[This reprinted article was originally written in 1993 by Soror Ishtaria of the QBLH, one of my mentors. It describes the discovery of the Cyphers of Nu, explains the algorithm behind this particular system and provides some examples. Ed.]

So Many Stars!
The Discovery of the Cyphers of Nu.
by Soror Ishtaria, QBLH

The First Look
In the fall of 1979 I was handed a discovery which completely changed my approach to the study of Gematria, lead me to question the basis of my Magickal training and embark on the study of mathematics and computer science. Not many events change one's life and course so drastically, but then again it is not often that one is handed what I believe to be a codex to hidden knowledge. That codex was a key to the meaning of the English Alphabet and its relationship to the Aeon of Horus.

My first encounter with what I like to call "The Classical English Qabalah" was in a letter sent to me by a friend who was in contact with a Thelemic Magickal group in England. A member of their group had apparently devised a way of extracting numerical associations with the letters of the English alphabet by mapping them upon the 8 by 10 square grid work contained in the original manuscript of Aleister Crowley's Liber AL. In doing so she found that by drawing diagonal lines starting at the top left and wrapping them around produced a discernible pattern of letters which repeated itself on the grid work. By assigning a value to each letter as they occurred on the line produced a complete alphabet with each containing a unique value.
At first my reaction was of interest in such a creative way of approaching the grid work. In the letter my friend told me of several people who were working with the alphabet in this manner and were coming up with rather astounding results.

Being rather skeptical while at the same time open-minded I decided to investigate this a little and see what results this Gematria would yield when applied to Liber Al. So I looked for words that were interesting, added them up (as one would with any Gematria) and found a consistent association with words of like meaning. A few days later I became interested in the method of discovery (i.e. mapping the alphabet on to the grid work). In spending some time looking at the pattern I decided to attempt to re-map the pattern on to other forms. My first attempt lead me to producing a 26 pointed star. This created a tremendous excitement (both in myself and in my immediate circle) upon seeing the result for the first time.

As time went on many people spent time working with the English Gematria including a number of people in England who produced a Numerical and Lexical dictionary of each of the words contained within Liber Al (an astounding work which took 7 years to produce). During this time I felt that if we could only have a computer program to aid us in our analysis that we would better understand the meaning of the codex that we were working with.
Over the next few years I spoke with computer consultants in the attempt to determine how much it would cost to produce such a program. Only one of them would take us seriously and his fee (although reasonable) was more than we as a group could afford.

Enter Automation
Three years later I had the opportunity to buy my first personal computer and as a result spent all of my free time, for the next several months, learning everything I could about it and what I could about programming. Eventually this lead to a very primitive program which allowed the user to enter text and see the results printed on the screen showing each word with its total value underneath it. In the process I became totally obsessed by computers and computer programming concepts. Enough so, in fact, that I later went back to college to study the subject formally.
During all of this I continued to think about how to design a more useful program for examining text via the English Gematria as well as various ways of re-mapping the English letters and obtain new values. As my exposure to computer science increased I began to look at the problems of pattern re-mapping in a different light, I began to examine it more as a Computer Science problem than a puzzle.

Eggs and Donuts
This lead me to first view the 8 by 10 grid work as more a three dimensional problem. I determined that by reshaping the 8 by 10 grid that it might be possible to extract more unique values to the English letters and (MAYBE) find even more interesting results. My first attempt at this was to make the left and right sides loop to each other (thus creating a tube) and then stretch the top and bottom around so that they met. The result of this new shape was that each square on the edge met the one (and became next to) across from it both left to right and from top to bottom. This produces a shape which looks like a donut (or in Topology circles what is called a "Torus"). I was ecstatic that a new (and so radically different) shape could be extracted from the grid work but the Torus shape did not "feel" as though it "fit" into the Magickal scheme of things. So I continued to search for another shape which felt "right."
My next attempt at re-mapping the grid was to stretch it out on to a sphere. It worked somewhat but not being symmetrical to start with required that each of the squares be somewhat distorted. Then after discussing this with some Topology pros (one of whom said, "you can not comb a fuzzy sphere...") I realized that what I was really working with was not a sphere but an EGG shape! Ah Ha! That seemed to have a connection with the REAL Mythos. Now all that I had to do was to map the letters around it and come up with a creative way to extract letter values from the re-mapped three dimensional grid work.

