Reconstructing the Olympic Spirits’ Sigils with the AIQ BKR method.
© Frater Acher, theomagica.com
Much has been written about the Arbatel, and yet its nature remains essentially enigmatic: Only a fragment of the originally intended text has come upon us, the spirit of its aphorisms resembles much more the work of the Late Medieval German mystics than the traditional grimoire literature, its master seal has never been fully restored, let alone put into practice, and the actual instructions for the conjuration of its famous Olympic Spirits is nowhere to be found either. In a magical source-book that comes with levels of ambiguity even unusual for a genre steeped in the abstruse, what has remained an anchor of clarity and focus for practitioners over centuries was the one thing that seemed absolutely certain: the seven sigils of the Olympic Spirits.
The intent of this short text is to cut off this buoy as well, and to return the student’s attention to the open water of the 49 aphorisms. As we will show, the seven Olympic Spirit sigils are not at all magical seals, but relatively simple sigils constructed thanks to a famous kabbalistic technique of cryptography. Before we progress though, we’d like to clarify the terms we just used and the significant difference between them.
A sigil has come to be known as an iconographic contraction of a word or even full sentence. Its origin is entirely based in the human realm, pivoting on a combination of traditional cryptographic techniques and artistic creativity. Usually, it is created by leveraging an alphabetic key to transform letters into reduced symbols and then to synthesise these curtailed segments into a single sigil. A sigil thus acts as an iconographic anchor for a highly compressed human idea or affirmation. A sigil thus can be turned into a mnemonic tool which, especially since the influence of Austin Osman Spare on this creative technique, is meant to be able to bypass the censor of human day-time consciousness, if only activated and made flesh in the correct form. — For further explanations we recommend Frater U∴D∴’s classic Practical Sigil Magic.
A magical seal, on the other hand, is entirely different from the above category. First, none of the seals that deserve to be counted into this category are ever man-made. Instead, magical seals are graphical representations of power patterns, entirely independent of the human realm and expressing the very nature of the spirits involved in their creation and maintenance. Think of significant events occurring in the natural world around us: A tornado, an earthquake, a sunrise, a sunset, the extinction of a species, the emergence of a new one. Now consider that each such liminal event could be expressed in a succinct graphical form, a seal, capturing the very essence of the spirit-patterns that uphold its power. If a sigil is considered to be able to be infused into the subconscious of humans, then a magical seal offers access to the subconscious of nature (even though that last term is a contradiction in itself). Finally, the form of a magical seal indeed often is both temporal and individual; i.e. they are revealed by spirits to magicians for a particular purpose. Other magicians working with the same seal might not achieve the same results. Thus, not all but many magical seals should be considered personalised iconographic access codes granted to workers who deserve to hold them. — I have given examples of the magical seals I was given by the Olympic Spirits for my personal use in my ritual accounts of the Arbatel cycle.
With this differentiation in mind, we can return to the examination of the Olympic Spirit sigils. For anybody interested in a more in-depth analysis of the text from a true magical adept, we recommend Josephine McCarthy’s 80+ page analysis of the Arbatel in Module Four of the Adept section of the Quareia curriculum. Josephine and I have shared our findings on the Arbatel for many years; we differ on several points in regard to the practical and theoretical exegesis of this fascinating text. Hence, I’d recommend her study not because I agree to all elements of her analytical approach, but because it will reveal to everyone the depth and detail required in one’s study to truly unlock such magical texts. For me, it has been a journey of more than ten years of engaging and living with this white grimoire and yet I am still only touching its surface.
