Professional Documents
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The Ophanic Revelation
The Ophanic Revelation
The Ophanic Revelation
by
Vincent Bridges and D ARLENE
Introduction:
Vincent Bridges and Terri Burns
Appendix A:
S. Robert Wilson
Illustrations:
D ARLENE
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in a review.
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ISBN 978-1-257-08521-7
CONTENTS
PREFACE by Vincent Bridges
“Who are the Ophanim and Why are They Following me Around?” . . . . . . . . . . . 1
I. When Beautiful Minds Talk to Higher Intelligences
A Brief Historical Overview of the Ophanic Language
by Vincent Bridges and Terri Burns (2009). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
Angels in the DNA: The Emerald Modem and Dr. Dee’s Ophanic Language
A Continuation of the Above by Vincent Bridges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
THE GREEN WOMAN
© DARLENE 2009
“Then shall your eyes be opened to see and understand all such things
as have been written to you, and taught you from above.”
Preface
Who are the Ophanim
and why are they following me around?
An Autobiographical Preface
by Vincent Bridges
WHO ARE THE OPHANIM AND WHY ARE THEY FOLLOWING ME AROUND? 1
A decade after that wintry hike, I was back in Sedona. This time I was with
a hundred or so earnest New Agers. The Fifth Way had merged briefly with the
Melchizedians and we were on a mission “to anchor the Blue Light around the
planet,” starting with the red rocks of the Sedona desert. We spent the week out
on the vortex spots, working on our own internal processes and aiming toward
the big event of bringing in and grounding that mysterious Blue Light thing…
This particular week in November of 1989 happened to be a pivotal moment
in history, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in soviet controlled
central Europe. It was a strange feeling to spend the day meditating and come
back to the motel and watch the events in Europe unfold live on TV. By Saturday,
the day of the big event, I had decided to do something different; I was going to
climb up on Bell Rock and do the entire sequence of the Enochian Calls or Keys.
The Calls are at the core of the material the angels dictated to Dr. John
Dee and Sir Edward Kelley, the perhaps misnamed the Enochian system. They
contained most of the translated angelic language, which Dee and Kelley never
called Enochian, but were convinced that Enoch spoke. The Calls are also Keys
in the sense that they open or unlock powerful structural components of the
universe. The first two activate a kind of control panel, using the central cross
that binds the elemental quadrants of the Great Table together, the next four the
elemental angles, and the last twelve the remaining sub-angles of the elemental
quadrants of the Table. In addition, there is a last Call or Key that unlocks the
thirty aethyrs or spirit levels.
So I found a good spot high up on Bell Rock and settled in to carefully do
all 48 Calls. It was quite an experience, and when I finished I found that I was
surround by a group of Japanese tourists who had been taking my picture. They
bowed and left and I slowly climbed down to where the group planned to collect
for the evening’s big event. I settled on a limb of the ancient juniper tree at the
rendezvous and waited.
About an hour before show time, our leader arrived in a state of complete
emotional collapse. His wife had announced that she was leaving him after
discovering that they were in fact both having an affair with the same man.
He turned the big event over to me, saving he was too devastated to do the
ritual. It was up to me to bring in, and anchor, the mysterious Blue Light of the
Melchizedek movement.
I agreed, and although the resulting ritual had its moments of comedy, it
was in my opinion very successful. Something energetic and dynamic on a very
large and intense scale was connected into the earth through the large red bell-
shaped rock in Sedona that week, as the Cold War ended, the Iron Curtain fell and
the Velvet Revolution swept the new Czech Republic. It’s a long way from Sedona
to Prague, but the arc of this story connects them directly.
In the next few years I traveled widely in Egypt, India, Nepal, Tibet and Eng-
land, following many of the peripheral threads of the larger pattern through
what seemed at times an endless tapestry of cosmic strangeness. Sufi saints on
the Nile, Shiva devotees in Kathmandu and Rishikesh swamis by the Ganges,
WHO ARE THE OPHANIM AND WHY ARE THEY FOLLOWING ME AROUND? 3
Fast-forward thirteen years to 2009. Dan Winter and I are scheduled to
head up a six-day workshop on Alchemy in Prague, the first time we’ve worked
together in over a decade. Dan, with help from the insights gained in our angelic
working, has become an international new age headliner, touring the globe
giving lectures on his unique brand of mystical science. I’ve become an expert on
the mysterious French Alchemist Fulcanelli and almost by accident an authority
on the life of Nostradamus. But by a curious mixture of coincidence and karma,
Dan and I wind up in Prague, where, 420 years before, Dee and Kelley received
their final angelic communication, achieved, by some accounts, the transmuta-
tion of lead into gold and preached the approaching apocalypse to the Holy
Roman Emperor Rudolph II.
The conference was great, our collaboration extremely fruitful, and some-
where along the way I fell under the spell of Prague and the circle of my Enochian
obsession was complete. I can explain it no better than that; being on the spot
brought the whole of my understanding and work into a sharp, laser-like focus.
We closed the conference with a brief bit of Enochiana, the first two Calls in a
simple magical setting accompanied by harp music. It was amazingly powerful,
and in the days that followed a new idea took root and began to grow.
What if this strange series of conversations and informational downloads
were designed to come on line, so to speak, at this point? What if the entire
corpus of Dee and Kelley’s work could only be understood, or used, not 400 years
ago when it was received, but now, at this precise moment in time? And if we
accepted that premise, then what exactly was it meant to do?
I had postulated that the system functioned as kind of non-physical com-
puter or communication device, and that certainly seemed to be the case in
the Sedona working. The Ophanim appeared and what communication there
was, beyond the very experience of their appearance, focused on creating and
projecting the Tree of Life on the celestial sphere and aligning the Cube of Space
properly in space. Even the cosmic Djed raising in September 2002 had been part
of the larger vision from the “angels” in Sedona. Working from these clues, I had
already determined that the basic structure of the Great Table was aligned to
precessional motion, and could used as a way of marking the galactic alignment,
Fulcanelli’s season of catastrophe and the end point of the Mayan calendar, and
my new insight showed that this was no accident.
And so, the book you are about to read came into being. Based on work
that went back to the early days of the Fifth Way Mystery School, the notes
and written preparation for the Sedona working, as well as my articles on the
structure of DNA, divination and language, we also tried to break new ground, in
terms of telling a bit of the real history of the system and its reception, and with
my wife Darlene’s new work on the letter forms themselves and their connection
to the physics of vortices and the phonemes of DNA, the goal was to make this
book a sort of beginner’s handbook of the larger project for which the system
seems to be designed.
WHO ARE THE OPHANIM AND WHY ARE THEY FOLLOWING ME AROUND? 5
Section 1
INTRODUCTION
ELDOM DO WE FIND a precise date and location for the beginning of a
S magical tradition, but in the mid-1580’s, the original British agent 007,
Dr. John Dee, and his enigmatic scryer Sir Edward Kelley received one
of the most powerful yet mysterious systems of “angelic” magic ever known, what
has become commonly known as the “Enochian” language and system of magic.
Even critic and magician Donald Tyson, who thinks the “angels” conveyed their
language with the sinister intent of bringing on the Christian Apocalypse, calls Dr.
Dee’s angelic conversation diaries and transcription of the Enochian system “the
most remarkable artifact in the history of spirit communication.” 1
Conversing with angels to discover a secret control language of celestial
mechanics−and, apparently, succeeding−is without linguistic precedent,2 though
we may think of a few tales that are similar if more modern. For instance, today
universities hold week-long conferences on the recently discovered “lost” work
of India’s Srinivasa Ramanujan, a mathematical genius who filled notebooks with
pages of mathematical formulas and relationships whispered in his ear by the
Goddess Namagiri; high tech mathematicians aided with supercomputers still
can’t solve many of the theorems he proved by scribbling numbers on a paper
while his wife stuffed enough food in his mouth to keep him alive. Or we might
think of the case of “Beautiful Mind” economist and Nobel-prize winner John
Nash, who was famously asked, “How could you, a mathematician, believe that
extraterrestrials were sending you messages?” “Because the ideas I had about
supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did,” he
answered. “So I took them seriously.” 3
Who is to say, when beautiful minds talk to higher intelligences, whether
they are speaking to angels, extraterrestrials, a Goddess, or an intricate system
somehow extruded from the light emitted by their own DNA? The test should be
in the mathematical integrity of the system, rather than the mythology in which it
is dressed. Dee’s angels speak to us through a heavily Christian Hermetic tradition
of angel magic, which one can embrace if one chooses, or discard if one finds it
outdated, quaint, or discomfiting. Nevertheless, the integrity of the system holds
in a way unheard of among such phenomena. The angels came looking for Dr.
Dee, much as Michael Rene, the space visitor, sought out Sam Jaffe, the brilliant
INTRODUCTION 7
system software, vibrating all 49 Enochian keys and ensuring that all interior and
exterior aspects of the system matched perfectly so that 93 aethyrs resulted. The
hardware and operating system platform interface via phase-locks and shared
axes of symmetry between multidimensional geometric shapes and frequencies,
and respond in truly interactive ways.
If you have not begun to work with Enochian material, the above may sound
like so much incomprehensible jargon; if so, don’t worry about the terms for now.
But if you have had some limited experience with the work of John Dee or used
Enochian as part of some energetic practice, you probably notice components
listed above that are not used by the initiatory systems that employ but rarely
explain Enochian.
Part of the discussion following the above working is still posted on the
goldenmean.info sacred geometry site, including the call for an Ophanic mystery
school, that resulted, thirteen years later, in the Ophanic Revelation project now
underway. While the Enochian Handbook was geared for an advanced audience
of practicing magicians focused on single exhaustive all night working, it still
behooves students of Enochian to see how this group approached the material,
which is introduced thus:
The Ophanic Intelligences, the sentience of whirling Light,
gave Dr. Dee a powerful tool for leveraging reality. Imagine a
magick toolbox, small enough and portable enough to be scattered
throughout the galaxy. The toolbox contains ‘tools’ designed to build
a mechanism that functions as a combination radio set, life raft and
emergency medical instrument. Included along with the tools is a
DNA trigger coded 6 instruction sheet.
Learning the alphabetic waveforms of symmetry set coherent
sacred languages, 7 such Hebrew, Greek, Sanskrit, etc., creates a
stable psychic platform onto which the inter-locking non-local
dimensional structures of the Ophanic Language can be
downloaded. This ensures that the toolbox will be opened by
someone with the spiritual perspective to use it. The information was
originally given to Dee because he could understand and respect the
material.
Viewing the Enochian (or Ophanic, or Angelic) material through the lens of
modern breakthroughs in mathematics, physics, and cosmology, rather than via
Renaissance Hermetics, one point becomes immediately clear: the simple fact
that two men received material which their own time did not have the science or
mathematics to explain, but which our time period does, suggests some kind of
contact with a higher level of intelligence, from either within, without, or both.
It is crucially important to keep in mind that one of the major stumbling
blocks to understanding the Enochian material has been the failure to recognize
that John Dee already had in his repertoire certain concepts, like that of four
dimensional geometry, precessional astronomy, and a concept for the nature of
INTRODUCTION 9
Within Agrippa’s, and John Dee’s, heavily Abrahamic belief system, this original
language was used by the first man, Adam, to talk with God and the angels. Later
sacred languages, they thought, descended from this primary angelic speech. Some
Renaissance Kabbalists, both Jewish and Christian, thought the primary language
was Hebrew; modern students of the mystical Kabbalah, who believe that the “22
sounds and letters of the Hebrew alphabet are the foundation of all things,”11
ordering the first creation of earth and stars in the heavens, and represented by dif-
ferent occult symbols and gematria, will recognize the outline of this belief system
in modern esotericism. Gematria, the system of assigning numerical value to letters
in sacred alphabets, especially Hebrew and ancient Greek, is derived from both the
ancient Greek words for geometry, and grammar.
By the time Dee and Kelley began their angelic conversations, Dee was con-
vinced that Hebrew (or some proto-Hebrew that could be refined or even “cor-
rected” by Kabalistic study) was constructed by Adam after the Fall based on a
shadowy memory of an earlier language, which Dee termed “Angelicall,” or other
synonyms such as “First Language of God-Christ” or “Celestiall Speech.” In Renais-
sance Hermetic Christian belief, in common with all Abrahamic faiths, the Biblical
patriarch Enoch was the one known human who
also spoke this language.
Enoch, “Idris” in Islamic tradition, and associ-
ated with Tehuti, Thoth, and Hermes in multiple
magical traditions, was, within the belief systems
drawn upon by Dee, the lone human prophet
from whom the Angelic language was not
hidden. Dee believed that he and Edward Kelley
were the first to have this language revealed to
them since Enoch. Within Muslim tradition and
within the ancient and medieval alchemical tradi-
tion that passed into Christian Europe via Islam,
Enoch/Idris is also credited with the invention
of writing, grammar, geometry, arithmetic, and
astronomy, all of which were, both to those tradi-
tions and within the work of John Dee, intrinsi-
cally related pursuits.
