The K Stands for Kabbalah

I’ll keep this tight, because I know what you’re going to say, and I want to get the receipts on the table before you reach for whatever you reach for when a man tells you the truth about America’s pastime.

Baseball is a ritual. Specifically, it is a Theosophical-Masonic-Thelemic ritual conducted nightly in thirty open-air temples across this country, broadcast nationally, financed by beer companies, and watched by your father, who has no idea.

You’re skeptical. Good. So was I.

Then I looked up Abner Doubleday.

The Founder Was a Literal Occultist

Abner Doubleday — the Civil War general credited (falsely, but stay with me) with inventing baseball in a Cooperstown cow pasture in 1839 — was the second president of the Theosophical Society in America. Theosophy, briefly, was a late-1800s occult movement founded by a Russian medium named Helena Blavatsky. It sold itself to Victorian intellectuals as the hidden operating system behind every world religion and still has chapters to this day.

Doubleday personally corresponded with Madame Blavatsky. He wrote the introduction to a translation of The Bhagavad Gita. He believed in astral projection, spiritual evolution through reincarnation, and a hidden brotherhood of Mahatmas issuing instructions to humanity from a mountain in Tibet.

That’s the same guy on the bronze plaque at Doubleday Field in Cooperstown.

The myth that he invented baseball was manufactured in 1907 by the Mills Commission, chaired by Albert Spalding — same Spalding whose name is on every glove in your garage. Spalding was also a Theosophist. He retired to a Theosophical commune at Point Loma, California, where Katherine Tingley (Blavatsky’s successor) ran a colony of robed initiates doing dramatic readings of Greek tragedy on the cliffs above the Pacific.

So the inventor was an occultist. The promoter was an occultist. The myth was invented by occultists.

The Diamond Is a Diagram

Look at the field. I mean really look at it.

Home plate is a pentagon. Five-sided. The single most charged shape in Western ceremonial magick (with a k, we’ll get to that). That’s Crowley’s pentagram — the figure the Catholic Church spent four centuries trying to scrub off barn doors in Bavaria. We let children stand on it.

The pitcher’s mound is exactly 60 feet, 6 inches from home. Why the half-foot? Surveyor’s typo, MLB will tell you. Sure. Numerologically, 6.06 reduces to 12, which reduces to 3 — the trinity, the triad, the foundational integer of every sigil in The Lesser Key of Solomon. Which, incidentally, indexes 72 demons. Same number, in Kabbalah, as the names of God.

I am not making any of this up. Look it up.

The bases are 90 feet apart. Nine. The number of completion in Pythagorean numerology, the number of rings in Dante’s Hell, the number of fielders, the number of innings.

Three strikes. Three outs. Three bases plus home.

Three. Threes. Threes.

The K

Now we get to it.

When a batter strikes out, the official scorekeeper marks it with a K. When he strikes out looking — that is, without swinging, without consent, frozen at the altar — the K is drawn backwards. Inverted. Reversed.

Reversed letters are the oldest trick in the grimoire. The Black Mass is a Latin Mass said backwards. The reversed pentagram is the sigil of Baphomet. The reversed cross is the mark of Saint Peter, sure, but also of every metal album cover from 1986.

And we have decided, as a culture, that the appropriate way to record a man’s failure at the sacred pentagon is to draw the eleventh letter of the alphabet, mirrored, on a clipboard. In red ink, the traditional color of any contract worth signing.

Eleven, by the way, is Crowley’s number. Liber AL vel Legis, the founding document of Thelema, the system of high ceremonial magic he insisted on spelling with a k to distinguish it from stage illusion, names eleven as “the general number of Magick, or energy tending to change.”

Magick. With a K.

K is for Kabbalah. K is for Kether, the topmost sphere of the Tree of Life. K is for the Key of Solomon. K is what the catcher signals with two fingers down.

Sacrifice. Their Word, Not Mine.

I want to point out that I am not the one who introduced the word sacrifice into the official rulebook of Major League Baseball. They did. There is a sacrifice fly. There is a sacrifice bunt. The runner on third is called home — the place of origin, the place of return, the place a soul attempts to reach after being struck three times and cast out.

There are curses. The Curse of the Bambino. The Curse of the Billy Goat. There were goat heads delivered to Wrigley Field — not as metaphor, as actual police reports filed across multiple decades — until the Cubs finally broke the hex in 2016 in a season their fans openly described, in print, as a lifting of supernatural pressure.

You think a hundred and eight years of curse-language around a baseball franchise warrants no follow-up question?

108, incidentally, is the number of stitches on a regulation baseball. It is also the number of beads on a Buddhist mala, the number of principal Upanishads, and the number of names of the Hindu goddess Durga. The ball you have been catching with your son in the backyard is a rosary. You have been handing him a rosary and telling him to throw it harder.

Ty Cobb Was a Mason. So Was Cy Young. So Was Connie Mack.

I’ll stop listing them when I run out of plaques.

The point is not that some baseball players were Freemasons in the early 20th century — most prominent American men were, the way most prominent American men are now on LinkedIn. The point is that the architecture of the sport — the diamond, the numerology, the sacrifice, the cursed objects, the inverted letter, the pentagon altar, the 60.6-foot ritual distance, the founder who corresponded with Mahatmas — was assembled, defended, and mythologized by men who genuinely believed in a hidden order of cosmic intelligences communicating through symbol and number.

Then they sold it back to us as a wholesome family activity with $14 beers.

So Mote It Be

I want to be clear. If America has decided that the correct way to spend a summer evening is to gather forty thousand strangers in a stadium shaped like a sacred geometric diagram, eat processed meat, stand for a hymn at the seventh inning (seven, the number of the planetary spheres, the number of seals in Revelation), and watch nine men in matching uniforms attempt to complete a circuit around a pentagonal altar while a tenth man hurls a 108-stitch rosary at them — then the seals are opened, the bargain is sealed in red, and woe unto the man who would break the circle.

The offering is consumed. The host is sated. The kids love it.