Gematria Research

A Ground-Breaking Project that needs Funding - NOW!

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:49:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

My work on this blog has stalled a bit (I mean, for almost 2 years now) 😅 but I really, really had to write this, because there is a new, absolutely ground-breaking project that needs funding — and the deadline is in two weeks!

The project I want to present you is Tom Oberon's The Tarot of Love, a beautiful work of Art and Occult Science that brings to us the legacy of a man whose research and discoveries have never seen the light of day — until now.

I'm talking about Edgar Joel Love, the man behind Cipher X.

Five years ago, when I wrote a series of articles dedicated to the Thelemic ciphers, I wrote one article where I talked specifically about Edgar Joel Love's Cipher X (a base-3 inversion of the ALW cipher), even though I also mentioned other ciphers in that article, like Leo Gillis' Trigrammaton Qabalah.

I must say that those articles are nothing but a very small shadow of the tremendous work these guys have done. However, there is one fundamental thing that distinguishes these two cases in particular: R. Leo Gillis is still alive, and the guy is still creating new things and making new discoveries, and sharing them publicly. His work is published and publicly acknowledged. Edgar Joel Love's work, however, has remained in almost absolute obscurity — and there is one man, Tom Oberon, who's working on making it public. This isn't just a Tarot, this isn't just another book. It's a legacy of love that is being shared with us, and I for one would very much like to see this ground-breaking material finally published. Tom Oberon deserves it, and I'm pretty sure that Edgar Joel Love would be proud of it.

So, if this strikes your interest, and if you, like me, want to see this treasure finally unearthed, so that the public finally knows about Edgar Joel Love's legacy, PLEASE support this project. Remember, there's only 15 days left!

Here's the link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tomoberon/the-tarot-of-love/description

This image is copyrighted © Tom Oberon, and is used here in order to support Tom Oberon's work.

* * *

As a final note, and as this is a blog dedicated to Gematria, I can't avoid noticing that the Tarot of Love is also called "Liber CXXXVII" (i.e. Book 137). And since Edgar Joel Love's Cipher X is deeply connected to English Qaballa (the "ALW" cipher), there is one numerical match that must be noted:

Thank you for reading this, and please support this independent initiative!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tomoberon/the-tarot-of-love/description

Luís Gonçalves

Alphanumeric Qabbala & the Riddles of AL

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Sat, 25 May 2024 11:28:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this new text I will present my solution to some of the riddles in Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law), the central sacred text in the religion / philosophy / creed of Thelema.

I should make it clear, however, that for decades I thought it would be useless to try to find a solution to the riddles of AL, particularly the one in AL II:76 ("the numbers & the words") and the one in AL III:47 (the "grid" page). I studied many proposed solutions, particularly the one involving the cipher known as English Qaballa / ALW cipher / NAEQ, which immediately became my favorite because it seemed to make perfect sense — well, at least when compared to all the available "solutions".

However, it seems that the Universe always has a sense of irony, and one day in early 2023 an entirely new "solution" made itself known to me, while I was writing my longest and most deeply encoded text about Gematria that I have written to this day: The wonders & magic of Alphanumeric Qabbala. In this text I explained how this solution works, even though it was far from complete or perfect, so this time I will greatly expand on my previous exposition of this solution. Also, in my previous text I focused my attention on the riddle of AL II:76 only, while at this time of writing my research has advanced a lot — and this solution seems to be capable of, in a very simple and elegant way, answering the riddle in the so-called "Grid page" as well.

In fact, what distinguishes this new solution that I propose from all the other solutions — including English Qaballa — is the fact that it is so simple and, as far as I can tell, carries immediate conviction. Likewise, this solution is the only one to use exactly the same Key (actually a "new symbol" — you know what I mean if you studied the Book of the Law) to answer both riddles in AL II:76 and AL III:47, in a very simple and elegant way.

Anyway, my intention in writing this text is more to provide a new line of investigation for my Readers who have some interest in this specific subject, rather than to present a "final word" on this subject. In so doing, I will also explain my line of thought, so that the Readers may understand why I think that this solution actually works — even though, of course, the final word on the validity (or not) of this "solution" cannot be mine, but instead it could eventually be demonstrated beyond any doubt one day in the future. My intention, thus, is only to show the way, or at least to open a door, so that others can explore further this uncharted territory.

One thing I would like to suggest first to my Readers, would be to read R. Leo Gillis' excellent essay called "Secrets of the Cipher Naughts – A Survey of Solutions to Liber AL verse II:76", which is freely available to read on the author's website (PDF - 1.7 MB).

In this essay, Gillis explains many solutions that were given to this specific riddle over the years, giving all details about each solution and detailing its pros and cons. I must say that I really like this work, because it contains a wealth of information about this subject that you simply cannot find anywhere else. Also, it ultimately served to measure the "strength" of this solution against other solutions, and I must say that, considering all pros and cons, this solution seems to me (the most suspicious person who could give an opinion about this) to be far superior to all the other solutions.

In any case, if my Readers aren't quite sure of what I'm talking about, before we delve more deeply into the famous Riddle of Liber AL, I would invite my Readers to revisit my first text on the Thelemic ciphers, so that they can get a bit more of context on the mysteries and riddles of Liber AL / The Book of the Law.

* * *

The Alphanumeric Solution to Liber AL

This solution occurred to me on January 31ˢᵗ, 2023, while I was finishing writing "The wonders & magic of Alphanumeric Qabbala", an article about a continuous, non-redundant, alphanumeric cipher that treats the entire sequence of digits from 0 to Z as if they were numerals in a modulus 36 notation.

So, you may ask: is the solution... a cipher?

Well... the short answer is: yes, it's a cipher. But the long answer is that it isn't just a cipher, and hopefully you will understand how this is a whole transformation of the English Alphabet into a magical tool, using "new symbols", and is especially fitting for a creed or philosophy founded by someone who called himself The Beast 666.

* * *

How does this Alphanumeric solution work?

The Alphanumeric solution I'm suggesting allows us to take the following conclusions:

The Riddle of AL II:76 cannot be decoded into a message because it is not a message. In fact, it was never intended to be decoded that way, indicating, instead, how the cipher (which is ultimately the true solution to the Riddle) can be derived. It does this in three different ways: (1) through the disposition of the numbers & letters and "their position to one another" (according to AL III:47); (2) by hiding a secret pattern in the specific numbers and letters chosen for the Riddle, which can only be decoded through the cipher and some of its 'special' properties; and (3) the verse immediately before the Riddle seems to contain a clue about the structure of the cipher itself. In so doing, this solution explains not only why the Riddle contains numbers and letters, but also why those specific numbers & letters were used.
The key that solves the riddle in AL II:76 is the same key that solves the riddle in the so-called "Grid page" in the manuscript of Liber AL vel Legis, in a very simple and elegant way. This alone is extremely curious and noteworthy, and since other 'solutions' don't show a comparable efficiency in solving both riddles using exactly the same key and in a simple way like this one, then I can only believe that this is the only solution that actually works — and it makes sense too, and my Readers will understand why this is so when they finish reading this text. Hopefully, my text will stir some minds, and convince new and already existing researchers into exploring this solution more deeply.
There seem to exist some clues in the source material, as well as in other Thelemic Libri (most notably perhaps Liber 777) indicating that the solution to the Riddle is Alphanumeric — i.e. that "the numbers & the words" in the Cipher correspond to a magical Alphabet of the Beast.
The cipher in question seems to be extremely relevant in a Thelemic context, even though it has been consistently ignored by almost everyone practicing some kind of English Gematria in the context of Thelema. It also allows us to find "new symbols" to which we can attribute the "order & value of the English Alphabet" (according to AL II:55).
This solution/cipher delivers some outstanding results when applied to some key terms in Thelema, including most notably the name of the Book of the Law, as well as the Law of Thelema: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law".

