Welcome to lecture five on the philosophy of the CCIU, part one, which is on Kabbalah and the Numogram. This lecture is by far the most complex, occult and infamous. So the following two parts will be on the CCIU's work in relation to the Kabbalah and Kabbalism and the Numogram and the combination of these into an occult system of time sorcery, which is based on the philosophy we've previously spoken about. Now I will be getting into the specifics of the numagram later, that's the second part, but I'm going to begin here with a brief overview of what Kabbalism is, or Kabbalah, and how the CCIU, though it seems largely Nick Land, mutated the traditional Kabbalah into something juxtaposed with cyberculture. Now people spend their entire lives studying the
Kabbalah, quite literally, so any short course on Kabbalism isn't going to truly expand on it in any serious way. So for the sake of these lectures, I'll be looking less at the practice of Kabbalah and the practice of the numagram and the actual practice as opposed to what it means in relation to philosophy. So once again, we're focusing on the philosophy, the theory, what these things mean in terms of the system, as opposed to actually how to use the system, because a course on how to use the system is doubly difficult because one, it would be 10 to 20 hours long, and two it's something that you actually personally have to undertake yourself because any serious occult study and serious occult practice usually has a few rules one it needs to be a personal journey two it needs to be a journey that you undertake by yourself and you need to
figure out the things on your own with regards to practice and three the conclusions you come to have to be your own so one could go and study and practice the numogram or kabbalah or the tree of life and then give you all their conclusions but the conclusions that come from that aren't going to make sense to anyone who hasn't practiced it themselves so as much as I'd love to show you pneumogramic practice and how to do that and whether or not it's possible to do that or the methods of doing that I don't think it would actually be beneficial for those who want to do it and I believe that those who want to do it would find these ways with that said at the end of lecture two within the resources section there will be a few resources with regards to the CCIU writings text and with regards to some exterior books and pieces which will help someone sort of
direct themselves towards how you might do that. So we're going to begin here. The mythos of the CCIU in relation to the lemurs and the Lemurian time magic is one in which the lemurs or lemurians are seen as good. Even though they are chaotic, they are fragmentary and divisive. As stated in the first lecture with regards to Burroughs, Ghost Lemus of Madagascar, the lemurs are understood in the Kantian sense as these beings which conflict between time and space, and with regards to the traditional understandings of things such as this, because of their smooth nature as opposed to their striated nature, they would traditionally be seen as sort of chaotic, dark and bad. However, within In the CCRU mythos, what stands in for the bad guys is the AOE, or the architectonic
order of the eschaton. So the division here between what's considered good and what's considered bad is one of control and one of freedom. That is, the architectonic order of the eschaton, in concordance with the CCRU mythos, wish to keep man in his transcendental chains on the inside. So they want control, they want order, they want to retain the form of linear time indebted, to man's mode of synthesis. The Lemurians and the Lemus, however, and the form of Lemurian sorcery, on the other hand, are seen as the good guys. They are atemporal fluxing freedom, which we expanded on once again in Burroughs' story, The Ghost Lemus of Madagascar, mentioned in lecture one. So the mythos flips general notions of right and wrong, good and bad on their head.
with that said any notion of moralism with respect to non-linear time is already thwarted as we no longer have the generally accepted idea of causation as a way to determine what caused the right what caused the wrong what's considered bad how bad comes along as soon as you remove the the temporal form of linearity everything changes and this is why when you read Deleuze and Qutari and you read land and you read the CCIU, there is very, very little of what one can consider traditional, ethical or moralistic thinking because it just does not have the potentiality to appear in the usual ways that we expect it to. Okay, so we'll move on to the Kabbalah here.
