How to Find the Center of the Universe
A Practical Guide to the Watchtower Star Map
Picking the Celestial Lock
My primary aim with this present piece is to give you a key to the stars. If you follow the steps and commit them to memory, you will learn how to locate any constellation in the sky at any time. It does not matter if it is day or night. It does not matter what time of year it is. It does not matter where you are in the world. If you learn how to use everything I will provide, you will be able to locate them effortlessly to within a few degrees in under a minute with just a watch and a compass. Eventually you can even learn to do it using only the watch.
I have spent the last few weeks picking this lock. My method requires some semi-complex memory work and basic mental math, but I believe anyone can do it, and it will allow you to get your celestial bearings without a digital device even in areas thick with light pollution.
Using it, you can learn to identify constellations by look, figure out which sign a planet or luminary is in or simply re-align yourself with the celestial sphere, which is the closest you can get to aligning with the universe itself. I have been doing this a lot as I have found it has a strong grounding and clarifying effect on my psyche.
This also happens to be one of the easiest ways to prove (should you ever have to) that the Earth is in fact a sphere. The geometry would not work if it wasn’t.
You will need the following:
An analog watch set to standard time — not daylight saving time.
A compass with a well-marked, azimuth ring that can be rotated.
1. The Day of the Year
In order to use this method, you will need some means of memorizing at least twelve numbers up to three digits long. This is the key to everything: you have to be able to know which day out of 365 today is.
Many will balk at that because it sounds absurd, but I have a system with which I can convert any date into the corresponding integer within a few seconds — we will go into that later.
For now, I’ll simply show you what it looks like in practice using the current date as of writing this:
Today is August 29th.
August is the month of Zor.
Zor is 213.
213 plus 29 minus 1 for the first is 241.
Therefore, today is the 241st day.
I’ll explain how you do that at the end. For now, we’ll move on to the next step.
2. Configure the Compass
Knowing the day of the year, I rotate the compass’ azimuth ring accordingly so that today’s number is at the top. Since today is 241, we rotate the ring so that 241° is at the top in the 360° position, marked by the red line.
At this point, you will get the most precise results if you add ~5-10°. These extra degrees better align the cardinal points of the compass (90°, 180°, 270°, 360°) with the day numbers of the equinoxes and solstices (usually 79, 171, 264, 355).
The optimal number of degrees may vary slightly depending on your exact position in your local time zone, so I recommend calibrating to see what works best at home.
In my experience, ~7° is usually optimal as a best guess.
You may notice that the solstices and equinoxes are not perfectly spaced (92 days, then 93, then 91, then 89). Because of this, the realignment can never be exact.
This slight imperfection is due to the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit, which is not a perfect circle. Thus, its orbital speed changes slightly throughout the year.
Thankfully the orbit is very close to a perfect circle so it hardly matters.
Just a fun fact.
We are using the azimuth ring on your compass as a 1:1 model of the ecliptic circle which is the sun’s apparent path through the sky over the course of the year.
When we place today’s adjusted number at the top of the compass, we are essentially finding the Earth’s orbital position on the current date.
By making this simple transformation, you have made a model of the noonday sky for the current date which will rotate relative to us throughout the day.
Using the compass, find and face North. Then remove your watch and place it on top of the compass, turning it so the hour hand points to the current position of 360° on the rotated azimuth ring.
3. Position the Celestial Sphere
Still facing North, hold the watch-compass at an altitude from the horizon equal to that of your latitude. If at 45° North, hold it 45° above the horizon. If at 30° South, hold it 30° below the horizon. Make sure you are holding it straight.
The center of your watch face will now be aligned with the North Star, Polaris, within a few degrees. All you have to do is bisect the angle between the hour hand and 12 on the clock.
When the center of the watch-compass is aligned with Polaris, this bisector shows you the line in the sky known as the “Solstitial Colure.” I call it “the Abraxas Ring” because it is aligned with the raised arm of Orion where it intersects the ecliptic ~65° from the pole star. It passes through the cusp of Gemini and Taurus at a perfect right angle.
