Dear Reader,
The following material appeared in an interview I gave to my dear friend Phoebus Glykon, where we talked about Alphanumeric Qabbala, Aleister Crowley's Liber AL vel Legis, the CCRU, Hyperstition, Gematria & wild synchronicities with the 'Synx' cipher.
For some of my readers, this text might be a surprise; for others, it may even be a shock. Others might very well criticize for talking about some things that are "strange" and should be left alone. To be honest — I don't care either way. Someone had to talk about this in the open, and that's exactly what me and Phoebus Glykon did.
You can read the original interview here, and it's being reproduced in this blog in this entirety with the approval of Phoebus Glykon.
Here it goes!
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Today we are continuing our Metempsychotic Metalogos series in written interview form with Luís Gonçalves, a gematria cipher lord of the web who has been studying occult numerological praxis and cryptography for over two decades. Luís and I started chatting sometime around 2020 when I began blogging about my experiences with Lynchian synchronicities which were mysteriously amped up by the ALW Cipher. The ALW Cipher came into usage in the late 1970’s when British Thelemite James Lees posed it as the answer to several lines in Liber AL vel Legis which indicate that a new form of English Gematria would uncover the secrets of The Book of the Law and the mysteries of its aeons. By the time I was deep into my work with ALW, Luís was already moving on and studying other solutions. He seems to have settled, at least for now, on CCRU’s Alphanumeric Qabbala as the best choice. Of course as early as the first decade of the 2000’s Nick Land had at least made an insinuation that AQ may indeed be the key to Liber Al since by AQ, AL = 31. In this interview, Luís systematically explains why AQ is relevant to Thelema. Luís also shares his hyperstitional experience of discovering the Synx Cipher which Nick Land apparently uses to this day and grapples with the disruptive nature synchronicities can take. Along the way Luís also gives us many helpful hints and tips concerning gematria and occult cryptography arguing for a lighthearted and skeptical approach to alphanumeric synchrogeneration.
You can check out some of his AQ calculators here:
Thank you again to Luís for retracing all of this fascinating work and sharing your steps for our own edification!
AND NOW
THE INTERVIEW
Phoebus: Luís, please tell us a little bit about who you are, where you are from and about your background in esoteric research and gematria.
Luís: Of course! My name is Luís Gonçalves, I’m 44 and I live in Portugal, my native country. I had my first contact with Gematria (and a bunch of other occult-related stuff) when I was around 12, and I started going to the library because I had never been in a library before, and I was curious to know what was there to read. And I found many interesting things, but the stuff that really caught my attention was on the shelf that was farthest away from the entrance: books about Astrology, religions, superstitions, folk traditions, numerology, well, many many things.
One of the first books I read from that section was a book on Numerology called “The Magic of Numbers”, by the pseudonymous Jorg Sabellicus. In the last pages of this book there was an oracle called “Hand of Fatima”, which contained an interesting figure of a hand, and each of the divisions of the hand contained a Latin letter and a corresponding number. Supposedly, if you added the values of the letters in your full birth name, you could have a glimpse of what your life would be like. It was very interesting and I played with it a lot — at least until I understood that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to play with it for too long... haha Anyway, this was just my first contact with Gematria. My most systematic study of Gematria, particularly English Gematria, only started around 2003 or 2004, when I began studying Thelema and knew about the riddles in the Book of the Law.
It was like this:
*As an aside, you can see what the oracle looks like with this software. It’s pretty much the same, including the same cipher (which is actually a Latin cipher from Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy): https://2near.com/edge/cabalistic/
And here’s the table of meanings for the numbers:
Try it with the name “Titanic”.
Phoebus: Very cool! So you just kind of followed your curiosity into occultism? Did you have anyone in your family or friends at school who were interested in these subjects?
