On this page I will tell the strange story about how the Temple of Abzu system came to be, how the gematria was found through Magickal Dreaming and how the images of the deck was “transmitted” to me. I have previosly not talked much about this but I think it's now time to do so.
But before I do I have to describe one of the ways Esoteric Order of Dagon works with dreams. There is this thing in Buddhism/Bon traditions that is called “terma”. The word terma means treasure and refers to hidden teachings that can come in different forms, and it’s seen as being hidden teachings that through a process of revelation expands the knowledge of their religion. Sometimes this is actually hidden books and scriptures that is found, but they also have found termas in dreams. This is an area that Esoteric Order of Dagon works with too. Through Magickal Dreaming our members sometimes find “dream treasures” and bring the knowledge back from dark astral realms and this way expands our esoteric Eldritch Lore.
Back before the gematria was created we (the E.O.D) had decided to use gematria and go through the writings of Lovecraft to see what we could find. Gematria has been used on some of his writing before, mainly on the names of the main entities/gods, but we wanted to take this to a whole new level. One idea we had was that Lovecraft's kind of strange way of writing existed for a reason. That he subconsciously wrote that way to channel some strange alien message, It was like just beneath the surface of his writing one could almost feel a nightmarish hidden pulse of eldritch energy. We experimented with traditional system of gematria for a while but none of them worked to our satisfaction and they were to tightly tied up in non Lovecraftian symbolism for our taste so we started thinking about somehow find a way to create a gematria of our own and a period of experimentation followed.
Then one night I was going to sleep after having been pondering this during the evening had a dream I encountered “something” that manifested visually within the dream as enormous strange glowing spirals forming in a fractal like pattern and I heard random numbers(I thought) in my "head" while this was happening, but after waking up I found it after some research to be the Fibonacci sequence in scrambled form and the spirals I had seen looked much like the Fibonacci spirals. I now used this and put together a system based on the numbers I had received in the dream and after some time of experimenting with it myself I took this back to the Order. We had now worked on this for some time in the E.O.D. without any breakthroughs but when we tried this system interesting results came right away and after rigid testing we understood that this was what we had been looking for and we have used it since then. We first called it the all-in-one gematria because of how the Fibonacci sequence seems to appear everywhere in nature and throughout the universe but after the deck was created settled for the name it have now.
When the gematria had been in use for some time I came up with the idea to create a deck of cards to enable a more intuitive use. The idea was to create images and phrases that somehow would relate to the gematrical value of the cards. But once I started to work on this something strange happened. All of a sudden a stream of images and ideas started to flood my mind and the only way I can describe it was like it was being transmitted to me. This resulted in me working intensely with the deck and the whole deck of 99 cards was actually created in just under two weeks (13 days to be exact). As soon as the last card was done the “transmission” just stopped.
The fact that it took 13 days is interesting in itself since Arcana 13 in the Temple of Abzu deck seems to describe similar transmissions. The phrases on that card are: “COLORS AND SOUNDS FROM SPACE” and “BLACK WELLS OF WISDOM” and one of the words with that value is actually “WISDOM”. Thus, it seems to represent transmissions of wisdom/knowledge from otherworldly eldritch sources.
So what to make of all this? Well workings have showed that the system actually gives concrete results and people who have used the deck have reported many really strange things back to me, not just regarding Lovecraftian magick, no in whatever paradigm they used it in. This a system that connects to “something” and my hope is that this system will be expanded on even further in the future, not just by the E.O.D, but by others that start using it. This is something every practicing occultist can use in their work and that can bring them newfound gnosis from the beyond.
The Temple of Abzu system is probably perfect for people who want to work with various forms of dark magick, chthonic energies, daemonic entities and beings from beyond. The TOA deck also been found to work as astral gateways. Lets see were this system will take us and what strange knowledge we might discover together!