Tesseract Magick [Part I of III]

The concept of Tesseract Magick was originally developed and promulgated by Ebony Anpu and
continued by various groups and individuals since his death. A tesseract is what is referred to as a 4-cube
or hypercube, loosely defined as a fourth-dimensional equivalent to a standard cube. A three-
dimensional cube has (8) vertices, (8) edges and (6) faces. By comparison, a tesseract has (16) vertices,
(32) edges, (24) faces and in fact can be “unrolled” into (8) cubes the same way a standard cube can
“unroll” into a cavalry cross.

Let us consider how a tesseract is constructed. For convenience, the (16) vertices of the tesseract
have been labeled from 0 to 15. If you look at the bottom of the image you can easily locate point 0, and
a quick examination
will reveal that vertex
0 connects to points
1, 2 and 3 to form a
face. However, the
layout of a tesseract
can be very difficult
to follow, and people
unfamiliar with the
intricate layout of
this figure may have
trouble. Luckily,
there exists a simple
chart that can reveal
the construction of a
tesseract and more
importantly the relation of those components to the other portions of the tesseract.

© Michael A. Eckhard, 2009. Permission is freely granted to distribute this work so long as 1
the document is left unaltered.
 Tesseract Magick [Part I of III]

The figure below is referred to mathematically as an adjacency matrix, which I will refer to as the
base table for convenience. The base table can show one how to verify all faces and even cubes in the
tesseract and their
relationships to each
other. Let us now
learn about the
relationships that can
be discovered using
this table.

Using the base

table, it is easy to
identify all of the 24
faces of the
tesseract. All rows
and columns reflect a
face, so for example
vertices 5,4,12 and 13 form a face and vertices 5,7,3 and 1 form a face as well. Please take a moment to
review on the tesseract drawing to verify you understand. Now that you have verified the vertices of 8
faces, we can discover the others.

On the base table, a 2x2 grouping of squares is also a face, so for example vertices 8,9,10 and 11
form a face as does 10,2,6 and 14. Note that as you move from right to left, these faces “wrap around”
back to the other side. For example, the square
labeled 5 in the top right wraps around to 1,9 and 13
to form a square. For your convenience I have shown
small squares to help illustrate this for you, inserting
more “phantom base squares” to aid in
understanding. With the (16) additional faces now
shown, we can now identify all faces on a tesseract.

© Michael A. Eckhard, 2009. Permission is freely granted to distribute this work so long as 2
the document is left unaltered.
 Tesseract Magick [Part I of III]

To find the eight cubes within a tesseract the method is even simpler. Every 2x4 grid of squares are
the vertices of a particular cube. The image below shows them in two colors for easy reference.

It should be
understood that it is
also possible to
determine all vertices
that connect to any
given vertex. In this
case, taking the
north, south, east
and west neighbors
will show these
relationships. For
example, vertices
14,2,8 and 11 are
directly connected to
vertex number 10. Again, please verify of the tesseract illustration to verify this.

© Michael A. Eckhard, 2009. Permission is freely granted to distribute this work so long as 3
the document is left unaltered.