Open any table of the dark Tree. Inside it sit two lists of names, one of ten rows and one of twenty-two. Both sound equally foreign, both stand on the same page, and neither is labelled, so the reader draws the only conclusion such a page allows. Thirty-two entities of one kind. The conclusion is wrong, and the fault is not in the counting.
Ten and twenty-two differ by more than length. They are quantities of different kinds, like a list of cities and a list of roads. You can ask which road belongs to Rome, but the answer will be several roads at once, and every one of them leads somewhere else as well. The whole confusion around the Tunnels of Set rests on one missing line, and the line is short: a tunnel has two ends.
Thirty-two, of which ten are not roads
The number thirty-two shows up at the very beginning of Sefer Yetzirah, in its opening line, and it breaks into two unequal parts.
בִּשְׁלוֹשִׁים וּשְׁתַּיִם נְתִיבוֹת פְּלִיאוֹת חָכְמָה Sefer Yetzirah, opening line: thirty-two wondrous paths of wisdom
Ten of those thirty-two are sefirot: numbers, vessels, places. The remaining twenty-two are letters, and a letter in such a system works as a connection. The reverse of the Tree repeats the same split, with ten qliphoth where the ten sefirot stand and twenty-two tunnels where the twenty-two letters stand. The confusion is therefore built into the number itself. Thirty-two is a sum of two addends of unlike nature, and a table that prints both lists in a row says nothing about it.
Why there is no “tunnel of Gamaliel”
In the archive's canon each of the twenty-two tunnels carries two fields, from and to. Two ends, and no field for an owner. A request for “the tunnel of Gamaliel” is therefore addressed to a table that cannot answer it, because Gamaliel is a shell, a place, a node of the net. Four tunnels touch it, and each of the four touches something else too.
| Letter | Gematria | Arcanum | Tunnel | What it joins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ס Samekh | 60 | Temperance | Saksaksalim | Thagirion and Gamaliel |
| צ Tzaddi | 90 | The Star | Tzuflifu | Harab Serapel and Gamaliel |
| ר Resh | 200 | The Sun | Raflifu | Samael and Gamaliel |
| ת Tav | 400 | The World | Thantifaxath | Gamaliel and Nehemoth |
Four different letters, four arcana, four names, and not one of them belongs to Gamaliel any more than to the shell at the other end. Thantifaxath is a tunnel of Nehemoth in exactly the same measure. Raflifu is a tunnel of Samael in exactly the same measure.
A qlipha is a place.
A tunnel is a road.
How many roads each shell has
Count how many times each qlipha stands at the end of a tunnel and the net stops being a list and becomes a map. The count comes out uneven, and the unevenness comes from the Kircher arrangement of the Tree, which the archive adopted as decision D5.
| Qlipha | Sefirah | Tunnels |
|---|---|---|
| Thaumiel | Keter | 3 |
| Ghagiel | Chokmah | 4 |
| Sathariel | Binah | 4 |
| Gha'agsheblah | Chesed | 4 |
| Golachab | Gevurah | 4 |
| Thagirion | Tiferet | 8 |
| Harab Serapel | Netzach | 5 |
| Samael | Hod | 5 |
| Gamaliel | Yesod | 4 |
| Nehemoth | Malkuth | 3 |
Add the right-hand column and you get forty-four. That is as it should be, because every tunnel has been counted twice, once at each end, and twenty-two taken twice is forty-four. Out of this comes a working check worth remembering. Any other table of tunnels must total the same number, and if it totals less, a row has been lost.
The same column shows where the net thickens. Eight tunnels out of twenty-two touch Thagirion. That is more than any other shell carries, and exactly twice what five of the ten carry. Thaumiel and Nehemoth, top and bottom, hold three each. What this means is interpretation, and the archive offers one, but the imbalance itself came out of a count and was read out of no source.
Whose names these are
The most common attribution error runs like this: Kenneth Grant invented the names of the tunnels. He did not, and the dates make it plain. The twenty-two names stand in Crowley's “Liber CCXXXI”, also known as “Liber Arcanorum”; the archive cites it from The Equinox I:7, 1912. Grant's “Nightside of Eden” came out in 1977. Sixty-five years apart.
What Grant did was something else, and it was no smaller: he built a system of tunnels on those names, tied each one to a pair of shells and to an arcanum, and turned a list into a map you can walk. Decision D7 fixes the division of labour in one phrase, the names Crowley's and the reading Grant's. A correct citation is therefore double, and shortening it to a single surname fails in either direction.
What was chosen here, and what was found
Now the honest part, without which the paragraphs above would be worth little. The tunnels are almost absent from classical kabbalistic literature: the Zohar and the Lurianic tradition treat the shells at length, while the twenty-two crossings between them belong to twentieth-century Western magic. The readings on the archive's pages are the archive's reconstruction, and that is how they are signed.
The attribution of letters to arcana and to astrology is taken from the Golden Dawn. Crowley later exchanged the Emperor and the Star, moving two arcana between the letters Heh and Tzaddi; the archive does not accept that exchange, because it desynchronises all twenty-two rows of the table at once. Recorded as decision D5. The numbering of Strength and Justice is likewise the result of a choice: Strength runs as the eighth arcanum on the letter Teth and Justice as the eleventh on Lamed, as in the Golden Dawn. The Marseille tradition numbers those two the other way round, and that is not an error of the Marseille.
The division of the twenty-two letters into three mothers, seven doubles and twelve simples, on the other hand, was nobody's choice: it comes straight out of Sefer Yetzirah. Three plus seven plus twelve makes twenty-two, and this is the only place in the table of tunnels where the structure rests on a text older than the twentieth century. The paths are numbered from eleven to thirty-two, the first ten numbers being taken by the sefirot, so the numbering itself remembers that thirty-two is made of two unlike addends.
While we are on Da'ath
On the drawing of the Tree, between the upper three and the rest of the spheres, sits a point drawn as a dotted circle. No tunnel enters it and none leaves it: the ends of all twenty-two lie among the ten nodes, and Da'ath is not one of them. That deserves a whole issue of its own, and it will get one; here it is enough to note that the dotted line is not a stylistic flourish.
How to audit someone else's table
Look at how many shells are named in the row of a tunnel. Two means the table is built correctly. One means either an abbreviation or a mistake, and only the neighbouring rows will tell you which.
Add up the mentions of shells across all rows. Forty-four means no row has been lost. Any other number means one has, and then there is nothing to compute from such a table.
Find the letters Heh and Tzaddi. If Heh carries the Star and Tzaddi the Emperor, the table follows the later Crowley, and it will not line up with ours row by row. Neither of the two is lying about anything; they are simply two systems, and mixing them inside one calculation is not allowed.
And the refusal, which is also a result. If a table names neither the system nor the edition it was taken from, there is nothing to check it against. That is the only honest conclusion about such a page, and it speaks about trust in it while saying nothing about its contents.
What comes next
Why different authors give the shells themselves different names will get an issue of its own: Mathers has one set, the system of 777 another, and translations add competing spellings of the same set on top of that.
For now, the most useful thing to do with what you have read is to open the full table and read it with new eyes. Twenty-two rows, each with two shells, a letter, a gematria and an arcanum: Tunnels of Set.