Finding your qlipha from a birth date

There is no shortage of services that compute something from a birth date, and nearly all of them are built the same way: you type in a number, the page thinks, an answer appears, and how it got there is written nowhere. You have nothing to argue with. You also have nothing to agree with. This issue is written the other way round. The archive's whole calculation is laid out below, and by the end you will be able to repeat it on paper and catch us in an error if one is there.

One caveat first, and without it the rest is not worth reading. A qlipha from a date is a correspondence, and that is all it is. The calculation answers the question of which shell stands closest to the make-up of this chart, and no other question. About events it is silent, about character silent, about the future silent. All it does is lead from the positions of the luminaries to one row of a table, and it does so identically for everyone.

A chain of four links

The calculation runs like this. Take a sign. From the sign to its classical ruler. From the ruler to the sefirah that planet answers to on the Tree of Life. From the sefirah to the shell that stands in the same place on the reverse of the Tree. The shell has a ruler, and he arrives with it as the last link.

All four steps are unambiguous, and here is the whole table. There are no hidden coefficients in it: this is the same correspondence that stands in the archive's canon.

Why there are seven rulers

The rulers here are the classical ones only: Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto are not used by the archive as rulers of signs, and that is recorded as decision D4 together with a reason you can check in one move.

The reason is that the chain breaks otherwise. The archive's table of sefirot contains no Neptune at all: seven sefirot are planetary, while Keter holds the Prime Mover, Chokmah the sphere of the zodiac and Malkuth the Earth. Take the modern system, put Neptune in charge of Pisces, and any planet in Pisces runs into a ruler that no sefirah answers to. The second link snaps, and there will be no third. The classical system is closed, and that is its one advantage here.

Three shells the chain never reaches

From this follows something usually left unsaid. There are ten shells and seven rulers, so seven qliphoth can come out of the answer and three can never come out at all. Their planets simply do not rule signs: Thaumiel has Pluto, Ghagiel has Neptune, Nehemoth has the Earth.

This is a property of the method, and hiding it in a footnote would be dishonest. If somebody's calculator handed you Nehemoth from a birth date, it counts by something else, and it is worth asking by what. Ours cannot produce it for any date, while the Nehemoth page lives in the archive as a description of the tenth shell, the one the chain of rulers simply does not reach.

What the archive's calculator does

Now the part this issue was worth writing for. The free qlipha calculator takes exactly one thing from your date, the sign of the Sun. Day and month go into a table of boundaries, the table returns a sign, and the sign runs down the chain of four links. Thirty seconds, one planet, reproducible on paper.

That simplicity has a price, and the price is measurable. The boundaries of the signs are fixed calendar dates in the calculator, whereas the Sun enters a sign on a slightly different day each year. Checked against the DE421 ephemeris for every day from 1990 to 2005, that gives forty-seven disagreements out of five thousand eight hundred forty-four days: none at all in some years, eight in others. All forty-seven fall on the twentieth, twenty-first, twenty-second or twenty-third of a month, and you can only land on such a day by being born right on the cusp.

An example anybody can verify. At noon GMT on 23 October 2003 the Sun stood at twenty-nine degrees forty minutes of Libra, that is in the last degree of the sign, and it crossed the boundary only after that noon. The calculator declares 23 October to be Scorpio and leads to Golachab. The Sun's real sign at that noon is Libra, and the chain leads to Harab Serapel.

The second count on the same site

The Sun is not the end of it, and a second calculation stands on the same site, one that takes all seven luminaries. It runs inside the Dark Name page and inside the services that know nothing about a person beyond a date, and it is built as a vote. Each of the seven luminaries looks at the sign it stands in, finds that sign's shell in the table above, and gives it a weight. The weights are added up. The shell with the largest sum wins.

The weights total twenty-two, so a shell that reaches twelve holds more than half and has won outright, while a shell holding the five solar votes can lose to three smaller luminaries if those three have gathered under one ruler. There is no Ascendant in this count at all. A count from a date knows no hour of birth, and without an hour the Ascendant cannot be had: the sky turns right round in a day, and it passes through all twelve signs.