Let's take a deeper look at how all of this works:

* * *

The Riddle of AL II:75-76

II:75. "Aye! listen to the numbers & the words:"

II:76. "4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meaneth this, o prophet? Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever. There cometh one to follow thee: he shall expound it. But remember, o chosen one, to be me; to follow the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven; to look forth upon men, to tell them this glad word."

About this Riddle, Crowley writes the following in his Commentaries on the Book of the Law (link here):

"This passage following appears to be a qabalistic test (on the regular pattern) of any person who may claim to be the Magical Heir of The Beast. Be ye well assured all that the solution, when it is found, will be unquestionable. It will be marked by the most sublime simplicity, and carry immediate conviction."

While I don't claim to be the "Magical Heir of the Beast", whatever that means or implies, I felt the need to share this solution precisely because, when I found it, it was absolutely unquestionable, was marked by the most sublime simplicity, and carried immediate conviction.

On that day, while I was looking at the cipher chart of Alphanumeric Qabbala, I suddenly remembered that in the Riddle of AL, letters always come after numbers:

4 6 3 8 A B K / 2 4 A L G M O R / 3 Y X / 24 89 R P S T O V A L

The verse immediately before the Riddle invites us to "listen to the numbers & the words", and Alphanumeric Qabbala is composed precisely of "numbers" (i.e. numerals) and "words" (i.e. letters, which we use to write words), so I thought that maybe this could be a clue to the cipher that was intended to be used in order to 'unlock' this Riddle.

Some days elapsed after I made this finding, and eventually I found some things that seemed to corroborate this hypothesis, and I shared some of them (still very crude and incomplete) in my article about AQ. In the next section everything will become clear.

* * *

The Alphanumeric Solution to AL II:76

In the previous section I explained how my first thought towards an Alphanumeric solution to the Riddle of AL was that, in the Riddle, letters always come after numbers. Another observation that can be made about this is that there are exactly 28 "numbers & words" in the Riddle, 28 being the 7th triangular number. In fact, even if we take the numbers of the chapter and the verse and put them together (i.e. II:76 -> 2:76) we obtain 276, which is also a triangular number. So we can actually write the numbers & the words of the Riddle in the shape of a Triangle. This point was also noted by some other people, as explained by R. Leo Gillis in "Secrets of the Cipher Naughts", particularly Frater RVS in his own solution to the Riddle:

Now this is very interesting because, as there are 36 characters in the alphanumeric sequence from 0 to Z, and 36 is a Triangular number as well, we can also write the same alphanumeric sequence in the shape of a Triangle. In this presentation I will be calling this symbol the Alphanumeric Triangle (even though I would prefer calling it Alphanumeric Pyramid, for... numerical reasons 😁):

The Key — the Alphanumeric Triangle.

And by a very curious synchronicity, there will be in that Triangle exactly 4 rows for the Indo-Arabic numerals 0-9, and 4 rows for the English letters A-Z, as if they were complementary series.

Since there are 4 rows for the numerals and 4 rows for the letters in the Alphanumeric Triangle, and remembering that there are 4 groups of "numbers & words" in the Riddle of Liber AL, as we have seen before, we could, in principle, compare the layers of the Alphanumeric Triangle with the 4 groups of "numbers & words" in the Riddle of AL, and see if we can reach a conclusion, or see a connection between them:

My methodology for the analysis of this connection follows a simple reasoning: compare numbers with numbers, and letters with letters. So if we are to compare these two sets of data, we should find a way to go from one to the other. Or in other words, how can I arrive from "4 6 3 8" (in the Riddle) to "0" (in the Alphanumeric Triangle)? How can "A B K" in the Riddle of AL be related to "A B C D E" in the Alphanumeric Triangle? And how can we go from "6 7 8 9" to "24 89"? If we can find a direct connection between these two sets of data, then it should follow that the Riddle doesn't in fact contain any encoded message, but was made that way in order to encode the cipher itself that should be used to unlock the Riddle.

In terms of the numerical part of the Riddle, the following connections could be made:

Click to enlarge.

Regarding the letters, apparently it doesn't look as linear as the example above, since the letter "X" seems to be an anomalous element. However, I found that "A L G M O R" and "F G H I J K" share the same number of letters, as well as "R P S T O V A L" and "S T U V W X Y Z". The other two pairs, instead, can be related through the reduced value of the letters. By "reduced value" I mean the numerological reduction of the value of the letters: so for example, if the letter "L" corresponds to 21 in Alphanumeric Qabbala, its reduced value will then be 2+1 = 3.

Click to enlarge.

However, there's a detail regarding this decoding of the 'words' in the Riddle that should be mentioned. In some previous solutions that were given before to this Riddle, it is sometimes noted that the "x" in the second line of the manuscript may actually be a multiplication sign and not the letter "X".

In the English Qaballa (ALW) solution, for example, it was noted by the late (and sorely missed) Jake Stratton-Kent that that there are 17 "numbers & words" in the first line and 11 in the second (including "x" as a letter), and if we multiply 17 by 11 we'll obtain 187, which is the value of "English Alphabet" in English Qaballa. While this is a noteworthy observation (since in EQ the string of numbers and letters adds to the same value as the full English Alphabet), I couldn't find a different explanation in this specific context of Alphanumeric Qabbala. However, I could point out eventually that, if we consider the "x" to be a multiplication sign and not a letter, then the reduced value of "Y" alone indicates the number of letters in the corresponding layer of the Alphanumeric Triangle, "L M N O P Q R", and so the solution becomes much more straightforward. Only the multiplication (if "x" really is a multiplication sign) remains to be explained.

Click to enlarge.

To complement this:

The verse immediately before the Riddle invites us to "listen to the numbers & the words", and the Riddle is composed precisely of numbers which are followed by letters. Also, the sentence "listen to the numbers & the words" has exactly 26 letters (excluding the ampersand '&') and has the same value as the complete sequence of the English Alphabet. Considering that this could be a clue to the structure of the cipher that answers the Riddle, we could also note that the first word in this sentence is "Aye!", which starts with an "A" = 10 in Alphanumeric Qabbala. So what this sentence could be telling us is that:

— The solution is composed of "numbers" (numerals) and "words" (letters);

— First come the 10 Arabic numerals 0-9 (represented by the initial letter of "Aye!", which corresponds to the number 10 in Alphanumeric Qabbala);

— After the numerals come the letters A-Z, which will then be represented by the following phrase that has exactly 26 letters, and adds up to the same value as the full English Alphabet.

Click to enlarge.

Another detail that has been pointed out by R. Leo Gillis when I first told him about this solution is that the word "listen" could be interpreted as "list ten", referring to the 10 numerals (0-9) that come before the 26 letters of the English Alphabet.

As a side note, I would also point another intriguing detail. In the original manuscript of the Book of the Law, there's a first page that is only rarely reproduced in physical copies of Liber AL vel Legis. The page contains some annotations by Aleister Crowley — and there's a calculation at one of the corners of the page that, as far as I know, no one has ever explained before.

Click to enlarge.

Is it related to Gematria? I have no idea, and to this day I haven't seen one single explanation of what those values mean, or if they stand for letters. I know, however, that the result of the calculation is quite curious — 1026 — which is not an especially relevant number in terms of Gematria, even though it could be a veiled reference to a cipher containing both "10" (numerals) and "26" (letters). Anyway, I have no way to prove that this was the original intention, so please don't take my word for granted. It's most probably a wild guess... I guess.

