The Qabalistical Hypercube

by Frater Pyramidatus 14th April 2011 WEYMOUTH

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law

A 'hypercube' has connotations these days with incomprehensible concepts about multidimensional
physics that mean nothing to most people, except when they enjoy the morphing graphical
representations of 6D expansions on the Web. I do not pretend to by a physicist of any calibre,
however I do know the Tree of Life in an intimate manner. I have lived with the 'restored' Tree of
Life for well over a decade and it is 'part of me' in a way that only other Qabalists might appreciate
and sympathise with. It is the universal regret of many academics that they did not begin their
intellectual lives with a symbolic system that was up to par with the insights they garnered yet,
sadly, could not express. We simply refer the student to the short essay by Crowley called 'What is
Qabalah' found in the preface to Liber DCCLXXVII, or at least in the modern edition from Samuel
Weiser. I do not pretend to understand the multidimensional physics that relates to the term
'hypercube' at all, but I do wish to share some insights into the Tree of Life as it connects perfectly
to the stacking of cubes.

When discussing the Tree of Life most commentators explain it away as a 'trinity of triads' with the
tenth Sphere, Malkuth, as a 'pendant' to the whole. Similarly they will explain it as a 'section of a
snowflake', for which Google The Diamonds of Chaos. Also Frater Achad wrote an amazing
treatise called The Anatomy of the Body of God. This book, with its stunning technical displays,
explains away the Tree of Life as an exponentially expanding diagram with each Tree's Kether, or
first Sphere, being allocated to the Tiphereth, or sixth Sphere, of another Tree. And this not in the
Jacob's Ladder diagrams that we find from Halevi, drawn by hand, but like I say in an exponentially
expanding and 'flowering' sense. We also find concentric circles being used to explain the Tree, for
instance by Drunvalo Melchizedek, as expansions of the seven circle 'Seed of Life', the larger
'Flower of Life' and so on. Another school of thought approaches this complicated exegesis from
the point of view of 'pillars' and turns the flat Tree of Life into a 3D construct by reflecting the Tree
around an axis either three or four times. In Laing's The Qabalistic Tarot we find the Tree reflected
four times to usher in the concept of the 'Four Worlds', whilst in some O.T.O. lectures we find that
they prefer to reflect the Tree only three times to confirm the 'trinity of triads' concept. Other
schools of thought follow Rudolph Steiner's ideas about projective geometry and turn the Tree of
Life into something utterly odd to the present author. The Occult Typhonian Order are obsessed
with the eleventh 'pseudo' Sphere as we find echoed in the Typhonian Trilogies in a manner which
also eludes my understanding. There is also more modern work being done in
www.abrahadabra.com with treats the Tree of Life as a subset of a single word; this web forum
seems to be also tangential, yet axiomatic, and drawing by stages away from anything I understand
as Qabalistic. I do not wish to go into much detail about the ground breaking work of Stan Tenen
and the Meru Foundation, nor Michael Drosnin's The Bible Code series of best sellers. It seems the
study of geometrical diagrams, such as the Tree of Life, has also seeded the growth of many new
and alien intellectual plants all of its own. However, in all my researches it seems that a rather
simple approach to the Tree of Life has been oddly omitted from the available literature, and this is
the approach of dealing with the Tree of Life as it applies to the stacking of cubes. And by the way
this has nothing to do with The Cube of Space by Hulse, which only deals with the reflections of the
Tarot as applied to a single cube, and only with the 22 Greater Mysteries and their reflections as
Mother, Double and Single letters as dictated by the Sepher Yetzirah. As always every Qabalistic
commentator has to bow in humility to the austere beauty of the original Hebrew, and wonder at the
tolerance limit of more ancient explorers in these rather murky waters. So I will finish my
introduction and make it also a disclaimer by saying this paper was written entirely from memory.
There are a few clues as to why the cube should be a model. First and foremost we know that the
Garden of Eden is based on a fourfold model, specifically the Four Rivers that flow out of it as we
find in Genesis. The idea of a Luciferean empire is based on a pyramid with escalating hierarchical
control mechanisms. We find pyramidal type thinking in most areas of modern life. The Garden of
Eden however is based on solidity and equality, which is prefigured in the Platonic, or regular, Solid
of the cube. A Tree found in the Garden of Eden would quite possibly be planted in the ground and
flower outwardly rather than reach an invisible summit, or a point, as prefigured in the Platonic
Solid of the octahedron, which if bifurcated is the conventional idea of the pyramid.

