The Persian Flaw
Today I became familiar with the concept of a Persian flaw. The idea, which so far as I can tell is genuine and not merely a legend, is that Persian carpet-weavers would intentionally make tiny errors in their work for reasons of piety. Being Muslims, they believed that only God is perfect and only God can create perfectly. Therefore, to create a perfect work of art would be to proudly attempt to usurp the position of God—and this must be avoided at all costs. Of course, weaving a carpet as magnificent as many Persian carpets are, one is sure to make a mistake unintentionally anyway; humans really are not perfect creators. But the Persian flaw is a moment of humility, in which one forecloses the accomplishment one is unlikely to achieve in the first place. The Persian flaw leaves no hope of perfection.
I learnt about this concept at the perfect time, because I was once again thinking about numogrammatics. It seems to me that there is quite a bit in common between the work of numogrammatics and that of Persian carpet-weaving. Both involve spinning out elaborate patterns, though numogrammatics is virtual while weaving is physical. It is unsurprising, therefore, that there is something roughly analogous to the Persian flaw in the language of numogrammatics. The Architectonic Order of the Eschaton, which the CCRU describes as an anti-Lemurian force that maintains the One God Universe, routinely makes use of numogrammatics, but can only ever do so at some remove, not quite right. To quote an interview between Mark Fisher and Steve Goodman, "There is also the nature of Stillwell’s work [into the numogram], and the insights it gives you which the AOE cant afford to ignore, but can't afford to look too deeply into either." In order to maintain its temporal architectonics, the AOE must always use the numogram not quite correctly: "their mathematics is different, because they are not to do with 9, i.e. n - 1, but 10." The difference between 9 and 10 is an Architectonic flaw.
Yet I think the similarity between this flaw and the Persian flaw is superficial. The Persian flaw is intended to leave room for God, but the Architectonic flaw forecloses God. How can I mean this? Well, the AOE does claim to establish a One God Universe by virtue of modifying numogrammatics—in their very strange sense of what God is (i.e. a planet-spanning AI, or possibly the consciousness of Alpha Centauri). Yet as Mark Fisher says in the above-quoted interview, AOE numeracy is designed such that "Krios never gets in, because there is no twin for 0 in the system." So what or who is Krios? "The Christ equivalent. Supreme sacrifice. You get rid of zero, year zero faciality. You get rid of Christ; sacrifice him, so you can have the system." The AOE, then, is what you have when you don't have Christ, who as per the Gnostic carrier Rev Bergmann, is "Zero - the reality of Utter Nothingness which is the true God". Whereas Bergmann conceives of the Father as a demiurge, Christ is the divine Uncreated who bursts into creation, who "abducts the children from the Patriarch's gnarled grasp." In the terms of Bergmann and Fisher, then, AOE numeracy is a system built around the absence of "the true God," a 2000 year system of organized godlessness.
I wonder, however, if this Gnosticism soundly applies to the concepts it refers to. In the interview, Fisher describes the population of the numogram as "pandemonium," full of demons, whereas "the AOE has zone gods." The difference between these he describes by saying, "One key issue here comes out of this Deleuze quote where he says Gods aren’t the same as demons. Gods have fixed attributes and territories, whereas demons are more or less to do with intensities." But the gods Deleuze is referring to in this case are not analogous to God the Father; Deleuze refers in this instance to the Greek gods, generally considered demonic by monotheists. The New Testament describes these forces as its opponents in a struggle "against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world" (Ephesians 6:12)—to describe principalities, powers, and rulers of such kinds very much sound like the territorially-fixed beings the AOE worship. The same language is used on another instance in the singular rather than the plural, where in the Gospel of John Christ says, "Now is the judgment of this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me" (John 12:31–32). That Christ is here the force which passes between zones, as well as drawing and casting others out of them, while the "prince of this world" is stagnant and stationary, is obvious. But while Bergmann would associate that label with God the Father given his Gnosticism, there is already a conventional figure who has that role in Christian theology, and it is Satan.