It also does the same on the other side of the ecliptic at the cusp of Scorpio and Sagittarius. It is the only celestial longitude that is perpendicular to the ecliptic.
These perfectly orthogonal intersections are the places the sun is on the summer and winter solstices and are the reason the solstices happen in the first place; hence the name.
Once you have found the solstitial colure, simply follow it with your finger until you are pointing ~65° out from Polaris at the summer solstice point.
Of course, the meridian is a circle so the line goes both ways. Orion might be ~65° in either direction. How do you know which way to follow the line?
This is actually rather straightforward.
4. The Axis of Abraxas: Orion and Ophiuchus
The magnetic disk inscribed with the cardinal directions is the Earth where you stand from horizon to horizon. The azimuth ring encompassing it is the ecliptic circle.
~180° on the ring represents Orion’s position at noon year-round. Thus, after adjusting, it is approximately where the sun will be at noon on the summer solstice, since that day generally falls on the 171st day of the year.
~360° on the ring is the noonday position of Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer who stands directly opposite to Orion. He stands where the sun will be after adjusting on the winter solstice, which is generally the 355th day of the year.
Since they are directly opposed to one another, we know that come midnight, they will have switched places.
In theory, we could trace the colure to either location. The reason we go by Orion is because the summer solstice point is farther North and thus closer to the North Star.
If Orion is at 180° at noon, he will be at 360° at midnight. The line between these two points is your “Axis of Abraxas” for the day. When you hold the compass to Polaris, that line will cut the sky in half. From noon to midnight, Orion is moving counterclockwise through one of the halves, and from midnight to noon, through the other. Knowing this, you will always know which way to follow the colure.
5. Drawing the Heavens
After tracing the solstitial colure 65° into the correct half of the sky, your arm will now be aligned with the summer solstice point. Using both hands, trace another line from this point in both directions orthogonal to the colure line. This is the ecliptic.
Trace the ecliptic line until your arms are fully extended at your sides and you will have found the equinox points. Your right arm will be aligned with the Aquarius-Pisces cusp and your left with the Leo-Virgo cusp. Now you have the pole star, Orion, the summer solstice point and both equinox points. Using these as guides, you can locate any other constellation.
You will know if you followed all these steps correctly because if the sun is out, your ecliptic line will pass right through it (this does not necessarily apply to the moon as it does not follow the same line (if it did, there would be an eclipse every time there was a new or full moon)).
Astrologically, each sign is ~30° wide, and since you’ve located the cardinal boundaries, you should be able to cut the quadrants of the zodiac into thirds, estimate what is rising, what is setting, and which sign any visible objects are transiting.
You’re not just looking at the dome of the firmament now like you were before. You’re looking through the firmament and at the solar system. Your inner world is aligned with and shades seamlessly into the whole universe. You have found the connection point between Heaven and Earth.
Time zone standardization, orbital eccentricity, magnetic declination and minute operator error produces small inaccuracies. But if you do everything right, your model will almost perfectly mirror the sky.
After you’ve made the movements a few times, you’ll get a muscle memory of what 65° should feel like and will be able to nail it pretty much every time.
You can also find East and West using shadows which takes just a few minutes, so in principle, after some practice when you know what you’re doing, you can map the whole daytime sky using only a watch (I’ve done it myself).
Pinning the Serpent
It is helpful to understand what we’re actually doing here, as it gives us a better grip on the method. The steps are easily remembered if you know the purposes they serve.
Astronomically, the pole star is very close to the point where all the celestial meridians or lines of longitude come together. We could have chosen to track any of them, but we use the solstitial colure for its unique property of being orthogonal to both the celestial equator and the orbital plane.
Today, this meridian aligns with the raised arm of Orion so that on the summer solstice, if we could see him, he would seem to hold the sun aloft.
This will not be true forever, but it will be for a long time and it is fateful that it should be the case right now.
By mapping the heavens around us, we symbolically enact the role of demiurge. You create a micro-cosmos and conform yourself to the solar cross of the year. After extending both arms from the summer solstice point, the right hand of favor intersects the spring equinox, the gaze “shines” on the summer solstice, the left hand of judgment intersects the fall equinox and the winter solstice is in the “darkness” behind the head.
