Since the bulk of the progress on this has been made in fits in spurts in the 2003 Kayo Dot interview thread, I thought it would be good to gather everything here. Let's try to keep the current state of the puzzle's solution here, shall we?
The Beginning
First things first: the lyrics to the Secret Song are the most direct instructions we seem to have about solving the puzzle.
The Greek Stuff
Oraios, Topio, Petra, Ypnos are Greek words. It is believed that they correspond to 4 specific songs throughout the two albums.
It's not too much of a stretch to presume:
"I saw the branches of a tree falling on these planets"
This line is super ambiguous and could mean a variety of things. However, the reference is to the Kabbalah Tree of Life, which you should probably go read about if you want to work on this thing.
Anyhow, notice that Binah, Geburah, Hod, and Yesod are all "branches" of the tree. (If you're a programming nerd like me this terminology might annoy you a bit, but you'll get over it. You can think of them as "vertices" if you like. They are also called "sephira", I believe.)
Now:
Ignore the comment about the importance of Birth Pangs for now -- this does, however, give us an ordering to work with.
Awesome! I hope you like how consistent and easy this mapping is, because things are about to get way shittier.
I read into these four songs / The numbers of the lines
So now, if you flip through the Bath and LYBM booklets, you will find these weird sigils that are written overtop lines of Hebrew.
The Hebrew in the bottom line always corresponds to the name of one of the sephira from above. They also appear in the order from above also, starting with Bath and moving to LYBM.
The top line consists of columns of Hebrew words, but note that Hebrew words can also be interpreted as numbers. Hebrew is also read left-to-right. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_numerals for a primer.
As for the sigils... we'll discuss those later, as it's still a fairly wide-open question as to what we should be using those for.
First diagram in Bath:
The Hebrew in the bottom line corresponds to Binah ("Understanding").
The top line columns, when read right-to-left and interpreted as numbers are:
Second diagram in Bath
The Hebrew in the bottom line corresponds to Geburah ("Power").
The top line columns, when read right-to-left and interpreted as numbers are:
The Beginning
First things first: the lyrics to the Secret Song are the most direct instructions we seem to have about solving the puzzle.
The Greek Stuff
Oraios, Topio, Petra, Ypnos are Greek words. It is believed that they correspond to 4 specific songs throughout the two albums.
Helm said:
It's not too much of a stretch to presume:
- Oraios = They Aren't All Beautifull
- Topio = Geography
- Petra = Stones of October's Sobbing
- Ypnos = Sleep is a Curse
"I saw the branches of a tree falling on these planets"
This line is super ambiguous and could mean a variety of things. However, the reference is to the Kabbalah Tree of Life, which you should probably go read about if you want to work on this thing.
Anyhow, notice that Binah, Geburah, Hod, and Yesod are all "branches" of the tree. (If you're a programming nerd like me this terminology might annoy you a bit, but you'll get over it. You can think of them as "vertices" if you like. They are also called "sephira", I believe.)
Now:
Ignore the comment about the importance of Birth Pangs for now -- this does, however, give us an ordering to work with.
- Oraios => Binah => Saturn => They Aren't All Beautifull
- Topio => Geburah => Mars => Geography
- Petra => Hod => Mercury => Stones of October's Sobbing
- Ypnos => Yesod => Luna => Sleep is a Curse
Awesome! I hope you like how consistent and easy this mapping is, because things are about to get way shittier.
I read into these four songs / The numbers of the lines
So now, if you flip through the Bath and LYBM booklets, you will find these weird sigils that are written overtop lines of Hebrew.
The Hebrew in the bottom line always corresponds to the name of one of the sephira from above. They also appear in the order from above also, starting with Bath and moving to LYBM.
The top line consists of columns of Hebrew words, but note that Hebrew words can also be interpreted as numbers. Hebrew is also read left-to-right. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_numerals for a primer.
As for the sigils... we'll discuss those later, as it's still a fairly wide-open question as to what we should be using those for.
First diagram in Bath:
The Hebrew in the bottom line corresponds to Binah ("Understanding").
The top line columns, when read right-to-left and interpreted as numbers are:
- 4 + 10 = 14
- 8 + 10 = 18
- 6 + 10 = 16
- 4
- 3
Second diagram in Bath
The Hebrew in the bottom line corresponds to Geburah ("Power").
The top line columns, when read right-to-left and interpreted as numbers are:
- 6 + 10 = 16
- 2
- 8
- 1 + 10 = 11
First diagram in LYBM
The Hebrew in the bottom line corresponds to Hod ("Majesty/Praise").
This is where things get ugly. We're sort of hoping that all these columns correspond directly to line numbers (more on that later), but one of these columns makes no sense at all, and another is 400.
- 1 + 10 = 11
- 400
- 8
- 20?? 4??
delamarche said:
Second diagram in LYBM
This one doesn't have its own page. Is this another clue, or did Toby just run out of space?
The Hebrew in the bottom line corresponds to Yesod ("foundation").
The top line columns, when read right-to-left and interpreted as numbers are:
- 8 + 10 = 18
- 6
- 8
- 5 + 10 = 15
- 1
So what do we do with all this?
The First Breakthrough
YaYo said:
FuSoYa said:
The method?
YaYo said:
The Great Unknown
OK, that was the fun part.
So now the question is, where the hell do we go from here? Toby has already indicated that those sigils are pretty important to the solution.
My first stab at this was to try to inscribe the sigils directly onto the tree of life itself. I had no idea what the purpose of this was, it was just the first thing I thought to try.
