INSTRVCTIO·TABVLAE

How to read the plate and how to turn it — every wheel, seal and dial of the Labyrinthus generator, and where each one comes from.

The top row of the sidebar holds six finished plates. Press one and every dial below is set at once.

• DIES — the day’s own plate: the ruling planet of the weekday holds the centre in his own star and ink. Tapping the day line beneath the title does the same.
• CLASSICVM — the plain seven-circuit labyrinth, walls rendering, the planet’s star small at the goal.
• CODEX — a manuscript rosette: fourteen bands of woven nets, scallops, petals and dots, no seal.
• SALOMONIS — the Clavicula plate: rings of pentacles around a pentacle centre, framed by the alef-bet.
• COMPOSITVM — labyrinth within rosette, a kamea at the goal.
• FORS ↻ — chance sets the plate: a tasteful throw of every dial, new seed included. Press it until something looks back at you.

One integer governs every “random” choice on the plate: the mixed motifs of a Chance rosette, the strokes of the charaktêres, the order in which a ring of pentacles is dealt. The same seed always draws the same plate — which is what makes a shared link honest. ← Prev and Next → step through neighbouring worlds; ↻ Random leaps.

Labyrinth. A single path, no choices, no dead ends — the unicursal figure. The oldest datable example is scratched on a clay tablet from the palace of Pylos, about 1200 BCE, and the same figure appears on coins of Knossos, on rocks in Galicia and Gotland, and in the sand-drawings of the American Southwest. It is not drawn by eye: it is a permutation. Seven circuits are visited in the order 3 2 1 4 7 6 5 8 — down to the third ring, out to the first, in again, and only then to the centre. The generator builds the figure from that level sequence, which is why only 3, 7, 11, 15 and 19 circuits close correctly on a single axis. Eleven circuits is the count of the great pavement labyrinth of Chartres cathedral (c. 1200 CE), whose path runs 261 metres to cross a 13-metre floor.

Rosette. Concentric ornamental bands, the vocabulary of manuscript borders and rose windows: rings, woven nets, petals, scallops, teeth, dots, small stars and seals. Which motifs appear is set by the motif set; how many bands, by Rosette bands.

Composite. A rosette shell around a labyrinth core. The Core / shell split dial decides where one ends and the other begins.

Walls or Thread. The same figure can be drawn as the masonry — the walls, with the path left dark between them — or as the path itself, a single line from mouth to goal: Ariadne’s thread, the clew of yarn by which Theseus came back out.

• Overall scale and Centre radius — the size of the whole plate, and of the open goal at its heart. The seal claims its radius first; the rings open up to clear it.
• Line spacing / weight / Path width — the distance between circuits, the stroke, and the fraction of each circuit given to the path (the rest becomes wall).
• Axis width — the angular wedge at the top of the labyrinth where every turn is made. Narrow is severe; wide is generous.
• Symmetry fold and Fold growth — how many times a rosette band repeats around the circle, and how much finer each band grows toward the centre.
• Weave step — the chord reach of the woven bands: low is a polygon, high a dense net.
• Rotation turns the finished plate; Jitter breaks perfect band spacing by a seeded wobble — keep it near zero for a clean plate.

The open centre can hold a figure. The choices, in the order of the menu:

• Star of the planet — each planet carries a classical star figure: Saturn a triangle, Jupiter two interlaced squares, Mars the pentagram {5/2}, Sol two triangles (the hexagram), Venus the heptagram {7/3}, Mercury the octagram {8/3}, Luna the enneagram {9/4}.
• Pentacle of the Key — one of the fifty figures on the shelf below.
• The pure star polygons {5/2} through {9/4} — a star {n/k} is drawn by joining every k-th of n points on a circle in one unbroken stroke.
• Kamea — the planetary magic square. In Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia (1533), book II chapter 22, each planet owns a square of numbers in which every row, column and diagonal sums to the same constant:

• Name sigil over kamea — the old device for turning a name into a figure: each Hebrew letter of the planet’s intelligence or spirit is read as its gematria number, found in the square, and the cells are joined in order. The line begins with a small circle and ends with a crossbar. Toggle Intelligence / Spirit to trace the other name.
• Characters (charaktêres) — seeded ring-letters in the manner of the Greco-Egyptian magical papyri and gem amulets: strokes ending in rings, bars and hooks. No two seeds write the same alphabet. Their count follows the Symmetry fold.
• Cross in circle — the plainest of the old protective fields.
• Versicle frame — the double ring that carries a verse around a pentacle in the Key of Solomon. Plain gives the ticked ring; Alef-bet writes the twenty-two Hebrew letters in order.
• Seal size — the fraction of the plate the figure claims.

