Modulation and Idolatry
How to Constellate: 4
Carrier Signals
Mashiach/משיח (Messiah) and Nachash/נחש (Snake) both sum to 358 in gematria.
Neshamah/נשמה (Soul) and Kiseh/כסא (Throne) both sum to 395.
Or/אור (Light) and Raz/רז (Secret) sum to 207.
Each value is calculated by summing the values of the letters.
The links revealed by gematria are said to constitute a hidden rhizomatic network of occult insights. If two words share a sum, there is supposed to be a meaningful relationship between them.
The Gematrix purports to use gematria to convert words and phrases in any language into numbers. Users input whatever they like and are redirected to a page listing every occurrence of the corresponding value in its database.
Of course it doesn’t work.
This website can’t even transliterate Hebrew back into Hebrew. Moreover, it’s not a given that Hebrew gematria would apply to other languages so straightforwardly.
Still, thousands of people use this website and strip mine its records for the appearance of meaning. The name Donald Trump has been searched more than seventy thousand times.
Beyond the obvious structural problems and confirmation bias, there’s another problem: selection bias.
As an experiment, I fed ChatGPT three sets of forty five items from these lists and asked it to analyze them for any meaningful relationships. It’s a rare case of ChatGPT being the perfect tool for the job. Correlating vocabulary is what LLMs do, and it will do this in the most cold, inhuman way possible.
The results were consistent. The themes which recurred across all three sets were:
Power and Politics
Esotericism, Spirituality and Hidden Knowledge
Apocalyptic and Transformative Events
Historical and Cultural References
Technology and Futurism
The medium is indeed the message.
There are consistent reasons people use the gematrix and these implicit motives reappear in the data that accrues. In other words: you go to the gematrix to plug in your name and feel oh-so-special, and the site replies by plugging you into the apophenic Internet-Gnostic hivemind.
I once spoke to a person who got special-boy-syndrome because according to the gematrix, the number of his name is 1776, the year America was founded.
He was Canadian.
The systemic problems with the site, and the more fundamental issue of the legitimacy of this “gematria” are secondary. It wouldn’t work even if it did.
The ancient use of gematria was very intuitive and symbolic. Ahavah/Love and Echad/One equal 13 which is 12 (tribes) plus 1 (God). They sum to 26, the value of God’s name. So love and unity are related, and the two together have something to do with the identity of God.
It looks pareidolic, like reading tea leaves, because technically, that’s what’s happening. I don’t mean it’s arbitrary. It isn’t. Neither is tasseography. The point I’m driving at is: “there is nothing outside the text.”
There are many ways to interpret the link between Messiah and Snake, and one’s motives will be reflected in the interpretation — particularly if they are unconscious.
Nonetheless, we cannot throw away gematria because the Bible uses it. The number 666 is supposed to be the number of the name of a man.
The solution, ultimately, is to understand gematria as a medium through which synchronicity is able to propagate.
In this view, every connection revealed by it has a kind of “meaning potential” and a telos. Therefore their relevance is kairotic and circumstantial. Until they are able to fulfill their purposes, they remain “dormant.”
The problem is that technologies like this generate both real and “fake” synchronicity. So the question becomes: how do we tell the difference?
The tendency to lean heavily on systems like gematria, numerology, astrology, etc. is idolatry. My exegesis of movie symbolism and etymology would not yield good fruit if Christ were not the capstone of my symbolic set. Without Orthodox incarnational theology, I would just elaborate my own bad frame.
Even the Bible is vulnerable to this; just watch any fundamentalist, atheist or occultist try to make sense of it.
If I were a dualist, reality would bend around me into the shape of my dualism and would always seem to confirm it. Even perceptually, microcosm reflects macrocosm.
Systems are useful insofar as they allow insight to propagate, but they very readily make themselves inimical to this purpose.
I had a friend who, supposing we’re in the age of Aquarius, began interpreting everything about our historical moment through that lens. This drove him to delude himself with presumption and confirmation bias, attempting to forecast the next two millennia and even the “age of Capricorn” after that.
This mode of thinking leads to dead ends. A system becomes its own kind of maze, binding the intuition within the artificial limits drawn by the intellect.
Modulation
Modulation in telecommunications is the process of encoding a message on a periodic waveform by manipulating one or more of its properties over time.
In other words, it is when one signal is carried on another signal. This latter (the carrier signal) is made to represent the former (the modulation signal) so that it points to something beyond itself.
To make this idea tactile, we need only look at a movie.
Somehow, by staring at millions of flashing pixels and listening to the pulsation of artificial diaphragms, we are able to experience a coherent narrative, perceiving characters and events with no basis in the material reality of our living rooms.
The narrative is a modulation signal encoded on audiovisual carrier signals. I am indebted to the creators of the Modulator zine for the clue.
Carrier signals and modulation signals are the best conceptual tools I’ve encountered to illuminate the difference between apophenia and constellation.