* * *

The Alphanumeric Solution to AL III:47

Click to enlarge.

Up until now we've seen how Alphanumeric Qabbala could, in principle, be decoded from some clues contained in the text of the Book of the Law, particularly the Riddle in AL II:76. However, none of this would actually be relevant if there weren't other factors somehow confirming this theory, and that's precisely what I'm going to talk about at this moment.

The so-called "Grid page" is a page in the manuscript of Liber AL vel Legis that is different from all other pages in the manuscript, because it contains a grid (which, as far as I know, was added at a later date), as well as a diagonal line, and a squared circle. The original text says the following:

III:47. "This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine. Let him not seek to try: but one cometh after him, whence I say not, who shall discover the Key of it all. Then this line drawn is a key: then this circle squared ⊕ in its failure is a key also. And Abrahadabra. It shall be his child & that strangely. Let him not seek after this; for thereby alone can he fall from it."

This is another of the most enduring riddles in the Book of the Law. There were some suggestions of solutions to this riddle as well, and one of the most interesting is the one proposed by the adherents of English Qaballa / the "ALW" cipher. However, the solutions proposed to this riddle, at least up until this day, always use different "keys" for this riddle and the riddle in AL II:76 — and this detail alone marks a stark contrast between the Alphanumeric solution and all the other solutions.

In fact, the Alphanumeric solution uses exactly the same key to unravel the mysteries of both AL II:76 ("the numbers & the words") and AL III:47 (the grid page) — and that Key is precisely what I called before the Alphanumeric Triangle:

In order to understand how this key unravels the riddle in the grid page, let us analyze the original text and divide it into three parts:

- "Then this line drawn is a key"

The key is the sequence from 0 to Z, described by the line, from 0 to Z.

- "then this circle squared ⊕ in its failure is a key also"

It's "in its failure" because, in the manuscript, the symbol looks more like a plus sign, rather than an X, inside a circle. But why "X" exactly? In Alphanumeric Qabbala, the letter "X" equals 33 and both "English" and "Alphabet" sum 137, with 137 being the 33rd prime number. By a curious coincidence, the word "Trigon", not very commonly used as a synonym for "Triangle", also adds up to 137.

And why the circle, then? Well... when you find the "X" that marks the spot, you draw a circle around it in order to highlight it. That's precisely what I did — and then I understood. "In its failure" indeed.

Other observations are equally possible, namely that: (1) "circle squared" sums 252, while "in its failure" sums 251 — i.e. it misses the mark by 1; and (2) in Elizabethan times, the English Alphabet was known as the "Christ-cross row" — and the letter "X" looks exactly like a Cross.

Anyway, just like "X" can represent the English Alphabet based on the correspondences above, it can also stand for the 10 Arabic numerals 0-9, since 10 is written as "X" in Roman numerals. Thus "X" is truly an alphanumeric key as well, describing simultaneously the sequence of numerals 0-9 and the sequence of letters A-Z.

- "And Abrahadabra"

Or should we say... Abracadabra? In fact, I believe that "Abrahadabra" is only a key to this riddle in the sense that it is a modification of the magic word Abracadabra, which was always inscribed in the shape of a Triangle. Thus, to say that "Abrahadabra" is a key would be another way of saying that a Triangle is the key. And indeed that seems to be the case.

Coincidentally, "Abracadabra" adds up to 151, the 36th prime number...

A B R A C A D A B R A

A B R A C A D A B R

A B R A C A D A B

A B R A C A D A

A B R A C A D

A B R A C A

A B R A C

A B R A

A B R

A B

* * *

My most perceptive Readers may remember at this moment that when I presented the alphanumeric solution to "the numbers & the words" in AL II:76, I noted the alternative theory that the letter "X" in the second line of the riddle could in fact be a multiplication sign and not a letter. And you may also remember that, at that time, I also said that it would make all sense to treat that "X" not as a letter, because in that case there would be a perfect match between the 7 letters in the 7th layer of the Alphanumeric Triangle, and the letter "Y" in the riddle of AL, whose reduced value is 7.

In fact... the "X" that corresponds to the "circle squared in its failure" in the riddle of AL III:47 and, as we have seen before, is a true alphanumeric key, is the same "X" in the riddle of AL II:76 that is treated as different in order to make the riddle work. So we could say that both riddles intertwine around a key element "in its failure" — the letter "X" that represents simultaneously "the numbers & the words" — that is, the 10 numerals and the 26 letters.

My notebook, containing an explanation of the Alphanumeric Solution.

* * *

New Symbols

"Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet;

thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto".

AL II:55

I believe this verse has been the subject of systematic misinterpretation, which has given origin into a whole set of different ciphers that always have something in common: the order of letters of the alphabet is completely different from the one we use everyday (i.e. A to Z). And while all these systems are based on different interpretations of the text of Liber AL vel Legis and all of them certainly have their merits, the fact remains that the text makes it absolutely clear that what is being said here concerns the English Alphabet. And what is the English Alphabet, if not the sequence of 26 English letters from A to Z?

So if there already is an "order" of the English Alphabet, what is it exactly that is being conveyed by "the order & value of the English Alphabet"?

In my opinion, the interpretation is simple: the "order" that is mentioned in this verse does not refer to a different order of the letters of the English Alphabet, but instead to the order of the English Alphabet coming after the sequence of ten numerals from 0 to 9. So after 9 comes A=10, then B=11, C=12, etc, until Z=35. Thus can the "value" of the letters of the Alphabet be derived from their "order" coming after the numerals from 0 to 9. Also worthy of note is the fact that, in Alphanumeric Qabbala, "order" sums 105 while "value" sums 106, two consecutive numbers — so we could say that the "order & value" of the English Alphabet is based on a continuous sequence, which it is.

What about the "new symbols"?

From what has been exposed before, there is at least one obvious new symbol, and that is the Alphanumeric Triangle that I've talked about before.

This symbol answers simultaneously the riddles in "the numbers & the words" and the grid page in AL III:47 and it is, in fact, the most simple and straightforward solution to both.

But there's at least another symbol that I already mentioned in The wonders & magic of Alphanumeric Qabbala that should be mentioned here again: and that is the Alphanumeric Square: a magic square that contains all 36 alphanumeric digits from 0 to Z.

In fact, among the many curiosities about this magic square, there's a particularly curious detail that also deserves special attention. And it is the fact that, even though it is impossible to create a 6×6 magic square following a perfectly symmetrical pattern or sequence, the two diagonals of this magic square do indeed follow a noticeable sequence. Notice for example that the diagonal from 5 to U follows a progression of 5 (5, A=10, F=15, K=20, etc), while the other diagonal, from 0 to Z, follows a progression of 7. Nowhere else in this magic square is there a clear progression of numbers as it can be seen in its diagonals. So there's that "X" again:

And by the way... can you guess what the magical constant of this square? I mean, what is the sum of the numerals & letters by line / column / diagonal? It's 105, the value of "order"...

Talk about finding order out of chaos...

"Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet; (...)"

AL II:55

"They shall worship thy name, foursquare, mystic,

wonderful, the number of the man; (...)"

AL II:78

* * *

Why did Crowley name his book

of correspondences "Liber 777"?

In the context of Thelemic Qabalah, the answer to this question would be that in the Tree of Life, the paths that constitute the "Flaming Sword", from Kether to Malkuth, add up to 777. So if Liber 777 was a book of correspondences for the numbers (the Sephiroth) and the letters (of the Hebrew alphabet), then it would make all sense to name that book as "Liber 777" (i.e. Book 777).