Luís: Yeah, exactly. At school I only had one friend who shared these kinds of interests with me, but we talked more about Mayan calendrics rather than Esotericism. It was by that time that I had another friend, who I never met in person (we only talked through mIRC or actual handwritten letters: miss those times), and we talked a lot about the occult symbology in Marilyn Manson’s album “Antichrist Superstar”. He once sent me a copy of Alexander Roob’s “Alchemy & Mysticism” as a gift, and I really love that book. That guy disappeared completely. The last time we talked he told me he would do some ritual on a special date, his 23rd anniversary that would also be the 23rd day of (some month) in the year 2003. And that’s the last time we talked. I was baffled. Years later, when I joined the same IRC server we used before, apparently no one remembered him. Anyway, by 2004 me and some friends from Lisbon and Porto were part of a study group, lead by Gilberto de Lascariz, a very well-known figure in the occult circles in Portugal, and a terribly interesting guy, with a powerful and magnetic presence. We all did some rituals together, and I learned a lot with him and my friends. I was invited into an esoteric order and I did some preparatory things... but I never actually completed it, or (to be honest) cared about joining an order. I understand it can be an enriching experience, but I guess I always preferred to be ‘neutral’, i.e. to do what I want to do, not what others expect me to do.
Phoebus: So were you always interested in mathematics or did your interest in numbers start with your esoteric discoveries?
Luís: I would say that I always had a natural inclination to numbers, but it was after I started studying Numerology (particularly the book I told you about in the last message, by Jorg Sabellicus) that I started paying more attention to numbers, and their characteristics, cycles and patterns. But as I said before I always liked numbers, even outside of the esoteric context, because I remember, as an adult, re-reading an old book of Mathematics from my childhood because it had many interesting things about the numbers, like simple techniques for finding the divisors of a number, different historical methods of doing multiplications, etc. Even today, the same passion for numbers remains.
Phoebus: There are of course many forms of numerology and gematria that may produce all kinds of results. Do you have a specific criteria for what counts as a valid result or one that warrants further investigation?
Luís: Excellent question. That’s one of the major challenges when we try to decode a text. When I use Gematria to try to decode something, the first thing I try to understand is the context the text is inserted in, and that context will tell me something about which ciphers can be used, and which ciphers don’t make sense to be used at all. But first of all: how can we be sure that a text is ciphered with Gematria? Here’s some examples:
— we are sure that the author of the text is familiar with Gematria (for example “The Canon” by William Stirling, which contains at least one hidden ciphered message);
— there’s something “fishy” in the text: for example a sequence of words that are capitalized and/or italicized (so as to catch the eye of the cryptographer), differently formatted text, patterns at the beginning of consecutive lines, strange or misspelled names, etc. The limit is literally the imagination, and with modern technology the techniques may vary a LOT;
— there are subtle references in the source material indicating that more is being said than what is written, so we must use the correct ‘key’ (cipher) to crack the message.
For example, if I have a suspicion that a book about Rosicrucianism contains ciphered messages (in paragraphs, or phrases, or names, etc) I will try to use ciphers that are related to Rosicrucianism, like the Baconian/Elizabethan ciphers. If the book in question is written in classical Latin, for example, then I’ll know that I can’t use modern English ciphers with that book, because the classical Latin alphabet had less letters than the modern Latin alphabet (23 instead of 26). So that’s the second step. The next step is simply to experiment, and that’s the tricky part. And it’s tricky because, in fact, many different ciphers can deliver “significant matches” when applied to the same source material — but even then we can check if the ciphers we’re using to decipher the text are actually valid in that case. And to know that, we must verify if we can decode hidden references consistently with the same cipher. Because if one specific cipher can decode several ciphered parts of the source material in a consistent way, then that is highly unlikely to happen by chance. If, on the contrary, the decoded text is meaningful only 1% of the time, then that’s a sign that maybe the cipher wasn’t used originally to encode any secret references in the source material. But many times, even with these kinds of tests it’s difficult to be 100% sure. Many times it’s just guesswork — particularly in the context of English Gematria, which has become an absolute chaos of new ciphers invented every day and being used indiscriminately. In that aspect, working with Hebrew Gematria or Greek Isopsephy is much easier.
William Stirling never mentions this in the whole book (The Canon, William Stirling Maxwell), but the fact is that “Jesus Christ” sums 1275 in Agrippa’s Latin cipher.
Phoebus: In reference to these cryptographic texts, our paths intersected in the study of Aleister Crowley’s Liber AL vel Legis concerning the mysteries of verse 2:76 which some posit is a key to the “new order and value” of the coming Aeons. Can you tell us about your journey concerning these mysteries and how it relates to gematria?