For instance, Dee’s most famous work, the
Hieroglyphic Monad or Monas Hieroglyphica, 12 Squaring the circle through the
and a related much longer work, the Pro- pentagram is meant to symbol-
13 explicitly combine ize the harmonization of intu-
peudamata Aphoristica,
ition (pentagram) with reason
sacred languages and sacred geometry within an (square) or the idea that the infi-
alchemical system purporting to show the struc- nite (circle) communicates with
ture of physical reality and how it is placed within the human intelligence through
the larger cosmos; both make use of four dimen- laws of harmony.
sional mathematics and show an understanding
of gravitational forces 100 years before Newton.14
INTRODUCTION 11
That brings us to the term “Ophanic.” Perhaps this term is more metaphori-
cally correct, or packed with more layers of meaning, than “Angelic” or “Eno-
chian.” In any case, understanding it requires understanding what is known as
“the Green Language,” used by esotericists from Rabelais to Nostradamus to
Shakespeare to the 20th century alchemist Fulcanelli.22 As Renaissance writers
shifted to vernacular tongues like English, French, or Italian, such puns developed
to keep alive the packed symbolism and correspondences possible in sacred
languages like Hebrew, ancient Greek, or Latin. We might distinguish between a
“sacred language” and a particular writer’s “green language” as follows: the writer
employing an allusive set of green language references usually assumes that,
while perfect correspondences may be inscribed within sacred alphabets, such
perfection no longer exists in our commonly used vernacular languages. Because
of this, alchemical writers resorted to a complex web of symbols; beneath the
symbols, however, lays a deep skein of correspondences learned through the art
or theater of memory.
The term “Ophanic” is a modern-day equivalent of such green language pun-
ning, containing within its references a vague outline of the language’s alchemi-
cal keys. Dee would have associated his “angelic” language with the Ophanim, or
Auphanim, the choir of angels associated with the Sephiroth Chockmah, and by
extension, pun intended, with Da’at. In terms of the Kabalistic Four Worlds, the
Ophanim are associated with Briah, the Creative World, and the highest level the
human mind can comprehend.
In Hebrew, Ophanim/Auphanim means “wheels,” as in the wheels of the
chariot in the vision of Ezekiel so often referred to in modern esoterica, and have
great rims covered with “eyes,” (which can mean jewels or stars), and appear
again in the Revelation of St. John. Among other things, the Ophanim refer
us to the zodiacal Great Year, the Apocalypse, and the creation of individuated
knowledge from archetypal realms.
Choosing to Anglicize Hebrew as “Ophanim” rather than “Auphanim” also
makes a Dee-like green language play on both “Ophir,” the legendary Biblical city
renowned for its purity and abundance of gold; on “oph” the Hebrew collective
noun for birds or in this case the language of the birds, and of course the ancient
Greek word for serpent, contained in the 13th sign of the zodiac, Ophiuchus, the
serpent-bearer, whose alignment with the winter solstice sunrise marks the end
of the precessional round. Greek ophis can be a poet, serpent, or even metaphori-
cally an arrow, and together these puns show us the outlines of different direc-
tions the study of Enochian might take us. If Shakespeare was indeed the student
of Dee and Kelley, we might expect to find all of these meanings packed into the
name of Hamlet’s once-beloved Ophelia, whose name also is ancient Greek for
“indebtedness,” and ponder her appearance and death in a play named after the
mythological character, Hamlet or Amleth, who turns the cosmic mill of time in
Icelandic mythology.
John Dee did not use the term “Ophanic” to describe the language he was
transcribing any more than he called it Enochian, but he was a master of such
INTRODUCTION 13
the ship of his adversaries, and through the conjuring of spirits he has used to
protect his island, all manner of ills are set aright. Indeed, as one studies the
Angelic workings, it becomes difficult not to see the similarity between Ariel and
Uriel, Prospero’s angelic familiar and Dee’s angelic informant, and even Calaban,
Prospero’s other magical servant, has a name strongly suggestive of the Rulers of
the Heptarchy. More recent scholarship, including that of the authors,26 suggests
that William Shakespeare (under the spy pseudonym “Francis Garland”) may have
been present for Dee and Kelley’s Heptagonal working, as well as some of their
other continental adventures.
What were the circumstances that led John Dee−geographer, mathematician,
alchemist, and spy-to try to learn the workings of the universe from angels?
John Dee was born in 1527 and his formative years were colored by the
religious turmoil brought on by the Reformation. Dee’s family, through which
he would later claim distant kinship with Queen Elizabeth, probably arrived in
London in the wake of Henry Tudor’s coronation as Henry VII. By the time he went
up to Cambridge at fifteen, he was searching for a resolution to the problem of
religious authority, seeking a type of spiritual science that could supply insight
into the workings of nature by infusing the natural world with mystical meaning.
After studying at Cambridge and Louvain, Dee achieved the status of Renais-
sance celebrity in 1550 with a lecture on mathematics and the spiritual aspect
of number at the University of Paris. During the reign of Edward VI, Dee became
involved in the political maneuverings around the throne and by the summer of
1555 found himself in prison on an unspecified ecclesiastical charge. After Catholic
Queen Mary,“Bloody Mary,” and her followers displaced the “nine-day Queen”
Lady Jane Grey following the death of the boy King Edward, times were tough
for known Protestants, especially mathematicians and magicians, especially those
known to have cast horoscopes of the Queen. Dee spent several months in prison.
Over six hundred others went to the stake for witchcraft and heresy, perhaps even
Dee’s own father.
Dee survived the purge of 1555, as did his new patron, Queen Elizabeth I,
who asked him to pick an auspicious date for her coronation. Curiously, she also
gave his widowed mother an old house on the site of an ancient lake, a house
whose title a few years later would pass on to Dee. He settled in at this family
home, Mortlake, which would eventually house the largest library of its time in
all of Europe. Only the great national collections of the next century surpassed
it. The type of books he collected-everything from Hebrew grammars to clas-
sical mythology to Galenic and Paracelsan medical texts to works by Agrippa-
show him as Elizabeth I’s chief “intelligencer” and “philosopher” in that specific
Renaissance context where espionage meant everything from cryptography to
astrology to, in Dee’s case, talking to angels.
At the end of 1562, Dee departed for an intelligence-gathering expedition to
the continent. The easiest way to follow his trail is by noting the manuscripts he
collects. The first of these was the Stenographia of Abbot Trithemius, a bizarre
text written on multiple levels. . When Dee learned of the manuscript’s existence
INTRODUCTION 15
in his own time. Increasingly, it must have seemed that only non-local, non-
physical intelligences could answer Dee’s ever more complex questions.
From 1563 on, Dee had the tools and the basic understanding to embark
on an exploration of angelic communication, the idea that had led him to copy
Trithemius with such excitement. His notes, however, record only a few attempts,
done without much enthusiasm. That is, until the angel rapped on the window.
The logic of turning to supernatural forces for knowledge about the universe
seems strange to our modern scientific sensibilities. This is a category of experi-
ence that “science” has labeled subjective and therefore suspect. To Dee’s con-
temporaries it seemed less unusual. The possibility of acquiring knowledge by
revelation or inspiration was a vital component of the Renaissance paradigm. In
the “Mathematical Preface” to his edition of Euclid, Dee asserts that man “partici-
pates with Spirits, and Angels: and is made to the Image and Similitude of God.”
He also notes that there are powerful precedents for angelic communication:
the traditions of Enoch and Esdras, Abraham and Elijah and Moses, and “sundry
others thy good angels were sent (to) by thy disposition, to Instruct them.”
Dr. John Dee’s first serious attempt at angelic communication, on December
22, 1581, involved a man by the curious name of Barnabus Saul, one of Dee’s
servants, who acted as a medium or seer. Apparently, he was a better footman
than a medium, for after a few sessions we hear little more about him. By March
1582, however, Dee’s seer had located him. His diary reads:
Mortlake: In the Name of Jesus Christ, Amen. In the year 1582, on the
10th day of March, before noon, Saturday.
One Mr. Edward Talbot came to my house and he being willing and
desirous to see or show some thing in spiritual practice. . .
So begin Dee’s notes of his first scrying session with his new seer, Edward
“Talbot” Kelley. At first, Dee was suspicious of the younger man, and rightly so.
Kelley appeared unannounced, offering a fake name−he might have been a
spy seeking information on Dee’s spirit conjurations−and even when identified
proved to have an unsavory reputation. Dee must have resolved his doubts,
because on an early spring morning roughly a year after Dee’s first angelic visita-
tion, they sat down for a trial run with the scrying stone. It is hard not to be
impressed by the vivid quality of the quickly written notes of the proceedings.
Kelley fell to his knees before Dee’s desk and began to pray over the stone;
surprised, Dee took Kelley and the stone into his chapel, or oratory.
Within a quarter of an hour, Kelley began to see an angelic shape in the crys-
tal. This being identified itself as the Archangel Uriel, accompanied by Raphael
and Michael. Dee was hooked by this immediate success, and so began a long
strange relationship between these two men and the angels. For the next seven
years, they conducted almost daily sessions. Dee of course wrote everything
down in his “Spiritual Diaries,” and reading them becomes after a while an exer-
cise in applied surrealism. As an example of a dialogue with the deep uncon-
scious Other, they are unparalleled. 31
INTRODUCTION 17
out the English and read it back−to fill in a large 49 x 49 square, where each
square was a word and each line a text. After two lines of text, Dee expressed a
desire for a simpler method. Annoyed at the request, the angel departed. By the
following Tuesday, when the session reconvened, the angels were prepared with
a completed square from which Kelley could read off the text. Kelley however had
not memorized the letters given the previous week.
Annoyed again, the angel intervened:
A voyce - Read.
E.K. - I cannot.
<Dee>- You should haue lerned the characters perfectly and
theyr names, that you mowght now haue redily named them to
me as you shold see them.
A voyce - Say what thow thinkest. (Dee- he sayd so to E.K.)
E.K. - My hed is on fire.
A voyce - What thow thinkest, euery word that speak.
E.K. - I can read all, now, most perfectly, and in the Third row
this I see to be red.
Palce duxma ge na dem oh elog. . .
(Sloane MS 3188, April 2, 1583)
What happened here? The angel said “What thou thinkest, every word, that
speak,” and Kelley miraculously began to read. Kelley’s “my head is on fire” com-
ment suggests something very strange happened that afternoon. Did the angels,
those non-earthly, non-local intelligences, force Kelley’s consciousness into reso-
nance with a language pattern coded into our very DNA?
The texts that Kelley generated from the tables shown to him by the angels
resemble the vast literary mandalas of Tibet, and like them are full of phonetic
patterning, repetition, rhyme and alliteration. This type of verbal patterning is
not found in normal speech, but is characteristic of poetry and magical charms
as well as “speaking in tongues,” or glossolalia, that is language produced under
trance conditions. There is no question that Kelley was in some kind of trance
during these sessions: Dee notes many occasions indicative of a deep trance state
on Kelley’s part. However, this does not mean that the “language” produced in
these sessions was meaningless gibberish. The phonetic patterning is also similar
to verb tense and other grammatical drills. Perhaps Kelley, with the help of these
“angels,” was constructing in a trance state, the linguistic links his unconscious
needed in order to receive a more complete form of the angelic language, one
that developed from these original text-filled squares.
The squares of the Liber Logaeth, or the “Book of the Speech from God” as
Kelley and Dee called the great book of his vision, did indeed form the basis
of a new series of 49 invocations dictated in the spring of 1584, while Dee and
Kelley were in Cracow, Poland. Unfortunately, the details of how this version of
INTRODUCTION 19
at the advanced age of 106, one of the brethren discovered his tomb and his
uncorrupted body. This was the signal for the Brotherhood to emerge and spread
their message, hence the publication of the Fama.
Their message, of course, was nothing less than the dawn of a new Golden
Age. The Fama informs us that the Brotherhood possessed the keys to a secret
knowledge capable of transforming society and ushering in a new era, one in
which “the world shall awake out of her heavy and drowsy sleep, and with an
open heart, bare-headed and bare-footed, shall merrily and joyfully meet the
new arising Sun.” This quote is taken from the next Rosicrucian production, the
Confessio Fraternitatis, a restatement of the basic themes, but with a more direct
emphasis on its revolutionary implications. It also goes to the core of the alchemi-
cal mystery.
