfortunately, a random assigning of 26 letters upon an also random arrangement of trigrams hardly resolves anything logically and we are rather left with a presumptuous sort of "father knows best" argument in the final analysis...something I am not only not persuaded by, but find starkly embarrassing coming from someone who clearly should have known better to begin with. It is difficult to defend the man's work at all when he is predisposed to imbecilic stunts of this nature...yet...having said that, it is my belief that he was actually onto something but as was so often the case with him, found the worst possible way to express it.
Before I attempt to explain this I have to take a moment to point out that I am not an expert qabbalist. There are people right here on this forum who can probably run me right into the ground with their own levels of expertise and this doesn't bother or intimidate me. I know what my strengths are and I am not concerned about having a few areas left that still need reinforcing. With this in mind, I am going to attempt to put forward an observation that I think needs to be expressed.
The problem I have with the term "English Qabbalah" is that it is an oxymoron, owing to the nature of Modern English itself. English, as we know it, is a language already stripped to the bone and borrowed from bits and pieces of nearly every other language on earth...bleached clean...wrung tight...and put to whatever utilitarian tasks we may assign it. Qabbalah is not just about assigning words and numbers. It is about whole harmonic archetypal and elemental constitutions embedded within words and numbers and in order to negotiate these you need a body of language that is already embued with these "traditions" to begin with. That simply isn't how Modern English works. People have been confusing the ideas of Numerology and Qabbalah, yet even at the level of numerology, English has no inherent capacity to this because English letters have no unique relationship to numbers, save through the agency of other languages which do. Yet, despite that, English does have its virtues. It has fairly recently overtaken Latin as the official language of science owing largely to its homogeneous qualities. It is vaguely possible that English could ultimately evolve a kind of Qabbalah built upon these inherent qualities, but to achieve this it would have to reinvent itself at the level of its own letters because what we have in place already is a language system devoid of any particular "soul" so far as that kind of connectivity is concerned.
Trigrammaton might actually be the ticket that makes a meaningful English Qabbalah possible because here we have a dynamic system of "letters" that have all kinds of built in associations going on already and it might be possible to develop an especially "elemental" sort of language from such an amazing lineup of letter values. But in order to achieve this we would have to start from scratch in terms of whatever names and qualities we finally assign these letters. We can't just call this one A and that one B and mark it good to go. That just isn't what Qabbalah is, and even if numerology itself can work this way, it won't have any real meaning to anybody if that's as far as it goes. I am of the opinion that Crowley may have seen something of this potential owing to his own degree of expertise with language, but I think he very much missed his mark in the way he attempted to render it. The end result is a kind of alpha-numeric gibberish slathered on a chronological garble. What he has come up with has no practical merits at all other than being something puzzling to gawk at. An example of a more appropriate English Qabbalah might be to develop a harmonic language system that could be partitioned evenly across the 27 Trigrams in which the properties therein bore some elemental or numerical resemblance to the trigrammal letters assigned. In this way the resulting language system would come to serve some useful purpose not already served better by another toungue.
In the interim, the Qabbalah of Nine Chambers itself already follows a natural chronological numerical order, so if you want to know what traditional letter values best correspond to each of the trigrammal structures, look to the numbers first, and look to all those existing qabbalistic standards that already conform to the numbers...notably Hebrew and Greek and perhaps a handful of other systems I am not as intimately familiar with. The chart below should serve to demonstrate how and why this method will work, though in this instance I am limiting my example to Hebrew.
http://abrahadabra.com/images/trigrammaton01.gif
This chart serves to demonstrate that the 27 Ternary Trigrams follows the so-called Qabbalah of Nine Chambers perfectly, both to the Letter and the Number. It does this because the Qabbalah of Nine Chambers itself is actually an arrangement of 27 Numbers grouped together in Nine "Chambers" following the pattern: 1, 10, 100 / 2, 20, 200 / 3, 30, 300...all the way to 9, 90, 900. As a matter of closure, the Number 1000 is typically expressed as a large Aleph but this is not essential to the chambers themselves and is something we could just as easily accomplish in trigrams. All kinds of things are possible once you begin using the natural chronological attributes of the trigrams and there really is no rational explanation why Crowley would have abandoned this advantage unless he never actually made the connection to begin with.
What this chart does not tell us is that the 27 Ternary Trigrams are necessarily synonymous with the 22 Hebrew Letters, which, in fact, they are not. It also does not tell us that we should trash our minds attempting to fit Trigrammaton onto the 22 paths of the Tree of Life, even though the temptation is fairly obvious. But in attempting this, we run into certain contradictions with the Trigrams that we might not encounter with the letters in themselves, which are first and foremost an arrangement of 22 letters that has simply been extended in this instance to accomodate a preferred numeration system. This is achieved by way of the 5 "Final" letter values that come at the end of the sequence and push the numerical total to 27 instead of 22. So it is worth cautioning that the two systems are not the same thing but rather they share a certain chronological symmetry with respect to the 9 Chambers system itself. The chart I have layed out above contains a number of hidden mysteries emphasizing the appropriateness of this comparison, but this is beyond the scope of this particular chapter. I will say in passing to pay close attention to the top line (sometimes referred to as the *gender line*) of the trigrams in their descending order. Notice that the 1st 9 trigrams follow the Yang (or T'ien), the 2nd 9 the Jen and the 3rd 9 the Yin (or Ti). What happens in the Nine Chambers is that each of these sets is also earmarked by a shift in digits 1-9, 10-90 and 100-900, neatly corresponding to the shift in gender lines. This is an important feature of the Nine Chanbers that I will return to at a later time.
The purpose of this immediate article is essentially to slap a few sacred cows silly and try at length to make it plain that Trigrammaton is hardly a foregone conclusion by any stretch of the imagination. We have a highly technical sort of enginery to sort out here and it simply will not do to rest on any half-baked assertions that either cannot or will not address the practicalities of the matter. Someday I will discover for sure who it was that made the statement "To be mystified is not to be edified". I might consider carving the phrase on Crowley's tomb on some auspicious moonless night, though I suppose that would probably be taking scholarly criticism a bit too far.
m1thr0s