Luís: My studies of Crowley’s Liber AL vel Legis can be traced back to the early 2000's, when I started studying Thelema and a lot of other different things at the same time. The late 90's had been a time of discovery for me, because I had decided that my path would be neither “light” nor “dark”, but I would have to explore both sides of the spectrum in order to find my own way. By the early 2000’s I made a lot of friends who shared many interests with me (most of them from Porto and Lisboa), and we were together many times and shared lots of things with each other.
It was a very enriching time for me. Inevitably, we had many discussions about Thelema, and my attention (as someone who always enjoyed studying codes and ciphers) was immediately drawn to the riddles contained in the Book of the Law.
Almost at the same time, I don’t remember exactly when, I also found some very nice software, like the good old programs called LEXICON (by Soror Ishtaria / Tina Coutu) and CIPHER 1000 (by Gerald Del Campo, I think), which became my favorite tools for analyzing Liber AL vel Legis according to the cipher known as “English Qaballa” or “ALW Cipher”. For a very long time (at least until late April 2021) English Qaballa was my absolutely favorite cipher to analyze the Book of the Law, because (amongst all the other solutions that had been proposed before), the ALW cipher seemed to make sense, or at least it seemed to be the least unsatisfactory solution to the riddles of AL.
I must be honest here: I was never 100% convinced about any of the solutions that had been presented over the years. English Qaballa looked like the most promising, no doubt about that, but even then the solution it presented to the riddles of AL wasn’t entirely satisfactory — I always thought there was something missing, something didn’t make sense, or something truly inspiring was missing. But I played along with it for a long time, and I even made some tests in the way with the cryptographic cipher of the Bavarian Illuminati as well. LOL.
So I had plenty of time to experiment...
Anyway, in April 29, 2021 a major discovery and synchronicity innaugurated a new area of exploration for me. It was on this day that a friend told me about Alphanumeric Qabbala (or simply AQ), which is fundamentally the same as base36 notation (0-9, A-Z) but applied to Gematria. The great synchronicity about this is that just 1 week before this, I was experimenting with base36 as a cipher of Gematria, merely as a personal experience and being completely unaware that such a cipher was already known and being used. Then I found this through the text “Qabbala 101, Part 1” in the Hyperstition blog where someone had written about how the AQ cipher seemed to show some interesting patterns when applied to Thelema. Namely, the fact that the Law of the Thelema added to 777 (DO WHAT THOU WILT SHALL BE THE WHOLE OF THE LAW = 777 (AQ)), which is precisely the number of Crowley’s book of correspondences for both Sephiroth & Hebrew letters (Liber 777). Also, the fact that “AL” adds to 31 (AL = 31 = LA (AQ)), matching its value in both Hebrew Gematria and Greek Isopsephy. I was already aware that base36 seemed to be an “interesting” system to work with, but it was only when I read “Qabbala 101” that something ‘clicked’ in me, and I immediately knew that I had to explore this.
I later found that this text had been written by the philosopher Nick Land, who at some time was the head of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU), an experimental cultural theorist collective that operated for a time at Warwick University, and later in the very same flat where Aleister Crowley had been born more than a century before (!!!). I was immediately thrilled with so many new different things I was finding while reading the CCRU materials — besides, the CCRU writings were FILLED with secret references and correspondences, concealed in AQ equivalences, so for a very long time I analyzed the CCRU writings in search for secret correspondences using Gematria, and I was able to collect quite a few. At the same time, I never actually found how AQ could answer the riddles of AL, even though I was absolutely convinced that AQ was ‘special’ and that I should do ‘something’ with it. I just didn’t know what, so I continued experimenting with it.
Fast forward, and on January 31, 2023, an entirely new solution to the riddles of AL made itself known to me, and that solution is based precisely on Alphanumeric Qabbala. I’m not sure if you want me to explore this further right now, or if I could talk about it later. Anyway, let me just say that the universe truly has a sense of humor and irony. After all those years studying the riddles of AL and going against a brick wall, and after quitting my search for an actual solution (which I was already convinced was pointless), there comes a new solution that crosses my way, out of thin air, and it yells at me that I should explore it further. So the AQ solution came to me in phases, as it were. It was more like a process, not an immediate discovery.