The central Sphere of the Tree of Life is Tiphereth, which translates as 'beauty', it is numbered as
six, which is the number of faces of a cube. There are ten Spheres in total, this is itself a very solid
and useful number. If we add all the integers up to four we arrive at ten. Qabalistically we say that
the Mystic Number of four is ten. The formula for calculating Mystic Numbers is: x(x/2)+(x/2). In
Platonic Theory the five regular solids are made by lines drawn across the interstices of the
economical grouping of spheres. For a rough idea of what I am talking about remember that the
most spheres that can be in simultaneous contact is four. Again the Mystic Number of four is ten,
the number of Spheres in the Tree of Life. You might think that you can compose a cube by
drawing lines over the interstices of eight spheres, which is true. However, in Platonic theory the
number of spheres is actually 14. This is because the order is tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron,
then cube, and finally the wonderful and sublime prism that we humbly refer to as the
dodecahedron. The number 14 is the value of ID, which is one way of spelling the Hebrew for
'hand' (normally it is spelt IVD however this shorter spelling is still valid). We find that the Hebrew
letter Yod which means 'hand', and stands for the character 'I' or sometimes 'Y', is the lowest
common denominator of the Hebrew Alephbeth. It is the central 'flame' of 'Flame Hebrew' (as it is
sometimes called in distinction to 'Rock Hebrew'). In a similar way the English letter 'I', as a
straight line, is the lowest common denominator of our alphabet which is generally composed of no-
nonsense straight lines and bold curves. (It may be useful to point out that the English letter 'Y' was
added to the 24 letter Latin alphabet along with the letter 'U'.) In more tangential fashion, or as
Crowley would say: 'by Yetzirah' we find that the 14th Trump of the Tarot corresponds to the
Hebrew letter Samekh which has the meaning of 'prop'. This could mean 'foundation', arguably, and
might mean that the cube, composed from the 14 spheres of Platonic Theory, is the basis of the
whole.

I now intend to get us closer to the point. It has been proved many decades ago that the Hebrew and
Arabic alphabets share a common source. If you take an utterly asymmetrical, and dark, shape that
fits inside a transparent tetrahedron, you will have a configuration that is known as 'The Light in the
Meeting Tent'. Technically, and in a way the author does not really grasp, this shape – or serpent –
is a three and a half turn torus. This is the serpent in the Garden of Eden, in one sense. So we have
here a combination of light and darkness, symmetry and asymmetry. If one shines a light through
this prism in certain ways in the shadows cast upon any convenient surface, as the prism is
manipulated, one will find the letters of the Hebrew Alephbeth as imprint. Admittedly the shapes
cast are hardly congruent with any modern recension of Hebrew, but the patterning does hold, and
the logic is watertight. This was all proved, and published, decades ago. As for the Arabic alphabet
I do not feel qualified to speak. So analyse below the two Great Duals:

Light – Darkness
Symmetry – Asymmetry

What is missing? I will tell you:

Rigidity – Flexibility
And now we come to paper folding. I would like to explain away my card folding as 'origami' but I
believe this a misnomer; firstly because origami only deals with square pieces of paper, and
secondly because card folding is very simple once the basics are mastered.

If one takes any cards based on the Golden Ratio, that is typically A4, A5, A6 ad infinitum, and fold
the card so that one has a square in the middle with two equal flaps then you can begin. Simply
take the cards, in what is known as a 'French grip' for some reason, and place six cards in such a
way that a 'solid' cube results. With a further six cards you can reinforce the surfaces and make
them smooth. It is only a little further away for one to start interconnecting these cubes into larger
'prisms'. I believe somewhere in Scandinavia a group of people are folding cards around the clock
in an effort to create a record breaker of some kind. People used to refer to these 'origami' type
shapes as 'business card boxes'. They are creepy yet fun, but the point here is to show that the Tree
of Life is based on a cubic idea rather than any of the multitudinous other schemes.

So we go on to make our hypercube. This is a simple cube with an extra cube on each surface.
Seven cubes altogether. This obviously requires 42 cards. In Gematria this is the value of 'AMA'
which means 'mother', or as Crowley elaborates: 'the mother as yet unfertilised by the Yod'. Now
each exposed cube will show five faces. Five times six is 30. We then have our hypercube made up
of 72 cards in total.