The Rosicrucians were alchemists, but the Fama and the Confessio are both
highly critical of the “puffer” type of alchemical worker who sits in his lab and
actually attempts to get the mineral gold out of boiling lead. The Fama talks
of “ungodly and accursed gold-making, whereby under the colour of it many
runagates and roguish people do use great villainies, and cozen and abuse the
credit which is given them.” The Fama implies that the Rosicrucians could make
gold but found the higher spiritual alchemy to be more important. Higher spiri-
tual alchemy related to the coming Golden Age and how to prepare for it. That,
seemingly, was the intent behind the publication of the first two Rosicrucian
documents−to prepare the world for the new era that was dawning.
The third volume, however, was very different. The Chymical Wedding of Chris-
tian Rosenkreutz appeared publicly in 1616, the year Shakespeare died, and is the
only Rosicrucian document to be linked with an author.
Johann Valentin Andreae, a Protestant minister from Germany, claimed late
in life that he wrote The Chymical Wedding in 1601, though the attribution is
extremely somewhat suspect, as he would have been just fifteen at the time. The
Wedding is full of complex occult imagery and surreal metaphors and describes
Christian Rosenkreutz’s experiences as he observes a royal wedding. It is hardly
the stuff of adolescent fantasies. John Dee’s Monad glyph appears prominently
in the margins of the Chymical Wedding; and the Wedding’s story-within-a-story
serves as a gloss for the message of the whole, much like the play-within-a-play
in some works of Shakespeare.
Like many alchemical works, the Wedding is filled with ciphers and green
language. No less a mind than Leibniz, who along with Newton invented calculus,
solved one of the ciphers. In the Wedding, the king announces: “My name contains
five and fifty, and yet hath only eight letters.” Leibniz correctly unraveled one
layer of this mystery by using a simple Latin gematria, where A = 1, B = 2, and so
on, to arrive at the answer of “ALCHIMIA.”
We must consider The Chymical Wedding as an initiatory text, much like Wol-
fram’s Parzival or Fulcanelli’s Le Mystère des Cathédrales, which cannot be under-
stood without the aid of an esoteric gloss. However, no explication appeared and
after this strange work, the original Rosicrucians fell silent. It is not known if they
INTRODUCTION 21
and some of those included connections to Kelley’s surviving relatives as well as
Dee’s. He had an alchemical “initiator,” William Backhouse, who he said revealed
to him the secret of the philosopher’s stone, and also passed on to him many
manuscripts. He also had access to the early angelic sessions after 1662 when
they were discovered in a secret drawer of a cedar wood chest once owned by
Dr. Dee. The finder, a Mr. Wales, traded them to Ashmole for a copy of his book
on the Order of the Garter. This material led Ashmole to attempt his own angelic
communication in the 1670s.
Beneath the shadowy surface of Rosicrucian, proto-masons and other occult
societies, we can see the outlines of the early Enochian tradition developing. But
the core of that tradition remained underground, partly obscured by a mysteri-
ous “Dr. Rudd.” Some 20th century Dee scholars, Frances Yates included, specu-
lated that this “Dr. Rudd,” whose work is copied by a later copyist called “Peter
Smart,” might have been Thomas Rudd, who published an edition of Dee’s Math-
ematical Preface to Euclid in 1651. Whoever Rudd was, he had to have a connec-
tion to some initiatory circle connected to the family of Dee or Kelley, though
recent research has cast doubts on this being his real name.36 If the name itself
is a pseudonym, consider the many green language puns pointed to by the name
Rudd- it suggests “red” or “ruddiness,” the act of spawning, even a “rudder,” but
most tellingly a Rudde or Roode was an old word for a Cross, and might well
suggest the “light of the cross” or LVX of Dee’s Hieroglyphic Monad.
“Dr. Rudd” represents the survival of a magical connection from Dee’s era,
through the Rosicrucians and into the era of Ashmole and physicist Robert Boyle.
In 1660, Ashmole and Boyle were founding members of the Royal Society, which
itself grew out of an “Invisible College” referred to by Boyle in 1646. Incidentally,
one of the most unexpected accounts of Edward Kelley’s alchemical work, to
modern minds anyway, is the story told by none other than Robert Boyle, who
claimed in 1670 that he had heard the story of the grand transmutation from
Kelley’s own kin, and spent a fair amount of time trying to produce something
similar on his own. Even Isaac Newton was not immune to the lure of alchemy,
and, as he was familiar with Ashmole’s work, certainly knew of Dee and Kelley.
By the early 18th century, some Enochian material was circulating in manu-
script form among what would soon become Freemasonry. And thereby hangs a
curious story, one that connects many obscure threads and leads back to Dee’s
involvement in the Elizabethan theatre and forward to the Hermetic revival of the
19th century’s occult societies, including the Golden Dawn.
Smart, Byrom and Falkner: The Tradition Splinters
REEMASONRY formally started in England in 1717 with the public
F announcement of the Four Lodges at the Apple Tree Tavern in London
on June 24, Saint John’s Day. Something like these “lodges” had existed at least
since the mid fourteenth century as craft guilds. These Freemasons were differ-
ent, however. They weren’t actually working, operative masons but middle-class
members of a secret society gone public. As early as the1640s, around the same
INTRODUCTION 23
These included George Ripley, Robert Fludd, Jacob Boehme, Michael Mair and
Heinrich Khunrath, a roll call of scholars, mystics, scientists and Rosicrucian phi-
losophers. One curious mention was Matthew Gwinne, an Elizabethan professor
of medicine and a contemporary of John Dee and Shakespeare. One or two
sheets mentioned the Royal Society, of which Byrom was a member and a few
contained biblical references, including the measurements of the Ark of the
Covenant. One very small drawing depicted an English acrostic featuring the
word “Cabalists.”
Given just these clues, the obvious Kabalistic nature of some of the drawings,
and Byrom’s involvement with Freemasonry and Jacobinism, it is not too radical
a supposition that Byrom should have been given the collection by the remnants
of some secret society, perhaps for safe keeping. We have no evidence, beyond
Hancox’s wishful thinking, that Byrom himself ever formed a working group
around these papers, or that they were ever part of a collection within the Royal
Society. But the collection itself does indeed appear to be the teaching and
demonstration diagrams of a magical society, one that apparently existed from
the 1590s to the early 1730s.
What do these drawings have to do with Enochian? Their focus seems to be
sacred geometry and Kabbalah in architecture. The seeming split between sacred
geometry and angelic languages exists just as palpably as the one between Dee
and Kelley’s physical alchemy and angelic communication. The deep geometric
understanding is what supports the latter and allows it to operate.
Fortunately, this is not the only example of the survival of archives of such
a secret group, and the others relate more directly to angelic magic. In the
Harleian manuscript collection in the British Museum there is a collection of
alchemical and magical texts copied between 1699 and 1714 by one Peter Smart,
self-described Master of Arts of London.43 Among these manuscripts are several
relating directly to Dr, John Dee’s Enochian workings and angelic magic as well
as a collection of alchemical and Rosicrucian material, also containing fragments
of Dee’s work, entitled The Rosie Crucian Secrets. This work was examined by E.
Langford Garstin, a member of an early twentieth century esoteric and magickal
group, 44 who commented: “There is a mass of evidence in favour of the sup-
position that as early as Dee’s time there was in existence a secret fraternity...
(and) that this society may even have been, and probably was, a branch of the
Rosicrucian Brotherhood…” 45
Could the Byrom collection also once have been part of Peter Smart’s copy-
ing project? Could it have been part of the originals from which Master Smart
worked? Such complex geometric diagrams would have been almost impossible
to copy in the early eighteenth century without considerable skill as a draftsman;
the documents Smart is copying are ones that would need geometric “support”
to ever make sense magically or mathematically.
The texts, those that wound up in the British Museum, could be copied, but
the drawings were truly irreplaceable, the core of the secrets. Given the close
proximity of the dates−Smart’s work on Dee and the Rosicrucians was done
INTRODUCTION 25
of a group around Arthur Dee, John Dee’s son, whose esoteric pursuits were more
alchemical. 48
This family connection is made even more probable by the specifically Eno-
chian material contained in the manuscripts. Some of this material, in the Angelic
Magic manuscript that also contains Rudd’s “Nine Hyerachies,” suggests that
Rudd had access to information that was unavailable in the published sources
of his time. Dee’s son would seem a likely source for this material. Adam Mclean,
in his introduction to The Treatise on Angel Magic, comments: “The Rudd Treatise
was never meant to be published. It was rather a private commonplace book or
reference book for a group or order of occultists working closely with Dr. Rudd.”
He goes on to say: “The existence of this manuscript indicates the continuity of
an occult system of Angel Magic, stretching from the workings of John Dee and
Edward Kelley in the late sixteenth century into the early eighteenth century.” 49
According to Joy Hancox’s work, some of the drawings in Byrom’s collection
date to Dee’s era, so it appears that all of these threads lead back to Dr. Dee and
the origins of the Rosicrucian movement. If the whole current contained in the
manuscripts leads back through Dr. Rudd and the Rosicrucians to Dr. Dee, then
we might have an answer to the question of why John Byrom was entrusted
with what was arguably the most important of the manuscripts, the geometric
diagrams. Byrom’s family was related by marriage to Arthur Dee’s family. Perhaps
it was felt that the diagrams contained secrets that could only kept by a family
member.
Whatever secret fraternity, going back perhaps to Dee and the original Rosi-
crucians, was dissolving or in transition in the 1720s and 1730s, the nexus point
seemed to be Mr. Falkner and his curious collection of alchemical, Rosicrucian
and Kabalistic manuscripts. How he came by the manuscripts, whether he was a
member of the same group, a collector, or even Peter Smart himself, is unknown.
All we can say is that Mr. Falkner lurches in and out of obscurity just to pass
on the collection of manuscripts, and he has a green-language name just as
interesting as “Rudd.”
Indeed, the mysterious Mr. Falkner had already come to the attention of the
authors during an epic investigation into the French twentieth century alchemist
mentioned above, Fulcanelli.50 At one point, we found ourselves searching for
anyone interested in “Kabalistic alchemy,” which we had discovered was the
secret to Fulcanelli’s view of alchemy, and anyone with a similar name, Fulk, Falk,
and so on, and whose death was suspicious or unrecorded. Out popped Mr.
Falkner, recommended to the Royal Society as a mathematician and a student
of “Kabalistic alchemy,” and who disappeared after 1748 leaving no will, court
records or notice of death. Curiously enough, the first datable mention Fulcanelli
makes to events he observed in Paris is the late 1740s.51 Two obvious allusions
of Fulk, Falk, Falkner, and Fulcanelli are to “Vulcan,” the Roman god of fires and
volcanoes and a blacksmith, thus implicitly associated with alchemy, and to a
“falcon,” perhaps the falcon-headed Egyptian God Horus (in ancient Greek Horos)
whose very name means “falcon.”
INTRODUCTION 27
a hexagram enclosing three circles from which a central triangle emerges. This
depicts Boehme’s three principles, and was probably the drawing that Mr. Falkner
explained to Byrom, back in May of 1735.
Drawn on this diagram, and perhaps also showing through from the reverse,
is a classical Tree of Life diagram. The reverse has the same Tree of Life pattern,
with a more detailed depiction of its internal geometry, highlighting the solar,
Tiferet-centered cube at the heart of the Tree. This drawing matches the work
done independently by Nigel Pennick in his book Mysteries of King’s College on the
ground plan of King’s College Chapel, and takes it a step further.54 Combined with
the geometry on the front side of the drawing, it demonstrates how this figure
is also related to the larger Cube of Space in which, according to the Bahir, the
Tree of Life is projected.
These are very sophisticated Kabalistic ideas, and their clear and direct inclu-
sion in the ground plan of King’s College Chapel provides powerful support for
Fulcanelli’s argument. The drawing from the Byrom Collection allows us to see
another level of interconnections. Certainly any group in the mid-eighteenth
century interested in Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism would find the idea of
Hermetic architecture extremely compelling. Fulcanelli, as the last representative
of the tradition, supplied the template against which we can measure the history
of alchemy, and, by comparison, we gain an even greater understanding of the
esoteric material in the Byrom collection.
To Byrom, it must have seemed that Falkner’s collection of manuscripts was
the esoteric mother lode. We can be sure he returned to view these curiosities
once again, even if no mention survives in his journal. During his lifetime, Byrom
carefully preserved the collection of geometric diagrams with which he had been
entrusted, and he must have felt honored to be part of a tradition going back to
Dr. John Dee. We can’t be sure how much Byrom knew concerning the use and
meaning of the diagrams, or even if he understood their importance, but he did
ensure their survival.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn: The Fragments Reunited
AISY ADAMS was a simple shop girl, very middle class and just sixteen,
D when she met the Madame Swami and her husband in the summer of
1901. She went to one of their Order of Theocratic Unity lectures and immedi-
ately fell in love with M. Theos Horos, the exalted master of the Order, even
though he already had a wife, the somewhat older Madame Horos. That of
course did not stop the psychically endowed M. Horos from spotting the love-
sick teenager and moving in to take advantage of her devotion. An assignation
resulted, and a month or so later, a tearful Daisy confronted M. Horos with her
doubts that a real Spiritual Master would act as such a cad. M. Horos responded,
being in fact not a Spiritual Master, or even a gentleman, by raping her in front
of a witness. Daisy reported the assault, and M. Horos, real name Frank Jackson of
Newark New Jersey, was arrested.