Phoebus: Fascinating, yeah as one of the most habitual abusers of the ALW cipher I will say that there are some wonderful aspects to its usage and it seems to be an apt communication device for certain transtemporal hyper agents but it does not seem to be THE KEY to AL. Yete maybe it does reveal some layer of its esoteric secrets. I have only started taking AQ seriously in the last year myself after being prompted by some strange experiences concerning the Lemurian Time War but there were several correspondences which made for interesting analyses as it pertained to Thelemic ‘lore’, gematria, and these puzzles in Liber AL. Can you tell us more about how this link between AQ and AL unfolded for you?
Luís: When I was told about Alphanumeric Qabbala, with a link to “Qabbala 101” in the Hyperstition blog, I had already been using base36 notation as a cipher of Gematria for a week. So it was a curious coincidence — but more than that, after reading that post, I thought about how AQ could be an answer to the riddles of AL. My first thought was merely based on numerical patterns: AQ contains 36 characters (i.e. 0-9, A-Z), 36 is a triangular number (the 8th), and Crowley’s 666 is the 36th triangular number. So it seemed to make sense that this cipher would be relevant in the context of Thelema. But even then, how exactly could AQ explain the riddles in Liber AL vel Legis, or how and why could a cipher based on a computational notation system be the answer to the riddles in a book that was written by / transmitted to Crowley in 1904?
I don’t remember exactly when it was, but my greatest finding / experiment with AQ was when I wrote the complete alphanumeric sequence in the shape of a triangle:
I first called this symbol the “Alphanumeric Pyramid”, which is seemingly incorrect (since it’s a triangle, not a pyramid) even though it does have its own qabbalistic secrets. Anyway, the name that I finally decided to use was “English Trigon”, for the simple reason that “English” = 137 (AQ) = “Trigon” = “Alphabet”.
The first thing I noticed about this triangle was that there were 4 rows for the digits 0-9 and 4 rows for the letters A-Z, as if they were complementary series. For some time (roughly 2 years) I played a lot with this alphanumeric structure but never actually went beyond that. One day, however, more exactly on January 31, 2023, when I was writing my longest and most deeply encoded text about AQ, the alphanumeric solution made itself known to me. It was while I was looking at the cipher chart of AQ that the riddle can be divided into 4 groups of numbers followed by letters, and that the English Trigon itself contained 4 rows for the digits 0-9 and 4 rows for the letters A-Z. From that moment onwards, the alphanumeric solution became my obsession (even though I admit I was already fairly obsessed with AQ), and I shared a very crude first draft of the solution in my text “The Wonders & Magic of Alphanumeric Qabbala”.
Later I understood that the actual secret of the sequence of ‘numbers & words’ in AL II:76 is that it doesn’t mean anything per se, nor does it translate to any kind of message. What it actually does is to point towards the solution, which is the English Trigon itself. And it does this in three different ways:
1. The sequence in the riddle can be divided into 4 segments of numbers followed by letters, simulating the very same structure of base36 notation, on which both Alphanumeric Qabbala (its Gematria counterpart) and the English Trigon (i.e. the trigonal demonstration of AQ) were inspired:
— 4 6 3 8 A B K
— 2 4 A L G M O R
— 3 Y X
— 24 89 R P S T O V A L
(Compare with AQ = 0123456789abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz)
2. Those 4 segments of ‘the numbers & the words’ can be further compared with the 4 layers of digits (0-9) and 4 layers of letters (A-Z) in the English Trigon, establishing a direct correspondence between ‘the numbers & the words’ and this ‘new symbol’ of the English Trigon. What is important to note in this case, however, is that there is only 1 character in the riddle that doesn’t fit in the decoding process: and that’s the letter ‘X’. This is extremely relevant, and it actually reveals the key to unravel the riddle of AL III:47, the ‘grid page’.
3. The verse immediately before the riddle tells us to “listen to the numbers & the words”, which could be a further clue to the solution involved:
— The first word, “Aye!”, starts with an ‘A’ which corresponds to the number 10 according to AQ. This could represent the sequence of ten numerals, from 0 to 9;
— The next words, “listen to the numbers & the words”, contain a total of 26 letters (like the alphabet from A to Z) and they add to 585, exactly like the full English Alphabet.
Then we have the other major riddle of Liber AL vel Legis: the ‘grid page’, whose secrets still haven’t been fully decrypted or explained until this day — at least not in a completely satisfactory way.