However, in this specific context of the Alphanumeric solution that I'm proposing, the answer wouldn't depend on the Tree of Life or even the Hebrew alphabet, but instead on a number of seemingly "random" factors that, however, when judged in their entirety, seem to indicate that there is more to this than meets the eye.

The fact is that in Liber 777, Crowley listed many correspondences for both the Sephiroth (the 'spheres') of the Tree of Life, and the letters of the Hebrew alphabet (the 'paths' between the spheres). He did this by listing first the 10 Sephiroth, numbering them from 1 (Kether) to 10 (Malkuth), and then the 22 Hebrew letters, numbering them from 11 (Aleph) to 32 (Tav). Now... if we were to adapt this system to the English Alphabet, listing first the ten Arabic numerals from 0 to 9, and then the twenty-six English letters from A to Z, we would end up precisely with Alphanumeric Qabbala: a continuous, logical and non-redundant alphanumeric sequence from 0 to Z=35.

The ultimate 'proof' of this connection, as it were, would be to find an indisputable connection between the number 777 and the Cipher that we have been talking about. And we can certainly find it:

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" = 777 (AQ)

Obviously, the decimal number 777 is written as LL in base-36 (alphanumeric) notation — notice the two larger letters "L" in the manuscript cover of Liber L vel Legis (see above).

* * *

To conclude:

Why Alphanumeric Qabbala?

In this final part I will explain why it makes perfect sense to have Alphanumeric Qabbala as the solution to the riddles of AL.

In my previous exposition of AQ, as I like to call it (for obvious reasons), I stressed the importance of Alphanumeric Qabbala being based on Base-36 notation, and of 666 being the 36th triangular number. So we have (1) a creed or philosophy that was founded by Aleister Crowley, the man who called himself The Great Beast 666; (2) an alphanumeric code that answers the riddles of Liber AL in the simplest and most straightforward manner possible; (3) new symbols to which we can attribute the "order & value of the English Alphabet".

Well, and now what?

Someone might eventually ask:

"OK, now we have the Key. What shall we do with it?"

Well — I don't know. That's not my business.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

Luís Gonçalves

History of Ciphers (part 7) - Satanic Gematria

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Fri, 04 Aug 2023 17:18:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this new text I will be talking about Satanic Gematria and other less-known ciphers. Even though I don't usually work with Satanic Gematria, nor have I explored it as deeply as I have explored Alphanumeric Qabbala, for example, I think that this cipher deserves at least a short reference in this blog of mine. After all, have you ever wondered where did this cipher come from, or who created it, or even where it was mentioned for the very first time? Those are the questions I will be answering in this text.

Unfortunately, like I said above, I never duly explored this cipher (personal choice really), except some minor personal synchronicities, so there won't be much space in this post dedicated to talk about the numerical matches we can find with Satanic Gematria. Instead, I will be referencing the work of the person who was responsible for the discovery of this cipher, and there you will be able to find many curious — and sometimes, not so curious — coincidences with Satanic Gematria.

History of Ciphers

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 7: Satanic Gematria

... and other related ciphers

Satanic Gematria is one of those few ciphers, like Alphanumeric Qabbala, which were perfectly named. I don't quite remember where I first read about this cipher, even though I remembered that it had something to do with Barack Hussein Obama. I would retain these curious synchronicities about this cipher in my mind for many years to come, and eventually I would have almost forgotten about Satanic Gematria if I hadn't seen it again, some 2 or 3 years ago, in the Gematrinator calculator.

I must admit that I never really cared about searching for the origins of this cipher, for the reason that I always considered it a very fittingly named system of Gematria and nothing more than that. I mean, I never actually used it. However, as I've been writing about the history of the ciphers that I find more relevant, I would discover that some people also wanted to know where this specific cipher came from, so this post would be the inevitable next step.

Ironically, it was through a simple and very brief Google search that I managed to find the source material where I had first read about this cipher for the very first time, and it was a book called A Step into the Numeric Enigma of God, written approximately 8 years ago by Alexander Marcussen (owner of the website 777codes.com). The part of that book dealing specifically with Satanic Gematria goes from page 46 to page 56.

Coincidentally, it was last year, on June 24ᵗʰ, 2022 that I found (actually recollected) this information, and shared it in two or three Discord servers dedicated to Gematria. If you reduce the day, month and year in that date to single digits, you'll have 6-6-6. I hadn't noticed that detail at that time, but it is indeed a curious synchronicity, for some reasons that will soon become apparent.

This is the chart for Satanic Gematria:

According to Alexander Marcussen, the name of this cipher and its numerical value basically pay a tribute to the number 666, the "Number of the Beast" in Christian apocalypticism. Its basic premises are the following:

— The first and last letters of the alphabet are assigned the values 36 (=A) and 61 (=Z). Note that the 36ᵗʰ triangular number is 666, while 61 is the 18ᵗʰ prime number (and 18 equals 6+6+6), so these are quite curious details about this cipher;

— And secondly, the name "Satanic Gematria" sums 666 in the same cipher (!!!), which greatly reinforces the same symbolism:

I must admit that I really like the way how this cipher was named. It is indeed a very well crafted cipher, with a very fitting name — but I was never able to see it as more than just that. And that's precisely the reason why I never duly explored this cipher, except on very rare occasions or fitting circumstances. And, to be honest, that's also the reason why I haven't written this text earlier.

* * *

In A Step Into the Numeric Enigma of God, Alexander Marcussen focused much of his work on the Bible codes, and the discovery of numerical and geometrical patterns in the Holy Bible. It is actually a very interesting reading, and I would recommend it, though not entirely without reservations, to all my Readers. I say "not without reservations" not as a criticism to Alexander Marcussen's work, which I think is fascinating, but simply because I don't work like him, nor do I accept all the 'evidences' that he gives as being... well, evident. But that's simply my personal opinion. I invite my Readers to read this work and study it thoroughly, if it ignites their interest.

In the section about Satanic Gematria, however, Marcussen seems to have been more focused on an analysis of the name Barack Hussein Obama and the strange numerical alignments that it originates. In fact, Marcussen found that, using Satanic Gematria, the value of that name matches its value in the Standard/"Extended" English cipher, which follows the same pattern of numerical correspondences for the letters as the traditional Hebrew and Greek systems.

When analyzing this specific number, Marcussen goes to great details to find hidden synchronicities involving this value. Namely, he notes that 793 equals 13×61, with the number 13 being biblically related to ideas of "rebellion" (based on Genesis 14:4) and the number 61 being the 18th prime number — with 18 corresponding to 6+6+6.

Marcussen also notes that Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, the 216ᵗʰ day of the year (216 = 6×6×6), in the year 1961. By a curious coincidence, 1961 was exactly 1891 years after the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, when the Second Temple was destroyed, and 1891 is precisely the 61ˢᵗ triangular number.

Thus, both the "good" cipher (English Standard) and the "evil" cipher (Satanic Gematria) would show that Barack Hussein Obama is connected to the "antichrist number" 793 — especially considering that the name "Yehoshua" (Jesus/Joshua), written as יהושוע, sums 397, the reverse of 793, in Hebrew Gematria.

Even if I don't agree that these or other similar considerations are sufficient proof to claim that Barack Hussein Obama is the "Antichrist", I do consider these findings to be very, very curious, to say the least. Anyway, as at this moment it isn't my purpose to further explore this thesis, I will move on to other less-known — and in my view, equally interesting — ciphers.