INTRODUCTION 29
Mina Bergson Mathers, sister of philosopher Henri Bergson and darling of the late
pre-Raphaelite painters; and her husband, Samuel Liddell “MacGregor” Mathers,
a quirky translator of ancient grimoires and student of the esoteric mysteries. At
its height in the late 1890s, the order had over 300 names on its membership
roles, and lodges in London, Paris, Edinburgh and New York. Imagine the shock
and dismay these members felt as their inner rituals and secrets were displayed
in court and ridiculed in the tabloids during the Horos trial. Some completely
panicked and destroyed all evidence of their involvement, some simply resigned,
while the more resolute began to look for a way to disassociate themselves from
the fiasco. 56
And, as if to add injury to the insult, in the January 1902 issue of the journal
Light, Mathers, then Outer Head of the Order, explained how the felonious Horos
couple came into possession of their knowledge of the Golden Dawn and a copy
of the Neophyte Ritual. Simply put, he was duped and they stole the manuscripts.
This had been known in various circles within the Golden Dawn for some time.
Mathers had originally introduced Mde Horos as “Fraulein Sprengel,” the adept
who supposedly chartered the original Die Goldene Dammerung, at a February
1900 meeting of his Alpha et Omega lodge in Paris. This charade had apparently
not lasted the evening, and in a fit of anger, Mathers alerted the entire group
that Sprengel, in all her forms, was a fake created by Westcott. These revelations,
followed by the Horos affair, completely undermined Mathers’ authority and the
Golden Dawn began to splinter into factions and spin-offs. In June of 1902,
what remained of the group officially changed its name, becoming the Hermetic
Society of the Morgenrothe. 58
How Mde Horos fooled Mathers goes to the heart of the mystery behind the
founding of the Golden Dawn, the origin of those cipher manuscripts. Curiously
enough, instead of being just a strange footnote to a Victorian true crime tale, the
origins of the Golden Dawn’s cipher manuscripts point to evidence of an almost
continuous line of initiates and scholars going directly back to the group around
Dr. John Dee, including, perhaps, William Shakespeare.
Arthur Machen, in his 1923 autobiography Things Near and Far, gives a simple
and succinct version of the Golden Dawn’s origin myth:
A gentleman interested in occult studies was looking round the shelves
of a second-hand bookshop where the works that attracted him could
sometimes be found. He was examining a particular volume−I forget
whether its title was given−when he found between the leaves a few
pages of dim manuscript, written in a character which was strange to
him. The gentleman bought the book, and when he got home eagerly
examined the manuscript. It was in cipher; he could make nothing of it.
But on the manuscript−or, perhaps on a separate slip laid next to it−was
the address of a person in Germany. The curious investigator of secret
things and hidden counsels wrote to this address, obtained full particu-
lars, the true manner of reading the cipher and, as I conjecture, a sort of
commission and jurisdiction from the Unknown Heads in Germany to
INTRODUCTION 31
of the western tradition, from Egyptian motifs, the Chaldean Oracles and the
mysteries of Eleusis and Samothrace to the Kabbalah, the Tarot and the Enochian
tablets of Dr. John Dee. That this grand synthesis worked at all is amazing; noth-
ing like it existed, although echoes of the rites of almost every western secret
society of the preceding three hundred years can be found within it. And some of
its elements were truly revolutionary.
The original Cipher Manuscripts, as shown to the Inner Order in the 1890s,
were 56 loose folio sheets, 7 ¼” by 6 ¼”, written by quill in brown ink on paper,
some of which is watermarked 1809. Most of these that have survived seem to
be by the same hand and quill, with minor exceptions. The Cipher itself is from
the Abbot Johann Trithemius’s Polygraphiae et Universelle Escriture Cabalistique,
published in Paris in 1561, which was a favorite of many 16th and 17th century
Alchemists. Recall that Dr John Dee spent a month in the winter of 1561 copying
Trithemius’ work on Angelic Magick and considered his copy of the Polygraphiae
to be the equivalent of a state secret. Westcott also had access to Trithemius
and would have had no difficulty transcribing the Cipher Manuscripts, in either
direction.
Westcott’s toughest critics, including Mathers, agreed that Westcott found
something, but what that something was has been lost to history. Eventually a
committee of the Golden Dawn’s descendent, The Stella Matutina, found in 1914
that the whole of the Cipher Manuscripts were no older than the mid-1860s,
based on their use of Egyptian ideas unknown before Champollion. This made
the purported age, the first decades of the 19th century, of the Manuscripts
extremely unlikely and therefore undermined the last vestige of the Order’s
authority. The remnants of the original group folded soon after.
However, even if Westcott, or someone before him, put the Cipher Manuscripts
together, the question remains: where did the information and the very practical
integration of ideas and initiations contained in the manuscripts originate? The
Enochian elements obviously go back to Dr. Dee, so who combined them with
Kabbalistic psychology, the Tarot Trumps as psychic initiatory doorways, the virtu-
ally unique use of the pentagram as a magical gesture and so on?
Let us suppose that Westcott found and transcribed some document that
contained, roughly, the material in the Cipher Manuscripts. Imagine his surprise
and excitement, and his desire to share his discovery. Something that momen-
tous couldn’t be kept secret for long and sometime in 1887, Westcott showed
his discovery to a rising young member of the Hermetic Society, S. L. Mathers,
not yet “MacGregor,” who immediately grasped their importance. Together they
approached Dr W. R. Woodman, the Supreme Magus of the SRIA, of which Mathers
was also a member, and by the spring of 1888, the group was initiating members.
We will perhaps never know whether “Fraulein Sprengel’s” contact informa-
tion was already part of the package when Westcott presented it to Mathers.
If it was, it must have struck him as very odd. The material in the manuscripts
suggests 18th century Rosicrucianism, while the paper points to the early 19th,
yet if the information is that old, why should it have an address of accommoda-
INTRODUCTION 33
a thorough examination,” to “I appoint you” without skipping a beat. Here, rather
than initiation or even understanding, the key is the literal possession of the
manuscripts. It all seems rather ineptly crafted to give the impression that every-
thing required for initiation and attainment can be found in the manuscripts
themselves, no transmitting body of Adepts required.
From the date of the letter, we can see that it arrived at a critical juncture
in the formation of the group. Westcott approached Mathers perhaps as early as
August of 1887, and by October, they had Woodman on board and Mathers was
fleshing out the work already done by Westcott on turning the Cipher Manuscript’s
text into workable group initiations. All that was needed was the authority to
use the material, and that, very conveniently, arrived with Fraulein Sprengel’s
November letter.
Why did Westcott feel the need for such an elaborate charade? It may be
as simple as unwillingness on Westcott’s part to admit ignorance. He had found
something of great importance, but he knew nothing about it except whose
papers it had turned up among, and he was reluctant to admit even that for
reasons of his own. This posed an insurmountable obstacle because the very
nature of an esoteric society implied an authoritative source, a body of adepts
who had, and could transmit, the experience of gnosis. To Westcott, the Cipher
Manuscripts couldn’t be simply an odd fragment of a plan for an Order that no
one had worked; no, by its very nature it had to be a connection to the real
masters, those who actually guarded the secret wisdom. The Golden Dawn, Die
Goldene Dammerung, and perhaps Fraulein Sprengel herself, might have been
Westcott’s creation, but the core of the initiatory tradition came from somewhere,
someone had put the different threads contained in the manuscripts into a
coherent whole.
Modern researchers have focused on the two Englishmen mentioned by
Westcott/ Sprengel in her letter. They have identified these as Kenneth Mackenzie
and Fred Hockley. Mackenzie, as we mentioned above, has many connections
to the substance of the Cipher text, from the use of similar diagrams to the
published grade structure itself. Fred Hockley was less an author than a collector
of rare manuscripts, including copies of the Harley Collection’s manuscripts of Dr.
Rudd and John Dee, and spent years engaged in experiments concerning physical
alchemy. Both were influenced by and had met Eliphas Lévi, the Abbe Constant
mentioned by Fraulein Sprengel. Lévi’s view of the Tarot’s relationship to the
Hebrew alphabet, with some significant changes, is a keystone of the Cipher text,
which maps the 22 cards of the Tarot’s major arcana to the alchemical changes
represented by the 22 paths on the Tree of Life There is even some evidence that,
as the good Fraulein suggested, Mackenzie and Hockley attempted to start their
own Order, the Society of Eight, around the ritual basics of the Cipher text, but
that it never got off the ground.
That Westcott mentions this so directly in his Fraulein Sprengel letter shows
that he knew, roughly, where the Cipher manuscripts or something like them
originated. Why he didn’t just say that directly is a mystery. However, no matter
INTRODUCTION 35
So how did Mde Horos fool Mathers into thinking she was indeed Fraulein
Sprengel? The answer supplies another odd loop in the strange story of the
Cipher Manuscripts, one that just might explain the oddly prescient Egyptian
usages, as well as the origins of the secret chiefs.
The Egyptian Connection
NTIL THE EARLY 19th century, when the European tomb robbers and tour-
Uists arrived, Luxor, or al-Uqsar, Arabic for “the Palaces,” was a sleepy backwa-
ter town in the province of Qena. For the previous six hundred years, it’s one
claim to fame had been the tomb and teaching school of the Shi’a shayik
Abu al-Haggag, built amid the ruined foundations of the ancient Temple to
Amun, Mut and Khonsu. With the European influx came awareness of the ancient
monuments and temples, and, as they were looted, the new town of Luxor
grew fat from serving the needs of archaeologists and the idle rich tourists.
By the late 19th century, it was the chief town of the region, and as tourism
increased−Thomas Cook & Son added it to their itinerary in 1896−it became the
fashionable spot to spend a Victorian winter.
In the mid 1800s, a series of meetings occurred in Luxor that would have
far reaching consequences for the development of the western tradition. The
contact began in 1838 when an adventurer, linguist, archaeologist, engineer
and artist named Achille-Constant-Theodore Emile Prisse d’Avennes, a French-
man descended from the English noble family Price of Avens, arrived in Luxor.
D’Avennes spoke perfect Arabic, having lived in Egypt for a decade before set-
tling in Upper Egypt, and was a keen student of both the hieroglyphic language
and Islamic mysticism. At Luxor, the quixotic Frenchman would find a connection
between the two.
Champollian had just published his study of hieroglyphics a few years before,
but, while d’Avennes had certainly studied Champollian’s work, his subsequent
mastery of the ancient Egyptian language went far beyond it. Karl Rickard Lep-
sius, the Prussian archaeologist who competed with d’Avennes for temple loot,
commented that d’Avennes had the greatest grasp of hieroglyphs of any man
living. Coming from the “German Champollian,” whose later discovery of the
Canopus Tablet confirmed Champollian’s readings, this was high praise indeed.
So where did d’Avennes learn his hieroglyphs? That answer will take us back
hundreds of years to the origin of the local Sufi order before we return to the
twentieth century and the Golden Dawn, because d’Avennes apparently gained
his knowledge of hieroglyphs, and of a particular initiatory system, from the Sufis
who occupied the ancient temple of Amun, Mut and Khonsu, which we will refer
to it as Luxor Temple.
In d’Avennes day, the small village of al-Uqsar clustered around Luxor Temple,
and the center of the village, and its claim to fame, was the mosque and tomb
of Abu al-Haggag built within the temple’s forecourt; its 12th century minaret
standing solidly on the base of an ancient pillar. The al-Haggagis are a seemingly
out-of-place Shi’a group in a Sunni country, and by tradition they retained a
INTRODUCTION 37
This time, d’Avennes was documenting Arabic culture, including the Al Azhar
mosque in Cairo. This work, The Monuments of Cairo from the 8th to the 18th
Centuries, supplied many of the missing links between the European Gothic style
of the 12th century and the Cairo mosques, from vaulted arches to the use of
stained glass. After a brief trip up river in 1860 to visit Abu Simbel and Luxor,
where d’Avennes was initiated as a full member of the al-Haggagis under his
local name of Idris Efiendi, d’Avennes returned to France.64
“Idris,” remember, is the Islamic version of Enoch, and equivalent to Tehuti,
Thoth, and Hermes is other mythological and magical systems. “Efiendi,” some-
times “Effendi” or “Efendi,” is an Arabic and Turkish title and term of respect
sometimes even used for the Prophet Mohammed, and from the 15th century on
usually means a well-mannered and well-educated aristocratic male friend. In this
case, we have someone taking a name that seems to mean “respected friend of
Idris or Enoch.” Sometimes “Idris Efiendi” went by the name “Idris Bey,” Bey being
another title which also means a well-educated man with a position. “Bey” after
one’s name shows respect (much like “Mr.” or “Sir” before one’s name in English),
and can also be used to show courtesy by one’s peers.