The alphanumeric solution, again, brings a fresh new perspective on what the riddle means, associating the symbology of the English Trigon with the instructions contained in the cryptic verse of Liber AL:
“This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine. Let him not seek to try: but one cometh after him, whence I say not, who shall discover the Key of it all. Then this line drawn is a key: then this circle squared in its failure is a key also. And Abrahadabra. It shall be his child & that strangely. Let him not seek after this; for thereby alone can he fall from it.”
(AL III:47)
These instructions gain a new meaning when we read them as if they were pointing to the English Trigon:
1. The ‘line drawn’ is nothing less than a line drawn on the English Trigon, connecting 0 to Z, as if to point out that the solution is the sequence from 0 to Z.
2. The ‘circle squared in its failure’ corresponds to the letter ‘X’ — the same letter which was an anomaly in the riddle of AL II:76, thus “in its failure”. ‘X’ is moreover a key in the sense that it encodes the full alphanumeric sequence in two different ways:
— as a Roman numeral, ‘X’ corresponds to the number 10, thus encoding a reference to the 10 digits from 0 to 9;
— as the numeral 33 (according to AQ), the letter ‘X’ further encodes a reference to the full English Alphabet, since both ‘English’ and ‘Alphabet’ add to 137, the 33rd prime number. Remember the verse from AL II:55? It says it all:
“Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto.”
(AL II:55)
— it is also known that, in Elizabethan times, the English Alphabet was known as the Christ-Cross Row (=333 AQ), from the cross that was appended before the alphabet in old hornbooks.
3. And finally, ‘Abrahadabra’ is a key in the sense that ‘Abrahadabra’ is a mere modification of ‘Abracadabra’, a magical formula that was always written in the shape of a Triangle.
Perhaps by coincidence, the value of ‘Abracadabra’ according to AQ is 151, the 36th prime number.
Now, what exactly does this solution imply in the context of Thelema?
That’s actually the most interesting (and potentially polemical) part of all this, so we’ll talk about it, one step at a time.
I.
There are NO written records of base36 notation (or AQ, its Gematria counterpart) having been used in the late 19th or early 20th century, when Crowley ‘received’ the Book of the Law.
In fact, base36 notation only started being widely used during the age of computers, while the earliest records of any possible use of Alphanumeric Qabbala only come from the late 20th century — from the works of an experimental cultural theorist collective named CCRU (Cybernetic Culture Research Unit), which for a time operated at the Philosophy Department of Warwick University, and later in the very same flat where Aleister Crowley himself had been born more than a century before (!!!).
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II.
If the English Trigon (and by extension, AQ) is the ultimate answer to the riddles of Liber AL vel Legis, then this implies at least two hypotheses, and both of them are extraordinary.
There are (at least) two possibilities here. Let’s explore one at a time:
A) Crowley knew the solution to the riddles of Liber AL vel Legis all along, but posed as if he didn’t understand it. This would mean that the so-called ‘reception’ of the Book of the Law was nothing but a hoax, and Crowley himself authored the Book of the Law using his own secret cipher, and persistently lied about not understanding at least the major riddles contained in the book.
This is not impossible to have happened, at least considering Crowley’s distinct personality and his extreme megalomania.
It is unlikely, however, because there are no written records of base36 notation (and by extension, AQ) having been used by the time of Crowley. It wouldn’t be impossible for Crowley to come up with a new alphanumeric system of Gematria based on numbers & letters, but in that case I think he would have recorded it somewhere, or talked about it with someone, I don’t know — something. But the problem is: there’s nothing. Zero. Niente di niente. Nada. No records of Crowley having ever used an alphanumeric system of Gematria remotely similar to AQ. So it isn’t impossible: but I think it’s highly unlikely. Either that, or Crowley was THE hoax master, and his whole career was based on a cosmic prank on his followers. Again — that’s not impossible. But it sure is polemical.
There are many clues in Thelemic source materials that lead me into thinking that this might have been the case:
— Working with a sequence of numbers (or sephiroth) followed by letters wouldn’t have been a novelty for Crowley, since that’s precisely what he did in Liber 777. In this book, Crowley listed a series of correspondences for the sephiroth and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, numbering the sephiroth from 1 to 10, and then the Hebrew letters from 11 to 32. If we adapt this system and make it an alphanumeric sequence (i.e. “the numbers & the words”, as it says in AL II:76), we will have 10 digits 0-9, and 26 letters A-Z, and that’s precisely what Alphanumeric Qabbala is. Besides, the Law of Thelema adds to 777 in Alphanumeric Qabbala (which is most certainly irrelevant in light of this), not counting the fact that Liber AL was originally named “Liber L” (this is very relevant: https://hermetic.com/legis/xxxi/index).