* * *

Other experimental ciphers

based on Satanic Gematria

In this section I will be talking about a less-known cipher that I discovered/devised just 1 week before I found Alexander Marcussen's original materials on Satanic Gematria.

The idea of this new cipher came to me when I was comparing Alphanumeric Qabbala (tightly associated with Base-36 notation) with Satanic Gematria (starting at A=36). My first thought when comparing them was that Alphanumeric Qabbala goes from 0 to Z=35, while Satanic Gematria continues the same numerical sequence, going from A=36 to Z=61.

So, what would happen if I joined these two in a single cipher? And then a thought suddenly came to me: "Wait a minute! Isn't there a Case Sensitive cipher? What if I use it as a model to build this new cipher?"

Click to enlarge.

And so, the cipher that I first called "Satanic Qabbala" (later to be renamed as "Alphanumeric Satanic") was born:

Click to enlarge.

However, I must tell you my true opinion about this cipher. When I devised/found it, I was merely playing with the ciphers and not exactly looking for any "supreme satanic cipher". In fact, I never took this cipher seriously, and I always saw it as a kind of "joke cipher". Firstly, because I don't like case sensitive ciphers and I definitely don't use them. And secondly, because I simply don't feel compelled to use it — except, perhaps, as a means to play with Gematria and Base-62 notation simultaneously. Anyway, even in that case it is important to note that the order of lower- and uppercase letters is usually reversed in Base-62 notation.

Numerical connections between AQ,

Alphanumeric Satanic, and Satanic Gematria

In this section we will learn how these 3 ciphers are numerically related.

If we look closely at Alphanumeric Satanic, we will understand that:

— the sequence of Arabic numerals (0-9) and lowercase letters (a-z) corresponds to the sequence and values in Alphanumeric Qabbala;

— the sequence of uppercase letters (A-Z) corresponds to the values of the letters in Satanic Gematria.

Given this connection between these ciphers, it will thus become clear that if a word or phrase contains only lowercase letters, the value of that word/phrase in Alphanumeric Satanic will match its value in Alphanumeric Qabbala. And if a word or phrase contains only uppercase letters, then its value in Alphanumeric Satanic will match its value in Satanic Gematria.

Besides this, there's also the following consideration: if a word or phrase contains both lower- and uppercase letters, then the difference between its value in Alphanumeric Satanic and its value in both AQ and Satanic Gematria will always be 26 or one of its multiples.

Take this example, in order to better understand my explanation:

While I don't use these systems very frequently (except AQ, which is my favorite system of English Gematria), I will conclude this section by saying that many curious synchronicities can be found when we use these three systems at the same time. However, I would warn my Readers that being carried away by some natural synchronicities (and by this, I mean synchronicities that can be mathematically predictable) as if they were supernaturally relevant, may not always be the best decision to make. In fact, that's one of the greatest dangers in Gematria.

Use Gematria; but please don't be its slave.

* * *

As a bonus, in the next part I will briefly talk about "Custom Ordinal" ciphers, or what Alexander Marcussen calls the "English Starter" systems.

"Custom Ordinal" / "English Starter"

Gematria systems

Just like Alphanumeric Qabbala could be considered to be the same as "Ordinal starting at 10" and Satanic Gematria could be called "Ordinal starting at 36", there are other experimental systems of Gematria that could be included in this category. In fact, there's an infinite amount of Custom Ordinal systems of Gematria, depending only on which number is chosen as the value of "A", and then following the natural sequence of numbers all the way through "Z".

There are 4 other such ciphers that I will be talking about in this section, as they are the only ones relevant enough that I've seen before in a Gematria calculator.

The Gematria calculator I'm talking about is not available online; it's rather an executable software that a friend sent me on Discord, and when I saw the amount of ciphers it included, I was... speechless. 👀

Click to enlarge.

Well, I must say that I was speechless, but not because I liked it a lot. In fact, with all due respect for the creator of this software (which I don't know who it is), this software is filled with what I call "junk ciphers", i.e., many of the ciphers it contains simply don't make any sense to even be considered as valid. And that's possibly due to the fact that the author of this software didn't have enough knowledge on the history of ciphers in order to understand why some ciphers are the way they are (like the "ALW" cipher or "Chaldean" Numerology, for example), so the author took the liberty to create "reverse" and "reduced" versions of many ciphers that simply don't make sense to have those counterparts. I won't even talk about some ciphers like "The 911 Cipher" or "Vortex Unreduced", which I think are ridiculous.

Again, please be aware that I'm talking about the ciphers contained in this software and not about its author. The author's work was impeccable: however, I'm afraid that their knowledge on the history of Gematria is unfortunately very limited, so they simply did what they thought was correct — and I respect that. However, I do not support the idea that "anything goes", since that's not how Gematria should work, in principle.

Anyway... amongst this deranged chaos of experimental Gematria ciphers, there were exactly four ciphers that caught my attention, and those ciphers are called (in this software) "Master", "Master Builder", "Masonic" and "Foundation". They look like this:

A quick gaze at these ciphers will lead us to conclude that these are precisely "Custom Ordinal" ciphers: which means that the "Master" cipher is nothing more than Ordinal starting at 11, the "Master Builder" cipher is the same as Ordinal starting at 22, "Masonic" is equal to Ordinal starting at 33, and "Foundation" is precisely the same as Ordinal starting at 44.

Why these names, though? And why starting the numerical sequence at 11, 22, 33 and 44?

In fact, I have a strong suspicion that these ciphers were inspired directly on Satanic Gematria, which starts at A=36 (remember that the 36ᵗʰ triangular number is 666, and "Satanic Gematria" adds to 666 in the same cipher), while adding to the equation some considerations that are specific to Numerology. And it's precisely through Numerology that we can understand why the numbers 11, 22, 33 and 44 were chosen: and why the ciphers were named the way they were.

In Numerology (see this example), the number 11 is called a "Master number", similarly to its multiples (22, 33, 44, 55). And each "Master number" has its own characteristics and 'temperament', as it were. So for example, number 22 is associated with the symbolic imagery of the "Master Builder", and number 33 is traditionally tied to Masonry (supposedly due to the fact that the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Masonry has 33 degrees), while the description of the Master number 44 includes references to "building a strong foundation to achieve success".

So this is the actual origin of these ciphers. By starting the numerical sequence with specific "Master numbers", the ciphers were named according to the numerological, occult or symbolical meanings of those same numbers.

In any case, these ciphers are not as intelligently named as Satanic Gematria since their names don't translate to any relevant values when analyzed through their own systems.

At this point I should argue that, for example, the "Masonic" cipher was never used in Freemasonry and its relevance in a Masonic context is disputable at best, or absolutely irrelevant at worst. So, even though I enjoy the imaginative process involved in the creation of these ciphers, I'm not entirely convinced that they would be "useful" somehow... except if we want to explore some mathematical laws behind what we call "numerical matches" in Gematria.

And that's precisely what I'm talking about now.

How "numerical matches" work

regarding Custom Ordinal ciphers

In this final part I will compare the most basic English cipher ("English Ordinal": A=1, B=2, etc) with several Custom Ordinal ciphers, in order to show my Readers how numerical matches work when we're dealing with this type of ciphers.

In my previous text How I use Gematria, in the section called "What is a numerical match?", I gave a practical example of how we can weave a story based on numerical equivalences between words:

Click to enlarge.