You put your left foot in, you pull your left foot out...
Now with the egg shape to work with and the letters mapped around it I was ready to embark on a different approach to generating letter values. This is how it worked:

Each square has four sides and four corners totaling eight different directions in which a square may connect with its neighboring squares. For the sake of this paper lets refer to each direction as North, North-East, East, South-East, South, South-West, West and North-West. By starting in a given direction (lets say North) from a given square we arrive at the next adjacent square. If we "remember" the letter of the previous square we can compare it with the letter contained on the next square (in this case the northern most square). If we find that we have already encountered that letter we step back to the previous square, turn clock-wise to the next square (in this case North-East) and see if we've already encountered the letter contained there. If we haven't then we move to that square and begin again by starting to the northern square (from the one that we just move to) and continue to compare that letter with all of the ones which we have currently gotten on our path. We continue this until our path has been exhausted by

a) obtaining each of the 26 letters without any duplicates

or

b) have made an attempt in all eight directions

In either case we then move back one square turn to the next direction and continue the search using this simple set of rules. The only difference is that in the case of finding 26 unique letters that we save the pathway and the number of the letters in the order that they were found.
(I know that reading this can be somewhat confusing so I suggest that you try it and it will become more apparent, you can even do it on paper (with some limitations) using the original 8 by 10 grid itself).

My next task was to write a computer program to apply these rules to the Egg and see what could be found. So I spent several weeks (my skill set had improved in the years since my first programming attempt) to encode the rules and display the progress of the path search on the screen for viewing. I foolishly thought that I could run the program for a few hours and get all of the results that could be found.

Finally the time arrived! The software was in place, the graphic image showing the progress was working, results could be saved and latter recalled and I started the program. To my amazement the path search looked like a Snake wildly moving it's tail all over the Egg surface! I can not describe the shutters that went up my spine at that moment.

The Snake and the Egg!

Why had this not occurred to me before?!

The program ran for a day, for several days and finally for the full week before I finally halted it. It was apparent that we were nowhere even close to being finished and it had produced over 100 thousand possible Gematrias. I was disappointed. Not so much that it had not finished (though I did feel a little foolish) but rather that the number of positive results were so incredibly high. It didn't seem that there was anything "special" about the results (being that there were so many). And as far as when it would finally finish... There are 80 squares, each having 8 directions and requiring that it reach out to 26 squares. This results in:

26! X 8! X 80

That's right, 26 factorial times 8 factorial times 80 unique starting points. Even at the time of the writing of this article (April, 1993) no current machine could complete the full assay before the sun collapsed in on itself!

I am sure that there is something there, especially after seeing how it Snaked its way over the path surface. But all I could do is put my tail between my legs and "go back to the drawing board" and re-think the whole problem out.

Reaching for the Stars!
I began to re-examine the 26 pointed star that I had drawn years before. The Classical English Qabalah contains a cycle of 11. That is, you start at A, count eleven letters and reach L, count another eleven letters and you reach W and so on until you get back to A again. It's clean and simple. So I wondered how many stars could be drawn.

In thinking about this it was immediately apparent that to produce multiple star patterns one would again have to come up with a set of rules. This is needed to determine when one has obtained a 26 pointed star as well as when an attempt has failed. Additionally, it is necessary to devise a "playing field" to work on. Getting away from the idea of using computers for a moment lets see how this could be accomplished manually.

To start with draw a circle and mark 26 equally spaced points (if we were doing this on wood we could pound a nail in at each point and leave it just sticking out a little). Starting with the first point at the top assign the letter A to it, B to the next clock-wise point, C to the next and so on. Now we have a wooden circle, 26 equally spaced nails (each sticking out just a little) with the alphabet placed in order above each nail. Now we need something to draw the stars with, let's use a string. Tie the string on the nail represented by the letter A at the very top of the circle. At this point we now have the machinery needed for our analysis. Next we need to establish how we are going to draw the star in an orderly fashion. Remembering that star shapes are composed of "cycles" (just as the one produced via the Classical English Qabalah uses a cycle of eleven) we can draw (with the string) each line of the star by counting over an established number of letters to produce the next point, then counting again to the next point and so on.

Now we need to establish the set of rules to identify the successes from the failures.

1. Start at a specific point on the circle (we chose the A point at the top).
2. Count over a specific number of letters and connect the previous point to this one using the string.
3. If the new point does not already have the string wrapped around it then wrap the string around it and repeat Rule 2.
4. If the string has already been wrapped around this point and this is not the A point then this is not a True Star. Un-wrap the string from the circle, add 1 to the cycle and go back to Rule 1.
5. If this IS the A point but there are still points on the circle that have not yet been touched then this is also false because it is not a True 26 Pointed Star. Again, un-wrap the string from the circle, add 1 to the cycle and go back to Rule 1.
6. If this IS the A point and all of the points have been wrapped by the string then we've found a True 26 Pointed Star! Write down the number of this star (was this the first, second, third, etc. one that was found), the cycle that was used to produce it and the value of each letter starting with A (A=1).
7. Add 1 to the cycle and go back to Rule 1

Now we are ready! We will start with a cycle of 1. Starting at A we count over 1 and wrap the string around B, then we count over 1 again and wrap the string around C and so on. Finally we arrive back at A again. Each of the above rules have been followed and we successfully have found our first star (albeit that it looks more like a circle). So here A=1, B=2, C=3..., our cycle is 1 and this is the first star successfully found (Star 1). Next we use a cycle of 2. Starting again at A we count over 2 and reach C, then E and then G and so on. Finally we reach A again but find that not all of the points have been touched by the string. This fails so we add 1 to the cycle and go back to Rule 1. Now using a cycle of 3 we start again... This produces a 26 pointed star so A=1, D=2, G=3..., our cycle is 3 and this is the second star (Star 2).

