I have no vested interest in getting lost in the mire of conflicting arrangements of The Book of Thoth and/or attempting to resolve these to any great extent, since, for the most part I find that it is of little consequence to Abrahadabra how you assert the conventional Tree of Life anyway, within certain constraints. In a sense, all popular arrangements are pronounced dead on arrival according to Abrahadabra for reasons owing to their own internal contradictions, making it impossible for them to actually equilibrate the sheer magnitude of universe they purport to map out. Yet Abrahadabra distinctly reclaims the Tree of Life according to its own unique criterion, so that we are left with a profound mystery to sort out regarding the Tree's final elemental constitution. My principle objective is to unveil a new way of looking at elemental properties themselves, but as a matter of clarification I will spend just a little time surveying how the Principle of Proximity impacts Aleister Crowley's Book of Thoth, since I am most familiar with that version in general.

Curiously, what we find is that there is almost no difference here at all save in the positional swapping of 6 of 22 paths, so that we are left having to conclude that either (A) conventional arrangements have only ever approximated a true chronology without consciously recognizing any underscoring principle at all, or (B) may have started out at some earlier stage of things properly aligned but became modified over time by those who either did not know or did not care about the distortions they were promoting. The arrangement above is based upon the "Aik Bkr" alignment of Hebrew letters/numbers to the Chronological Tree with Atu (Thoth) numerations lining up (somewhat awkwardly) behind these values. It should be recognized that alphabetical arrangements are not true logical chronologies but are rather a matter of convention, so if these conventions should change somewhere down the line, their alignments will also change accordingly. This is just one of the reasons all such arrangements must ultimately fail, since it is not finally possible to meet universe on its own terms, armed with nothing better than a makeshift system of language built upon prejudicial thinking. We have every good reason to suppose that the universe itself does not speak Hebrew any more than it speaks Goldfish, so that if our system of organizing this vast Sum is rooted in so limited a methods, we cannot expect it to prevail in the true light of day.

What occurs in the glyph above is that 6 letters come to occupy new positions according to their proper placement via the Proximity Principle. Path Numbers 15 & 16, 17 & 18, and 25 & 26 switch positions, while everything else remains unchanged. There is a strong suggestion here is that Atu #'s IV & XVII, VIII & XI should also reverse numerical assignments to come into closer compliance with their revised Hebrew letter values, something Crowley left hanging for whatever reason. In general, the conventional naming/numbering rules are so loose and so poorly rooted in anything rational that it is very difficult to assert what should or should not be the case with an absolute certainty but we can reasonably assert that conventions providing no real justification of their superiority probably lack any to begin with. All in all, if Heh is the proper letter corresponding to the Star Card, then the proper number of the Star Card should be Atu IV, not XVII, barring some exceptionally good reason to the contrary (and assuming we are starting from Atu 0, which is debatable in itself). Crowley's own failure to make these Atu corrections was apparently just a knee-jerk resistance based upon nothing of any exact merit. He swaps out the Hebrew letter values in several instances but leaves the Atu assignments the same, rendering them broken by any rational standards. The solution is perfectly obvious and Proximity Principle does in fact recommend repairing this damage in future versions of the Book of Thoth.

At least insofar as Hebrew letter assignments is concerned, we have every good good reason to swap out these 6 positions since they are simply out of sequence according to their own conventional letter/number values. Heh comes before Vau, so the Star card necessarily precedes the Heirophant card in geometric positioning. The Proximity Principle reveals that these two positions have been misinterpreted and the Star card should stand to the outside linking numbers 2 and 4 with the Heirophant positioned on the Inside, linking Numbers 2 and 6. The same confusion exists on the flip side of the coin where Zayn should be linking 3 and 5 with Kheth linking 3 and 6, for the same exact reasoning, Zayn comes before Kheth in natural alphabetical progression. The effect of this correction is one of placing the Heirophant and the Chariot in a more proactive positions linking 6 to the Supernals overall. It places these two outstanding archetypes in the driver's seat where their respective strengths establish a formidable linking potential to Crown. The Chariot card makes the perfect symbol representing the Left Hand Path whereas the Heirophant exactly symbolizes the Right Hand Path so that from an action point of view, this corrected alignment could hardly be more perfect.

This accounts for 4 of the 6 corrections the Proximity Principle reveals and, while interesting in many respects, they really are not especially troublesome or startling in any way. Whatever problems this may represent for some is entirely cosmetic since we are only discussing where these path assignments necessarily fall in geometric relation. No modifications to the letter-image assignments have been made at all. The remaining two corrections between paths 25 & 26 are perhaps a bit more exhilarating since the corrected alignments places the Devil card between sepheroth 6 and 9, formerly held by the Art card. The Art card itself comes to occupy the position between 8 and 6 which strikes me in every way best suited to its usual definitions but the realigning of the Devil card between 6 and 9 is nothing short of brilliant and raises some interesting questions as to the possibility of historical tampering, since everything about the Devil card would naturally seem to suggest that the path between 6 and 9 is the most logical possible position for it on the Tree of Life to begin with. We know that the Devil card has been met with a great deal of superstition and all appearances here are that it may have been deliberately shuffled off to the side at some point to avoid allowing it such a prominent position in the scheme of things. Whether this did or did not occur will have to be sorted out over time but the Proximity Principle itself overrules all such tampering, deliberate or not, and it is quite clear that the Devil card must occupy the position between 6 and 9 such that the sexual energy of the Devil card is seen to be the driving force behind the linkage of Moon and Sun itself. This is unmistakably a tantric standard, just as the spiral horns of the Devil are representative of Kundalini energy in general, so this correction has ramifications that may impact how the Tree of Life is to be implemented...whether it remains a rather stodgy mental construct as has been the case up to this point, or gains acceptance as a direct expression of tantric art and science, much as the Chakras system of Ayurvedic tradition.

I have already stated that Abrahadabra itself is predominantly a Tantric heuristic and will proceed to establish throughout these pages just exactly how and why that is. For the moment I can only confess that I could not be happier to see the Devil card assume its proper throne between 9 and 6 and I would personally be content to toss the Art card out altogether to make this adjustment possible, were it an option that could be logically defended in some way. This has always been a personal bias with me but I do not act on personal bias when it comes to matters of physics, so I have remained quietly dissatisfied with popular Tree alignments for many years, simply ignoring what seemed to be no way to logically correct. The Proximity Principle appears to be correcting those paths that have especially bothered me on a personal level and goes a step further by laying down and iron-clad logic that should serve to prevent such confusions from creeping in again. As we shall see, the ability to determine proper chronology within the Tree itself not only corrects existing attribute assignments but paves the way to aligning all kinds of other systems as well.

m1thr0s