Behind the visible script of Avash lies a layer of correspondences between geometry, biology, and the order of emergence in the natural world. What follows traces some of those correspondences. Many were discovered rather than designed — patterns recognised, often years apart, as the script took shape.
The five kingdoms
The alphabet’s twenty-three letters trace a sequence: mineral → plant → animal → human → spiritual. This is the order of emergence observed throughout nature and recorded in ancient cosmologies. The script does not impose this sequence; it reflects it.
Within this arc, four elemental anchors are placed at structural points in the alphabet — Fire (letter 1), Earth (letter 9), Water (letter 11), Air (letter 19) — and the final four letters carry the four seasons.
Two upward bridges
Two natural movements bridge the kingdoms.
At letter 10, the first shoot of grass rises from the earth — mineral to living, the threshold of life. At letter 11, water meets the newly emerged: the dew drop on the tip, the morning’s gift to what has just begun to grow.
At letters 19 → 20, the bird takes flight from the horizon — air ascending into spirit. Living to spiritual. The most rarefied physical element dissolves into the realm of virtue; breath becomes spiritus; the soul detaches from material things and rises.
Both transitions are upward natural motions, occurring at structural points in the alphabet rather than as decorative metaphors.
Letter 19 also carries an astronomical resonance: the Metonic cycle of nineteen solar years — the reconciliation of solar and lunar time, used in the Hebrew, Bahá’í, and ecclesiastical calendars — is the calendrical signature of the air through which sun and moon move. Classical cosmology placed air between earth and the heavens.
The number twenty-three
Twenty-three is the count of letters in the Avash alphabet. It is also:
- the count of chromosome pairs in every human being
- the approximate tilt of the Earth’s axis in degrees
- the total arc length of the mother letter
- a recurring perimeter that appears across multiple letters (23.236 units)
- the structural sum that emerges from the alphabet’s molecular reference
The DNA bases of human heredity are themselves built from two geometric shapes: the pentagon and the hexagon. These are the same two shapes the Avash alphabet uses throughout. The script, the species, and the molecules of inheritance share a single geometric grammar.
The mathematical constants
The fundamental constants of natural form appear in specific letters:
- π — the constant of the circle, present in the geometry of the mother letter at position 1
- e (natural growth) — the height of the mother letter (≈ 2.718), and again as the area of letter 20 (e − 1)
- φ (the golden ratio) — implicit in the Fibonacci spiral at letter 8, explicit at letters 17 and 18 (R₂ = 1.618), used as an exponent at letter 20, and squared (φ² = 2.618) as the defining length of the closing mosaic
Each constant lands where the philosophy says it should: π and e at the origin, φ in the cell-division and seasonal zones.
The mineral zone and retinoic acid
The first nine letters of the alphabet — the mineral zone — trace, as a continuous form, the molecular structure of retinoic acid, the morphogen that orchestrates embryonic development in all living organisms.
The mother letter at position 1 is the source. Letters 2 to 7 derive from her, breaking into symmetric pairs. Letter 8 — the Fibonacci spiral — is the carboxylic acid end, the signal-sending part of the molecule. At letter 9 (Earth, traced as a cardioid curve), the signal is received. At letter 10, life emerges as the first shoot of grass.
Three letters tell a complete story: signal sent → ground received → life emerging.
The seasonal virtues
The four seasons sit at four points on Earth’s solar orbit — the two solstices and the two equinoxes — which together form an invisible cross on the plane of its path. Two of the seasons are extremes of temperature: winter (cold) and summer (hot). The other two are transitions: spring (cooling becoming warming) and autumn (warming becoming cooling).
In Avash, the final four letters carry these seasons, and each season carries a category of virtue. The pattern of extremes and transitions runs through the virtues themselves: two “extreme” categories at winter and summer, two “moderate” categories at spring and autumn.