So firstly, though, the Kabbalah, you know, what is it? So the Kabbalah is an esoteric method relating originally relating to jewish mysticism it later fragments off into forms of christian and hermetic kabbalah the teachings of the kabbalah are meant to explain one's relationship with god and the universe so explain one's relationship with the divine it's a divine practice one can already see that as a numeric system the kabbalah in the sense of the cciu can be easily assimilated onto a kantian framework and into the kantian framework into critique where the output of any Kabbalistic calculation isn't a representational form of the arithmetic but it's actually a communication between the inside and the outside so we spoke I spoke before
about how numbers on the inside are metric but they become diagrammatic on the outside so that that in turn in a Kantian sense we can understand that as there is actually a communication coming in from the outside when we work things out with numbers. So the communication between the inside and the outside, the output of any Kabbalistic practice, quite literally, is the outside coming in. The Kabbalah then, and Kabbalism, is the foundational framework used to create communication devices with the outside, or one of the possible systems you could use to create communication device to the outside. The overarching communication or sorcery device used by the CCIU is the pneumogram, which is part of a larger system called pandemonium, and the pneumogram is the
map of time within this system, and then there is the matrix which lists part of the pneumogram. We'll get into that later. Firstly, we'll look a little further into Kabbalah. As stated, traditionally it allows one to understand their relationship with God and the divine. traditional Karbalists hold two aspects in relation to God. God in essence as absolutely unknowable and God in manifestation. So you could almost say God, the second aspect is God as imminent. So we can see some overlaps between traditional Karbalism and the way in which the CCRU are using Karbalism, except God in the general sense is replaced with the outside for the CCRU, which understood very roughly is the atemporal outside of all possibility and potential. So the reason that we're using this communication device and this
Kabbalistic device is to metaphorically contact God but God is replaced with a materialist conception of the outside so we are attempting to communicate with difference with production in itself and the outside as a way to control our future. The most important text with regard to the CCIU and Cabala is Nick Land's Cabala 101, as far as I'm concerned, which can be found in Collapse Volume 1. Alongside this, there's various posts and comments on the CCIU run and affiliated blog Hyperstition, which will make up for any gaps in knowledge here, and there will be links and resources in the description below, as per usual. So in Cabala 101, Land starts by describing Cabala as
proceeding according to rigorously constructible procedures, as attested by the affinity with technicization, yet intrinsically related to an outsideness through which alone it could derive pragmatic sense. So Land here is drawing Kabbalah into the framework of Deleuze-Quartarian production and the machinic unconscious. He's understanding the calculations outputted by Kabbalist method, not as divine messages sent by God or by some traditional form of God, but cybernetic communications sent in from the outside, stating that it's through the outside alone which we can derive programic sense. There can be no programic sense unless it's coming in from the outside. Now when we think back to the lecture
on can and synthetic apiary knowledge, the carbonate system can be understood as a translation device which translates the mathematical principles coming in from the outside into a form of decipherable content on the inside. So we understand now that mathematics and scientific principles and mathematical principles touch on both these zones inside the outside and we understand there's communication and what Karbalism is. Karbalism is the system that allows us to have this communication and allows us to be able to translate it and the actual tools are for some they would be the tree of life but for the CCRU they've developed their own which is the numagram. so the tool needed to immanitize translation between the inside and the outside is the numagram
so in short the kabbalah allows us to understand the outside land continues since kabbalism is a practical program rather than a doctrine of any kind its formal errors mistakes are mere calculative irregularities and correcting these is actually a procedural requirement of, rather than an exception to, its continued development. This is on page 272 of Fang Numenah. Lan's understanding is that we're not dealing with an extension of Kantian critique in a philosophical or theoretical sense, but metaphorically we're dealing with a plugin, which allows us to interact with the Kantian system as if it was some form of software, which arguably it can be very easily read as a form of software. So, tribalism is a practical
program and installation which allows us to actually interact with the inside outside dynamic of Kantian critique. Land argues that any attempt to analyze code within the system in itself outside of kabbalistic utilization is a rationalist enterprise. That is to say one would be chasing their own tail again in the manner of analyzing representation from the position of representation. So Land continues his piece by expanding on his understanding of a system called gematria which is a system wherein a numerical value is assigned to a word or phrase based on its letters. Within this system, a single word or phrase can yield multiple values based on the geometric system used. Land also makes it clear in Kabbalah 101 that Kabbalah, and in a certain sense geometria,
