Liber 777 demystified - the Tables

Liber 777 is a rather convoluted set of tables of correspondences that are a reworking of the Golden Dawn attributions of the Tree of Life. Liber 777 is very concise, but it is also very abstruse; evidently written for the benefit of the Crowley, Allen Bennett and the other Adepti of the Golden Dawn rather for us, the great unwashed public.

There are actually six tables, which is not evident at first glance. For a start, even though Table 1 is at the beginning, it starts on the top right hand side of the page, and works across to the top of the left hand page, then back across for the bottom half of the right hand page, and then to the bottom of the left hand page. So, if you turn the page, you should always look to the top of the right hand page, rather than the top left.

If you are accustomed to hebrew or arabic, you are not much better off, because even though the flow across the page is from right to left, the tables start at the front of the book, rather than from the back. Confused? If someone can come up with a better explanation, please tell me.

Some of the tables do not run contiguously. So, for example, in my copy, Table 1 starts on page 3, then continues onto page 2, then page 5, page 4, and so on. Not surprisingly, mistakes occured, so the final columns of Table 1 appear after all the other tables, on page 37, with the columns going from left to right!

Matters are not helped by the use of Roman numerals; especially as the counting goes up from right to left...

So much for the tables and columns. Now it is time to mention the rows. Except for the late inclusions on page 37 and 38, there is always a Key Scale column on the far right that is composed of numbers. Table 1 starts from Zero, 0, and goes up to 32, with 31 and 32 duplicated. I will not go into the duplicated numbers 31bis and 32bis for now.

It is worthwhile remembering the numbers and their attribution to the Tarot cards (I have not mentioned the Tarot yet, but the Tarot is critical to understanding Liber 777, far more so than the Tree of Life.

The basic numbering from 0 to 32 encompasses all the Tarot cards in a very simple way. Zero or 0 is Nothing, and in many of the tables this row is empty. The numbers 1 to 10 are the Sephiroth, starting with Kether. 1 to 10 also signifies the Minor cards, with the Twos, Threes, Sixes and Tens also representing the Court cards. 11 to 32 represents the Major Arcana, starting with the Fool at 11. These tables do not have the Star and Emperor transposed - they were written probably by Crowley's mentor Allen Bennett who died long before the Book of the Law suggested that "Tzaddi is not the Star" .

To help the reader, in the original book some of the numbers in this column are offset to the left or right of centre. 11, 23 and 31, the Mother Letters, are set to the left, while the seven Planetary cards are to the centre, with the twelve zodiacal cards to the right.

The Six tables

Table 1 has 57 columns and 32 rows with the extra Zero and 31bis and 32bis. It is the biggest table by far, and it could be that the intention was that all the attributions would be on this table.

However, there are easier ways to handle the data (remember this is essentially a Victorian document), so we have Table 2 which has only five rows, composed of the Mother Letters, à, î and ù and 31bis and 32bis, so we are dealing with the four elements plus Spirit. There are 26 columns.

Table 3 is more straightforward, since it covers the seven planets and ten columns.

Table 4 takes us back to the ten sephiroth, which has 54 columns. The attributions here are not the general ones known.

Table 5 summarises the magical attributes of the twelve signs of the zodiac, including the angelic and goetic attributions.

Table 6 will be more familiar to the student of tarot since it details the basic attributions, such as the Hebrew letters to the Major Arcana, the titles of the cards, and descriptions.

These six tables are summaries of summaries, since they list the titles from the top of each column. This is intentional so that you can better see the structure. All the tables are sortable - click the Headers.

There is another reason why I have created these tables. I want Liber 777 to be Tarot friendly, so there are a further 78 pages that order the attributions according to the cards. The heading and number of each row will match the list of attributions for each card.