158 @ The Secret Liji fe Nature
In Plato's Timaeus a kinship is shown to exist between his five sa-
cred volumes and the five elements, with the hexahedron, or cube, for
earth, icosahedron for water, octahedron for air, tetrahedron for fire,
and the dodecahedron for ether. Interestingly, this last solid contains
five hexahedrons, one for each element. These essential forms have in
themselves, and through their analogues with the elements, the power
to shape the material wor1d.M four volumes appear in differing com-
binations in the chemical elements described by Leadbeater and
Besant. "In this sequence of five essential geometric volumes," says
Leviton, "we have evidence of the mathematics of the cosmic mind.
Precise geometrical equations and mathematical laws describe the re-
lationships among the five, and the lawful progression of their genera-
tion, one to the next, to form a nest (or maze) of polyhedra which is
the underlying geometric matrix of the physical world."
As Phillips began his mathematical analysis with the tree's infra-
structure, its "trunk," he realized that the alignment of sephiroth in this
central axis depicts-as it starts from a mathematical point and devel-
ops into line and triangle-the generation of a tetrahedron, nature's
simplest regular polyhedron, or four-sided triangular pyramid. Coun-
ting the total number of points, lines, triangles, and tetrahedrons in this
infrastructure of the tree, Phillips came up with a total of twenty-six,
the number ofJehovah, God-name of Chokmah, symbol of the creative
or generative powers of nature.
Next, viewing the tree as a three-dimensional object, he saw that it
is composed of ten points, twenty-two edges of triangles, sixteen tri-- angles, and two tetrahedra, for a total of fifty.Thus, fifty pieces of infor-
mation are needed to define its form in space. And fifty is the number
of Elohim, God-name for Binah. To Phillips it was clear that these
Hebrew God-names quantifi the number of bits of information
needed to construct the trunk of the Tree of Life. But that was only
the beginning.
Phillips soon found that the tetractys has an even more fundamen-
tal function, one that he suspects made it into the figure so highly es-
teemed by the Pythagoreans. Stacking a series of tetractys triangles one
on top of another to represent a series of overlapping Trees of Life,