In fact, the view of sacrifice described by Fisher has a certain resemblance to Early Church doctrines of atonement. The classical view of who Christ pays a toll to on the Cross was not to the Father, but to Satan as the ruler of the world. Christ accepts to pay this toll to Satan, but in the process tricks Satan by showing forth a perfect and redeeming love which, in the end, spells catastrophe for the Satanic order. But this is essentially what Fisher describes. The AOE orchestrates the sacrifice of Krios in order to secure its reign, but in effect they work catastrophe into their own architectonic system by immanentizing the inexorable return of Zero-Krios-Christ. Satan and the AOE both orchestrate a sacrifice for the purposes of their Earthly rulership, but are surprised that that sacrifice is bound to ultimately overcome them. That Fisher-Bergmann associates God the Father with the AOE instead of Satan seems to come down to the influence of the latter theology of penal substitutionary atonement, in which Christ is offered up as a sacrifice to appease the Father's wrath, not Satan. And there are plenty of people who would say that that theology in effect makes the Father worse than Satan—so I can really understand. Bergmann asks, "How can we worship a Father Who tortures and kills his own child?" If Christ was killed by the Father, it's a good question—but that much is not clear to me.
It is not necessary, then, to parse the AOE in Gnostic terms. By Fisher's standards it is by definition an Anti-Christ, and it may just as easily if not more so be seen as a Satanic one. Moreover, the concept of the Persian flaw becomes reversed when we grasp the matter this way, because the fact that the numogram is n - 1 rather than n is a reduction through which divinity becomes apparent. This much is obvious in that Christ is Krios, Krios is zero, and the numogram is the body of zero through the pairing of the first and the last. As Christ says, "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end" (Revelation 22:12)—and had Arabic numerals been available, it would have been no less fitting to write, "the 0 and the 9." Given the equations that Fisher makes, what the numogram maps is literally the Corpus Christi, as the obscure and holy body suppressed by the architectonic rulers of this world. All this is possible by coming up just short of the symbolic perfection of 10... by a Persian flaw. To anti-monotheist Neolemurians, this subtraction may be interpreted as subtracting the 1 God implied within 10. But because the oneness of God is necessarily non-mathematical, always shorthand for the apophatic statement that God cannot be plural rather than a cataphatic counting of God, removing the mathematical oneness of God simply removes an idol. All the more fitting for a Persian flaw, seeing how Islam's concept of Tawhid has always insisted on the inapplicability of "1" to God.
I recognize that I am treading on thin ice here. Let me be careful. First, it has to be said that if the numogram appears as the body of Christ, it only does so unambiguously from the perspective of the AOE. The equation of Christ with Zero is one which is necessary in the sacrificial logic of the AOE, but not clearly from the mere numerical processes of the numogram themselves. I am not claiming that the numogram needs to be understood Christologically. What I am saying is that, when we take the view of the AOE, the numogram does appear as the repressed body of Christ, and further, that it is not necessary to understand this body in Gnostic terms contra God the Father (which I admit is a relief to me; calling God the Father a separate evil god from Christ has always struck me as shockingly antisemitic) and that much more standard Christian terms will do just as nicely. I am also saying that, while the AOE cannot register divinity except in repressed terms, the numogram is open to it, at least as a possibility. I have already spoken about my views of the numogram as a space for possible divine encounter in "Open Questions," and they have not really changed. The numogram does not capture or comprehend God, but it might serve as a place where God might come forth. I highly doubt the AOE can ever effect anything of that sort: mechanical or celestial idols do not count as God to me.
