oh man, so I was away for a while going on a mystical journey through Kabbalah’s ‘tree of life’ ala Alan Moore’s fantastic comic series “Promethea”, and you guys, it’s totally crazy. It’s way crazier than just Madonna and celebrities and Judaism, it’s like proper D&D, Gary Gygax/ Ursula LeGuin-type crazy.

 Let me start by stating that I’m not really studying the Kabbalah, as that seems to be a little more complex; I just quickly went through the Cliff’s notes version of some of the larger motifs (easy joke to make is that quickly going through the Cliff’s notes version is my larger motif). So you have this pattern called the ‘tree of life’, and it looks like this:

Bam! And all those little points on it are called sephira, which is just the hebrew word for number. So you’ve got these 10 spots, in order, and each represents something capital B Big. How big? Well all of Earth and the physical objects we interact with everyday, that’s number 10. At the bottom. *fart sound*

 It’s kinda complicated after that, with each path between sephira having a corresponding tarot card, and what the colors mean and the separation of the upper sphere and shit, so fuck all that. I skipped all that because any person’s own journey to spiritual enlightenment is boring to everyone else. Seriously, it’s like listening to people describe dreams.

 ANYWAY, the one I became most fascinated with is number 8, Hod. Hod (literally from hebrew ‘majesty’) is the domain of all types of communication.  It’s where we have notions like language and understanding and math and symbols. All of that is in number 8.

See I figure it’s the ability to process information and effectively communicate it to others that grants us intelligence. And it’s the ability to give rich, complex and varied descriptions of new things which proves our sentience. Without math to calculate or words to begin to construct philosophy around, we would have lost all the ingenious shit that mankind has contributed, like engineering and poetry and karaoke. So yeah, fuck the Golden truth of the Human Soul (6) or the Foundation of the Human Ego (9, although that’s where everyone’s bangin’), Hod’s where it’s at when it comes to being a thoughtful motherfucker.

 And you’re all “uh, whoa Diggy, it’s a little weird that you’re studying the Kabbalah in the first place. Is everything alright?”

And I’m all “oh, don’t worry about it. I mostly got into it as an offshoot of all the Hermetic stuff I’ve been reading”

And you’re all “Hermetic…stuff? Whu-“

And quickly, I’m like “yeah! You knew, like Hermes Trismegistus! Like Thoth, and Mercurial Magick and quicksilver and all that. Just the principle properties of Alchemy at this point, but I’ve got a couple Crowley books and I’ve been reading a lot of Austin Spare, so we’ll see what I can get up to by the end of Summer. My hope is that by the next solstice, I’m ready to take some serious communion with the Magic Square of Eights… maybe channel Ben Franklin or some shit”.

And that is when, even through the cold distance of web-based social interaction, you slowly back away, your face betraying a mixture of concern and disgust.

And it looks like this:

):0

 Thanks, Hod!

-diggy