In France, as Idris Efiendi, or Idris Bey, d’Avennes began to spread the idea
of a new kind of initiation based on the neophyte and nine-grade plan of the
Ismaili Shi-a. This never openly appeared as a working “lodge,” but the outline
for such an initiatory scheme apparently passed from d’Avennes to Eliphas Levi
and on to Fred Hockley and eventually to Westcott and Mathers. The similarity
between the initiatory outline of the Ismaili Shi-a and that of the Golden Dawn
is rather uncanny.65
And thereby hangs a curious mystery. When S. L. “MacGregor” Mathers met
Madame Blavatsky in 1887, he asked her about her sources, in fact the name
of her Egyptian contact. She must have responded correctly, which must have
impressed Mathers enough that he decided to take seriously W. W. Westcott’s
scheme to start a magickal society. How could Blavatsky have known the answer?
And why did that answer move Mathers to help start the Golden Dawn?
Tracing the history that led Helena Petrovna Blavatsky from Russia through
India to Egypt, Europe, and beyond, and to authoring her famous tome Isis
Unveiled and founding the movement of Theosophy, is a tale not for the weak
of heart, and is far too complex and full of blinds to recount here. By the time
Madame Blavatsky washed ashore in Egypt in the winter of 1871, she’d survived
twenty-three years of adventures that included everything from escaping from a
brutal husband to intrigues in Istanbul and Paris, circus riding and belly dancing,
and perhaps even a trip to Lhadak or Nepal. In Cairo, Helena met a few ex-patriots
and began the forerunner of the Theosophical Society, the Cairo Spiritism Society,
which quickly became a haven for con men and fortune-tellers of all kinds.
In the fall of 1871, as her society was falling apart from the weight of its own
criminal incompetence, Helena met a real initiate. She would later refer to him
as Tuitit Bey. “Tuitit” was a mis-transliteration of the name of the Egyptian god
Tehuti, who by now we also know in Greek as Thoth, and equated with Hermes,
INTRODUCTION 39
arrived giving Westcott exclusive access and began a pattern of promising extra
material that never seemed to materialize. The next letter is dated in September,
and offers the information needed to complete the Adept grades, 5 = 6 and
above. Over a year later, in October 1889, she writes to congratulate the group
on having the required number of adepts to achieve independent status. In
December of that year, she writes again to give official 7 = 4 status to the
three Chiefs, Westcott, Mathers and Woodman. The next letter, dated August
1890, came from an unidentified member of the Order, announcing that Fraulein
Sprengel had died. Also, it seemed that Soror SDA, Sprengel’s Order motto initials,
had no permission from the other Chiefs of the Order to charter the English
group, and they were now on their own. It seemed, at the time, a very convenient
solution; however it left the door open for a convincing con artist such as
Madame Horos.
Anglo-Irish poet, playwright and folklorist William Butler Yeats, who joined
the Order a few months before Fraulein Sprengel’s announced death, supplied a
suitable myth for the founding of the Order: “Then an old woman came, leaning
on a stick, and, sitting close to them, took up the thought where they had
dropped it. Having expounded the whole principle of spiritual alchemy, and bid
them found the Order of the Alchemical Rose, she passed from among them, and
when they would have followed was nowhere to be seen.”
Like many others, W.B. Yeats came to the Order through the Hermetic Society
and the Esoteric Section of the Theosophical Society. He was looking for magic,
something as real and overpowering as the music he found in ancient poetry, but
more direct and precise. In S. L. MacGregor Mathers he found his Magus. Mathers
cut an eccentric figure, dressing in kilts and tartan shawls. Yeats first encountered
him in the British Museum Reading room in 1889. Mathers had but two fields
of research, Yeats commented later, those being “magic and the theory of war.”
Even in that, Mathers was odd, being a vegetarian and an anti-vivesectionist. He’d
arrived on the esoteric scene in 1885, after his mother’s death, published a small
work on infantry tactics, and joined Anna Kingsford’s Hermetic Society where he
found one of the major influences of his life. Kingsford’s Hermetic philosophy
would supply the underpinning for Mathers’ magical worldview, and to great
degree, that of the Golden Dawn. The equality of male and female adepts is
directly attributable to Kingsford’s influence, for instance. Kingsford, another of
the eccentric characters of 19th century occultism, considered herself the reincar-
nation of Mary Magdalene.
A year earlier, in 1888, just as the Golden Dawn was taking shape, the young
art student Mina Bergson also encountered Mathers. She was studying Egyptian
art, sketching the statues in the British Museum, when she encountered what
appeared to a ghost from some older time, Mathers in kilt and shawl. Intrigued,
they became friends, and soon Mina was one of the early members of the Golden
Dawn, along with her art school friend, tea heiress Annie Horniman. In the Order,
Mina would put her artistic skills to use making and designing the instruments
and tools. Her greatest contribution may be her color scales based on the differ-
INTRODUCTION 41
Aleister Crowley: The Beast and Modern Enochian
N 1904, Edward Alexander “Aleister” Crowley and his new bride, the former
IRose Edith Kelley arrived in Cairo on an extended honeymoon. The young
Crowley, still shy of 30 and in the midst of a Saturn return, was already an
accomplished Alpinist, a celebrated, in some circles at least, minor poet and a
veteran of several occult societies. Little did he and Rose suspect, as they checked
into the second floor corner room at Shepherd’s Hotel in the heart of downtown
Cairo that they were about to make magical history and inaugurate a 93-year
period that would serve as the prologue to the Apocalypse.69
To give the reader an idea of how fast the change occurred, in just over a
decade, the world would be at war and Shepherd’s Hotel would become British
Imperial headquarters, a vital link in the chain of command between London and
Delhi. The suite of rooms occupied by the Crowleys became part of the offices
of the Arab Bureau, a semi-secret group of spies and plotters that included T. E.
Lawrence. Out of the Arab Bureau’s manipulation would come in time most of
the complications found today in the Middle East, including the nation of Israel
and the royal families of Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the deposed royal family of
Iraq. But of course, that’s just another coincidence…
For the first month or so, it must have been great fun for “Eddie,” as Rose
insisted on calling Crowley, who posed as a Persian nobleman and went in search
of Arabic instruction from the masters at Al Ahazr mosque. Rose wandered the
markets in Khan il Khalili and visited the chic set who lived on houseboats and
in new French-looking mansions over in Giza. They played golf at Helwan, and
decorated their new flat in the fashionable European section of Cairo, a few
blocks north and east of the Boulak Museum and a short walk from the terrace
restaurant at Shepherd’s where Cairo society met for lunch.
Rose and “Eddie” were young Edwardians loose in Cairo for the season after
a lengthy honeymoon that had already included a stay in Egypt the previous
fall, as well as Paris, Naples, and Ceylon. They were young, English and rich, the
world was their playground, and, as Crowley commented, their “marriage was an
uninterrupted sexual debauch” until the strange events began in Cairo. But, by
early March, Rose was three months pregnant and things had changed.
The previous November’s whirlwind tour of Egypt had been wonderful, full
of excitement and flash. The best hotels and romantic excursions such as riding
the Pullman to Aswan and on by camel to Abu Simbel, where, at the end of
the known world, the great Pharaoh still looks down on the barbarians in awe
inspiring solemnity. And then, as a special treat, “Eddie” arranged for them to
spend the night of November 22nd/23rd in the Great Pyramid. It was terribly
romantic, even if a little silly when “Eddie” began to chant and read poems, and
Rose was sure to her dying day that this was the moment when she conceived.
Two days later, they were on the train to Port Said, bound for India and on to
China.
In Bombay, Rose broke it to “Eddie” that she was pregnant. He replied, “right-o
then, let’s go kill something for a month or two and then if you’re right, it’ll be
INTRODUCTION 43
To Crowley the psychic and psychological ramifications went even deeper,70
as Mathers was something of a replacement father figure. Young Alex, as his
family called him, had had a troubled relationship with his father and had never
gotten over his father’s death just when he was hitting adolescence and needed
a father figure most. Mathers, in his own quirky way, had filled a missing father
role for young Crowley. Now, as happens to most fathers and sons, it was time
for Crowley to rebel and find his own way. On the verge of becoming a father
himself, and perhaps denying it subconsciously, this reference to the complex
emotions around Horus was guaranteed to grab Crowley’s attention.
Crowley took Rose’s advice seriously and on March 20th attained spectacular
results after a disappointing first try on the 19th. This ritual was outlined by Rose
and filled in by Crowley following her suggestions. It was indeed a new way, as it
was quite emotional in tone, much closer to the devotional style of bhakti yoga
than the crisp and commanding postures of ceremonial magic. In it can be found,
in embryo, most of the motifs and metaphors that would blossom forth in a few
weeks as the Book of the Law.
Perhaps Rose, with her shrewd womanly intuition and keen emotional intel-
ligence, simply devised a powerful and effective way to keep her dear “Eddie”
at home and focused on her and at the same time exorcise some of his own
internal fears and guilt about fatherhood. Or perhaps the invocations in the Great
Pyramid had indeed made contact with some sort of “higher intelligence” who
did indeed have a message for anyone who would, or could, listen.
The ritual brought amazing results. Here’s how Crowley summed it up in his
small diary, The Book of Results: “20: Revealed that the Equinox of the Gods is
come, Horus taking the throne of the east and all rituals, etc. being abrogated.
20: (contd.) Great Success in midnight invocation. I am to formulate a new link
of an order with the Solar Force.” In another diary, he recorded: “Hoori (Horus)
now Hpnt (Hierophant), “ another reference to the changing of the officers of the
Golden Dawn on each equinox. Now, Horus is the Hierophant of the Age, not
just the season. 71
THIRD CALL - Exarp; the whole Tablet of Air - GRADE OF 2 Degree = 9 Square (Air)
FOURTH CALL - Hcoma; the whole tablet of Water - GRADE OF 3 Degree = 8 Square (water)
FIFTH CALL - Nanta; the whole tablet of Earth - GRADE OF 1 Degree = 10 Square (earth)
SIXTH CALL - Bitom; the whole tablet of Fire - GRADE OF 4 Degree = 7 Square (fire)
INTRODUCTION 49
NOTES
1 Tyson, xi.
2 For a detailed discussion of this, see Laycock, “Introduction.”
3
Nasar, page 1.
4 See Bridges and Burns, “Shakespeare and Dr. Dee; “ Burns, “Francis Garland, William
Shakespeare, and John Dee’s Green Language;” Burns, “William Shakespeare, Spy, and
a Visit to Trebona.”
5 Ibid. Also, see Harkness.
6 Bridges has shown how the 64 codons of DNA, which have elsewhere (Yan’s DNA
and the I Ching: The Tao of Life) been related to the 63 I Ching hexagrams, also
correspond to the 64 squares of the 8 x 8 grid that is the “alphabet packet” of
letters/ titles. For more on this, see his article “Angels in the DNA,” later in
this collection; this is also available in the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition at
http://www.jwmt.org/v2n15/dna.html.
7 For more on this subject, see Bridges, “Symmetry & Sacred Waveform Alphabets.”
8 See James, “The Magick of Enoch,” in The Enochian Magick of Dr. John Dee, for a
thorough transcription of these angelic conversations.
9 Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia, Book I chapter 23.
10 Ibid.
11 Regardie, page 150. These words are part of the Zelator initiation ritual.
12
Understanding of the Monad or Monas has been hampered by continual poor transla
tions. A new one underway is available at: http://www.jwmt.org/v2n13/partial.html;
the Latin original is available at: http://www.billheidrick.com/Orpd/Dee/JDMH.pdf.
The best in-print translation is by Josten; the esoteric commentary in Hamilton-Jones’
translation is more useful than his poor translation.
13
An English translation is available in by Shumaker in John Dee on Astronomy, how
ever it ignored virtually all esoteric aspects of the work. This attitude has been
recently criticized by Clucas in his introduction to John Dee: Interdisciplinary Studies
in English Renaissance Thought.
14 Some of the best scholars on Dee would disagree with this statement because,
largely due to poor translations, they do not understand the work. .
15 See Burns and Moore.
16 Also available: http://www.jwmt.org/v2n13/square.html
17 Burns and Moore, op. cit.
18 See discussion in Bridges and Burns, “Olympic Spirits, the Cult of the Dark Goddess,
and the Seal of Ameth,” in The Consecrated Little Book of Black Venus.