A funny thing happens once we get to cycle 26, we count over 26 points and end up where we started at A. If we count over 27 points we have extended ourselves outside of the scope of 26 points (i.e. 27 repeats cycle 1; 28 repeats a cycle of 2, and so on). We have reached the number of cycles which can be drawn within one sweep of the circle (there are only 26 points to the star). Are we finished? Is there some way to over come this limitation? YES! We create multiple cycles. Just as the odometer in a car clicks over to the next digit after 9 miles (or kilometers depending on where you are reading this) our cycles can click over to the next digit after 26 cycles. So when we reach cycle 26 we click the next digit by one and assign 1 to the first digit thusly:

25=Cycle 25
1,1=Cycle 26
1,2=Cycle 27
1,3=Cycle 28
-
-
-
1,25=Cycle 51
2,1=Cycle 52
and so on...

This should take just a minute, Right?
After having established the rules needed to perform the analysis and writing the program to do the work we start the program running and sit back and just wait until it finishes giving us all of the results. OOPS! There are many more possibilities than I first thought, so many in fact that after running the program (on a variety of computing platforms) for 5 years we have only touched the surface.

During that 5 years about 20,000 stars have been found but we've attempted to draw a 26 pointed star just over 112 billion times! It would not have been possible for a Magickian to perform an analysis of this magnitude without computerized automation. This study was only possible, in fact, within the past 25 years. Consider, it has been estimated that a total of 12 billion human beings have walked the earth since our species first came into being. To do this manually each human has ever lived would have had to contribute 9 attempts of drawing the 26 pointed star. Additionally, everybody would have had to work together so that they didn't get the stars, and the attempts at drawing the stars, out of sync.

The very idea of having the whole human race doing this is of course ridiculous but it does demonstrate the scale of such a task. It is not possible to count from 1 to 112 billion in one's lifetime but it is possible to count to 20,000 in a relatively short period of time (at least when compared to 112 billion). And when one thinks about it in these terms it demonstrates how rare these star shapes are. They almost never occur in nature but these crystalline forms do exist!

So what's the point?
Each one of these stars produces its own Gematria and each star occurs in an ordered sequence (for example the Classical English Gematria is Cypher/Star 6). In working with these different Gematrias over the years I (and others) have determined that each one produces specific results (this is obvious). Several researchers working with these Cyphers have speculated that each Cypher (Star/Gematria) produces results specific to the number of that star. To wit, Cypher 6 seems to produce results which one might expect the number 6 consciousness to produce. Cypher 156 produces results which one might expect from the consciousness of the number 156.

A person who had been working with these Cyphers for several years once said to me, "It's as though each Cypher is the language of the angel of the number of that Cypher."

Additionally, other occurrences have been found which defy explanation. For example Cypher 777 produces the following:

Cypher 777
Cycle = 7, 23, 7, 4, 19, 4

When the letters are placed in their numerical order we have:

AHELPIMTQXBUYFCJNGKROVZSWD

AHELP = ALEPH

Pure Occult Research
Over the years that I have worked with this system it has become more and more apparent to me (and to those who have studied the Cyphers) that we are working with totally unexplored territory. Unlike the ancient Gematrias (Hebrew, Greek, etc., having right brain origins) which have had the benefit of being thoroughly researched for generations the Cyphers are completely new. In addition to the Cyphers having left brain origins there are no gurus, no experts, no absolute answers. If there really is something to this (and I believe that there is) then it is Occult research unique to our age, something which was totally inaccessible to our predecessors.

In closing, I intended this article to be primarily informational. To address some of the issues concerning the Cyphers of Nu, their evolution and application which have confused many potential investigators in the past. Anyone who is interested in pursuing this work is invited to do so. The software tools exist, publications like this one are beginning to circulate and a network of dedicated researchers is now in the process of forming. As a result the most valuable tool of all is making its entrance on to the scene, that is the open exchange of ideas within a community. With the opened exchange of ideas comes concrete discovery and then, perhaps, we will finally know.

Download LEXICON for computer assisted gematria.

Related articles:

Cypher 6

What is QBLH?

EQ6 results for "Ormus Lodge"