I am not an expert, but I am happy to share what I have learned.
A follower asked:Yes, thank you. That’s very interesting. I have the same sort of troubles with the Judeo-Christian flavor of Qabalah. Would you be willing to describe the process you go through to build correspondences after you’ve decided on an effect? I’m sorry for bothering you with so many questions!
Here’s an example. A while back I created a muse. Take a look at the description from my old blog.
I wanted her to not only be my servant, but a servant of the goddess Babalon. So when I created her sigil it included the Star of Babalon. As mentioned in the blog post, there were also lots of roses involved. The cigar I included to make her part Loa.
It’s pretty easy to build up plenty of correspondences in a ritual with a little research. The hard part is when you try to create something more abstract, like Qabalah, where all of those traits become linked. I am only beginning to do that work myself. For me, that required a long examination of my current beliefs and trying to distill them down into their most basic parts.
I wanted to use Egyptian philosophy and beliefs as a basis, to match the use of an Ankh as the base symbol, but found it to be difficult to find ideas to work with, without learning ancient Egyptian and going to the source material. But as I looked more into Greek philosophy and terminology, it seemed better suited to the task. They were what some consider the greatest pagan thinkers, plus, Greek has had a direct influence on our language and thought in Western culture.
This is what I came up with:
I could go into what all of that means if you like. As a magus I would like nothing better than to have others adding fuel to my belief system. The point is, now that I have basic ideas to associate symbols and objects with, I can start building my own version of 777.
Logos = 1 = The Sun = White = Candle
Binary = 2 = Sirius = Thoth = Logic = Blue = Pen & Scroll
Khaos = 3 = Earth = Khepra = Potential = Black = Robe
And so on. The important part is never to become moribund in the system. Binary things may be associated with the stars Sirius, but Thoth is a Moon god and should be associated with that body. Also, don’t worry about building out too far. Only when you need a correspondence and you can’t find one through research that makes sense, look at your base concept and use what you associate with it.