The Catharturgy Corpus · after Paul Foster Case
The twenty-six letter-paths of the Christian English Qabalah on the cube’s six faces, eight corners and twelve edges, with the centre and the three axes left to the point and the Supernal forms
Squares are faces, bars are edges, discs are corners. Every letter carries the colour of its path; each face itself carries the colour of its planet’s Sephirah, shown as the ring around its square. Select a letter to find it on the cube.
Case’s cube, extended. Paul Foster Case set the twenty-two Hebrew letters on a cube’s centre, three axes, six faces and twelve edges, and left the eight corners bare (The Tarot, 1947). He also counted the cube’s faces, corners and edges and found twenty-six, the value of the Name. Here the twenty-six letter-paths take those twenty-six places: the edges keep Case’s letters under their English names, the faces keep them too save that B (Beth) and X (Resh) exchange places, and the corners take A, Q, Y and Z with the four river paths.
The frame and the faces. The three dimensions of space are formed by kenosis and have no substance or magnitude within creation. The axes are therefore the Supernal forms of The Ladder Inverted: Kether the line, above and below; Chokmah the plane, set forward, east and west; Binah the solid, across, north and south. They carry no letter, and the centre is the point, Ein Sof, present to every point of the frame as its origin. The axes are drawn in the CEQ’s Supernal scheme: Kether without colour, Chokmah white, Binah black. The six faces are the created dimensions, Chesed through Yesod, each the Sephirah of its letter’s planet; Binah is not among them, for Saturn stays with Z (Tav). Three axes, six faces and the cube itself, Malkuth, the totality, give the count The Ladder Inverted names for the divine faces: three, six and one.
The axes and their pillars. Each Supernal axis opens onto the two created Sephiroth of its own pillar. Kether’s runs from Tiphareth above to Yesod below, Chokmah’s from Netzach in the east to Chesed in the west, and Binah’s from Geburah in the north to Hod in the south. For this, B (Beth) and X (Resh) exchange the faces Case gave them: X (Resh), the Sun, stands above, and B (Beth), Mercury, in the south.
The corners as two frames. Case ran his mother letters along the three axes through Tav at the centre. Here they stand at one corner as a coordinate frame. Z (Tav), Earth, is the origin, and its three edges are the axes: up to A (Aleph, Air), east to Q (Mem, Water) and south to Y (Shin, Fire), the directions Case gave them. The four rivers hold the opposite corner as the mirror of that frame, with P (Silence), Earth, as origin. Each letter therefore faces its own element’s river through the centre.
Why this corner. Z (Tav) keeps the corner where Virgo and Capricorn, two of the three Earth edges, meet. That corner and its opposite divide Case’s zodiac in two. The six edges of the frames carry the six Air and Earth signs, and the ring of six edges between them carries the six Fire and Water signs; no other pair of opposite corners divides it so. The upright axis of Air is O (Lamed), Libra, the balance, and the Sefer Yetzirah calls Air “the tongue of a balance standing erect” (Westcott, II.1).
What the frames give up. Three rivers stand at an end of their creature’s edge: the Bull beside Taurus, the Lion beside Leo, the Eagle beside Scorpio. The Man does not reach Aquarius. Two corners have no edge of their own element: Y (Shin), among Scorpio, Capricorn and Pisces, and M (Courage), among Taurus, Cancer and Pisces.
Q and Y exchanged. By element, Y (Shin) belongs beside Chokmah (Fire), east and west, and Q (Mem) beside Binah (Water), north and south. Exchanging them gives Q two Water edges and Y an Aries edge. But H (Knowledge) loses its Water edge, and only the Bull still stands beside its sign.
The tetrahedral arrangement. The first proposal, under Two tetrahedra, sets each corner by the element most of its edges share: Fire and Air above, Water and Earth below. The letters fill one tetrahedron and the rivers the other, and each long diagonal joins contrary elements. Every corner has an edge of its own element, and the Lion, the Man and the Eagle stand beside their signs, but Case’s axes and centre are left behind.
Orientation and colour. The cube faces east, as the Sefer Yetzirah does: east before, west behind, south to the right, north to the left. Every letter, on edge, corner or face, takes the colour of its path from the Vitruvian Soul’s path layers. Each face itself takes the Cathartes colour of the Sephirah of its planet: B (Beth, Mercury) the orange of Hod, C (Gimel, the Moon) the violet of Yesod, D (Daleth, Venus) the green of Netzach, N (Kaph, Jupiter) the blue of Chesed, U (Peh, Mars) the red of Geburah, and X (Resh, the Sun) the yellow of Tiphareth.
Standing. This is a study, not a ruling. It carries Case’s mother letters and Tav from the axes and the centre to the corners, exchanges Beth and Resh, and places the letters by their Hebrew classes, which the CEQ’s display rule avoids; the legend therefore runs from A to Z.