The Catharturgy Corpus · after Paul Foster Case
The Cube of Twenty-Six beside the cubes of Case, Westcott and the Sefer Yetzirah, each in its own letters
drag a cube to rotate it · scroll to zoom · hover or tap a letter · Turn together moves all four as one
Squares are faces, bars are edges, discs are corners. Every letter carries its path’s colour; each face carries the Cathartes colour of its planet’s Sephirah, shown as the ring around its square.
Squares are double letters, bars are simple letters, discs are mother letters. The Hebrew cubes have twenty-two places each, and a double letter takes the colour of the planet it carries, so it can change colour from cube to cube.
Gold marks a place that differs from Case’s. Select a row to find the letter on the cubes.
The Cube of Twenty-Six. The Corpus’s own cube sets all twenty-six letter-paths of the Christian English Qabalah on the cube’s six faces, eight corners and twelve edges, in English letters and their path colours. The three dimensions of space are formed by kenosis and carry no letter: the Supernal forms run through the point at the centre, Kether the line, Chokmah the plane, Binah the solid, drawn without colour, white and black. The six faces are the created dimensions, Chesed through Yesod, each in the Cathartes colour of its planet’s Sephirah, and each Supernal axis opens onto the two of its own pillar; for that, B (Beth) and X (Resh) exchange the faces Case gave them. Z (Tav) with A (Aleph), Y (Shin) and Q (Mem), and the four rivers, hold the corners as two mirrored frames: Y (Shin), Fire, runs east beside Chokmah, where the Fire channel begins, and Q (Mem), Water, south beside Binah, where the Water channel begins. The buttons in the Twenty-Six row switch it between the two frames, the frames in Case’s order, and the two tetrahedra.
One frame for the other three. The Sefer Yetzirah sets the seven double letters on the six directions and the Holy Palace in the middle, and the twelve simple letters on the twelve diagonal boundaries, which Aryeh Kaplan read as the edges of a cube. It gives the letters and the places as separate lists; each of the three Hebrew cubes pairs them in order, as Case did. Each has twenty-two places for the twenty-two Hebrew letters, written as its sources write them.
Colour on the Hebrew cubes. Case coloured each letter by what it carries. The twelve signs run round the colour wheel from Aries, red, to Pisces, red-violet; the planets are Mercury yellow, the Moon blue, Venus green, Jupiter violet, Mars red, the Sun orange and Saturn blue-violet; the elements are Air yellow, Water blue and Fire red. Each colour sounds a note of the same scale, from C to B. Westcott’s text and the Sefer Yetzirah give no colours, so their cubes take Case’s scale from their own attributions: where a letter carries another planet, it takes that planet’s colour.
Case’s Cube of Space. Paul Foster Case built his cube on the Golden Dawn’s attributions (The Tarot, 1947). Three steps are his own: Aleph, Mem and Shin on the three axes, Tav at the centre where they cross, and his order of the twelve edges. The eight corners stay empty.
Westcott’s cube. W. Wynn Westcott’s translation was the Golden Dawn’s own text of the book. Its list of directions runs east, west, height, depth, north, south, so Beth stands in the east and Daleth above. Its supplement to the fourth chapter gives the planets, in the order the Gra version also follows, and its fifth chapter has its own order of the twelve boundaries. The six directions are the fifth to tenth Sefirot, each sealed with a permutation of the letters of the Name.
The Sefer Yetzirah. The fourth cube follows the Short Version in Kaplan’s translation. Its planets run down the letters in the classical order of the spheres: Saturn above and Jupiter below, Mars and the Sun east and west, Venus and Mercury north and south, and the Moon in the Holy Palace. Its twelve boundaries differ from Case’s in one exchange: Lamed and Nun hold the south-west and north-west edges, where Case has them the other way round. Case’s order is the one that sets Aries with Libra on the north face and Taurus with Scorpio on the south.
The mothers. Neither text gives Aleph, Mem and Shin a direction; Case’s axes are his own. Both texts divide the Universe by them: heaven from Fire, earth from Water, and the air between, deciding. Westcott’s cube and the Sefer Yetzirah’s draw that division: Fire in the upper half, Water in the lower, Air as the plane between.
What does not map. The first four Sefirot, the Breath of the Living God, air, water and fire, have no place in space, and neither have the depths of beginning and end, good and evil. No text puts anything on the eight corners; the Cube of Twenty-Six alone fills them.