But back to something I should have spotted years ago, and which is the most obvious once you see it. The credit for first publishing the origin of the Olympic Spirit sigils goes to the German magician Franz Sättler (1884-1942), aka Dr.Musallam. Around 1926/1927 Sättler acted as editor and contributor to the short-lived monthly occult magazine DIDO - Okkultistische Monatszeitschrift. In its February 1927 edition Sättler wrote a short piece titled Spirit-Conjuration (Geisterbeschwörung) and within it a specific section on the Development of the so-called Demonic Seals (Entstehung der sogenannten “Dämonensiegel”). I am sharing the original scans of this succinct 2,5 pages-essay here. Copies of DIDO are extremely hard to find today, and they have never been translated into English. My own collected edition cost a fortune and is only a high-end reprint of an edition of fifteen once done for a magical group in Germany.
So, let’s get to work. To understand the construction of the sigils of the Olympic Spirits we need to familiarise ourselves with a kabbalistic technique called AIQ BKR, or the Kabbalah of the Nine Chambers. It represents a very well-known method of Jewish temurah (esoteric cryptography) which derives its name from the first six letters in the first two chambers (see below, read from the top right according to Hebrew reading direction). It was originally devised to cluster letters of the Hebrew alephbeth according to similar numeric values; thus allowing to substitute letters in the same ‘chamber’ with each other. Interestingly, the enumeration of the six Hebrew letters making up the term AIQ BKR equal the value 333, which describes the idea of the tabular arrangement very well. In the Late Middle Ages Christian kabbalistic authors began to evolve this technique to construct a simple cube-based nine-letter alphabet which was used for cryptography as well as creating sigils. — We have previously provided an example of such work here, which stems from the inheritance of Karl Kiesewetter (1854-1894) and once was part of the secret library of the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross.
Leveraging this technique, in a straightforward move we can now translate the Olympic Spirit names into the sigillized alphabet of the nine chambers. The derived basic geometrical shapes are then synthesised into a single, slightly more complex form which has to lend space to each of the letters, and as well look graphically appealing, i.e. feature some form of symmetry and balance. Obviously, once the full sigil is constructed multiple ways of applying the original geometrical letters to its lines and angles are possible. In the below illustration we have just given one example of how the Olympic Spirit names can still be retrieved from the sigils in their nine-chamber translation. Note that the name of the Olympic Spirit of the Sun is given as HOC in the earliest version of the Arbatel, and corrected to OCH in later version. We thus provide a decryption of both versions, obviously substituting the letter ‘C’ for ‘K’ (or vice versa) as in classical Latin.
Thanks to Franz Sättler, and as so often in life, once someone takes us by the hand and shows us the key, it is effortless to open the door. The author himself applied the method above and at the end of his short essay provided his own seals for the seven spirits, derived from the nine-chamber approach.
The point of this short exploration, however, is not to substitute the original Arbatel sigils with the ones derived by Franz Sättler or even your own. The point is to show that there is nothing innate magical in these sigils at all. They are constructed by humans, leveraging specific techniques, and polished in the end to graphically look magical. Their magical appeal, however, is entirely derived from the fact that they look cryptic, i.e. occult. The actual sigils themselves do not give any more access to the realm of consciousness of the seven Olympic Spirits than writing their purported names in plain English. They simply translate the latter into a graphically encrypted equivalent. Ironically, writing this summary and creating the overview slides above is the most work so far I have put into anything simply to show that there is no magic in it.
If one dares to work with the Arbatel in practice, then they will need to find the key elsewhere rather than in the obvious places, i.e. the spirit sigils and names. It is possible, though. And we will dedicate a large portion of the final book in the Holy Daimon cycle (Holy Heretics, London: Scarlet Imprint, 2021) precisely to that end. Additionally in our forthcoming books Rosicrucian Magic (TaDehent, 2021) and Clavis Goêtica (Hadean Press, 2021) we will shine a light on the very principles which allow the practitioner to work with spirits, unaided by either sigils or other outer dressing. — Finally, the interested reader will be delighted to know that no other than David Beth is preparing a book dedicated to the theory and practice of Adonism, the magical system and cosmology coined by Franz Sättler. Make sure to sign up to Theion Publishing’s newsletter to stay up to date on news for this upcoming 2021 release.