Can you see a pattern here? I certainly do.
— According to Crowley:
“AL is the true name of the Book, for these letters, and their number 31, form the Master Key to its Mysteries.”
... and it just so happens that the value of “AL” according to Alphanumeric Qabbala is precisely 31 — which happens to match with its value in both Hebrew Gematria and Greek Isopsephy, which is extraordinary.
— Applying Alphanumeric Qabbala to key Thelemic terms and names reveals interesting patterns and significant numerical matches... which in fact can happen with any cipher that we decide to use. However, consistency is key here, and AQ surely is consistent in unravelling some secrets of Liber AL vel Legis. Notice, for example, the very first words in the 3 chapters of the Book of the Law:
- ‘HAD’ + ‘NU’ equals 93, matching the value of both Θελημα (Thelema, “will”) and Αγαπη (Agape, “love”) in Greek Isopsephy;
- ABRAHADABRA = 156: unexpectly, a significant number which represents Babalon in the Thelemic mythos (as well as seven 7’s, since 156 = 77+(7+7)/7+77). Curiously, SEVENTH = 156 as well, while SEVEN = BABALON.
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Now let's explore the second hypothesis:
B) Crowley was in fact ignorant of the solution, which means that he couldn't have been the author of the Book of the Law. In this case, the 'reception' of Liber AL vel Legis would have been genuine, and it was Aiwass himself (i.e. the 'Intelligence' who dictated Liber AL to Crowley) who had prophetic capabilities, being able to foresee the evolution of human technology, and the advent of base36 as a computational notation system.
This would be an equally extraordinary hypothesis, with the difference that in this case Crowley would have been honest about not knowing the solution to the main riddles of Liber AL vel Legis.
In this case, the main protagonist in this extraordinary discovery would be Aiwass, the 'Intelligence' who revealed the Book of the Law to Aleister Crowley, and encoded it with a cipher which had not yet been discovered — and, as we have seen before, is deeply connected to Crowley's favorite number: 666 (the 36th trigonal).
In this case, what remains to be answered is: why a cipher that only started being used in the age of computers?...
Phoebus: Ok so now I’ll just hit you with a slew of questions concerning the Landian aspects of AQ.
Can you help us understand AQ gematria’s role in hyperstition? Do you think that by working with AQ one begins to feed the hyperstitions in Liber AL or the CCCRU mythos? Recently, Land’s numogram was featured in a segment on Tucker Carlson’s podcast giving AQ a sort of surge in interest among ‘the masses’. Meanwhile Land has taken a weird “gnostic calvinist” turn. I recently heard him claim that the King James Bible is the supreme text for AQ work, that seems to fly in the face of everything we’ve just discussed.
What is your take on all this stuff?
Luís: Another excellent question, and I’m glad to answer it — and I’ll give you some very specific examples. I always say this when I talk about AQ, and I’ll say it again: my personal experience with AQ was filled with very significant ‘coincidences’ and synchronicities, to the point of sometimes making me doubt my sanity. I found about AQ and the Hyperstition blog (and by extension, the CCRU materials) simultaneously, even though, just some days before that, I was already entertaining the idea of using base36 notation as a system of Gematria. So you can imagine my surprise when, out of thin air, a friend tells me about AQ, and sends me a link to the post “Qabbala 101 - Part 1”, where Nick Land showed some ‘interesting’ properties of AQ when applied to the context of Thelema. Considering what happened in the meantime, I think this might have been an omen — or rather, perhaps it was the first hyperstition that I knew of, which eventually made itself true in 2023. It’s quite intriguing, looking at it now. Anyway, let’s move on.
The part of “CCRU Writings 1997-2003” that captivated me the most when I started studying it (in 2021) was the one dedicated to the Numogram and the Pandemonium system. What I really enjoyed about it is that it depends on numbers alone and basic arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction, and cumulation (i.e. triangular numbers). It’s almost a kind of “mathematical magic”, as I like to call it. The system is absolutely consistent in itself, and I like to compare it to a self-assembling machine, because it actually builds itself up, following its own principles and internal consistency. And in the end, all the Pandemonium system can be reduced to zeros and ones (see “Sarkonian mesh-tags”), which is precisely the fundamental language of computers. In my opinion, it’s the fact that the system “makes sense” (i.e. is mathematically consistent) that makes it work.