are historical accidents which arose alongside the numeric shift to decimal notion or notation, zero, and quantification. This is why in later interviews and writings, Land argues that the birth of capitalism, zero and Kabbalah all mark the same historic occurrence, which is the occurrence of a certain form of calculating machinic unconscious on the outside, coming in so we're finally able to communicate with it and translate it. And this moment in time begins to act as a thresher of production, targeted at increasing its own capabilities of production. Lannes states again, politically, Kabbalism repels ideology. As a self-regenerating mass cultural glitch, it mimics the senseless exuberance of virus, profoundly indifferent to all partisan
considerations, indifferent even to the corroded solemnity of nihilism. It sustains no deliberate agendas. In its existence on the outside, Kabbalism has no inherent connection and places no value on the after effects of its machinations which are represented on the inside, much like capitalism, except capitalism learns from its mistakes. So to Kabbalism, what is computed on the inside are simply symptoms of its productive process on the outside. So let's look a little deeper into Land's text Kabbalah 101. Land begins by mentioning the Anglossic Kabbalah by August Burroughs. This is a, as far as I can tell and found out, this is a fiction of Land and the CCIU's creation. It's a device used to propagate his own system of found Kabbalah or created Kabbalah into our reality,
the basic tool of which is the alphanumeric geometria. Geometric systems have two distinctive typical features, according to Land, and explained by the philosopher Reza Negar Astani. One, they substitute letters for numerical values, overcoding numerals where they exist. And two, they code for discontinuous numerical values, typically 1 to 10, then 20 and 30, chunked in decimally significant magnitudes. So in traditional Jewish gematria, each Hebrew letter is represented by a number. For example, within the Semitic Abjad script, the letter Aleph equals one, the next letter Bet equals two, and on and on, until one hits ten, and from ten onwards it increases in decimally significant magnitudes, twenty, thirty, forty, etc. From this one can
calculate the numerical value of a word by adding together the values of each letter in it. If you had a Hebrew word which was made up of the letter aleph twice you know a a and then bet it would be one plus one plus two equals four. In the realm of biblical interpretation commentators have based an argument on numerological equivalents of words. If a word's numerical value equals that of another word a commentator might draw a connection between these two words and the verses in which they appear and use this to prove larger conceptual conclusions. Let's take an example here of the word cybernetic. In Jewish Geometria, c equals 3, y equals 400, b equals 2, e equals 5, r equals 80, n equals 40, e equals 5, t equals 100, i equals 9, and c equals 3, which means the entire digit sum
added all the letters up of the word cybernetic in Jewish Geometria is 647. We can then take that number and cross-reference it with words which also add up to the same number within that same geometric system. For instance, within traditional Jewish Kabbalah, cybernetic equals 647, which also equals helixists, or the phoenix code, and not of this earth, just to give a few examples. This is the basic geometric practice, and we'll come back to this later. Land begins to further play around with number in his Kabbalah 101, I say, extrapolating on a form of numerization he calls primitive numerization or pn. Primitive numerization is the process of simply equating each single letter with or with one or the notational element one. So then each letter
just simply equals one and then one can process words as tallies of singular digits. So that for instance the word cybernetic would be 10 ones or simply 10. The word zero would be four ones or four. Now this is where we begin to see the formations of the numerology behind the numogram form. but before i can explain why that is i briefly need to explain something called the tree of life earlier on i mentioned traditional kabbalah and its methodology and its reasoning i.e as the method of understanding one's relationship with god the tree of life is regularly used is the regularly used traditional diagram for traditional kabbalism which allows one to understand their spiritual path the symbolic configuration is made of 10 principles usually represented as spheres and the lines between them as paths. The nodes represent aspects of existence, the spheres
represent aspects of existence, or of God or the human psyche, and the lines or paths represent the relationship between those concepts. In Jewish Kabbalah, the nodes are called sefiroth. Traditional Kabbalists believe the tree of life to be a diagrammatic representation of the process by which the universe came into being. The notion of diagrams as opposed to pure numeracy becomes important for the CCRU later. Now, I won't go much further into the details of the tree of life, because in the face of the numagram, and when subsumed into the materialist, numeric, and cybernetic philosophy of the CCRU, it is seen as rather haphazard and actually nonsensical in relation to its numeric coherence. This of course takes a bit of work to see why, but I will briefly take you through it. It's important to understand how the numagram is an alteration of the tree of
life. What I'm going to explain here is the difference between the numerology of the traditional Caballus tree of life and the numerology of the CCRU's numogram which is considered by many to be a bastardization of the tree of life and even is named by the CCRU at certain points as a degenerate form of the tree of life. This explanation is reliant on a further piece of Kantian exposition for it to make full transcendental sense. In a piece within Fang Numenna called Barker Speaks within a section called Barker Numbering, Land states that once numbers are no longer overcoded and thus released from their metric function they are freed for other things and tend to become diagrammatic. Sequence is not order. A decoded sequence is something else. Sheer numeracy prior to any insertion into chronological structure. That's why decoding numbers implies an escape from assumptions of progressive time.