Winter (20) — Truth and trustworthiness. Stillness, brittleness, coldness. Streams are frozen; the bear hibernates; the tree stands rigid and bare. The geometry of the letter is the unbending square and rhombus. The virtues of this season are the “cold” virtues — truthfulness, honesty, trustworthiness, purity, justice, perseverance, punctuality. Truth as the stripping away of seasonal decoration to expose what is.
Spring (21) — Joy. Nature awakens and movement returns. What was dark, cold, closed, and brittle becomes bright, warm, open, fluid, and colourful. The letter is the spiral — the breaching whale spinning, two eagles locked and spinning down, the maple seed falling in its spiralling descent. Joy as the form life takes when it can no longer be contained. Companion virtues: happiness, ecstasy, enthusiasm, proactivity.
Summer (22) — Love. Warmth made physical. The fruit of spring’s activities now hangs on the bough of the tree. The “hot” virtues — unconditional love, kindness, patience — the long-day virtues that have abundance to be poured out toward others.
Autumn (23) — Humility and submission to God’s will. Colourful leaves fall to the ground; the system undergoes a silent purging and a process of purification. The leaf does not fight the fall. This is also the season of detachment and reflection — a fasting and turning inward, a purification of what has accumulated. Humility as the willingness to release, to descend, to make way — not self-abasement, but surrender to a larger order. The form of the twenty-third letter can be read as a bowing — the alphabet’s final letter inclining toward its first, the child toward the mother, the creation toward its source.
These four also correspond to four aspects of the planet’s life: the sun (summer), the earth (winter), the air (spring), and water (autumn). The horizontal line on which Avash is written can itself be read as a horizon — sun, air, and water above; earth at and below.
The human at the centre
The closing four letters share a single mosaic scaffolded by Penrose tiles — an aperiodic geometry with five-fold symmetry, built from the golden ratio. At the heart of the mosaic is a five-pointed star.
In the Pythagorean tradition, in Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and in the Bahá’í haykal, the five-pointed star represents the human form. So the human is not at the end of the alphabet’s journey; the human stands at the centre of the spiritual zone, encircled by the four virtues of the seasons.
And this resolves something subtle. The pentagonal geometry that runs throughout the alphabet — from the mother letter at position 1 to the human-star at the heart of the closing mosaic — is, throughout, the geometry of the human form. The alphabet is one extended unfolding of that form.
The bookends
The alphabet begins and ends in acts of letting go.
At position 1, the mother letter sacrifices her structure to generate every letter that follows. Her arches break apart to become letters 2–5; her circle becomes the centromere shared by letters 6–7; her substance flows through the entire alphabet.
At positions 22–23, the paired letters can be read as two hands drawing forth a new life — the circle above letter 23 the child emerging into the world.
The script begins with a mother’s giving and ends with a child’s arrival. The same act, expressed at the alphabet’s two ends. Everything between them — the chemistry of life, the spiral of growth, the lifting into spirit — is carried by that double yielding.
Inspiration
The geometric and natural patterns that shape Avash were developed independently, through observation of forms in nature and the mathematics that describes them. The spiritual concepts of the alphabet’s closing zone — the four virtues and their seasonal correspondences — are drawn in part from the Bahá’í Writings.
The Genesis 1 sequence of creation was recognised, after the fact, to follow the same order of emergence the alphabet had independently arrived at: light, matter, earth, vegetation, celestial lights, sea and sky creatures, animals, humans. Two traditions of inquiry, ancient and modern, arriving at the same underlying pattern.
This recognition has surfaced before — in Pythagoras and Plato, in Galileo’s book of nature, in the floors of medieval Persian shrines, in the star-plan of an 18th-century Bohemian pilgrimage church, and in Roger Penrose’s aperiodic tilings of the 1970s. A seeker who follows any of these threads finds a deeper story than this page can hold. The correspondences in Avash were recognised, not intended.
What the script offers is not a translation of any particular worldview into letters. It is an attempt to honour, in written form, the order of emergence the natural world itself displays. If readers see in it resonances with their own tradition — Bahá’í, Christian, Buddhist, scientific, philosophical, or other — that recognition is part of the offering. The patterns belong to no single tradition because they belong to all of them.