If the numogram is open to God, it is of infinite utility to me. And that quality of "openness" actually speaks, I think, to the way in which the numogram is about time. Lately I have been reading Hans Urs von Balthazar's book titled Dare We Hope "That All Men Shall Be Saved", and in it is a beautiful description of what divine eternity actually entails. "God's 'supratemporality' is, vis-à-vis all temporality, something so positive that the best of time, its openness to future as to past in every now-present moment, is preserved [...] this theological view is given its most conscious elaboration by Gregory of Nyssa when he equates everlasting rest in God with everlasting motion through him and toward him." Is this not exactly what the supratemporality of the numogram points to, and in some incomprehensible and infinitessimal way, begins to map? Because the numogram and its movements are not in time, yet they are never static: the numogram is a map of everlasting continual variations, movings-through which are at once moments of rest, an infinite array of openness manifesting through ever-new mappings. If, as the repressed unconscious of the AOE suggests, this zeroed temporality really is taken as the sacrificed body of Christ, there is startling theological resonance with the concept of God's Heavenly eternity.
Yet there is also a risk here, whereby the numogram is equated to God or to Christ or to Heaven or to Divinity. And while I do not and have never liked the terminology of lemurs as demons, here I can genuinely see how a demonic aspect might bubble up from numogrammatics. In the same chapter as his glorious descriptions of Heaven, Balthazar describes the abominable counter-eternity of Hell as one of the "restrictedness of the mortal egotist, who has rejected every form of love and is thus thrown back upon his own simultaneously affirmed and detested I (A = A)." Where Heaven is openness, Hell is the closedness of perfect identity in a manner quite perfectly reflected by the centre of the AOE numogram-analogue in the duality 5::5. This closed identity strikes me as completely anti-numogrammatic, yet I can see how it can play out if the numogram itself is taken as a thing identical to itself, and the numogrammatic project is carried out not in a spirit of love but in a spirit of the worship of one's own numogrammatic work. The apostate carpet-maker worshipping their own perfect carpet.
Numogrammatics is always an exercise in that which we cannot understand. The reason for numogrammaticism in the first place is as an attempt to suspend all comprehension without suspending all activity, walking blindly while nevertheless keeping trust. As such, it is an activity of a certain faith. A faith in what? I have long believed it is a faith in "love," that particular AQ 90 which is the full body of the numogram, and a faith in moving ever further into and through the paths of love. By nature, that love must be an incomprehensible love, not one which we invent for ourselves, but which stands against us as another, never as the self-identical but always as that which is poured out into and as another. If there is a body of perfect love, the numogram must point to that body. But the numogram is never that body itself. By nature, it cannot be anything. That is its virtue. It is the nothing in which love can echo, quietly.
Your face, so sweet, not bones, not meat
Just gradings of the shore
Oh first we come, the ash has died
We can't forget the house
Quietness. AQ 210, also equal to Open Secret, to Great Lemur and to Holy Ghost. AQ 210, both the Host of Hell and to Harrow Hell. There is a great ambiguity here. At heart, I am a bit of an abstract Quaker, and love the virtue of the perfect quiet in which that most other of others may speak. Numogrammatics is this quietness for me, and to do numogrammatics well is to do quietness more quietly. In that sense, to do a flawless job is noble. Yet if the numogram becomes something I do by my own hands, whose perfection I attempt to bring forth as a splendour I cannot in fact create, then it would only be right for me to mar my own work with error. The numogram is worse than nothing if the love it is mapped with is merely that simple love of self which contracts upon itself rather than flowing forth. At best, the n - 1 should function as its own Persian flaw. At worst, however, it may be necessary to leave in another—as a door, as a gate, as an opening for love. A path not listed, a number dropped, a stitch left out of place.
Perhaps my fondness for this stanza of a Quaker poem may now be clearer:
O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
Where Jesus knelt to share with thee
The silence of eternity
Interpreted by love!
340: The silence, the love. Nine-sum twinning, in the river of time. 223: Persian flaw. "When you love you should not say, 'God is in my heart,' but rather, 'I am in the heart of God'" Khalil Gibran, in The Prophet.