This is on page 502 and 503 of Fagnumena. Firstly here, one can understand that metric and diagrammatic respectively stand for the reality of numbers on the inside, where they're metric, and the outside, where they're diagrammatic. On the inside, number is understood as a representational metric of quantification. It's a point of calculation. It's still a representation. Whereas once deciphered, one begins to understand the diagram it is attached to on the outside. And with regards to the cybernetic productive process on the outside, there is meaning in numbers regarding their reality and transcendental functions on the outside, from which one can begin to understand and tamper with time. So from the inside, when we understand the calculations of numbers and we decipher what numbers are doing on the inside, we are given clues to the productive processes going on the outside, which is atemporal.
So in this manner, we are, to a certain degree, escaping linear time. So what does this all have to do with the tree of life and the numagram? Well, the CCIU found out that it has very little to do with the tree of life, because the tree of life's numbers don't map anything. There are no topological connections on the tree of life, as far as I can tell. The numbers of the Sephiroth are understood as if they have meaning in themselves on the inside as representation. The absolute absence of numerological connections in the Tree of Life implies a lack of diagrammatic potentiality, whereas when one begins to play around with the digit sum reductions on the numogram, the numerological diagrams begin to form in an extremely uncanny way. Let's look at the numerology of the Tree of Life first, and then later we'll go into the numerology of the numogram. so the tree of life has 10 attributes or emanations on its diagram represented by circles of spheres
these are called the sephirot and the tree of life indexes or begins at one and the run runs through diagrammatically as in the representational diagram to 400 the numerals 1 to 10 designate one of each sphere and the numbers 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 200 300 and 400 designate a numeral representation of the paths between the spheres, and the numbers 20, 40, 50, 80, and 90 also represent the higher numbers 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, respectively. Now, in Lon Milo Duquette's Chicken Cabala, we can begin to understand how one could play around with the traditional geometria here to somewhat make sense of this system numerically. Now, I use the text Chicken
Kabbalah because unlike other texts which are taken as analysis on the Kabbalah, the traditional Kabbalah, Duquette's text doesn't subsume the Kabbalah into an academic or scholastic framework. It treats it as much as one can as a mystical or occult system, which is what we want to do here. So the ideas posited in the chicken Kabbalah run as follows. Duquette says, what separates human beings from other animals? Thumbs. We have thumbs. Sure, apes and monkeys and a few lemurs have thumbs, but none of them use them to create things. Therefore, I've made the following conclusions. The and of the creator, or the creative mechanics of the universe, must be absolute unity, represented by the thumb, and it executes its creative power through a fourfold process, represented by the four fingers. This, I believe, is the primary reason our venerable ancestors
worshipped one god, whose great name is composed of four letters. The Hebrew word for hand is Yod. Yod is the tenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the fundamental letter of the alphabet. Yod represents the number 10 in our system of counting. Furthermore, we can see that the holy number 4 itself conceals the number 10. So we have 1 plus 2 plus 3 plus 4 equals 10, according to Duket. So this is given by Duket as one of the reasons why the culmination of the tree of life at 10 makes sense. But in my opinion, there's a few things wrong with this. Firstly, Duket doesn't begin with number. He begins with the language. and so is avoiding the most important part regarding numerology, the inherent cybernetic connectivity of numbers which is diagrammed on the outside before anything. The names are pure representation.
