THE SQUARE OF THE MOON The Moon counts in nines, and every line comes to 369. In 1533 Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa printed the complete Three Books of Occult Philosophy at Cologne. Book II, chapter 22, gives seven magic squares, one for each planet: Saturn 3×3, Jupiter 4×4, Mars 5×5, the Sun 6×6, Venus 7×7, Mercury 8×8, the Moon 9×9. He had first sent a draft of the work to the abbot Johannes Trithemius in 1510. The Moon's square holds every number from 1 to 81 once. Every row, column and diagonal adds to 369. The whole square totals 3,321. Agrippa gives each of these numbers a Hebrew name. For the 81 cells, the divine name אלים, Elim: 1 + 30 + 10 + 40 = 81. For each line of 369, the spirit Hasmodai, חשמודאי: 8 + 300 + 40 + 6 + 4 + 1 + 10 = 369. The squares weren't his invention. The 3×3 Lo Shu comes from Chinese tradition. The Brethren of Purity in 10th-century Basra wrote about them in Arabic. In 1514 Albrecht Dürer engraved a 4×4 square, Jupiter's size, into Melencolia I, with the year 1514 in its bottom row. In 1801 Francis Barrett copied Agrippa's tables into The Magus. Tonight's Moon is a waxing crescent in Sagittarius, three days from its first quarter. In alchemy the Moon is silver, the whitening, the light that grows by reflection. Long before anyone made "3, 6, 9" a meme, the Moon's square was counting in it. What else is hiding in plain arithmetic? As above, so below. ⛈️