This is a magical circle par excellence: a living temple, uniting Heaven and Earth and connected from its center to the ends of the universe in every direction.
Directly opposite to Orion stands Ophiuchus holding a serpent, the perennial symbol of time. Ophiuchus, like Orion, appears to be headless, suggesting that both may have been two aspects of the demiurgic Akephalos of the Greek Magical Papyri, with whom I have identified Abraxas. We will discuss this connection more in the future.
The Watch and Compass
As you can probably tell, the system aligns mechanical clock cycles with astronomical cycles. This is why no real calculations are necessary. The method is the formula, and the clock computes it.
Symbolically, the watch and the compass represent Heaven and Earth respectively. Thus, ritually joining the two opens a theurgical doorway between the celestial and terrestrial realms.
The watch-compass is a kind of eclipse. Aligned with the pole star, the celestial meridians become the rays of light which shine out of it.
To remember the bisection step, simply think of Constantine’s vision of the Chi-Rho in the sky. The axes of the clock and azimuth ring form the arms of the letter Chi. The Rho is the bisector whose head points you to Orion.
But the easiest way to remember how to do it is simply to perceive why it works.
The stars revolve around the pole star throughout the day due to the rotation of the Earth. One complete rotation is a full day and it takes 24 hours. This is almost exactly equal to two full hour hand rotations — if it’s not, you have a bad clock and it won’t tell time. If it just loses a minute every once in a while, you’re already tracking the sky.
Although we don’t think about it, the rotation of an hour hand is supposed to be synchronized with the stars and mirror their rotation faithfully.
There are just two problems:
Facing North, the sky turns the other way: counterclockwise.
The hour hand rotates twice as fast as a celestial meridian.
What we have to do to fix these problems is thankfully straightforward: reverse the clock’s motion and reduce it by half. This is easily done.
To reverse the motion, simply anchor the hour hand to a static position for the day. By keeping the hour hand fixed, we essentially transfer the motion to the clock face and invert it at the same time.
Having reversed the motion, we just have to cut it in half. To do that, simply track a virtual line whose angle is always half that of the hour hand. This axis will rotate from 0° to 180° in 12 hours, not 6, crossing one twelfth of the clock in two hours. It will be in near-exact synchrony with the stars.
Our colure’s 12 o’clock orientation also drifts counterclockwise through the year. But a year is a circle, so the colure must return almost exactly to its original place after 365 days, and it’s not going to speed up or slow down significantly. All we have to do then is count the days of the year and adjust the colure’s 12 o’clock position accordingly.
So in summation: the hour hand always points to 360° on the ring. At midnight, the hour hand is aligned with 12 o’clock. So all three lines would point to the same spot: the position of Orion. This is why we always point the hour hand at 360°.
The reason it works anywhere in the world is because the actual angle of the solstitial colure is bound to the Earth’s position in its orbit. It is basically tied to the sun’s place in the zodiac. The colure’s apparent orientation varies geographically due to rotation, but that means it varies for the same reason that local time varies. Its actual orientation is not changing significantly through the day.
So if I am in North America and you are in Europe, then at your twelve o’clock, I will measure a different angle for the solstitial colure than you will. But both of these will be locally correct. Then, when my 12 o’clock rolls around, I’ll measure almost the same angle you did because my location is now at approximately the same stage of its solar cycle that yours was.
Keeping the local (standard) time essentially doubles as a correction for longitude. Calendars and clocks are already doing all the work, you just have to use it.
If you followed all these steps correctly, you will have Leviathan pinned.
The Key to the Key: Gematria
There was one step we did not go into, and that concerned getting the value of today’s date from 1 to 365. This is probably the most important step because it conditions the success of everything else. How do you do it?
The trick is to know what day of the year each month starts on. Then just add that value to the day of the month and subtract one for the first (you could also just use the number of the day before the first and not have to subtract one every single time for the rest of your life, but Prometheus means “forethought” and look what happened to him).
I actually figured out how to do this part first because I thought “it would be neat to always know what day of the year it is.”
The way I have encoded these numerical values is with Hebrew gematria.