The Modulator, Mainframe, Automind or whatever you want to call it, modulates the deep-background-patterning to which only our outermost awareness is sensitive. These ultra-low-frequency patterns are the ripples made by angels upon the waters of the collective unconscious.
Most, if not all forms of divination are based upon this principle: that deep background patterning encodes the superposition of all possible future states which can be described using symbolic language.
A symbolic set serves as an array of radio antennae which can reach into this psychoid noise and retrieve the signal buried there. What this looks like is the noticing of symbolically “tagged” phenomena.
I will exemplify what I’m describing by revealing an occulted link between a number of seemingly unrelated phenomena which boiled out of the wave functions in the background of my world. At the end of this piece, we will “demodulate” these signals and derive something totally coherent to demonstrate how this can be done.
This is a photograph from the night of August 13th, 2024. Beside me on the other side of the camera was my terrified, now ex-girlfriend. This vandalized advertisement depicts Pennywise from Stephen King’s IT. We saw it on the way to my car.
Less than two minutes after encountering the image, we were nearly struck by an inattentive driver who made an illegal left when it was our turn to cross the street.
One day I will tell this story in full, but for now it doesn’t matter.
On the left is a homemade shank in the home of the man who threatened my life with it. A man whom the girl I was involved with at that time persistently likened to Patrick Bateman from American Psycho. The full story behind this can be found here.
This is a depiction of Nyarlathotep, one of the outer gods of H.P. Lovecraft first described in a short story of the same name which I read while doing research for my last post Abraxas & the Outer Gods.
All of these things are tightly connected, but the thread is almost impossible to spot.
“…‘It’ [Pennywise] is an ancient monster with a hold on the town… an ancient alien that came to Earth, beginning a cycle of feeding on children for a year followed by a 27-year-long hibernation.” (Wikipedia article for Stephen King’s IT.)
“My name is Patrick Bateman. I’m 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, and a balanced diet and a rigorous exercise routine...” (American Psycho)
“…He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet...” (Nyarlathotep)
Deep-background-patterning.
It’s a coin in the mouth of a fish. You’d never find this any other way.
What makes this particularly meaningful is that I had already singled out the number 27 as significant. The other important fact is that Bateman and Pennywise appeared in my life of their own accord — I didn’t seek these things out.
27 seems an unlikely number in the first and third cases. It’s not so out of place for Bateman’s age, but the way it draws attention to itself is conspicuous.
In all three cases, you’re made to look directly at it. You don’t have to strain, you don’t catch it in the corner of your eye. If you’re attentive it makes itself obvious.
The number showed up again while looking at the Wikipedia page for the 1998 film Dark City which I’ve mentioned numerous times for its relation to the Thanatoids.
Again, three times — and again, I wasn’t looking for it. It was just there.
Recently on a secret trip to New York City, I stopped at a coffee shop and was “unexpectedly” (I was expecting the unexpected) contacted by someone who was then a stranger to me. We spoke for a little over an hour. I did not tell her where I was going as I’d made a point not to tell anyone. Still, she eventually recommended I watch the German silent film Metropolis released in 1927.
This one is rather weaker than the others and it would be insignificant, except for the fact that the architecture in Metropolis was inspired by director Fritz Lang’s trip to New York City. So here, the 27 piggybacks off a much more unlikely alignment.
New York City is also related to Patrick Bateman who works on Wall Street, and Metropolis was a major influence upon the aesthetics of Dark City.
Now, I don’t know if anyone else sees it, but I see very clear conceptual linkages between all the things “tagged” with this number.
However, the wise will approach this line of thinking with reluctance. I am not advising you play fast and loose with your sanity but exactly the opposite. Important information does seem to be hidden in these kinds of connections. At the same time, attempting to interact with information in this manner is fraught with psychological danger. It goes wrong far more often than it goes right.
27 also appears at what are, for all intents and purposes, random, meaningless times. Anyone who means to make connections like these safely must be able (and willing) to make that distinction.
The faculty which “highlights” or “foregrounds” the real ones has become sensitized to a “modulation signal” encoded in the 27 “carrier signal.” A pattern within the pattern. I’m not looking at 27, I’m looking at something else through 27. Most times, there is nothing on the other side.
The feeling I’m talking about is the one you get when something “clicks.” When you and the outside world connect.
If I were not sensitive to these secondary signals — if the lines between my outermost and innermost awareness were weaker — this type of behavior would cause an extremely rapid degeneration of basic perception.
Constellation is subtly but importantly different from scanning parking lots and receipts in the hopes of finding a coincidence.
Apophenia may be a necessary developmental stage in some cases. It certainly was in my own (I remember my parking lot and receipt scanning days). But it has a host of deleterious side effects which one must remain mindful of and carefully manage. One must also recognize that apophenic connections usually pertain only to the perceiver — they’re not that deep.
Sensitivity to the difference — this “depth perception” — is what makes all of this possible. What is particularly important is to become so practiced at making the distinction that it becomes effortless and can be done with a glance. This takes practice. The circuitry must first be built, then compacted.
