Reference · About
About this study
I collected this as a reference for the written history of Western esotericism: what the sources actually say, who said it first, and where you can read it yourself. It is not a course, a grimoire or a guide to practice.
How it started
This started as one diagram. I wanted a readable Tree of Life that did not merge the Jewish sefirot with the Hermetic Tree of the Golden Dawn. They share a shape and much of their vocabulary, and many online diagrams present one under the other's name. I built separate diagrams and added the sources for each arrangement.
The citations led to a collection of source books. Tarot followed because the Golden Dawn had placed it on the Tree, then astrology, alchemy, geomancy, the grimoires and the orders. The project has continued in the same way: collect a source, describe what it says and connect it to related material.
Both trees are still drawn, and drawn separately: see the trees and how the one became the other.
How sources are handled
Correspondences, dates and attributions are labelled by the kind of support found for them, from a primary source to unsourced. When relevant authorities disagree, the competing accounts remain separate. A specific absence is explained where it affects what a page can show, such as a missing seal or an untranscribed manuscript.
Where possible, quotations are extracted from digital source texts and then compared with the cited edition. Bibliographic records identify the edition and locator used. Errors are still possible, and corrections are welcome.
The labels are explained on the front page, and the books this study draws on are listed under source books, with a free edition noted where one exists.
Why everything here is so old
A reference that quotes its sources can only quote what it is free to reproduce, so the texts here are overwhelmingly pre-1930: Mathers and Crowley rather than Regardie, Westcott's Sefer Yetzirah rather than Kaplan's, Waite's Pictorial Key rather than a modern deck's booklet. Where a book still in copyright matters it is cited by page and never quoted, and the page says why. This shapes what the site can tell you: it covers the part of the tradition that has fallen out of copyright, which is not the same as the part that is most reliable.
That creates a problem, because a common habit in esoteric writing is to treat a source as reliable in proportion to its age. A site built mostly out of old books can look like an argument for that, and it is not meant as one. A date of publication tells you when something was written, not whether it is right, and much of the best work on this material is recent. The recommendations page is the counterweight: it points at current scholarship rather than at the archive.
What it is for
Use the site to look up a claim, identify the edition it came from and continue into modern commentary. It is a reference rather than a devotional or instructional work: grimoire operations are not reproduced as directions, and software-generated readings are not presented as historical or spiritual proof. The geomancy section does include Turner's figure meanings and house judgments; it leaves the final interpretation of a cast to the reader.
On how it is built
I am a software developer, and I built the interface and much of the client-side code with substantial AI assistance. I make the editorial decisions about scope, sources and omissions, and I am responsible for errors. Automated checks support that work but do not establish that every claim or citation is correct.
Where else to look
This site catalogues rather than teaches. If you want the subject explained, the people below do that.