Things get a little more difficult here, but even if you’re not interested in learning gematria or locating constellations, I really recommend learning how to use all of this. The skills you’ll pick up just by mastering everything here will benefit you enormously for the rest of your life.
The real point here is not to be able to do this specific thing, it’s to have the tools to design something similar.
Gematria is the system that binds numerical values to the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
Aleph (א) is equal to 1. Bet (ב) is equal to 2 and so on and so forth.
There are other such systems as well. Greek isopsephy is one example (it is according to Greek isopsephy that Abraxas equals 365)
However, I believe Hebrew is uniquely versatile because the Hebrew script consists entirely of consonants. The language has so few vowel sounds that they can simply be interpolated most of the time. This means it is much easier for any given value to be reached because the spelling rules are a bit looser and therefore, it is much more likely that an actual Hebrew word will meet the value you require.
If you’re going to encode information this way, it’s better to use actual words than constructed ones because it allows for more meaningful and therefore more memorable mnemonics.
When creating a memorable mnemonic, the key is often having the answer to a “why” question as this allows you to retrace your steps.
If we want to use gematria, though, we have to memorize the Hebrew alphabet and all of those numerical correspondences. At a glance, that seems like a complicated task, but it’s actually remarkably straightforward if you know how to approach it.
Two mnemonics will be your keys and they are easy to remember.
The first one is the beginning:
A Big Green Dragon Hissed Very Zealously Heathenizing The Youth.
These are the first ten letters: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, Hey, Vav, Zayin, Chet, Tet and Yod. They have the numbers 1-10 in that order, so you can just count the words on your fingers and that will tell you each letter’s corresponding value.
Just keep in mind that with the word “the” you’re using the letter (T), not the sound (th) and that Chet (Heathenizing) is actually a “ch” sound like in “Bach.” There aren’t many English words that start with that sound, so I used a weird word that stands out as a reminder.
The second mnemonic is the ending:
Kingly Lamb Makes New,
Saving All, Proclaiming Truth,
Kingdom Restored, Shining Triumphant.
Similar to the first mnemonic, we must keep in mind that Tsadi (Truth) is a “ts” sound like in “cats.” Again, not many English words start with that sound.
The trick I used here was to remember that the three T-words in the mnemonics represent the “Trinity” (“The Truth Triumphant.”) Therefore, the second one is the second person: The Son — “Ts.”
You also have to remember the order of Kaf (Kingly) and Qof (Kingdom), which are almost identical phonetically. I find this pretty easy because Kaf is “higher” so it comes first.
King then Kingdom. Kaf then Qof.
You’ll notice these latter twelve letters are broken up into three groups of four.
This breaks the numbers up into groups in a way that makes them more manageable.
Kaf, Lamed, Mem, Nun. (20, 30, 40, 50)
Samech, Ayin, Pey, Tsadi. (60, 70, 80, 90)
Qof, Resh, Shin, Tav. (100, 200, 300, 400)
It also allows you to map the letters to the segments of your fingers like so:
I call this the “horizontal lookup” because you count the letters from left to right in three lines. It’s the weft thread. Once you’ve mastered it, you can also use what I call the “vertical lookup” which uses the same mapping, but of course, verticalized into four warp threads.
I created this vertical lookup because it got tiresome counting through so many words horizontally every time I needed one of the letters further down.
Having a warp and a weft like this probably strengthens both and it means you can get to any letter in just a few moves. The trouble is, changing the order of the letters changes the order of the numbers too. This means the vertical lookup requires another way to keep track of the values. Counting the words won’t work.
To encode the numerical values vertically, just remember two things:
God’s name in Hebrew, the Tetragrammaton: יהוה (Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh)
Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.
The Creation of Adam will connect God in your mind with the index finger. The tetragrammaton, God’s name in Hebrew, sums to 26 in gematria, and you only need the first mnemonic — the easy one — to figure that out.
Therefore, because of the Sistine Chapel (and thanks to Michelangelo’s unique contribution to the Christian artistic tradition), the index finger can be tied to “26,” which will be our shorthand for “20 and 60” (kaf and samech).
