Numogram Shards

Lillian Patch - 𝌪𝌕

Twilight

Sun-Down. It is now conventional to think of the numogram as divided into cycles. But these are not the divisions used by the old lemurians, inspired as they were by a cosmic model of thinking. Interpretations of this antiquity have often understood the Twin Heavens as the sun-bearing firmament, accessible to the two syzygies of the Drifts and barred to the two of the Depths. But this understanding is deficient and overly spatialized when compared to the really attested view. Lemurian treatises proclaim the Heavens not as existing severed from the Depths, but lying between them. From the mesh of the Greater Depths proceed such Heavens as the Lesser Depths succeed in turn, and the role of the night in the day is not of simple coexistence but of interior simmering. There is no uncertainty, then, regarding how the dusk lies in the greater heart of the night, and why the difference it develops is that of the lesser heart. Passage out of the Drifts moves not away from the Heavens, but without and through them.

Sun-Up. It was Barrow, in his Shelves, that set forth the contemporary division of the cycles into hex, plex, and jinx. Yet unbeknownst to Barrow it was the Holy Qabbala which transplanted the ancient eyes into the modern skull. It was not him, but was surely a qabbalist not long after him, who recognized that the four zones of the Drifts and the four zones of the Depths, evaluated alphanomically, constitute two modes of the Heavens. It may have been the same qabbalist who first puzzled that, by the same standard, the Twin Heavens, the undivided Drifts and Depths, and the undivided numogram itself could be found in the dawn. It was as though the sun preferred to split off from the day at its beginning instead of ruling it, then descended to split the day into its ancient pair. It is this dawn which still resonates in August Barrow's bones, represented in its positive half in the hex and in its negative half in the undivided plex and jinx.

Once More, With Feeling

The depiction of Koa as a wrathful lemur has not gone unchallenged in the Cult of Cudle. Wrath, in Cultic dogma, has little to do with any syzygy. The question of whether Koa has to do with anger is seen as more worthwhile. While the emotion which the cultists most famously associate with Cudle is, of course, love, so too are grief and anger considered to be equally exalted and privileged constituents. In contrast to the notion of perfect decomposition which they apply to the other lemurs, Cudle is understood to necessarily be shot through with other flows and forces, forces which are represented in the tripartite abyssal emotion. Anger belongs to Cudle as evaluated by its overall sum, but evaluated by the digital sums of its letters, its viscous decomposition, it maps to Pibi. Early Cultic theory consequently held that it was Pibi who was an angry lemur, with Ulu equally tending toward grief and Koa in her turn tending toward love. It was as the syzygy of love that Koa also had the privilege of holding, like Cudle, the hug of the Heavens in her midst, so justifying her special veneration.

But today, this view is generally seen as archaic and oversimplified. It is true that the general associations hold, but they do not account for Cudle's immaculate completeness. For if these are the associations formed by viscous decomposition, there are different associations by fluid decomposition, as found through the string of each letter's unsummed value. For grief, anger, and love, the latter decomposition lies one step before the former: anger for Ulu, love for Pibi, grief for Koa. These three are not, as it turns out, stagnant assignments, which would quickly curdle into worry, ennui, and jadedness. Rather, they are the ever-fresh currents which pass from fluid to viscous syzygies. Koa, then, is love held just before the threshold of grieving, just as in Ulu grief boils into anger which in Pibi gives way to love.