So many of my readers know about the Darunumi project: a new language for magical ritual. I just had some realizations about it, and some new direction ideas.
I spoke at Crucible about adding two extra paths to the Tree crossing
the Abyss; hence Darunumi would have two more letters than Hebrew. I somewhat flippantly referred to this as “restoring the universe to its primordial perfection”, but that’s not the case.
Consult Regardie’s The Golden Dawn and look at the “before and after
the Fall” diagrams. And consider the primordial state of things.
I don’t want, as a magician, to restore the universe to its primordial “perfection”. In its primordial state, it was too simple. There was too little of interest going on. In the Biblical story, there were only two human beings. In a more scientific one, there was only a singularity, which by itself is pretty boring (although they get exciting real fast when you’re trying to pilot your starship near one, I bet).
I don’t want to restore the universe to its primordial perfection. I want to make it better than its primordial perfection.
We speak in Qabalah of Da’ath (knowledge) being a “false” Sephirah. But in Gnosticism, we speak of wanting Gnosis, that is, real direct experiential knowledge. And we speak of this world, which on the classical Tree of Life is Malkuth (the kingdom), as being only an illusion. Buddhism likewise considers this world to be somewhat false. How can we reconcile the two?
With a new Tree of Life, of course.
The old Qabalistic tree is good for describing the present state of the cosmos; but being a magician means, by definition, not being content with the present state. We can do better.
The new Tree shows the lowest sphere as being the “false” or “illusory” Sephirah with the dashed lines. It shows the sphere in the middle of the Abyss — where the Fall happened — as being “real”, solid lines and filled in color. And what color? Indigo, the missing color on the old tree, and a very popular term for the people and the “spirit” of the New Age, as nebulous as that concept is.
(An aside: A friend I just ran this past points out that the division of the spectrum into seven colors is sort of arbitrary, and I agree; the color we assign this new sephirah is not really the point. The geometry is. We could make it fuschia, or argyle, or, ideally, octarine; it represents the union of knowledge and reality in one experiential whole.)
Just like in the old Tree, the false sephirah isn’t actually connected to the other sephirah — it’s just that in the old Tree there are paths through it, and in the new and improved Tree, we can leave it behind, for “the first earth had passed away”.
It turns out that when we count the paths on this new Tree, there are in fact 22 of them. So that doesn’t change; the magical language should have 22 letters like Hebrew, not 24. What changes is the identity and meaning of the paths, and that’s the next step in the project. I can tell you one thing for sure: the letter Ayin is being replaced.
“Behold, I make all things new.” And happy new year!
Addendum: I was made aware that the Sepher Yetzirah presents a different version of the Tree much more like my own (an image can be found, for now, at this link.) Although the overall configuration of the Sephiroth is the same as my new Tree, the key feature of my Tree is that Malkuth has been raised to unite with Daath — it is between Kether and Tiphereth now. The Sepher Yetzirah tree is missing Daath entirely and still has Malkuth at the bottom.