19 This extremely complex idea can be found in Dee’s Heptarchia Mystica, though under
standing for most likely requires an esoteric gloss. If one exists in print, the authors
are unaware of it.
20 For a thorough discussion and relevant angelic conversations, see James.
21 That Dee and his circle believed they could be living on the brink of a Golden Age has
been discussed by many writers; for the first in modern times, see Yates, Occult
Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age and Rosicrucian Enlightenment.
22 See Bridges’ “Reading the Green Language of Light” later in this collection; this essay
INTRODUCTION 51
Strict Observance of Baron von Hund und Alten-Grotkau, who once met a mysterious
grand master and was told to wait for further instructions. He waited for the rest
of his life, but, since the unknown grand master was actually Prince Charles Edward
Stuart, the Pretender to the throne of England whose cause was crippled forever at
the Battle of Culloden Moor, we can understand the lapse. This Strict Observance to
an “unknown master,” however, would continue to influence Western occultism down
to Theosophy and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the late 19th century.
41 Hancox, pp. 8-9.
42 Ibid.
43
Mclean, “Introduction,” pp. 9-17.
44 The Alpha et Omega Lodge in Paris, a continuation of the Hermetic Order of the
Golden Dawn founded by MacGregor and Mina Mathers in the mid 1890s. Garstin
joined in 1920, after Mathers’ death, but remained on good terms with Soror Vestigia,
Mina Mathers, until her death.
45 Garstin, introduction to The Rosie Crucian Secrets, page 12.
46 Hancox, op. cit. p. 38.
47 Ibid. (Figures 5 and 6, facing page 265.)
48 See Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment and The Occult Philosophy in the Eliza-
bethan Age.
49 Mclean, op. cit. page 16.
50 For one culmination of that investigation, see Weidner and Bridges.
51 Bridges, “Fulcanelli and the Secrets of Rennes-le-Chateau,” part one, page 57.
52 Kuntz, page 15.
53 Weidner and Bridges, see chapters 11 and 12.
54 See Pennick.
55 Fortune, p. 2.
56 See Gilbert, The Golden Dawn, Twilight of the Magicians.
57 By now we’re used to expecting green language puns in pseudonyms, and “Fraulein
Sprengel” is no exception.
58 Gilbert, Golden Dawn, op. cit., and Kuntz, op. cit.
59 Machen, pp. 152-153.
60 Gilbert, in Kuntz, op. cit. p. 21.
61 Ibid, pp. 21- 23.
62 By this time, most assume the “alchemical transformations” strived for are personal
spiritual ones rather than those concerning either the alchemy of precessional ages
or physical alchemy, though that makes the references to physical alchemy in the
Golden Dawn knowledge lectures, and to precessional astronomy in its grade initia-
tions (especially from Theosophus on) rather curious.
63 Lepsius.
64 Siliotti, pp. 266 -281.
65 As far as we know, this has never been discussed in print, for several reasons that
should be obvious.
66 Burns, “Pascal Beverly Randolph’s Eulis!”
67 Godwin, page 9.
68 Yeats, page 215.
69 See Crowley, The Law Is For All, Confessions and the Equinox.
70 Much of this section appears in expanded version in Bridges series “Crowley’s Egg.”
71 See The Law Is For All, Confessions and the Equinox.
T
HE WORKS OF such modern day Kabbalists as Stan Tenen, in Light in The
Meeting Tent and J.J. Hurtak’s Keys of Enoch suggest that we have indeed
found the pivotal point where consciousness, quantum mechanics and
the Kabbalah intersect. The question then becomes: Is that point the origin of the
alphabet?
Although humanity has spawned thousands of languages, fewer than a dozen
instances of the invention of writing are recorded in human history. Most of these
occurred in or around the ancient Near East. Cuneiform script in Sumer, Proto-Elamite
in Caanan, and hieroglyphs in Egypt appeared roughly at the same time, around
3000 BC. Cretan pictoglyphs and the Indus Valley scripts are dated to around 2000
BC. Hittite hieroglyphs and Chinese pictograms developed between 1700 and 1500
BC, as did the Semitic alphabet which would eventually become, with the Chinese
alphabet, the form by which all living languages are written.
The Semitic alphabet developed, according to the best archeological evidence, in
the turquoise and gold mines of Sinai just after 1700 BC. Hieratic or cursive Egyptian
phonetic letters were applied to a proto-Semitic language. We can easily read the
Semitic word “b’lat,” the goddess, in hieratic characters on the quarry walls at Serabit
El-Khadem in the Sinai. Similar developments occurred over the next two hundred
years throughout ancient Caanan. By 1400 BC, roughly the time of the Exodus of
Moses, these trends had merged into a form that scholars call the Caananite Linear
alphabet. From this developed all other alphabetic scripts, from Latin Gothic to Old
Hebrew and Imperial Aramaic, from Cyrillic to Kufic to Sanskrit and Amharic.
Logically, if any ancient alphabet could be called sacred, it must surely be that
original alphabetic source. Tradition would also suggest that the origin of this sacred
alphabet, the moment when the “flame letters” were revealed, involved the conjunc-
tion of Egyptian and Semitic sources in the Sinai. Working the mines where proto-
sinatic inscriptions appear were the Midianites of the Bible, the people with whom
Moses lived while in exile from Egypt. They were a Bedouin sort of people, pre-
Yahweh Hebrews who worshipped a nameless God on a mountain top. It was while
tending his flocks on the sacred mountain that Moses, the Egyptian prince, encoun-
tered the Burning Bush. Moses, of course, eventually returned to the Midianites’
sacred mountain with a vast horde of wandering Semitic refugees to receive God’s
commandments; carved, we are told, by the divine appendage on slabs of stone.
SYMMETRY AND SACRED WAVEFORM ALPHABETS 53
The first sentence of GENESIS in Hebrew, read from right to left.
This experience, this direct, face-to-face encounter with divinity, was the culmina-
tion of the Exodus. If any moment could be said to have been infused with divine
meaning, in an alphabetic sense, surely this was the moment. Tradition also holds that
Moses was the author of that first sentence in Genesis, which Stan Tenen, in 1968,
deciphered as a geometric description of a universal dissipative structure, the torus.
Since the development of our original source alphabet, Caananite Linear, is con-
temporary with the Exodus from Egypt, we might postulate a connection. From this,
we might also postulate that the alphabet’s success derives in part from its divine
origin. If the Kabbalists and Stan Tenen are correct, then it should be possible to
imbue and encode an ordinary word, such as “mustard seed,” with a host of spiritual,
and perhaps even scientific meanings. This ability would surely help the spread and
acceptance of such an alphabet.
Something of the sort seems in fact to have happened. Languages and scripts
as far apart as Ethioptic, Tibetan and Arabic all have a “kabbalistic” tradition because
of the sound/shape/symbol quality of the alphabet itself. Since all of these sacred
alphabets were originally derived from a Caananite Linear source, we can speculate
that the source of the concept is also the source of the alphabet.
Stan Tenen’s great idea suggests that this is the case. However, his examination of
alphabet forms has a large flaw. He starts with an Aramaic Hebrew script from about
300 BC. This is a thousand years, or so, after the divine infusion on Sinai, and far down
the language tree from Caananite Linear. Old Hebrew, the script of the Old Testament
period, roughly 1000 BC through the sixth century BC, is much closer to the original
source alphabet than Hebrew Aramaic, which derived from Phoenician and Imperial
Aramaic, or Persian, sources.
But Tenen’s research suggests that his spiral strip also creates other alphabets,
such as Greek, which are not related to the Aramaic branch. If this is true, we must
look even earlier. Caananite Linear, origin of Old Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic, is the
only possible source. However, Mr. Tenen has never, to my knowledge, examined this
alphabet. If a single divinely inspired source, using a spiral strip off of a torus defined
by tetrahedral symmetry, generated the “sacred” alphabet shapes, then the obvious
place, according to archeology, linguistics and tradition, to look for verification would
be the original alphabetic source.
This lack, in my opinion, weakens Tenen’s premise, and, until such work is done,
the theory must remain in the realm of speculation. As for the “waveform alphabets
of quantum theory,” Tenen has had remarkably little to say. By his own admission, his
original models were too imprecise to achieve any kind of mathematical rigor. While
the Kabbalists have always attributed certain states of consciousness to certain letters,
Tenen’s work does little toward relating these letter-shape states-of-consciousness
with any portion of quantum theory. He does suggest that there are connections,
54 THE OPHANIC REVELATION − Section 2
spinors as symmetry sets are mentioned at one point, but nothing is developed
beyond that level.
And yet, the mystery remains. Like some fascinatingly unfinished jigsaw puzzle,
Tenen’s work suggests more than it reveals. But he does give us an important clue.
In the tenth and eleventh century AD, the city of Troyes in France was home to
a group of Jewish mystics. As Babylon declined as the center of the Diaspora, Islamic
Spain became the focus of Judaism. This effervescence spilled over into southern
France where the authority of the Church of Rome and its dislike for the Jews held
little sway. In the latter half of the eleventh century, this community of scholars
and mystics introduced a new elegant form of the Hebrew alphabet known as the
Nachmanides-Rashi letters.
In his pamphlet “The Meru Project,” Stan Tenen notes that the Hebrew alphabet
that most closely resembles his geometrically derived models is this Sephardic script.
The true significance of Mr. Tenen’s research may be his discovery that these specific
letterforms of Hebrew are based on precise geometrical models. The unification of
quantum mechanics and consciousness may not point so much to the origin of the
alphabet as to the origin of the Kabbalah.
The core text of the Kabbalah, the Sepher Yetsirah, achieved its final form in
the late eleventh century in southern France. Long thought to be the work of the
school of Isaac the Blind, modern scholars have found traces of third century Gnostic
thought as well as evidence of a ninth century reworking. The mystical scholars who
assembled this traditional wisdom into its written form also adopted the use of
the Nachmanides-Rashi letterforms. These Kabbalists were mathematicians as well.
It is not beyond possibility that they had decoded the torus shape inherent in the
arrangement of letters in the first verse of Genesis, and the outline of its tagin
delineated spiral. From this realization might have come the “shadows on the meeting
tent” idea expressed in the Sepher Yetsirah, and later elaborated by Abraham Abulafia.
From this perspective, the letterforms could easily have been generated by the
rabbis of Troyes from the same sort of mechanical model Stan Tenen developed
eight centuries later. All this becomes even more interesting when we remember
another famous citizen of Troyes in the late twelfth century. The medieval poet who
introduced the Grail Myth, Chretien de Troyes, wrote just a century after the earliest
manuscripts of the Sepher Yetsirah.
The Grail Myth, as begun by Chretien, is an elaborate blend of Celtic myth, Chris-
tian chivalry and Gnostic experience. Women serve the sacrament from a “graal” that
provides for all needs, except that of healing the wounded king and the wasted land.
For that, a question, “Whom does the Graal Serve?” must be asked. Both Chretien
and later Wolfram von Eschenbach, whose Parzival claims to be the real story that
Chretien only partly understood, reported that the tale originally came from one
Guyot, or Kyot, of Provence. Wolfram also claims that Kyot heard it from Flegantis, a
Jewish astrologer from Spain. Wolfram’s grail, unlike Chretien’s large shallow bowl, is
a stone fallen from heaven. It spells out the names of those called to its service and
otherwise communicates through miraculous means.
Perhaps what we have at the core of the Grail Myth is a glimpse of the language
generating “stone” or tetrahedron of the mystics of Troyes. The possibility is a fascinat-
ing one that invites further research. If the geometrical models that Mr. Tenen redis-
covered were first invented in the eleventh century, then where does that leave us?
DNA Code by Dr. Martin Schönberger; 8 x 8 Magic Square by Ben Franklin (Each line adds to 260/ any four of eight adds to
130/diagonals add to 260 +/- 32) ; Mayan Tzolkin by Jose Arguëlles
I to the Ophanic system three years earlier. At that time, the only version
of the letters available to me came from the Golden Dawn. As a life-long
practitioner of calligraphic writing with a formal education in type design, I’ve
a working knowledge of letterform design. Good typographers learn to become
finely attuned to the subtle nuisances of shape and the overall visual rhythm
and texture created when different letters are juxtaposed together on a page.
Developing a sensitivity to the cadence of the patterns created by the dark
strokes of the letter shapes and the negative counter spaces they produce, will
add an extra dimension to the study of all alphabetic characters.
Thirteen years ago, to produce what was then called The Complete Enochian
Handbook, I needed to create an electronic version of the Ophanic letters for
use on the computer. I was glad for the opportunity to create the Enochian
letters because I couldn’t shake the suspicion that something was “not right”
with the GD model. To judge which letter features were intended and which
ones accidental, I relied on my background in font design. I also approached my
reinterpretation the Ophanic alphabet intuitively—as an artist sensitive to how
letters become a dance of pattern and form. Now, as I revisit the Ophanic system
in 2009, I finally have the time and resources to formally analyze this 21-letter
alphabet.
