Month: May 2024

☉︎ in 5° ♊︎ : ☽︎ in 6° ♑︎ : ♄︎ : Ⅴⅹ

Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.

I’ve been playing with the riddle of Liber AL vel Legis for years now. I especially got hung up on the ALW cipher and even helped develop software to explore it further. However no version of a cipher ever felt satisfying to me.

In most copies of Liber CCXX you’ll find a pretty poorly scanned version of the written pages with tons of graphical noise. However there are versions of those pages with just the writing floating around on the Internet. It’s in these cleaned up versions is where things get interesting and potentially profound.

I got the initial idea to do this from a little hint given in the book The Philosophy of Thelema by Joseph Marek. In it, it has an image of the pages all laid out in columns and suggests you look at them at an angle. When you do that suddenly the chance shape of the handwriting seems to form into letters almost as if by magick. Ok that’s neat but what do we do with that? Well, on 3/14/2023 E.V. around 5pm I had a thought on that.

Within Liber CCXX, it contains a set of instructions that I’ve never seen anyone actually follow.

Paste the sheets from right to left and from top to bottom: then behold!

Liber AL vel Legis III:73

It’s such a simple instruction but beyond that little suggestion I’ve seen nobody else pay any attention to it. So given that realization from the hint and that instruction I did exactly that.

If you’re building lines and columns, how do you know how to structure them? Well, having dabbled as much as I have I immediately went to the enigmatic grid page. That grid looks a little stretched, doesn’t it? If it was there just to show correspondence of X to Y, why is the grid rectangular instead of square? Well, this book isn’t written on square paper, is it?

If you take those pages and follow that instruction, using the grid page as a guide, you get a nice little arrangement of lines and columns. Now, look at them in front of you at the shallow angle suggested, boom! A grid of letters.

Now I recognize that some are a little harder to pick out than others so I’ll admit some of it could be up to individual interpretation… except, what’s this? Brand new information that isn’t conveyed elsewhere that give specific and unambiguous insight to the riddle? How could that be if it wasn’t a part of the key?

This is a photo of the solve sheet I printed out and the letters I drew based on that I saw. Right there, line 6, that’s not random. That’s a message in plain English. “LINE-HOD”

This was exciting. I found something nobody else seems to have found and it’s something extremely unlikely to just be a random fluke. This is groundbreaking. So then what does it mean? Well if you overlay that on the grid page, things get even more interesting:

We’ve got a line and it connects two boxes on the grid both of which happen to be the letter C. This is a huge clue! Plus Hod is one of the sephirot, so that must be somehow related to the letter C.

Ok, what’s next? Well, I never figured that out but reading the bit about the word “abrahadabra” being a clue also. In a lot of folk magick practices, a common method employed to make something go away is to write the word “abracadabra” in a triangle shape removing one letter from the end at a time until it runs out. I had this image in my mind of something being done to the letters that involved that layout.

Having not solved it completely but given excitedly this new information to others, unfortunately never resulted any new insights or collaborators and I choose to keep it relatively quiet hoping I would later have some kind of discovery that would answer those remaining questions for me but every time I tried, I found myself discouraged hearing the words of scripture echoing in my head.

“…solve the first half of the equation, leave the second unattacked…”

Liber AL vel Legis I:56

So without any idea as to what to do next, and failing to find any collaborators, I just shelved the whole project thinking some new information would come to me eventually…until now. Just today, sent to me by a friend, is what I believe to be an answer to that very question.

This write-up of this solve can be found here: Alphanumeric Qabbala & the Riddles of AL

This suggests that if Hod = C, the new symbol to attribute to Hod would be 12, as C is 12 on the new chart. This would suggest perhaps an entirely new set of values for the Tree of Life. However I’m not satisfied with that answer. I think there’s something deeper I’m missing there.

As for the circle squared? Well if the X is a multiplication sign, the + in the center of the circle squared could be addition. So on the grid, the plus would when be to add I + C. If we use this new cipher then I = 18 and C = 12 giving us 31. Thelemites should already perk up their ears at that number given its significance. The entry for 31 in 777 includes this:

Coalescence of היהיהא and היהיהא‎
יהךה Macroprosopus and Microprosopus. This is symbolized by the Hexagram.

The hexagram? You mean the symbol we use to represent our religion? The goal of the alchemical union and arguably the goal of all of Thelema: merging of the microcosm (the self) with the macrocosm (God, or the consciousness of the universe)?

Then it also has this:

The Number of Abramelin

Abranelin happens to be the source of the oil recipe we use most in our rituals as it is called for in the book itself. Additionally, Crowley’s failed attempt at performing the Abranelin working to contact his own HG, Aiwass, happens to have created the new Kaaba, Bolskine House. It not only is our new origin point for prayer, replacing Mecca, but also was the start of what would turn into the very heart of Thelema. This significance cannot be ignored.¹

I know for certain now that there’s something to this, these solves each seem too on the nose to be wrong, but questions remain. However, while I’m not sure of everything, I intend to continue to play with it to try to find more.²

I’ll see you in the city of pyramids.

Love is the law, love under will.

Determined,
Vanessa

UPDATE: I created an alternative version of the gematria tool on this website to check the AQ cipher against various holy books. It can be found here.

¹ And to the question of the passage saying a mysterious “he” will expound it, well I’m not trying to be pretentious or anything but what would be a more perfect answer but to have two answers? For I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union.

² If you know me very well you’ll correctly guess that the next step I’m going to take is to throw it at a computer and see what happens.