Speaking only for myself and from my own experience, what I can tell you is that all the coincidences in my life that happened during my work with AQ (and by extension, during my study of the CCRU materials) always involved the number 36, which is important both in the context of Alphanumeric Qabbala, and in the CCRU’s Pandemonium system. (I won’t dive into all the intricacies of the Pandemonium system, because there would be too many things to talk about, but for a starter I can definitely recommend Vexsys’ ground-breaking work on the Numogram, “Time Sorcery 0 & 1”). The number 36 is quite relevant in the Pandemonium system and could be seen as a door to “outside forces”, because it encodes both the net-span of Djynxx (guardian demon of the ‘Warp’, a spiralling vortex beyond time & space) and Gate-36, which connects the Time-Circuit (composed by the Zones 1-4-2-8-5-7) to the Plex (the outer gulfs of the Old Ones). So when all these coincidences involving the number 36 started happening to me, I had a very vivid and discomforting sensation that, somehow, the system had made itself ‘alive’, infesting my own reality with forces that were revealed to be too powerful to handle. That’s why, at this time, I have ostracized “CCRU Writings” to an unseen corner of my bookshelf. It’s not that I’m afraid of it — I’m not. But at least I won’t feel tempted...
Regarding the role of Gematria in Hyperstition, I can give you a clear example where Gematria was effectively (though unwillingly) used to generate hype, and thus it can be a powerful aid in Hyperstition. My more recent work with Gematria has been more geared towards experimentation, and while experimenting, I sometimes devise new ciphers of Gematria. One of those ciphers, now called “Synx”, started as one of my experiments. The inspiration for that cipher came to me many years ago, when I found about a polygonal cipher for the Hebrew alphabet devised by Raymond Abellio, which was based on the divisors of 360. Abellio discovered that the circle can only be divided into 22 regular polygons (from the 3-sided triangle to a 360-sided polygon), so it followed that we could make the first Hebrew letter, Aleph, correspond to 3 (i.e. the 3rd divisor of 360), continuing with the sequence of the divisors of 360, until the last letter Tav which would correspond to 360. This cipher made a lasting impact on me, and I played with it for some time and later I virtually ‘discarded’ the cipher — even though I would always remember the idea behind it. It was brilliant. Fast forward to early August 2023, and the idea dawned on me: if Raymond Abellio devised a new polygonal cipher for the Hebrew alphabet that was based on the divisors of 360 (which is the smallest number with exactly 24 divisors), I wondered if I could do the same with Alphanumeric Qabbala. Why not? Hmm! It sounded just right. The only thing I had to do would be to find the smallest number having exactly 36 divisors, so that I could make a direct correspondence between them and the 36 alphanumeric characters: 0-9, A-Z. And so I found that the number in question is 1260, a biblical number (see Rev 12:6) and I devised a cipher that I first called “Alphanumeric 1260”. I made some brief experimentations with that cipher and I found some curious things. I knew that Alphanumeric Qabbala was Nick Land’s favorite cipher, so, since this cipher was deeply connected to AQ, as a mere curiosity I calculated the value of “Nick Land” in this new cipher. I was mind-blown. The value was 333 — which not only seems to be one of Land’s favorite numbers (it’s even in his email address), but it was also present as “3:33” in his own profile picture on Twitter (as @Outsideness) at the time. I also found that “Old Nick”, a nickname that was used by Nick Land in the Hyperstition blog, adds to 333 as well.
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| Synx at Luís / Alektryon's edited version of Gematro |
The really crazy part started after I told Nick Land about this cipher. It was too good not to tell him, though... and he liked it. A LOT. What happened afterwards was an even more feverish wave of extraordinary coincidences and synchronicities than the one I had already felt when I started studying Alphanumeric Qabbala and the CCRU materials. The really strange thing was that it seemed to be the cipher itself that was attracting coincidences, but this time, those coincidences were centered on Nick Land. Take this example: in recreational mathematics, the number 1260 is considered the first “Vampire number”. According to the definition, a vampire number is a composite number with an even number of digits, that can be factored into two numbers with half the digits of the original number, where the digits of the two factors are the same as the digits of the original number. The two factors are called “fangs”. The two fangs can’t have trailing zeros simultaneously. From this it derives that 1260 is the first vampire number, because it can be factored into 21 and 60, and the digits of 21 and 60 are the same as the digits of 1260. So 21 and 60 are the “fangs” of 1260. Now take Nick Land’s collection of writings, published by Urbanomic.
