Eleven Eleven Eleven

Eleven is the number of magic in the Western occult tradition.  There are ten fingers on a human and ten is the mathematical basis of most counting systems because of it. Eleven, then, is one step beyond the quotidian, rational boundaries and limits of The Human. Eleven is one more than the possible, one step past the logical, one coincidence beyond the the probable.

Scorpio, the eleventh sign of the zodiac, is considered to be the most magical (at least in the witchy sense of the word) among them, hence its rulership over Halloween, the night where – according to legend – the veil between this world and the Other one (what Kenneth Grant calls "Universe B") grows thin, even permeable.

The image at the top of the page is of a woman in the city of Bhopal, India, which, incidentally, like my hometown of Minneapolis, is known as the "city of lakes." On Dec 3, 1984 Bhopal was the site of one of the worst industrial disasters in known history. A Union Carbide pesticide plant leaked a cocktail of deadly gases, including methyl isocyanate, into the Bhopal night air.

About nine thousand died immediately, though many more were trampled to death as crowds panicked in the dense streets. The death toll is in the range of 18,000 to 20,000 people, to say nothing of those still born today with deformities and congenital diseases. An estimated 100,000 to 200,000 received permanent injuries resulting from the disaster. 

These are Indian women a few years ago protesting Union Carbide CEO Warren Anderson's refusal to appear for trial in Bhopal. In August 2009, the chief judicial magistrate of Bhopal, Prakash Mohan Tiwari, issued an arrest warrant for Anderson, though the United States, unsurprisingly, refused to extradite. Seven Union Carbide employees were found guilty of negligence and received fines of two thousand dollars, and prison sentences of two years maximum. Keep in mind that in the State of Minnesota 2 years is the average sentence for a fourth degree drug offense, such as, say, selling marijuana in a public park. Are you fucking kidding me? As Thomas Jefferson said "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep forever."

Allow me to change tack for a moment. In the Hebrew alphabet, each letter also has a numerical value which can, in turn, be combined with the numerical values of other words in the sentence to render mathematical formulas out of words. The practice of ferreting out numerical connections between different words in this manner is called Gematria.

    

There are three major schools of thought in Gematria. Hebrew Gematria adapts English words to their rough Hebrew linguistic equivalents to extract numbers from them. Simple Gematria, as its name implies, assigns 1 to the letter A, 2 to B, and so on. English Gematria, like the language from which it takes its name, is oddly convoluted, counting by sixes: A=6, B=12, etc. Nonetheless, it has turned up some rather interesting "coincidences."

The following sentences all add up to 1572 in English Gematria:

        

    "April four sixty eight"

         "Martin Luther King shot"

         "The Lorraine Motel balcony"

         "Civil rights leader killed"

         "James Earl Ray blamed in killing"

     

       and my personal fave:

         "FBI kills a civil rights leader"

That's 1572. All of them. The image below is an x-ray and infrared photograph of the remnants of SN 1572, the star that went supernova on November 11, 1572, the observation of which – by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, among others – is considered one of the most important moments in the history of Astronomy. Brahe is notable for his observation that the supernova lacked the kind of parallax that would identify it as taking place near the earth, and that it must therefore be quite distant. And yeah, it does look kind of like a tacky 3D picture of puke photoshopped onto a deep space background.

The Simple Gematria of "Brahe" and "parallax" are 34 and 85, which, when reduced numerologically (i.e. 3+4=7) yield 7 and 4, which add to 11, just like the fingers on that woman's hand. In Hebrew Gematria "Methyl" (563) and "Isocyanate"(699) give us 5 and 6 respectively, which add to that old magical 11.  Hebrew Gematria also gives us "Union" (339) and "Carbide" (104) which reduce to 6 and 5, yielding another 11. Reduction of the Simple Gematrias of "magic" (33) and "scorpio" (95) results in 6 and 5: eleven again.

"In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents. Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen." -William S. Burroughs

Enjoy your 11-11-11, or someone else will do it for you.