LIBER STARFISH
by GM Kraken, E.O.D
a.k.a Howler WyrdWalker

[this is version 0.1 of the document ]

Note: This text might serve as a bridge between the inner to the outer as it maps and mix some observable phenomenas of the universe with various numerical patterns of Yog-Sothothery found in Lovecraft's texts and with the inner realms were all is projected from. But don't expect this to be something like a occult 'out of a box' system. It is not and was never meant to be. It's rather something the creative can build upon. Also note that this is not a 'final' document (until I say so) so expect it to change at any moment. Because of this I have put a version number on it. Non 'full number' versions is more about adding context than spelling or grammatical correctness so if you have ANY trouble with that then either wait / go away or ignore all possible errors until you spot a 'somenumber dot zero' version of the document.
And finally you need to know that in this document tools developed to aid work like this will be used. The tools in question are the Temple of Abzu cards (also called TOA) and the All-in-One gematria (the TOA deck is based upon this gematria system).  The All-in-One gematria (called AIO in short) is a gematria system based on the famous Fibonacci sequence (0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,..) and it primary use is to explore Lovecraft's texts. This is the first time Lovecraft's works have been examined with gematria to this extent. Numerous of the works have been calculated sentence for sentence and all has been collected at the website:
http://www.blackalchemy.net/ and if you want to read more about this or work directly with this huge resource then I suggest you go there and check it out. With this out of the way let us begin.


This is a look into the Yog-Sothothery of the Star Fish and the Elder Sign. The 'starfish', or a 'sea star' that is the more common term, is in his works connected with a mysterious race that is said to have come from the stars. These beings are sometimes referred to as the Elder Things and sometimes as the Old Ones or Great Old Ones and they are even called the Elder Ones at a few places.

This in itself can be a bit confusing but to make things even worse there seems to be an issue with with what kind of entities the name belongs too. Even though the Old Ones sometimes seems to refer to the Elder Things there are many places were it seems more appropriate to connect them to another race, the Great Old Ones, lead by an entity with a tentacled head that is called Cthulhu. This being was also the priest of this wild race of cosmic octopi. The main source for this is the story "The Call of Cthulhu" but there are various things about them mentioned in other stories too. An example of this is how in 'At the Mountains of Madness' the Elder Things or Elder Ones, who in that story lived in Kadath in Antarctica, is said to be at war with the Cthulhu-spawn. The Elder Things is described as having starfish shaped heads instead of the race of tentacled cosmic octopi and one get the idea that this was a race of great scientists who transformed the enviroment to suit their needs. So all in all even though there are some similarities in some stories there are things that are really different between the races in others.

The sign of the Elder Ones (called the Elder Sign, also sometimes referred to as the Old Ones Sign) is also riddled with contradictions. It's said to both be a symbol for the Elder Things and the Old Ones. In the later case this is strange due to the fact that it's also said to be a protection against the Great Old ones and their minions. Even the supposed shape is under question. In a letter to Clark Asthon Smith Lovecraft draws the Elder Sign as a symbol that looked like something that could be a pine branch, while in the Shadow over Innsmouth the Old Ones sign is compared to the age old symbol of the swastika and at later times the symbol of a pentagram with a flaming eye or pillar inside has been popularised.
So what's up with this pseudohistorical inconsistency? I believe that the key to understanding this is to look it all this as different pieces of the same puzzle or perhaps as two sides of the same coin. If so it would be perfect if we could connect the various symbols somehow and preferable in some universal way?

It's amazing how Lovecraft intuitive could get to the core at things by his dream inspired stories and it seems like he also could connect to this force while awake too. This must have been what was what happened in the case of the Elder sign in his letter to C A Smith. We are about to study this sign more closely it as I think the importance of it has been overlooked.

Here is a scetch of the pine branch version of the Elder Sign:



 As you see 3 lines branch out from the diagonal one on the top while 2 lines does the same at the bottom side. It's not hard to see why some people think this resembles the branch of a pine tree. I think all these things is of importance as it points us in the direction to the thing they have in common, namely their connection to the fibonacci sequence. The numbers 2 and 3 are of that sequence and a pine tree is famous for having it's cones grow in the fibonacci pattern and even how the branches grows is connected to those numbers. Furthermore if you look as the middle line as a divisor and read it from left to right we get 3/2 (the division of the next higher number in the sequence by the one closest to it with lower value) and if one continues along the same path doing 5/3,8/5,21/8 and so on one gets closer and closer to Phi (approx 1.618), the famous ratio, also called the golden mean. It works the other way around too as inversing the division 3/5, 5/8 and so on after a while leads to the inverse Phi.

This seems to have been overlooked. So with the above in mind it seems like the Elder Sign and what the sign is a symbol for (the Elder/Old ones;the Elder Things) must somehow be closely connected to the fibonacci sequence.
In what could appear to be a stroke of luck (but what probably happened was a connection to the same source when the gematria was created) this sequence also happens to be what the All-in One gematria also is based on. The name 'All-in-One' gematria was chosen both because 'All-in-One' is title for Yog-Sothoth and because the value for 'Fibonacci' have same value. As the fibonacci numbers appers all over nature that felt natural. I think that this also must mean that using the geamtria as a tool here is really suitable, and (hardly surprising) some very interesting things have been found.