In Part One of this article, I briefly review the history of the letterforms, create
an in-depth, comparative study of key forms, and apply the results to the design
of a new typeface. I dedicate my efforts herein to every intrepid soul who has
sought to uncover the secrets of this non-ordinary alphabet.
But it is to be noted that when E.K. could not aptly imitate the form of the
characters or letters as they were shewed, that then they appeared drawn
on his paper with a light yellow colour, which he drew the black upon; and
so the yellow colour disappearing, there remained only the shape of the
letter in black… (Sloane 3188-104r)
Before they faded from the page, Kelley carefully traced the contours of the
letters with his pen. However, this is not the only example of the Ophanic alphabet
produced during this time. In Liber Logaeth, Kelley made his own version of the
Enochian letters (above), thus producing what’s considered to be Ophanic’s “per-
fected” script.
Regarding the letterforms themselves, about a month later (April 28, 1583), Dee
records a conversation with the Angel Il:
Dee: And first I think that those letters of our Adamical alphabet have a
due peculiar unchangeable proportion of their forms, and likewise that
their order is also mystical.
Il: These letters represent the creation of man, and therefore they must
be in proportion. They represent the workmanship wherewithal the soul
of man was made like unto his creator.
This is important and explains the reason we need to discover the true essence
of this angelic alphabet. Not only are there differences between the letter forms
recorded thus far, there are considerable differences between the forms of the
letters used in the Golden Dawn literature as well as those devised by Aleister
Crowley in the early 20th century. In the next section, I evaluate four versions
of the Ophanic alphabet. I have not adjusted the letters to compensate for the
distortions which inevitably occur when enlargements are drastic. Each letter’s
features, including imperfections, are greatly amplified. We must take into account
how enlargements tend to make thin strokes thicker than intended.
To study the above-mentioned versions of the alphabet, my comparative anal-
ysis adopts the font designer’s standard criteria. First, I determine each letter’s
height to width ratio by means of the square. I use the width of the widest
stroke and measure it against the height of the letter. I also found it useful to
determine the major angles of the letters, establish the way secondary strokes
branch from the main stem and compare how rounded forms and their negative
counter shapes relate to the circle. I also attempt to determine the probable stroke
sequence of the cursive forms.
© 1994 S. Tenen
© 1992 S. Tenen
© 1989 D. Winter
© 1997 DARLENE
In 1997, my expertise was called upon when I had to prepare a document for
U.S. Federal Court (above). In it, I compared the relationships between the same
Hebrew character belonging to four separate “font” sets. In the arena of font
design, my examination concluded that no copy-right infringements occurred.
The criteria I adopted to evaluate four different versions of the Ophanic alphabet
is similar to the “Font Design Analysis of Four Characters” court document:
1) the ratio between the height of the letters to their width,
2) the relationship between each letter’s thick and thin strokes
3) the shape of the counters.
45o
90o
AT RIGHT: To reveal PA’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet, was
created by tracing the central axis of each stroke and averaging the weight between thicks & thins.
© 2009 DARLENE
© 2009 DARLENE
AT RIGHT: To reveal GRAPH’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet,
was created by tracing the central axis of each stroke. In this case, averaging the weight between thick and thin
strokes decreased the horizontal / vertical angle from 85 o to 80 .o
© 2009 DARLENE
© 2009 DARLENE
© 2009 DARLENE
© 2009 DARLENE
Bottom
stroke is 1/3rd
the length of
All from Dee’s journal entry of March 26, 1583. top stroke.
AT RIGHT: To reveal GON’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet,
was created by tracing the central axis of each stroke. In this case, averaging the weight between thicks and thins
decreased the horizontal / vertical angle from 85 degrees to 80 degrees.
© 2009 DARLENE
70o
All from Dee’s journal entry of March 26, 1583.
AT RIGHT: To reveal UR’s basic structure, this mono-weighted version, based on Kelley’s May 6th
© 2009 DARLENE 1583 alphabet, was created by finding the central axis of each stroke and averaging the thicknesses.
AT RIGHT: To reveal TAL’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583
alphabet, was created by locating the central axis of each stroke and averaging the thicks and thins.
© 2009 DARLENE
AT RIGHT: To reveal DRUX’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet,
was created by finding the central axis of each stroke and averaging the thicks & thins of the letter.
© 2009 DARLENE
25o
AT RIGHT: To reveal MED’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet,
was created by tracing the central axis of each stroke and averaging the weight between thicks and thins.
© 2009 DARLENE
© 2009 DARLENE
© 2009 DARLENE
AT RIGHT: To reveal DON’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet, was
created by tracing the central axis of each stroke and the average weight between thicks and thins.
© 2009 DARLENE
50 °
Wide Narrow
All from Dee’s Journal entry of March 26, 1583
AT RIGHT: To reveal FAM’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet,
was created by tracing the central axis of each stroke and the average angles & weight between thicks and thins.
© 2009 DARLENE
AT RIGHT: To reveal GISG’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet,
was created by tracing the central axis of each stroke and averaging the angle and the weight between thicks & thins.
© 2009 DARLENE
AT RIGHT: To reveal VAU’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet,
was created by tracing the central axis of each stroke and averaging the angles/weight between thicks and thins.
© 2009 DARLENE
AT RIGHT: To reveal PAL’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet,
was created by tracing the central axis of each stroke. In this case, averaging the weight between thicks and thins
decreased the horizontal / vertical angle from 85 degrees to 80 degrees.
© 2009 DARLENE
AT RIGHT: To reveal CEPH’s basic structure, the mono-weighted version, based on Kelley’s May 6th 1583 alphabet, was
created by tracing the central axis of each stroke & averaging the curves, angles & weight between thicks and thins.
© 2009 DARLENE
Some ms examples of
the letter “P.” The last
one is uncharacteristi-
cally squared off.
As previously noted, the lengths of the horizontal and vertical stokes of Kelley’s letter “E” are nearly
equal whereas in Crowley’s version, the top is much shorter.
Both curves of Kelley’s letter “S” is more prominent than in Crowley’s version.
The top stroke of all of Kelley’s “O” letters are vertical and consistently point towards the center of the
bottom stroke. None of the bottom strokes curve in the way Crowley’s does.
The biggest difference between these two styles is in the length of the two secondary horizontal strokes..
NOTE: In Kelley’s
alphabet, he used
a double stroke to
define the thick
This is the only example where Crowley’s letter is wider than Kelley’s. The strokes, often not
length of the secondary stroke of the letter “N” is considerable. filling them in.
This is apparent
in many instances
and should esta-
blish how inten-
tional the thicker
strokes are.
Both Crowley’s letter “B” and “U” closely approximate Kelley’s versions.
© 2009 DARLENE
THE OPHANIC ALPHABET PART 1 87
A New Ophanic Font Design Emerges
hen I designed my unnamed Enochian font in 1995, I did not have
Wthe benefit of the comparative analysis produced here. Upon review, I
needed to update it. My font redesign occurred precisely fifteen years after it was
originally conceived. In my comparison below, the proportional relationships of
many of the letters have been tweaked or adjusted. The letters requiring major
rennovations were C/K, M, O, R and S. The C/K character is linked in the center: it
is not two separate forms.
The lower curve of the “O”
needed to bow upward adjust-
ing the way the upper and
lower strokes meet. Likewise,
the two strokes of the “S”
should connect in the middle.
The major difference
between the M and R regards
which stroke is primary and
which one is the tributary. The
primary stroke of the M is the
top one whereas the primary
stroke of the R is at the bottom.
The backwards angle seems to
also be a strong component of
the M. Whenever I forced the M
Comparison of two font designs created 15 years apart. character to be more upright, it
began to resemble the R, so I
adjusted the angle until it felt
right energetically.
The analysis resulted in
the emergence of a couple
of new type fonts: Ophanic
and Ophanic Lineal. Part Two
will examine the next step in
our indepth investigation: dis-
Above: Ophanic Lineal, a sans-serif Enochian typeface. covering the deeper meaning
Below: The Ophanic typefont created December,2009. implicit within these unusual
alphabetic letterforms.
1 Josten, C.H. 1964. “A Translation
of John Dee’s ‘Monas Hieroglyphica’
(Antwerp, 1564), with an Introduction
and Annotations.” Ambix 12:84-221.
2 Peterson, Joseph. (2003).John Dee’s
Five Books of Mystery, Boston, MA:
Weiser Books. Liber Mysteriorum Quin-
Ophanic and Ophanic Lineal typefonts are commer- tas and Liber Loagaeth is available on-
cially available at: www.kagi.com/ophanicfonts line at: http://www.themagickalreview.org/
enochian/mss/sloane_3188/
PARABOLA
HYPERBOLE
CIRCLE
ELLIPSE
POINT LINE CROSS
3-D
doughnut
hole
Part of Veh - C/K Conic View Part of Or - F Conic View Part of Or - F Conic View
The letter parts above (in black) are shown from the place they emerge from the stem.
The conical forms are shown beginning from a place, unseen, in the middle of the stroke from
which it branches.
Part of Van - U/V Part of Pa - B Part of Veh - C Part of Veh - C Part of Tal - M Part of Don - R
and Conic View and Conic View and Conic View and Conic View and Conic View and Conic View
4. Vortex Pair. When one stroke connects two cones, the letter contains a
“vortex pair.” When the pair connect through a curve, there are dual flows of
energy moving concurrently, spinning both clockwise and counter-clockwise
and maintaining a very dynamic balance. The effect of two cones connecting
smoothly through a curve would be similar to a U-shaped magnet.
Part of Ur - L Conic View Part of Van - U/N Conic View Part of Ged - G/ J Conic View
Part of Conic
Na - H Conic View Gal - D View Part of Don - R Conic View
6. Simple Vortex Pair. The two examples below represent a Simple Vortex Pair
that connect through a straight path.
W ERE IT NOT for one important consideration, skeptics might have been
tempted to dismiss this entire line of inquiry. But the truth—the undeni-
able proof of its correctness—can be observed in Raphael’s triumphant words
given in Latin after dividing the letters into three groupings of seven. Let us recall
what Dee recorded:
“Then he lay down before it: and there cam two lines and
parted the 21 letters into 3 partes, eche being of 7. He sayd,
Numerus o perfectissimus, Unus et Trinus. Gloria tibi, Amen. “
The translated Latin reads: “The number, O most perfect, One and Threefold.
Glory be to you.” 15 In the diagram below, notice that within the first column
corresponding to the first line, there are three letters containing five cones, one
letter containing four cones and three letters containing 2 cones, totalling seven.
The second and third lines likewise contain the one and three pattern, thus
providing us with the following: line one, 3 - 1 - 3; line two, 1 - 3 - 3; and line
three, 3 - 3 - 1.
Because the pattern could just as easily have involved 2s, 4s or 5s, I contend
this ”one and threefold” pattern referred to above is Raphael’s way to indicate we
are on the right track.
Line 1
2 5 5 4 2 5 2 = 25
Line 2
3 2 2 4 3 2 3 = 19
Line 3
1 2 3 3 3 2 2 = 16
The number of the Ophanic alphabet’s flared terminals is enumerated above at sixty.
Instead of calling the forms “serifs,” they are referred to as “flows” to remind us of the
energetics inherently involved.
108 THE OPHANIC REVELATION − Section 2
If this is the case, it would only follow that sixty, being the total number of
flows, would also be significant. And so it is. Let’s recall another earlier discussion
in which “sixty” was found to be the number of frequencies that happen to be
detectable within our DNA.
By comparing all 60 pitches, we can find all of the precise ratios found in
the first 16 harmonics of the overtone series: octaves, P5th, P4ths, Major and
minor thirds, Major and minor 2nds and 7ths; even a ‘flat’ seventh. According
to Susan Alexjander: “Mathematically, the odds of this happening at random are
almost non-existent.”16 This information is made more phenomenal in consider-
ation of discoveries directly connecting the substance of DNA with the syntax
of language.
Language Reflects the Syntax of DNA
N THEIR ground-breaking book, “Vernetzte Intelligenz,” two German scien-
I tists cite the work of the Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr
Garjajev and his colleagues who explored the vibrational behavior of DNA by
modulating certain frequency patterns (sound) onto a laser-like ray and discov-
ered it influenced DNA frequency and thus the genetic information itself. Their
conclusion: “Living chromosomes function just like a holographic computer using
endogenous DNA laser radiation.” The authors, Fosar and Bludorf, go on to say
that according to their findings:
“...our DNA is not only responsible for the construction of our body
but also serves as data storage and communication. The Russian
linguists found that the genetic code -especially in the apparent
“useless” 90%- follows the same rules as all our human languages.