Here was my reasoning:
delamarche said:
I found a way to make the latter two sigils fit, but it didn't feel right. Despite all this, xfer said:
xfer said:
I dunno why. I suspect maybe he's easily impressed, because this doesn't seem like at all the correct direction to be going in.
Braxil had a wayyyyyyyyyyy better idea:
I had myself convinced that this was the answer at first too, until I tried to do the last two and ran into the same problems. What I tried next, however, was a lot more promising. Saturn, Mars, Mercury, and Luna not only correspond to the tree of life, but also to magic squares. You can see what I'm referring to here. The circle, line, bar diagrams are actually called sigils, and encoding a word into a sigil is commonly done (example). My idea was to fit the sigils to the appropriately-sized magic square depending on the corresponding planet, and then record the numbers at each angle, and that these would end up being "the number of the lines" in the already-established tracks referred to in the Secret Song (They Aren't All Beautifull, Geography, Stones of October's Sobbing, Sleep Is A Curse). Unfortunately, I ran into issues again, especially with the last sigil which has rounded edges instead of angles that I couldn't quite figure out what to do with and never finished. I haven't worked on the puzzle in a while, but if what I've said in this post helps anyone figure anything out further I would really like to see the mystery solved.
EDIT: Included some pictures of squares and sigils.
Magic Squares:
Saturn:
Mars:
Mercury:
Luna:
It is interesting to note that the order of planets in the song also happens to be in ascending order of magic square size.
Example of a sigil (note the similarities to the symbols in the liner notes). The circle denotes the starting point, and the bar denotes the ending point:
If you want an example closer to our source material, consider the Binah inscription:
It's less obvious to know where to start the other ones, since the squares are a lot larger and those sigils could conceivably be inscribed in multiple places. I haven't even tried to look into that yet, I wanted to get all this written up first. But I really do think this is the right way to go, I've been reading Agrippa's "Of Occult Philosophy" book 2 and there's a lot of detail on this sort of thing there.
I actually had a bunch of ideas as to what these sequences could be used for. Braxis said:
Braxil said:
So, basically the same idea we originally had with the hebrew "line numbers" above. However, Toby already sort of praised YaYo for using those older numbers as the line indices, so I'm willing to bet that YaYo at least had started this off properly.
I can only think that means that these sigils and the sequences of numbers they form represent some sort of transformation of the lines from the poem. The frustrating thing is that there's so little correlation between them. e.g. the sigil for Geburah has 5 inflection points, but there are only 4 words in the line we created using YaYo's method.
The sigil for Hod also has 5 inflection points, but there are ostensibly only 4 words / sets of indices in the Hod line numbers (even though we still don't know what they mean.)
Actually, come to think of it, all the sigils have 5 inflection points in them...
Other random stuff
Birth Pains of Astral Projection
This song seems rather pivotal to the puzzle. My working theory is that you were intended to use Birth Pangs as your "guide" to solving the puzzle if you didn't have access to the secret song. However, I can't see how you ever would have gone anywhere with this, because there's no correspondence at all to the greek words, which you need to get the connection to the actual songs we believe we're supposed to be extracting words from.
But to quote the relevant passage
where the celestials are given italics in the text. This would at least get you the correct ordering of things, but I have no fucking clue how you'd make the connections to actual songs without those greek words.
Interesting tidbit: there is only one other word in the lyrics for this song that is italicized, and that is Amelia
Clue, or just misdirection? I have no idea.
Everything in Hebrew is also a number
We could conceivably get any of the words we're working with and see if we can find meaning in their numbers, and vice-versa.
The Dope talked about some of this in his posting back and forth with YaYo:
As another example of this, the "4 2 <-> 2 4" snafu in the Hod columns elicited a comment from my translator friend that the number 24 is also the word for "jug". Could this indicate e.g. an expansion into Girl with a Watering Can, for example?
The Squiggle-thing in the Bottom Left Corner of the Binah sigil
If you look up sigils drawn on magic squares, you'll find a lot of cases where they draw a little M-shaped "double bump" at a vertex, rather than just leaving a corner there. I have no idea what that means yet -- I saw a couple of examples where it seems to change the expected numbers (maybe it means it is being visited twice or something?) but there was no explanation of why at all -- maybe that's why they call it magick.
If you look at the bottom-left corner of the Binah sigil, it appears to have one of these little thingies there. Does it mean something, or is it just stylistic?
Why do pretty much all the songs have line numbers?
Besides Birth Pains (which is theoretically intended to be a "key" to the rest of the puzzle), all of the other songs have line numbers on them. Are we intended to use words from every song, or was that misdirection?
Does The Ferryman have any importance?
There are two things that make the Ferryman interesting:
- The line numbers are all fucked up because (I think) they're excerpts from Virgil or something (I think)
- There's an exchange between two Greek names or something in that section.
The large line numbers wouldn't be super interesting to me, except that the Hod sigil has at least one curiously large number in it. A line number of 400 doesn't really index into any of those paragraphs though.
The Greek part is interesting because Greek was used as part of the correlation in the Secret Song, whereas the rest of the puzzle has dealt in Hebrew. Is there a further connection to be made here?
Whew.
That seems like a good start to me. If you're new to the puzzle, reading everything above should get you more or less up to speed with where (I think) forum people here have taken things so far. Now it's up to you to go farther with it!
And if you have done personal work on this puzzle that you've never shared, please post it here! Even if you think it's totally stupid, it may lead someone else in the right direction!