The Key of Solomon (Clavicula Salomonis), the most famous of the grimoires, survives in manuscripts from the 15th–18th centuries and was assembled into its standard modern form by S. L. MacGregor Mathers in 1889. Its first book ends with the forty-four holy pentacles — consecrated figures of divine names, seals and verses, seven each for Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and the Sun, five each for Venus and Mercury, six for the Moon. Each planet’s set works in that planet’s domain:

One of each, from the room’s own shelf:

Beside them stand the five instrumenta: the Hexagram and Pentagram of Solomon and the Ring of Solomon from the Lemegeton (worn and shown to the spirits, not hung on walls), and the two secret seals. Choosing a pentacle in the picker also turns the Planet dial to its owner; the instruments belong to no planet and leave it alone.

The last figure on the shelf is the Sigillum Dei — the Seal of God. Its oldest surviving form is in the fourteenth-century Liber Juratus (the Sworn Book of Honorius); its famous form was dictated to John Dee in March 1582, through his scryer Edward Kelley and the angel then at the stone, and recorded in Dee’s Mysteriorum Libri (British Library, Sloane MS 3188). Dee named it Aemeth — Hebrew emeth, Truth.

Read it from the rim inward: a border of forty compartments, each holding a letter with a small number, from which the seven secret names of God are spelled by counting; a heptagram and nested heptagons carrying the names of the seven angels of the planets and the Sons and Daughters of Light; and at the heart a pentagram hedged about with crosses and the names of the great archangels. Seven of everything — the seal is a planetary machine.

Dee had the seal cut into discs of yellow beeswax, nine inches across: one under his crystal shew-stone on the Holy Table, four more under the table’s feet. The wax tablets survive and are kept in the British Museum. The room’s copy is traced from the house’s own plate of the seal, whole at every degree of its circle.

The week is a planetary wheel older than its Latin names. Order the seven classical planets by apparent slowness — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, Sol, Venus, Mercury, Luna, the Chaldean order — give each hour of day and night a ruler in that rotation, and the planet of each day’s first hour names the day. That is why the sequence of weekdays skips as it does. The generator opens every day on the day’s ruler; the glowing planet on the front page of this house is the same wheel, grown large.

Set Motion to Volve and the plate revolves. The speed is musical: Tempo in beats per minute, and Beats per turn deciding how many beats one full revolution takes — at 120 BPM and 8 beats, the plate turns once every four seconds. The still Rotation dial remains the base angle beneath the motion.

AVRIS — listen. Press Listen and the page asks for the microphone (nothing is recorded or sent anywhere; the sound is measured and discarded in the same instant). The music’s smoothed energy then throttles the wheel: silence all but holds it, a loud passage spins it up to triple time. Play something with a pulse and watch the plate breathe with it.

• Pigmenta — Ink and Ground, freely chosen; ⇆ Swap inverts the plate (parchment plates want a dark ink on #efe7d8).
• NEXVS — the plate lives in the link. Every dial you move is written into the address; Nexvs copies it, and whoever opens the link sees the identical plate, any day of the week. A bare address always means “today’s plate.”
• Reset returns to the day’s plate and clears the link.
• Download PNG — exports at 2800 × 2800 px, enough for a large print or a story crop.

• S. L. MacGregor Mathers (ed.), The Key of Solomon the King, 1889 — the forty-four pentacles and their order.
• Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia, 1533, II.22 — the planetary kameas, intelligences and spirits.
• John Dee, Mysteriorum Libri, 1582 (British Library, Sloane MS 3188) — the Sigillum Dei Aemeth; the wax discs in the British Museum.
• Liber Juratus Honorii, 14th c. — the seal’s oldest form.
• The Lemegeton (Lesser Key of Solomon) — the Hexagram, Pentagram and Ring of Solomon.
• The Pylos tablet, c. 1200 BCE, and the pavement labyrinth of Chartres, c. 1200 CE — the unicursal line, three millennia apart.