Tuckett continues by saying that the numbers 1, 4, and 10 be considered holy and or primary. Now as much as I've played around with these numbers, I simply cannot find any meaningful connections. Numerologically speaking, that is. With that said, I'm sure there's plenty of texts out there that could find numerological connections between these numbers, but for our purposes I simply don't see them in the way that we'll be using. So let's look at how Duquette unfolds this system and unfolds the diagram of the true life. Beginning with the number one Duquette decides to circle the number one with a sphere, draw a circle around it because it's a closed loop. Okay this somewhat makes sense, one is a closed loop, it doesn't have, it's not a multiple. He states that due to the loneliness of the number one it begins to ponder the nature of itself. What am I, the number one says. The conclusion it comes to is I am this,
and the tree of life in Ducat's analysis is quite Cartesian. From this analysis of itself, of the number one analysing itself, stating that one is this, Ducat argues that this implies a that, or the admittance of the concept two. Therefore, the numeral two appears in its own spheres. So the number one in analysing itself realises it's a single being, which implies that It has to have some form of reaction or opposition, which births two. This sort of makes sense. And the moment two is brought into existence, a third concept is created. The knowledge of the difference between self and not self. I am this, but not that. I am that, but not this. So three stands in for the other. If you have one and two, there is also something which isn't those two. You have to have the third path. And so now we have one, two, and three.
Now, since two and three are merely attributes of one, they are considered as a trinity. this trinity behaves in the exact same manner as the single number one did upon its birth and it reflects a second trinity of four five and six a third trinity is created upon the birth of the second trinity and the number 10 then hangs from the three triads and circles them as a kingdom fusing them into a whole it's not really explained why this is and it's also not explained as to why the third trinity seven eight and nine comes into existence now once this is all stacked It looks like the tree of life as we know it if you look at the diagram given. The backbone of this diagram, consisting of 1, 6, 9 and 10, adding together equal 22, which geometrically means God within traditional Kabbalah. When one inserts the three paths that join 1, 6, 9 and 10, we create a total of 12 paths.
These 12 paths link the 10 emanations and make a total of 22 once again. So okay, there's a couple of numeric connections here, but why is it the spheres total their inherent value and yet the paths are only taken as one and each path only represents a number. It's sort of playing around with it in a way which doesn't actually have a coherent system. Admittedly people spend their entire lives studying this tree of life as I've stated with meaning regarding the divine reality so I imagine there are some glaring gaps in my knowledge here but with regards to the CCRU system of pure numerology which is understanding that the numerology in the outside is primary and in relation to the CCRU Kantian framework we're talking about with its inherent relationship to the outside, I actually can't find any inherent numerological connections here between the numbers deposited in themselves as numbers foremost. Which means, in terms of the philosophy of the CCIU,
a few things. Early on, I mentioned that in relation to Kantian critique, the reality of numbers differs between the inside and the outside. So on the inside, for man, numbers are subsumed into the representational reality of metric and notation. That is, the way in which we experience numbers is phenomenally. We only perceive them as digits. However, this representation is mapping or veiling a diagram of the outside. On the outside, these connected numeric processes are mapping a topological numeral system. That is to say, when one notices numeric connections, communications, and maps which fluently work, then one is beginning to notice the ways in which numbers could be working diagrammatically on the outside, we're communing with the outside. And this is precisely what happens with the numagram. In their piece, Pandemonium Commentary, on page 297 of the CCIU writings, CCIU state, more devastatingly, the original consistency of
numeracy and language seems to have been fractured at an early stage, introducing the division between the number of the Sephiroth, 10, and that of the Hebrew alphabet, 22. The result was a break between the nodes of the tree and the interconnected paths, ruining all prospect of decipherment. The Sephiroth, segmented over against their connections, become static and structural, whilst the paths lose any rigorous principle of allocation. A strictly analogous outcome is evident in the segmentation of the tarot into major and minor arcana. Increasingly desperate, arbitrary and mystifying attempts to reunite the numbers and their linkages seem to have bedevilled all succeeding occult traditions. The CCRU here are alluding to the striated reality of the Tree of Life as opposed to the fluidity and smoothness of the numerological system of the numeral.
What the CCRU is stating here is, as I've stated, The numbers of the Tree of Life don't have any inherent natural or numeral diagrammatic connections which come to the fore immediately when you begin to play around with them. You have to play around with them in a humanist and representational manner to begin making any sense of them. You have to start from representation to do that, which means it just isn't working because what we're doing is trying to alter the outside from the inside, which can be done in certain ways but not this way. we need to target what's going on the outside first and begin to make sense of it so this has been an overview of Kabbalah and Dramatria and the tree of life and in the next lecture we're going to go on and we're going to look at the numagram system and the way in which that's
connected with this but purely the numagram system and how its numerological system is far far different and makes far far more sense than the tree of life which I've expanded on here see you