10,000 Days Puzzle Solution

Since we’ve crossed 14 years since the release of 10,000 Days, I’ve been recently thinking about the puzzle supposedly hidden within the album artwork. I know that different solutions have been proposed (mapping the album to the tree of life or merging songs to create hidden songs), but I’ve never been satisfied with those solutions.

On the tree of life solution, Blair’s response reads to me as snarky and sarcastic, not a genuine response that the puzzle is solved.


If I remember the clues correctly, the solution was supposed to be simple and obvious once revealed, and the clues were to be hidden in the 4 portraits of the band members. None of the other solutions seem to fit those criteria. (I went looking for the original newsletter but couldn’t find it).

So - here’s what I’ve come up with:

The portraits show the four elements of Alchemy, just like the band members are the four elements of Tool. Simple, right?

If you focus on the foreground of each picture, this is what you see:

Danny’s picture: Fire - it trails and sails over his shoulder. 


Justin’s picture: Air, the falcon beginning to fly.

Maynard’s picture: Water - the Aqua Vitae - the water of life. Maynard is offering a cup of distilled wine, and distilled alcohols were called the water of life.

Adam’s picture: Earth, his desk is filled with petrified animals and plants. Everything in the foreground represents material/physical things.

That’s my solution.

Now, if you want to take it one step further (and it’s always the one step further where ideas can turn crackpot).

Working backwards:

a.) In alchemy, the four elements are folded to create the Alchemical Triad (Sulphur, Salt, Mercury). This is why there are only three zoomed in images (Maynard doesn’t have one). The four turn into three. 

b.). The Alchemical Triad and the Four Elements can be folded up into the Celestial Salt and Celestial Niter. This is alchemical duality, where things are seen as either Active or Passive.

c.) Finally, the duality can be folded up into “the one thing.” The Prima Materia. Four becomes three, becomes two, becomes one. We’ve found a unity in diversity, just like Pythagoras.

This is why the Net of Being is the first image in the series. We have two Godheads on either side (duality), guiding us down a path that ends in a single light (unity). If you could the folds in the floor, there are ten before they dissolve into unity.