This is indeed a remarkable set of matches between words, all weaved into the life story of Jesus Christ, and one that has been repeated over and over by many people who see in Gematria a method to "decode Reality". And while this is indeed a very interesting exercise that will always give many fruits — irrespective of which cipher you're using — the question is different when we start talking about cross-cipher matches. In fact, even though these correspondences shown above can only be obtained using the simplest cipher for the English alphabet (A=1, B=2, etc), the same matches won't work with other different ciphers; or, in fact, using other ciphers we will see other matches that are equally relevant but aren't included in this specific set of matches. So considering this, wouldn't it be tempting to see if all these matches also worked in Custom Ordinal ciphers? That's the thing I will be explaining in this section: how cross-cipher matches work.

The basic premise is this:

If two words or phrases match in English Ordinal and they have the same number of letters, they will also match in any Custom Ordinal cipher.

If we look closely, this will make perfect sense. In fact, in any Custom Ordinal cipher, the value of a letter of the alphabet always corresponds to its value in English Ordinal added to a natural number (equal to 1 or larger). We will call this value the Custom Constant. For example, the so-called "Master" cipher is the same as English Ordinal + 10, while Satanic Gematria corresponds to English Ordinal + 35. So in order to have two words matching in both English Ordinal and a Custom Ordinal cipher, it will be imperative that both words share exactly the same number of letters, since the Custom Constant is accumulated across the same number of letters.

We could also think about the following:

The value of a phrase in any Custom Ordinal cipher will always correspond to its value in English Ordinal, added to the Custom Constant multiplied by the number of letters in the phrase.

Using the table above as an example, the value of the word "Cross" (5 letters) in English Ordinal is 74. Knowing that the Custom Constant of Satanic Gematria is 35, it is thus expected that the value of "Cross" in Satanic Gematria will be 74 + 35×5 = 249.

And the following will also be true, obviously:

If two words or phrases match in English Ordinal but they don't have the same number of letters, the difference between their values in English Ordinal and any Custom Ordinal cipher will always correspond to the cipher's Custom Constant multiplied by the difference of letters between both phrases.

Here's a practical example:

In English Ordinal, the words "Jesus" (5 letters) and "Messiah" (7 letters) share the same value (74). In Satanic Gematria, the value of the word "Jesus" will be 249, while the value of "Messiah" will be 319. The difference between 249 and 319 will then be 70, which corresponds to the Custom Constant of Satanic Gematria (35) multiplied by 2 (the difference between the number of letters of the two words).

Here's a table that shows, in practice, how these rules work:

Click to enlarge.

* * *

Hopefully, this short section will have helped some of my Readers understanding why some numerical matches are not "extraordinary" (i.e. fruit of some random or mysterious condition) but instead quite the opposite: they're actually based on very strict mathematical laws, and can thus be easily predicted. Or in other words, it is the words themselves that matter when we talk about numerical matches in Gematria, and not what they mean. So it's actually us who give meaning to the numerical connection between words, phrases or names, and build narratives based on numerical correspondences. This can be quite a fun hobby, but it can also be dangerously misleading sometimes. There's a fine line bet

Some final words on Satanic Gematria

(and Custom Ordinal ciphers)

My main intention in writing this text, as all texts in this blog that verse about the History of Ciphers, was above all to let my Readers know where the ciphers came from, the names of their discoverers, what's the logic behind the ciphers (if there is any, of course), and also if there is any specific context where the ciphers fit well.

Regarding Satanic Gematria, the main subject of this specific text, what I find most interesting is that it was devised so that it encodes the number 666 in at least three different ways:

— the first letter of the alphabet, "A", corresponds to 36, and 666 is the 36ᵗʰ triangular number;

— the last letter of the alphabet, "Z", corresponds to 61, the 18ᵗʰ prime number (and 18 = 6+6+6);

— and finally, the value of the cipher's name in the same cipher is, quite surprisingly, 666.

This is basically what I find most interesting in Satanic Gematria. Beyond that, I really can't say that I "like a lot" this cipher because, honestly, I don't. I only use it very rarely, because besides these intriguing patterns, there's nothing drawing me to use it. This, of course, is just my personal opinion, but I think that the best advice that I could give to my Readers at this moment is this: if you like it, use it. If you don't like it, don't use it. 😜

* * *

Then, we talked about my own experimental case sensitive cipher, which I first called Satanic Qabbala and was later rebaptized as Alphanumeric Satanic. This cipher is merely a combination of Alphanumeric Qabbala and Satanic Gematria (hence the name!) and when I devised it, I did it simply because it was a fun idea. So originally, I made this cipher as a "joke cipher", even though some people liked it and use it sometimes. Personally, I don't use it — and I don't like case sensitive ciphers either, so the best thing I can tell my Readers about this cipher is this: use it at your own risk. 😅

* * *

Now, regarding Custom Ordinal ciphers, or "English Starter" systems as Alexander Marcussen calls them, I thought this was a nice opportunity not only to talk about those ciphers, but also to talk about the mathematical patterns behind numerical matches involving these ciphers and English Ordinal. And this is a very important aspect of Gematria — particularly English Gematria — because sometimes people tend to be overwhelmed when they see a "match" across many different ciphers, while that match may in fact be mathematically justifiable through a simple demonstration, just like I've done in this text.

Regarding the "validity" of Custom Ordinal ciphers, I believe that's a question of personal choice, so it is up to my Readers to find out if they see much sense in these ciphers and if they should use them or not. On a personal level, I'm not very fond of Custom Ordinal ciphers — except Alphanumeric Qabbala, which is not the same as "Ordinal starting at 10" (even though the values they give to the letters are exactly the same), and it is in fact a whole different thing altogether.

* * *

Hoping that this text has been an enriching piece of information to my Readers, I bid my Readers farewell... well, at least until I think about a new cipher to write about. I don't have any idea at this moment, but as Gematria is a neverending universe, maybe something will occur to me in the mean time. Maybe in a somewhat different format, haha. 😉

Luís Gonçalves

On ciphers, probabilities, and the search for "meaningful matches"

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Wed, 10 May 2023 15:14:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this new text I will invite my Readers to discuss about ciphers, probabilities, the search for "meaningful matches", and their meaning in our work with Gematria. Even though this subject was already addressed (very lightly) in my previous text "How I work with Gematria", in my opinion this matter should be further discussed, not only because it is a fundamental aspect of Gematria, but also because people still tend to get confused about what a numerical match "means" — if it means anything at all.

* * *

It is my firm belief that, whether it be UFOnauts, Thelemic texts or sacred scriptures, all ciphers will always deliver certain "meaningful" matches when we want to "decode" those things.

One of the clearest examples of this can be found in Allen H. Greenfield's "Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts", in which he proposes that EQ / ALW / NAEQ is the "secret cipher" of the UFOnauts — for the simple fact that he was able to find "meaningful matches" when applying it to the cases he was researching.

But then a question arises:

What if we used a completely different cipher — would we still be able to find "meaningful matches"?

And the answer to this is an absolute YES.

Whether it be Simple/Ordinal, or John Farthing's Toavotea Key, or R. Leo Gillis' Trigrammaton Qabalah, or even Frater RIKB's Mars Kamea Gematria — or any other cipher you could think of — we will always find "meaningful" matches when we use this kind of ciphers to decode anything we want.

I did it before with the cipher of the Bavarian Illuminati, applying it to the names and specific phrases in Greenfield's book. I did it with Simple/Ordinal English. And I did it with Alphanumeric Qabbala, Edgar Joel Love's Cipher X, and even my own experimental cipher called "Elevenfold Qabalah" — only to find that all of them, in a way or another, delivered some outstanding results when applied to this specific subject.

