Liber 777

Liber 777 is a compact reference work consisting almost entirely of tables of correspondence that align the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, its ten sefirot and twenty-two paths, with gods, colours, plants, perfumes, animals, tarot cards, magical weapons and formulae drawn from many cultures. First published anonymously by Aleister Crowley in 1909, it systematises material inherited from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, itself resting on the labours of S. L. MacGregor Mathers and others (Crowley's friend Allan Bennett is often credited with much of the original tabulation). Its purpose is thoroughly practical: by giving, for each point on the Tree, its corresponding symbols across dozens of systems, it lets a magician assemble internally consistent rituals and see how different traditions map onto one another. It is the indispensable back-of-the-workbench companion to Crowley's ceremonial writing, and its method, reducing the world's symbols to a single correspondence grid, both epitomises the Golden Dawn approach and has drawn the criticism that it flattens very different traditions into one scheme.

Liber 777 is almost entirely tables. Its core is a set of numbered columns in which every row corresponds to a position on the Tree of Life, one of the ten sefirot or one of the twenty two paths, and each column supplies what that position corresponds to in some other system: the Hebrew letter, the tarot trump, the planet or sign, the element, the colour in four scales, the perfume, the plant, the precious stone, the animal, the Egyptian god, the Greek god, the Hindu deity, the magical weapon.

The columns of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Hindu, Buddhist and Chinese material are Crowley's principal addition to what he received. The Golden Dawn's own book of correspondences supplied the Western spine; he extended it eastward, and the extension is both the work's value and its main problem, since placing a deity from one tradition in a column beside a deity from another asserts an equivalence the traditions themselves do not make.

The format is the argument. A table implies that its rows are commensurable, and a reader who accepts the table has accepted the claim that all these systems are versions of one. The atlas records the correspondences as this tradition's own and does not treat them as facts about the traditions drawn on.