To this end they compared the rules of syntax (the way in which
words are put together to form phrases and sentences), semantics
(the study of meaning in language forms) and the basic rules of
grammar. They found that the alkalines of our DNA follow a regular
grammar and do have set rules just like our languages. Therefore,
human languages did not appear coincidentally but are a reflection
of our inherent DNA.” 17
If the proper frequencies of sound are used, the DNA substance (in living
tissue, not in vitro) will always react to language-modulated laser rays and even
to radio waves. Or one can simply use words and sentences of the human lan-
guage directly since the basic structure of DNA-alkaline pairs and language is of
the same structure and no DNA decoding is necessary. They’ve effectively proven
that its entirely normal and natural for our DNA to react to language.
“
No one knows how sound, the raw stuff of creation, impacts our
being; our consciousness. Mysteriously, we decode meanings which
come to us through sonic carrier waves, perceiving these waves as a
full-body experience not only through the ears but directly through
the bones, tissue and matter of the body. The body mass feels sound
“The Ophanic Alphabet: A Search for Meaning.” was originally published in the Journal of the
Western Mystery Tradition Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition 2.18 (2010).
PART ONE
5 Ibid. 157-161.
7 For a more detailed analysis of this process, see Crowley Liber LXXXIV vel chanokh.
Available: http://www.hermetic.com/crowley/libers/liber084.pdf. For a modern
transcription of Dee’s original notes, see Peterson.
8 Hulse.
9
Unfortunately few since Crowley have attempted to map out the sacred geometry
in any comprehensive way, and much of the mathematics used to describe symmetry
angles did not exists in Crowley’s time. Since understanding the subject at all requires,
for most, other initiatory knowledge in sacred languages such as Hebrew, see the build-
ing blocks presented by Regardie and others in the bibliography. Also note Crowley’s
discussion of the I Ching in Liber trigrammaton: Sub figura XXVII; Available on-line
http://lib.oto-usa.org/libri/liber0027.html. For recent comparisons
between the I-Ching and DNA, see Yan or Walter.
10 Bridges, op. cit.
The octahedron duals into the cube, point to face, and the cube spins into the
dodecahedron, which stellates into its dual, the icosahedron. 3D emerges from
the tetra, but what of 4D?
©1996 DARLENE
THE OCTAHEDRON
DUALS INTO
A CUBE.
It also emerges from the
tetra. If we take five tetra-
hedrons and merge
them according to their
bilateral symmetry we
form the 3D shadow of a
pentatope, the simplest
4D figure.
Cube Octahedron
Cubottaedro Cubealand
Dentro Octahedron
Cubo duals
e all’Ottaedro
©1997 DARLENE
©1996/2009 DARLENE
Edges: 30
Faces: 20
Vertices: 12
Length: Ø
Start with a Connect opposite From the mid-point, With the mid-point
hexagon hexagonal apexes. left, divide the hori- as center and radius,
inside a circle. zontal line in half and draw arc to connect
draw a line to the top with horizontal line.
of the circle.
Edges: 30
Faces: 12
Vertices: 20
Length: 1/Ø
THE DODECAHEDRON
EMERGES FROM THE ICOSAHEDRON
©1996 DARLENE
There are two more 4D solids, the 600 cell and the 120 cell, which are duals
and are developed from the icosahedron and the dodecahedron. Like the
cube/octa - hyper-octa/hyper-cube reversal, these higher 4D duals are also
reversed from 3D. These higher 4D solids have the same relationship with the
lower solids as in 3D. Five icosahedron merge to form the 120 cell polytope,
and fifty dodecahedrons form Phi ratios within the 600 cell figure, just as five
cubes form a dodecahedron and the vertices of the icosahedron appear within
the octahedron when its edges are divided into a Phi ratio.
COMPARISON TABLE
GEOMETRIC VERTICES LENGTH FACES CELLS
Pentatope 5 10 10 5
Hypercube 16 32 24 8
16-Cell 8 24 32 16
24-Cell 24 96 96 24
120-Cell 600 1200 720 120
600-Cell 120 720 1200 600
© 1996 DARLENE
Dodecahedronal
Sephiroth
Tiphareth
Cubic
Sephiroth
Tetrahedronal
Sephiroth
Sephira of the Tree of Life spaced by Tiphareth, the sixth sephiroth, is at the golden heart
the Vesica Pisces at the center of the Tree of Life and is encompassed
by the Cube and the Dodecahedron.
Malkuth
The Kabbalist’s Tree of Life is created by the intersection
points of four circles representing the four worlds and
the three vesica pisces they create.
The Geometry of the Earth Grid and its Connection to the Tree of Life
The earth is a dodecahedronal crystal. While the tectonic plates no longer
match the dodeca pattern, an indication of the planet's age, the basic crystal
structure survives. Each face is defined by the top point of one of twelve prism-
like 3D Trees expanding outward from the earth's core. This point becomes
the center of the dodecahedron's pentagonal face and one of the vertices of
its dual, the icosahedron. If we project all five platonic solid onto the surface
of a sphere, they nest perfectly within the pattern defined by the icosa-dodeca.
This pattern has been called the earth grid and there is much evidence that
it was used by the last pre-catastrophe civilization.
THE ICOSA-DODECAHEDRON
Length of Length of
line = Ø line = 1
If the earth grid mediates the An Unfolded Sphere showing how Four
Platonic solids and their 4D Tree of Life patterns fit together.
analogs, where do we find the
24 cell polytope, the Daat/gnosis
master solid?
We might look for something
that makes the earth unique,
such as the orbit of its satellite,
the moon. Thinking in terms of
the Tree of Life, we can collapse
the middle pillar, Kether, Daat,
Tiphareth, Yesod and Malkuth,
into two concentric circles,
Kether/ Tiphareth/ Malkuth and
Daat/ Yesod.
Taurus/
Gemini
Scorpio/
Sagittarius
Virgo/Leo
New Jerusalem then becomes the unitary model that allows the earth cube
and the solar hyper-cube to nest within the higher dimensional flow coming
from galactic central. It would mediate the centropic to entropic collapse of
light into matter by stabilizing the oscillation between 3 and 4 D, in other
words, a virtually eternal reality constructed from mind mirroring matter with
its own light.
The window of opportunity to create this is very narrow, and the results of
failure seem to be dire. The resonant alignment would seem to produce an
implosion of energy/information from the galactic core. The New Jerusalem
Cube is the switch box, and, to follow the analogy, if it is wired wrong or not
at all, then it explodes when the juice is turned on. The current is already
running, and the sparks are popping all over the planet.
The Radical Implications
In my examination of the Enochian system, I
discovered that the core of the system, the tablets
of the elements, form an unfolded hyper-
cube/hyper-octa matrix. Since the Enochian
alphabet itself develops out of an octa/hyper-
octa language crystal we might suspect that the
entire system is designed to translate the hyper-
dimensional energy cascade created by the
alignments of the Cube of Space.
THIS IS A COMPOUND
This means that the Enochian system might just OF THREE CUBES
be the best way we have of dealing with the influx FORMING CROSSES ON
EACH OTHER'S FACES.
of energy/information from the galactic core….
OPHANIC
STUDIES
of the
AETHYREA TEMPLE of
ENOCHIAN SCIENCE
E A F D G C B
E A F D G/J C/K B
Graph Un Or Gal Ged Veh Pa
7 6 5 4 3 2 1
N Q P LHI
N Q P L H I/Y M
Drux Ger Mals Ur Na Gon Tal
14 13 12 11 10 9 8
T S U Z R O X
T S U/V Z R O X
Gisg Fam Van Ceph Don Med Pal
21 20 19 18 17 16 15
y
rit
Aleph
la
Po
Mem
Shin
Mem
Shin
al
on
si
Aleph
en
im
D
ATTRIBUTES OF THE CUBE OF SPACE
Position Hebrew Attributes Enochian
3 Dimensions
Up/Down Aleph Air Un - A
Left/Right Mem Water Tal - M
Back/Front Shin Fire Gisg - T
12 Edges
Above-East Tzaddi Aries Ger - Q
South Cheth Cancer Na - H
West Lamed Libra Ur - L
North Ain Capricorn Med - O
Below-East Zain Gemini Ceph - Z
South Yod Virgo Gon - I,J,Y
West Samekh Sagittarius Pal - X
North Qoph Pisces Don - R
East-South Teth Leo Vau - U/V
North Vau Taurus Or - F
West-South Nun Scorpio Drux - N
North Heh Aquarius Graph - E
7 Directions (six faces + center)
Above Daleth Venus Gal - D
East Resh Sun Fam - S
South Gimel Moon Ged - G
West Kauf Jupiter Veh - C/K
North Pe Mars Mals - P
Below Beth Mercury Pa - B
Center Tau Earth Theta
The 7 x 12 Lamen Grid forms the basis for the Central Grid of the Holy Table.
The second version of the 7 x 12 Grid of the Holy Table is derived from rotatingthe
Symmetry Sets and this Forms the Basis for the Lamen.
The characters in the central diamond are built from the four
outer rows. The characters of the four outermost corners make
the corners of the diamond. Begin with the “L” in the lower left,
place it at the bottom of the diamond and work clockwise .
The next few steps are very complex and involve a type
of braiding. “G” and “B” are placed at the upper two squares;
mirrored by “O” and “L” at the lower two squares. Skip the “S”
and continue with the “E” “B” “A” and “O.” Next, use the first
“N” on the fourth line, then the “O” to its right. Next use the “N”
on the third line; jump across the table and use the next “N”
and “Y.” Now pick up the “S” from the second line.
Skip the last “N” on the fourth line and begin with the last
“L” on the sixth line. Jump across to the left and use the two
“Es” on the fifth line. Move back across and use the “A” and “N”
also on the fifth line. Pick up the skipped “N.” Use the “A” to the
left of the “N” and jump across to the sixth line, using the “S”
“E” and “U.”
ok
ah
ma
Bin
h(
th
are
d(
h
Tip
+)
(-)
ch
tza
Ne
CENTER
WEST Malkuth (- 0 +) Malkuth (- 0 +) EAST
K’AN LI
WATER Spirit AIR
Kether (0)
Ch
(-)
ok
ah
ma
(0) Yes
Bin
th o
h(
h are d(
0)
+)
Tip
RIGHT Geburah (+) Geburah (-)
FRONT
tza
d(
Ne
+)
BELOW
SOUTH / Feminine Node
Heaven Descending
AIR WATER
East West
(Yellow) (Blue)
EARTH FIRE
North South
(Black) (Red)
Angelic Angelic
Call Attribution Call Attribution
I for his work to depend upon the tools designated by the ancient Greek
geometers as the valid method for solving problems considered to be
worthy of mathematical investigation. These tools were simply the straight-edge
and compass. Other tools became to be used in more practical problems in fields
such as astronomy or navigation, but for the most philosophical speculations
the mathematics involved was studied for its own sake, something now labeled
pure mathematics. Dee considered these two tools more than objects for making
designs on paper, but fundamental principles that governed the structure of the
universe. In fact, throughout the Hieroglyphic Monad the explication reflects his
esteem for the geometric principles of a God created universe.
He explains to the reader that it is through the line and the circle that
“all things may be demonstrated” and therefore alludes to the actual straight-
edge and compass method as the preferred method for demonstrating algebraic
relationships. In Theorem II he is explicitly referring to Postulates I and III of Euclid
Book I concerning the necessity of a point in the construction of a line and that of
a line for the construction of the circle and therefore the point as the basis from
which “all things commence to emerge in principle.” Such a point is a Monad.
Dee expects the reader to have awareness of this Greek geometry. That expecta-
tion implies an acquaintance with the three classical geometric problems: the
squaring of the circle, the trisection of an angle, and the duplication of the
cube. Without understanding that Dee expects his reader to be aware of these
problems a large portion of the meaning of the Hieroglyph may be lost. The
hypothesis set forth is that John Dee intended for the culmination to occur
in Theorem XX by designating and thereby demonstrating a solution of the
duplication of the cube. To affect this he embraces alternative methods employ-
ing the use of conic sections, acknowledging the non-existence of a classical
solution, something that was only shown centuries later, and contrary to the con-
temporary attitude toward the quest for solutions. By considering these methods
he is not accepting defeat; rather by so doing he utilizes geometrical concepts
not in use until much later. This strongly suggests his awareness of geometry
beyond the earthly three dimensions.
According to historian of science J. L. Heilbron, in the introduction to the
translation of the Propaedeumata Aphoristica Dee really did have interest in the
duplication problem, the construction of a cube with twice the volume of a given
cube, for “there are two noteworthy points about Dee’s problems. First, they are
inspired by the ancient, unresolved problems of squaring the circle and, above
This article was originally published in the Journal of the Western Mystery Tradition 19, Vol.
2 (2010). See http://www.jwmt.org/v2n19/Delian.html
BIBLIOGRAPHY 235
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