So what would make a cipher "relevant"?

Would it be the matches we can get when we apply it in a certain context?

Or is it the context we're working on that dictates which ciphers make sense to be used?

Also — how can we be sure that something was previously encoded with Gematria? Is it the "meaningful matches" we can get that "confirm" that? Or do we have to be extremely cautious in these things, for the simple fact that a "match" doesn't mean anything per se, except the meaning that we willingfully give to it?

Just some food for thought...

NOTE:

I originally published this short text on Reddit, and I must say that I was very satisfied with most replies — namely that of u/diviludicrum, which I will reproduce here in its entirety, due to its relevance in this discussion:

"I don’t know anything about the specific text you’re referencing or what material it was purporting to decode, but I can speak to the question from the standpoint of general principles regarding coded texts.

   Simply put, you’re right, the mere existence of “meaningful matches” is insufficient grounds to conclude that the text was coded with a particular cipher, since it’s self-evident that meaningful matches could be found with many other conceivable ciphers too.

   So the primary concern should not be with the number or frequency of seemingly meaningful matches, but rather the opposite - ie how often does the decoded text lack meaning, and what is the proportion of those instances versus those that are meaningful?

   Because if a text can be consistently and perfectly decoded with a particular cipher, producing a 100% meaningful and coherent decoded text, that is highly unlikely to occur by chance. Whereas if the decoded text is only meaningful 1% of the time, with no consistent pattern that signals that 1% as somehow “special” within the context of the text as a whole, that would seem extremely weak evidence of a deliberate coding process."

* * *

My solution to AL II:76

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Mon, 06 Feb 2023 19:29:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In the previous text, published yesterday and named The wonders & magic of Alphanumeric Qabbala, I shared my solution to one of the most controversial verses in Aleister Crowley's Liber AL vel Legis. As the search for a "promised" English Qabalah has been the source of much dispute and confusion, and as I believe that this is still an extremely important subject to be studied in the context of Thelema, I'm sharing my solution as a separate post.

Most of this material is already in the previous post, so if you want to know more about Alphanumeric Qabbala and its wonders I recommend you read it in its entirety. There's much food for thought hidden in that post...

First, let's take a look at the verse(s) in question:

AL II:75. "Aye! listen to the numbers & the words:

AL II:76. "4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meaneth this, o prophet? Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever. There cometh one to follow thee: he shall expound it. But remember, o chosen one, to be me; to follow the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven; to look forth upon men, to tell them this glad word."

Liber AL, particularly the passages in AL II:76 and III:47, has been the sole reason for the creation of at least a dozen different ciphers, and an equally numerous amount of solutions that have been proposed to try to solve this riddle.

In my series of posts about the Thelemic ciphers (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4), my Readers will remember that some ciphers delivered some quite good results when applied to this riddle, particularly English Qaballa and Trigrammaton Qabalah, as well as English Ordinal — just to number a few examples.

For example, using the Ordinal cipher (A=1, B=2, ..., Z=26) the total of the verse in AL II:75 added to the string of numbers and letters in AL II:76 will be 777, a result that will also match the one obtained when using Joel Love's Cipher X. If you do the same with Alphanumeric Qabbala, the total sum will be 1209, which is 13×93, two very important numbers in a Thelemic context. If you calculate the value of the numbers & the words in AL II:76 using English Qaballa or Trigrammaton Qabalah the sum will be 351, the 26ᵗʰ triangular number (meaning that 351 = 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 26, encompassing the whole alphabet, as it were). And if you use John Farthing II's Toavotea Key, the string of numbers & words will add up to 418 — a highly significant number in Thelema.

Some of these systems have been called "The Key of It All" by their proponents, and all of them certainly have their merits, in a way or another.

However, saying and demonstrating that a cipher is the "Key of It All" are two very different things, and in most cases what we end up with is a demonstration that any "pattern" can be found when we apply many different ciphers to the same riddle. So is the search for a "promised" English Qabalah a useless pursuit? Well... maybe it is. Maybe it has been in front of our eyes this whole time.

* * *

My solution to AL II:76

Alphanumeric Qabbalism

My solution to this riddle is in fact quite humorous... and simple... and with it we would certainly understand why the numbers & the words are in their respective "position to one another" — even though I can't really explain all of it. And I still have many doubts that this would be a definitive answer to AL II:76.

This "solution", as it were, doesn't "mean" anything to me, except that the "riddle" was never intended to be taken seriously. There is no meaning as to which numbers or letters are used in it — but in fact how they are used.

Four times the same message is repeated:

"4 6 3 8 A B K"

"2 4 A L G M O R"

"3 Y X"

"24 89 R P S T O V A L"

And the message would be: Letters always come after numbers — which is precisely the most fundamental characteristic of Alphanumeric Qabbala. And so the answer could be obtained, assuming that AQ was the intended "key" to decode AL.

AQ = 0123456789 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

(Letters come after "numbers" — i.e. the numerals.)

And this becomes extremely relevant in a Thelemic context, with AQ being a offshoot of Base-36 notation (a continuous, non-redundant sequence from 0 to 9, and then A=10 through Z=35) and 666 being the 36ᵗʰ triangular number.

I can't explain why the same "message" would be repeated four times. However, what I do know is that the riddle contains exactly 28 numbers & letters, with 28 being a triangular number, just like 36. And if we organize the 0-Z alphanumeric sequence in the shape of a triangle, there will be exactly 4 rows for the numbers, and 4 rows for the letters.

Assuming that this would be the answer to AL II:76, we could further elaborate upon a possible connection between the rows of the "AQ triangle" and the rows of the (decoded) riddle in AL II:76, putting them side by side and watching for similarities.

Starting with the numbers, we will see that there does seem to exist some kind of connection:

However, doing the same with the "words" (i.e. the letters) won't retrieve any noteworthy connection — besides the fact that the 2nd and 4th rows share exactly the same number of letters:

Even not trying to "justify" this finding with Gematria, let my Readers consider the following:

— The Law of Thelema, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" sums 777 in Alphanumeric Qabbala.

— Then, consider that in Crowley's book of numbers and letters, Liber 777, Crowley listed the ten sephiroth numbering them from 1 to 10, and then the twenty-two Hebrew letters (the "paths"), numbering them from 11 (Aleph) to 32 (Tav).

— If we were to adapt that system to the English Alphabet, listing first the ten Arabic numerals from 0 to 9, and then the twenty-six English letters from A to Z, we would end up precisely with Alphanumeric Qabbala: a continuous, logical and non-redundant alphanumeric sequence from 0 to Z=35.

* * *

This, of course, is still a work in progress, and I intend to keep studying the Book of the Law for more clues about this. Obviously, I will keep my Readers informed as my research continues.

Also, I invite you, dear Reader, to read my previous post on Alphanumeric Qabbala. Scroll down almost to the end of the page and look for the section titled "The revelation of AQ in the context of Thelema". That part of my article will provide some of the reasons why I think that Alphanumeric Qabbala may be an important key to unravel some of the mysteries of Liber AL.

* * *

DISCLAIMER:

I make no claims whatsoever about "my role" in this solution — my intention is not to claim that I've found the "Key of It All" or that I am the "magical child of the Beast". In my opinion, that's simply naïve and irrelevant, and won't lead anyone anywhere.

I do believe, however, that AQ may be an important key in Thelema, and what I'm doing here is simply to play a bit with it, and trying to make it become more widely known in a Thelemic context.

Let my Readers be the judges of this...