Where the hour of birth is known, a third rule takes over, and it is built more simply. The same seven luminaries plus the Ascendant, one vote each, eight in all. A shell that gathers four of those eight is called fourfold in a personal reading, three make it threefold, and so on down. That is how a natal chart is counted, and it is not to be confused with the weights in the table above.

The Sun weighs five.
Three others are enough to outweigh it.

One example carried to the end

Take 15 August 1988. The longitudes are from the DE421 ephemeris at noon GMT, the sign follows from dividing the longitude by thirty, and the shell comes from the table of four links.

Now add. Samael takes four for the Moon, three for Mercury and two for Jupiter: nine. Thagirion takes the five solar votes and nothing else. Golachab three, Gamaliel three, Gha'agsheblah two. Nine beats five, and the weighted answer is Samael.

The calculator gives Thagirion for the same date, and it is not wrong: the Sun really is in Leo, and Leo really does lead to Thagirion. It is simply that the Moon, Mercury and Jupiter all stood that day in signs ruled by Mercury, and the three of them outweighed the Sun. Both answers are correctly computed. Where they part is in how much of the sky gets counted.

How often the two answers disagree

This can be measured, and we measured it. Twenty-one thousand nine hundred and fifteen days, from 1955 to 2014, longitudes at noon GMT from DE421. The answers agreed in three cases out of four: exactly 75.0 per cent. They disagreed across the remaining quarter. A tie between the first and second shell came up on 7.5 per cent of days.

The tie deserves a paragraph of its own, because the rule that resolves it is declared nowhere on the site while it fires on roughly every thirteenth day. On an equal count the archive takes the shell of the higher sefirah: Sathariel first, then Gha'agsheblah, Golachab, Thagirion, Harab Serapel, Samael, and Gamaliel last. This is an editorial decision. It follows from no source, and its one merit is that it is the same decision everywhere the archive counts.

A bias visible only in the numbers

The weighted count carries a skew, and the skew speaks about the method while saying nothing about people. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn each rule two signs, whereas the Sun rules only Leo and the Moon only Cancer. Thagirion and Gamaliel therefore catch half as much sky as the other five, and come out of the answer correspondingly less often.

The shares are counted over the same twenty-one thousand days and more. The conclusion is unflattering and worth saying out loud: Gamaliel comes up almost three times more rarely than Sathariel simply because the Moon holds one sign and Saturn holds two. Rarity here is a property of the arithmetic, and nothing along the lines of “you got a rare qlipha” follows from it.

What one date cannot give

The Moon travels some thirteen degrees of the zodiac a day and crosses a sign in a little over two days. From that follows something that spoils the picture worse than the Sun's cusps do: on almost forty-four per cent of days the Moon manages to change sign within the day. Checked against DE421 over twenty years, from 1990 to 2009. On such a day its four votes depend on the hour of birth, and the hour is what a count from a date does not know, so it takes noon GMT. Nothing about this is rounding: it is a genuine indeterminacy in four votes out of twenty-two, and knowing about it beats not knowing.

One more thing. Uranus, Neptune and Pluto take no part in the archive's personal count at all, and there is a decision for that, D8: those planets walk through a sign for years and stand identically for everyone of the same age, so a line resting on them alone is marked latent. A statement that is personal to an entire generation is not personal.

A check that may show nothing

The order is this. Open the calculator and get the answer from the Sun. Then take any ephemeris, request seven longitudes for your date, run each of them down the table of four links, and add the weights. Four outcomes are possible, and two of them mean the check settled nothing.

Both shells came out the same. Yours is then the case where the method of counting does not matter, and everything you read about that shell was about it. This is how it goes for three people in four.

The shells differ. Then you have two of them, and a paid reading follows the weighted one, because it reads the chart whole. Which of the two is “the real one” the calculation does not decide and cannot decide.

The first two shells scored equally. Then the answer was picked by the rule of seniority among the sefirot, the sky had nothing to do with it, and staking much on such an answer is unwise.

The Moon changed sign on your day. Then without an hour of birth its four votes are unknown, the whole count rests on eighteen out of twenty-two, and the honest answer here is that there is nothing to compute until a time turns up.

What comes next

The gematria of a name, where a calculation breaks in a similar way and for a similar reason, will get an issue of its own. For now, the most useful thing to do with what you have read is to walk the chain by hand and compare it with what the page says: the qlipha calculator.