Liber 777

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Cover of Liber 777

777 and Other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley commonly called Liber 777 is a collection of papers written by occultist Aleister Crowley. It is a table of magical correspondences. It was edited and introduced by Dr. Israel Regardie, and is a reference book based on the Hermetic Kabbalah.

Overall theme

The Golden Dawn was in part an expression of Hermetic Kabbalah, which was itself derived from Jewish mystical Kabbalah. In Judaism, Kabbalah is a form of Torah commentary that was especially prominent in the sixteenth century via the book the Zohar. It introduced the diminishing Four Worlds, God as the transcendent Ain Soph, Israel as embodying the Shekinah, or "presence", as children of the True God, and most famously the ten Sephiroth as schema of the universe between Israel and Jehovah.

It did this by interpreting the concrete ethics of the scripture. From the 15th century through the Enlightenment, esoteric groups drew from Christian Kabbalah, which was practiced and reinterpreted by occultists like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Pico della Mirandola and Eliphas Levi before being popularized in contemporary esoteric magic.

Content

Liber 777 Vel Prolegoma Symbolica Ad Systemam Sceptico-Mysticae Viae Explicande, Fundamentum Hieroglyphicum Sanctissimorum Scientiae Summae is designated a "Class B" document by Crowley. The title refers to a lightning flash descending the diagrammatic worlds, the zig-zag pattern suggesting three diminishing 7s and the sum value of the Gematria of the paths. It consists of roughly 191 columns, with each row corresponding to a specific Sephirah or path on the Tree of Life for a total of 35 rows and is used for a quick reference for corresponding mnemonics and factors of religion for use in magic.

Within the detail of the book the column's vertical axis is numbered from 1 to 32 signifying the 32-paths of wisdom which occur in the western Qabalah, numbers 1–10 are the sephirah of the universe and numbers 11–32 the paths which join them. The horizontal columns have many categories pertinent to religion, mythology and magick given in some 32-parts each.

The Hebrew alphabet, the tarot cards and the aastrological glyphs total 22-each and are given to the paths as a map of the magician's universe. From the 11th path onward some of these numbers have been exemplified by appearing to the left or right in the margin for easy reference, paths 11, 23, 31, 32-bis and 31-bis are leftwards and denote the five astrological elements; paths 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29 are rightwards and denote the 12 astrological signs, the rest are astrological planets.

The tables were constantly revised in Crowley's lifetime but it was not until 1955 that they were published ("Revised Prolegomena Symbolica ad Systemam......"). This includes smaller tables that extrapolate correspondences of the five elements, twelve zodiacal signs and seven planets only.

Publishing history

The first appearance of 777 was published anonymously in 1909 after Crowley had written it from memory in just a week. An introduction to one edition by "Frater N∴" states that Crowley may have published it anonymously because it was taken from a Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn manuscript that was obligatory for initiates to memorise.