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 Tree of Life I could actually read — and, more than that, one that did not quietly merge two different things. The Jewish sefirot and the Hermetic Tree of the Golden Dawn share their shape and a lot of their vocabulary. Almost every version you find online presents one while calling it the other. So I built this site to draw both, keep them apart, and say plainly where each arrangement comes from.
Once there were two trees there had to be a way to say who attributed what, and that meant citations. It became a lot of citations as the topic grew wider. Once there were citations there was a shelf of books to list. This led to tarot, because the Golden Dawn had put it on the Tree; then astrology, alchemy, geomancy, the grimoires, the orders. Everything since has been the same exercise repeated: collect a source, say what it says, and find ways to connect it to the others.
Both trees are still there, still drawn separately, and still say which is which: the trees, and how the one became the other.
How it tries to stay honest
The rule is that nothing is asserted without saying who says so. This definitely limits the scope of what can be said. I want every correspondence, date and attribution to carry a label for how well it is attested — from a primary source down to unsourced — and where the authorities disagree. When there is a disagreement, the disagreement is what gets recorded rather than just defaulting to which is tidiest. Where a thing cannot be shown properly it is left out and the page says why it is missing, which is why you will find notes explaining absent seals, untranscribed letters and meanings nobody has written down here.
Quotations are cut from the source texts by script and checked against them again, not retyped, because a hand-copied quotation is a sentence attributed to a book that may not contain it.
The labels are explained on the front page, and every book this study stands on is listed with a free edition where one exists on the shelf.
Why everything here is so old
Because it has to be. 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 any modern deck's little white book. Where a book still in copyright matters, it is cited by page and never quoted, and the page says which rule is being applied and why. That is a real limitation and it shapes what this site can tell you — you are reading the part of the tradition that has fallen out of copyright, which is not the same as the part that is most correct.
This unfortunately ties into one of the worst habits in esoteric writing: the assumption that a source is true in proportion to its age. A site built almost entirely out of old books can look like an argument for exactly that, and it is not meant as one. Antiquity tells you when something was written and nothing whatever about whether it is right, and a good deal of the best work on this material has been done recently, by people still doing it. That is what the recommendations are for — a deliberate counterweight, and the one page here pointing at the present rather than the archive.
What it is, and what it is not
It is a tool. Look something up, follow it back to the edition it came from, and go read that. Search for some good modern commentaries on that primary source, and enjoy! Nothing here is a devotional text or instruction: the operations in the grimoires are intentionally left out (there are much better teachers for that than this site could ever be), the meanings of the geomantic figures are not filled in, and no page tells you to do anything. If you practice, this is a place to check what the tradition actually says before building on it. If not, it's a history of an argument that has been running for thousands of years.
On how it is built
I'm a software developer, but not a great front-end engineer. The interface here — the diagrams, the layout, the colour and contrast work (for accessibility's sake), most of the client-side code — was built with heavy partnership with AI, and it is the reason the site looks like this rather than a huge ream of unstyled text. The editorial work is the opposite: what goes in, what gets cited, what is refused and what is left out are decisions taken one at a time against the sources, and the guards that enforce them are the most carefully built part of the whole thing. If you find an error there, it's my fault.
Where else to look
This site is a reference and a poor teacher. The people below are better company if you want the subject explained rather than catalogued.