Look at its title: “Fanged Noumena”. Now look at the artwork: it says “Vampire Noumena” (!!!). How many numbered pages does “Fanged Noumena” have? 666... These were just some of the coincidences that me and others found. Because that was the thing: findings and coincidences were ‘shared’ by different people. And eventually, many people who followed Nick Land started talking about this new cipher after our first exchanges (and subsequent ‘coincidences’), and there was even a time when I told Nick Land that I had found a great name for this cipher — “Synx” — and he told me that he had already been using it privately. Synx = Synchronicity. It was the cherry on top of the cake. The cipher had literally baptized itself. Even to this day there’s always someone amongst Land’s followers on ‘X’ that shares new findins with the “Synx” cipher, and there are some people who use it frequently.
But now, if you asked if I ‘liked’ telling Nick Land about this cipher, as well as everything that happened later? No, I didn’t. I even deleted my profile because the deliria was reaching insane levels, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. Now, what happened here? A new cipher was devised, and it created hype around itself (and Nick Land) precisely because some of the findings it returned were just too good to be true. Did it have an impact? I’m pretty sure it did, even though it seems to be residual at this time. Only Nick Land and a few other people still use it, and I for one try to avoid using it, because it is an experimental cipher, and people might confusedly think it is some kind of “historically relevant” cipher. It isn’t. But it surely entered in style.
Now, about Tucker Carlson’s podcast — when I first saw the image of Tucker Carlson holding a sheet with the Numogram on it, I thought it was a meme! Like most people, in fact... hahaha. Well, I think it can be ‘interesting’ — not exactly ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — if more people know about the Numogram and find new ways to use it. Vexsys made an excellent job exploring it as an effective magickal system. Maybe more people will be drawn to it and something new is born. Or maybe nothing happens and everything stays the same. Let’s see.
Regarding Nick Land’s claims about the KJB and AQ — I think Land isn’t the best person to have a discussion about ‘traditional’ uses of Gematria. I mean: the guy is really good with Gematria, and he can use AQ to try to decode the King James Bible, but what he will be doing in that case won’t be to “decode” anything, because it’s highly unlikely for AQ to have been used to encode information in the KJB — but instead to create meaning from the ‘meaningful’ matches he might find while exploring the KJB under an AQ lens. Personally, I think it would be much more reasonable to analyze the original King James Bible from 1611, which was written in Elizabethan English, using the Elizabethan ciphers. Even considering the controversy that says that Sir Francis Bacon had a hand in the King James Bible. THAT would be a really great idea of something to explore. But to think that the King James Bible is the “supreme text” for AQ work would be unreasonable, in my opinion.
Some images for context (note that the “Albano Quintanilla” account on X was mine, and is now deleted):
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ALPHANUMERIC SYNCHROGENERATION AND A STEP BACK FROM THE BRINK
This concludes our interview. Much like our last interview concerning Gematria with Groucho Trout, this installment of the METALOGOS leaves us with more questions concerning the deepest truths of alphanumeracy and its powers of hyperstitional synchrogeneration. Groucho and myself of course argue (though from slightly different perspectives) that the power of gematria lay in some larger entity’s hands and that reality itself can be read as a kind of script and deciphered through alphanumeric codes, while Gonçalves seems to stop short of adopting any sort of wild metaphysic to explain the synchronistic onslaughts that working with gematria will inevitably incur. Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the experience of working with alphanumeracy is this sort of impasse or aporia that occurs from the magickal success of the work. It’s as if at the very moment the results bleed out from within a text and it becomes real (hyperstition), this is precisely when the experiencer must take a step back and ask questions - a stepping back from the brink in spite of the brute force of meaning. I hope to keep probing this area of experience for some time to come here with the Metalogos series. Thank you for your support and thank you again to Luís Gonçalves. I hope to do it again soon.
- PHOEBUS_GLYKON
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