For example the gematria value for the word 'Starfish' AND the word 'Elder Sign' is 21 (a fibonacci value)  and Arcana 21 of the Temple of Abzu deck(that from now on just will be called the TOA) shows how a pentagon like shape with 5 lines emitting from it's center is being overlaid on the landscape almost like a spell has been cast on it. This shape gets me to associate it with both a starfish and a pentagram so here it seems to connect the various versions on the elder sign with each other. The texts that goes with this card is also interesting with regards to all this. At the top we have "ELDRITCH PRIMAL SECRETS' and at the bottom it says "A PRE-TERRESTRIAL WITCH-MARK" and both phrases can be view upon as connected to the Elder Sign. The shape in the middle of Arcana 21 is really starfish like and this sentence from the story 'At the mountains of madness' might even describe it to some degree:

MOM 2.27.4: Shaped like five-pointed star with tips broken off, and signs of other cleavage at inward angles and in center of surface.

Another intriguing thing is how the black cliff like thing in the middle seems to divide the lines in 2 and 3 so the symbolism repeats itself one again (if one turn the card clockwise this show more clearly). Notice how it even groups the the 2 lower of the top lines together as they go between the same cliffs in a way that reflects how two lines are close together in Lovecraft's drawing. Here are some pictures of this. The Fist picture shows a scaled down version Arcana 21 of the TOA and following that the same card but turned diagonally and with the pine branch Elder Sign outlined on top of it  and lastly I included a smaller picture of the sign for reference:




Arcana 21 of the TOA



Now this sign is supposedly connected to the race of the Elder Things and interestingly THE NEXT fibonacci value in the sequence 34 is the AIO value for "ELDER THING" and peeking even further to 34+21 = 55 we find "SHOGGOTHS=55" (As you might know the Elder Things made use of the Shoggoths as sort of an universal energy source or workers in 'At the Mountains of Madness').
You have to confess that when finding things like this one starts to expect to find it in the not mentioned numbers in the beginning of the fibonacci numbers too so lets investigate the 3 numbers before 21 too (the numbers 5,8 and 13). Obviously number 5 is connected to the five pointed figure that we call the pentagram (thus also too the starfish symbolism). The link to the fibonacci sequence really comes into focus here again too as there is a find a starfish/pentagram pattern in the sky that combines the numbers 5,8,13 in a celestial dance. It seems like the pentagram shape is intimately related to both Earth and Venus. Why you might ask? Well, Venus goes around the sun 13 times for every 8 orbits of Earth. Interestingly this makes Venus draw a pentagram pattern across the sky when plotted against the zodiac, although not perfect in shape but rounded and like a flower. It's fascinating how much of this knowledge ancient people seems to have known as Friday, the 5th day in the week, is attributed to the Goddess Venus and how one symbol for Venus is the eight pointed star [Interestingly I bought a house while in the middle of writing this who had the number 8:13 and the day I officially become the owner is Friday the 13th so the 5,8,13. Coincidence? ;)]. So regarding the sequential Fibonacci numbers 8 and 13 and Venus and Earth's orbit around the sun combine to produce the both the phi and the five pointed pentagram (the starfish) shape. On top of all this if we calculate the value in A-I-O gematria for the word 'PHI' that equals 21 too(like the previous mentioned words 'Starfish' and 'Elder Sign') AND the Old Greek symbol for Phi:

ΓΈ


is the 21st out of 24 letters in the old Greek alphabet. Furthermore let me also point out how Phi is diagonally cut in half and how the same thing seems to be happening in the pine branch version of the Elder Sign and how that also seems to show in Arcana 21. The phrase 'Elder Ones' actually calculates to 21 too as does the added value of 'Star'+'Old One'.
 
There is more about Venus than the orbital period as, Venus (as is the Christian Mary and other goddesses) that often is referred to as a symbol for the Cosmic Mother also is associated with the sea. Both Venus and Mary is associated with the Morning and the Evening Star and both are also referred too as Stella Maris (meaning the 'Star of the Sea' thus 'Sea Star'). You can trace similar connections to the Phoenican Astarte, the Egyptian Isis just to name some examples.

With that in mind consider this sentence from 'The Call of Cthulhu' that speaks of the beings that came from the stars:

COC 2.25.5: They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

Perhaps it's not to far fetched to call the children of the this Starry Mother the 'Stars of the sea' (value 34 in AIO thus the same value as an 'Elder Thing') and there are some other interesting AIO findings too that should be mentioned here like how both 'Starfish Image' and 'Incarnated Starfish' also calculates to that value (34). In 'At the Mountains of Madness' they find five-pointed stone fragments which kind of suggest us to try 'Starfish' + 'Stone' and that too has the value 34.


Lets examine the gematria a bit more. One other trick we can use to search for more interesting things that connects the Starfish with the Elder Things and Arcana 21 is to add each number from 1 to 21 and see if we can find something. Thus if we do 1+2+3+4..+21 we get the value 231. One of the sentences that calculates to this value is also from 'At the Mountain of Madness' and it actually is used to describe a fossil found of an Elder Thing and when you read it you will probably agree that it could also be a way of speaking about a symbol for the Elder Things. Here it is:

MOM 2.28.11: Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth, especially fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon.

The same story in itself also seems to follow the sequence. Consider how they first found starfish like fossils and stones (connects to value 21) before encountering live Elder Things (34) and lastly Shoggoths (55). There are other examples too.

There is one last point to consider that is kind of interesting. The Elder Things are said to have created life (including what became humans) on earth by creating life from inorganic matter. If we have that in min while we consider how the Old Ones and Elder Things sometimes seems to be the same race and sometime enemies (two sides of the same thing so to speak) it sort of exists parallels between this and how humans are a mix of two universal forces in mythologies (think Yin and Yang or about a mixture of chaos and order if you wish even though thats really generalizing it). For example in one popular myth there is an example of this in how humans are said to be created out of blood of Kingu and receiving the breath of life by Marduk. But then again this is hardly surprising since it that also reflects the All-in-One One-in All (the Yog-Sothothian) nature of reality.

With this I'll end this version of the document. There are a multitude of things in this document that will be changed and expanded upon eventually.