Tetragrammaton is the holy word of the Qabalah. It is so sacred that many orthodox Jews will not
write it even, and substitute it with the word ADNI. However, this word is IHVH, which by
Gematria has a value of 26, or 10 + 5 + 6 + 5. This is also the value of the Spheres on the Middle
Pillar of the Tree of Life: 10, 9, 6 & 1. We also find in some Qabalistic literature, especially in
Charles Poncé, that the Middle Pillar is the 'Tree of Life' whilst the other Pillars are the 'Tree of the
Knowledge of Good and Evil'. However, consider that: I + IH + IHV + IHVH, or 10 + 15 + 21 +
26, has the value of 72, the same number of cards in our construct.

So remember again our three Great Duals of Light/Darkness – Symmetry/Asymmetry –

Rigidity/Flexibility.

All this points towards the cube being a basis for the Tree of Life, rather than any of a number of
other approaches.

The further evidence is that we can actually 'see' the Tree of Life 'restored' diagram upon the
hypercube; if we can for instance stop thinking about it as a two-dimensional construct. Please
excuse the poor quality of the following diagram:
And we superimpose the Spheres of the Tree of Life thus:

So we have the rather familiar Tree of Life diagram on a rather unfamiliar background. And
however we try and deny this (admittedly poorly represented) scheme, the numbers and geometry
given above do confirm this as just as valid as any other approach.

We can analyse the paths now as though they are three-dimensional and look for new
correspondences, based on whether a Path is 1) on the edge of a cube, 2) crosses the plane of a
cube, 3) goes straight through a cube, or 4) entirely jumps out of the hypercube itself.

Aleph, joins 1 and 2 EDGE

Beth, joins 1 and 3 EDGE
Gimel, joins 1 and 6 AXIS
Daleth, joins 2 and 3 PLANE
Heh, joins 2 and 6 PLANE
Vav, joins 2 and 4 EDGE
Zayin, joins 3 and 6 PLANE
Cheth, joins 3 and 5 EDGE
Teth, joins 4 and 5 PLANE
Yod, joins 4 and 6 EDGE
Kaph, joins 4 and 7 PLANE
Lamed, joins 5 and 6 EDGE
Maim, joins 5 and 8 PLANE
Nun, joins 6 and 7 EDGE
Samekh, joins 6 and 9 EDGE
Ayin, joins 6 and 8 EDGE
Peh, joins 7 and 8 ESCAPE
Tzaddi, joins 7 and 9 PLANE
Qoph, joins 7 and 10 ESCAPE
Resh, joins 8 and 9 PLANE
Shin, joins 8 and 10 ESCAPE
Tau, joins 9 and 10 EDGE

Summary: 1 AXIS – 3 ESCAPE – 8 PLANE – 10 EDGE

Conventional Qabalistic dogma is echoed in the idea of the Abyss. We find that Gimel is the only
Path here that goes through a cube, and on the Tree of Life it is the longest Path, and the
conventional way of crossing Daäth. We also find another echo in the Path of Peh, in that it is
represented, by Yetzirah, as the 16th Greater Mystery of The Blasted Tower. Could the Tarot be
saying by the symbol of the lightning struck Tower that this Path exists outside of the construct?
We can only pontificate at this point.

How many different Trees can be projected on the the hypercube? Simply the same as the number
of points that live on each outer square, which is 24. There are 32 Paths (including Spheres but they
are sometimes all referred to as 'Paths') so there will be 768. This is mysteriously close to the key
Qabalistic number 777. If we remember that the Tarot deck contains 78, not 72 cards, we may see
where the extra nine Paths stem from. However, we find that this extra cube will consist eleven
Paths, not nine.

As as side note: If we fold up a 'vacant hypercube', id est a card construct that is basically a 27 cube
stack with the hypercube missing from, obviously, its middle. Then the number of cards needed to
'cover' its surfaces will also be 72.

I hope this short paper will provoke study into an aspect of Qabalism that I have not found covered
anywhere in Qabalistic literature or on the web. I hope its curt and pithy nature will be
supplemented by others of a more mathematical bent than me.

I will end this discourse by stating that the number 93, expressed in hexadecimal is 5D, which may
be read that Thelema is the key to the Fifth Dimension of Will, or Intention.

Love is the law, love under will