Then increase both digits by one — so, add 11 — for each additional finger.
Using all of this, I was able to memorize the letter-number bindings and then connect a short Hebrew word to every month of the year which encodes the number of that month’s first day.
As of writing this, we’re in September now. September’s word is “mered” (M-R-D/מרד) which means “rebellion.”
40 (Mem) + 200 (Resh) + 4 (Dalet) = 244
The Days of the Year
My twelve month-words were very deliberately chosen. They form six couples. Each couple encodes an image. The six images form two triads. Each triad forms a story. This stratified structure makes memorization very easy.
(It’s also why I don’t want to do the whole thing over again with the values shifted back by one. This took hours to set up.)
My words for March through June are personal, but feel free to use them if you want. This kind of thing just works better if the bindings are meaningful to you.
If you want to set up your own system, I recommend this website.
Entry To The New Heaven
I’ve been trying to feel “normal” again consistently for over a year now. I’m not sure what changed in 2024, but something did. I don’t know if it’s just me or if something in the world changed. If so, I don’t know what or why, although some others in far off places did seem to be affected around the same time.
For my part, I have been reeling and groping in the dark ever since (as you could probably tell). Almost nothing provided lasting relief. The most I could get was a gasp of fresh air with great difficulty every once in a while. I went so far as living out of my car recently just to try to get back into a much preferable state of consciousness which I quite easily maintained from 2020 until some time in the middle of last year.
Since I began entraining my mind to the celestial sphere every day, the oppressive psychic conditions, which plagued me for many months seem to have basically vanished. The awful weight that bore down on me and caused me to stumble is just gone. This could have been caused by many things, and the exact causality is not so much what interests me. What interests me is that feeling like myself again should coincide with this conscious synchronization with the celestial sphere (the actual stars, not the “stars” of Tropical Astrology).
Lately I find myself looking around, brow furrowed, asking in all sincerity: “did I take something today?” But I’m not impaired — far from it. I just see and think so much more clearly that I feel like I’m more “on” than I should be. It seems I’m still getting used to being properly awake again.
Correlation does not equal causation, it is impossible to tell what is the effect and what is the cause. Perhaps I was able to devise all of this because my mind started working better. Nonetheless, I think it would still be significant if this was the first thing I decided to do as I began to feel better.
All I can say for certain is that the two perfectly coincided.
I have many more ideas I’m eager to discuss, however, this post is already too long and the rest of my thoughts are not well-formed. I also want to give anyone interested in getting the hang of all this some time to do so before I explore it further.
Looking from the vantage point it all reveals, you will find yourself living in a strange and ill-defined astronomical epoch. I find myself reluctant to say “astrological” even though there is nothing inherently wrong with the term. This, because it is so unclear how astrology is to proceed and evolve from our current juncture.
I’m honestly not particularly interested in astrology as conventionally practiced. Both its ends and its means do not appeal to me. I can’t speak to the merit of it as I do not understand it and I’m probably not going to make any attempt. I kind of just want to wipe the slate clean, see what I see up there and watch what happens down here because I think that will be much more interesting and I seem to have a decent track record with approaching things this way.
You feel different when your body knows where the stars are. When you can find them without using an app on your phone because they’ve become a part of you. This is the kind of knowledge which is meant by the term “gnosis.”
What I suspect you’ll quickly discover if you try it is that you want to know where they are, even if you don’t know why and didn’t know that you did before.
One having found the center of the universe in this manner feels themselves as we really are: suspended in the midst of infinity. It is always much better under the actual sky, but even indoors, standing on floorboards where the sky cannot be seen, the distant boundaries of creation and the chasm between are suddenly made palpable and sensed in the depths of the soul. Some space below the floor, above the ceiling and behind all the walls is opened and felt to extend away forever. The room itself gains a kind of translucency, becoming a window into a boundless expanse, not seen by the eyes but by the body itself, with whom the depths are joined in an instant.
Don’t take my word for it.
This serves as a *perfect* example of what you meant when you were talking about "practical application" in secret passage theory. Like it doesn't get more definitive and direct than this article and what you've done here.
Now this is homework!