The wonders & magic of Alphanumeric Qabbala

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 15:15:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this new text I will talk about Alphanumeric Qabbala, a cipher that I already explored (somewhat incompletely) in my 3rd part of the History of the Thelemic ciphers, even though this time my approach will be very different from my previous articles. The reason for this is that in my first text about that cipher I had to focus a bit on where it came from — after all, am I not writing about the History of ciphers? — and as I did that, there was a lot of other interesting stuff that was left unmentioned. So in this new text, as I don't have to explain its history again, I will instead focus on what we can do with this cipher, as well as how we can explore some of its highly curious properties.

As a new introduction to this cipher, I'll begin by explaining what exactly is Alphanumeric Qabbala and how it is connected to Base-36 notation.

Next, I'll briefly talk about some of the very strange synchronicities that happened in my life when I found & then was told about this cipher, as I believe that they are very worthy of note and should be mentioned in this text. After all, it was through a very strange synchronicity that I found this cipher... so why not talk about it?

After that, I'm going to talk about this cipher's name(s), their Gematria values and mathematical properties. In this section, my main intention will be showing my Readers how some names can be devised in order to return a very specific and intended numerical value, when "decoded" through Gematria. In this case, Alphanumeric Qabbala is a cipher whose names have been heavily encoded in the past so that they could be specifically connected to the number 36.

Then, I will be talking about how Alphanumeric Qabbala is related to Base-36 notation, some interesting properties of that number base, and why I think that the alphanumeric sequence from 0 to Z is extremely versatile and should be further explored, even for creative or recreational purposes. In this part I will also explain how the alphanumeric sequence 0-Z can be used for sigilization, cryptography, or even applied to Astrology, following some of my experiments with it.

In the following part I will show you some of my findings with AQ in the context of Thelema, and the reasons why I think that this cipher may be extremely relevant in that specific context. Some of this material was already presented in my previous text about this cipher, while some other material will be fresh new — and extremely intriguing.

In the second-to-last chapter I will briefly talk about the "dos" and "don'ts" with Alphanumeric Qabbala, which in turn reflect the way how I work with AQ — and also some other ways how I think we shouldn't work with AQ.

And finally, as I like to leave the best for last, the last part of this text will present a riddle to my Readers — or better yet, a series of riddles.

* * *

So here's an approximate "table of contents" for this text:

— Alphanumeric Qabbala as an offshoot of Base-36 notation;

— Strange synchronicities involving Time, this cipher, and the number 36;

— The names of this cipher ("AQ", etc) and how they were heavily encoded;

— The mathematical structure and properties of AQ;

— Finger-counting with AQ;

— Using AQ for cryptography and sigilization;

— Applying AQ to Astrology (new techniques);

— The (frequently underestimated) role of AQ in a Thelemic context;

— Some ways how I tend to use this cipher.

For a start, let me first talk about how AQ is related to Base-36 notation.

Preliminary Notes:

It has been recently brought to my attention the fact that Mike, a.k.a. "Sean Virroco", deleted all of his repositories from Github.com, including his GEMATRO and ravic-norsou calculators. I'm not quite sure if this was a wise move on his part, but I won't be questioning his motives. Fortunately I still have my own forks and copies of "Gematro" and "ravic-norsou", so those are the calculators that I'll be using in this presentation — particularly my GemCon calculator, based on Sean Virroco's "ravic-norsou" calculator, as well as my copy of GEMATRO (to a lesser extent).

My calculators are just simple modifications of Virroco's previous work, to the extent that my (very) limited knowledge of programming allows me to do. So thank him, not me, for these wonderful tools.

* * *

Alphanumeric Qabbala and Base-36 numeration

Alphanumeric Qabbala, or AQ for friends (haha!), is basically an offshoot of Base-36 notation, a type of numerical notation that uses exactly 36 alphanumeric characters (from 0 to 9, and from A to Z) as numerical digits.

But what exactly is Base-36 notation, then? Actually, it's just like decimal notation, the one that we use everyday, but instead of using only the ten Arabic numerals from 0 to 9, it also includes the twenty-six letters of the modern English Alphabet as numerical digits. You can learn more about Base-36 notation here and here — and also read the history of a tech company that was named after Base-36 notation.

So how does it work, actually? In decimal (Base-10) notation, every number is written considering 10 possible values (from 0 to 9) for the units, tens and hundreds — so in Base-36 notation there are 36 possible values (from 0 to Z=35) for the units (1), "tens" (36) and "hundreds" (36×36). In other words, the number that is written as 360 in Base-10, meaning "3×100 + 6×10 + 0×1", would be written as A0 in Base-36, meaning "10×36 + 0×1".

Doing these calculations by hand can be troublesome for anyone who isn't used to count in groups of 36's instead of 10's, so I would recommend using some quite handy online calculators in order to convert numbers between Base-10 and Base-36:

— UnitConverters.net

— Numbers Conversion Table

— Conversion thingies (original)

... or you can simply use Gematro. If you right-click a number in the table containing the active ciphers, you'll see how that number is written in different number bases, including Binary (base-2), Octal (base-8), Hexadecimal (base-16), Base-36, among others.

In the meantime, let me tell you about...

My first synchronicities with AQ

In this section I'll tell you how I came to know this cipher: or in fact, how I only found that it already existed after I had devised it by myself.

My work with AQ began in the last days of April 2021, when I was first told about this cipher. There were a lot of synchronicities involved in this discovery, and I think that it is due time to talk about them. Please note that I was granted authorization to post screenshots of parts of my conversations. This is important in order to give this presentation some graphical context, and to note some important details.

On April 29, 2021, Sean Virroco sent me a message saying that someone had forked GEMATRO, making a pull request that included a cipher known as "Anglossic Qabbala":

Click to enlarge.

I was extremely intrigued by this (note my "eyes" reaction to Sean's message), because just some days before this happened I had already added the exact same cipher to GEMATRO — even though with a different name, of course.

Click to enlarge.

In fact, the first name I gave to that cipher, in mid April 2021, was Hexadecimal Qabalah — which was wrong, since "hexadecimal" refers to Base-16 notation, not Base-36. A proper name for Base-36 notation would be Hexatridecimal, which comes from the Greek words hexa~ ("six") + trideka ("thirty"), even though Sexatrigesimal, of Latin origin, is sometimes used as well. So in fact, my first "correct" name for this cipher was Hexatridecimal Qabalah, which I later noticed that matches the value of Numbers and Letters — which is precisely what AQ is.

Some time after this, on June 3ʳᵈ, I was in a Discord server where I found more people who were using this cipher, and there was a guy with the nickname "NN_Solex" who was sharing some of his findings with this cipher in a Thelemic context. As at that time I was doing exactly the same, I decided to start a private chat with that guy. To my absolute surprise, NN_Solex was precisely the person who had made a fork of Gematro and added AQ, just some weeks before:

Click to enlarge.

There would be nothing interesting about this, weren't it the fact that I was talking with the same guy that had forked Gematro and added AQ to it, without knowing who he was before talking with him — on the 3ʳᵈ day of the 6ᵗʰ month, which was precisely the 36ᵗʰ day since Sean Virroco had told me about AQ (i.e. counting April 29 as day 1):

Curiously enough, while talking with NN_Solex, we discovered that one of the subjects we share the same (almost obsessive) interest in is the ancient Egyptian stellar gods called Decans, a set of 36 deities where each one is traditionally allotted 10 degrees of the ecliptic — that is, one of three parts into which each sign of the zodiac can be subdivided.

This was my first great synchronicity with AQ, even though it was just the beginning. From that time on, I was going to see the number 36 everywhere and constantly, every single day — like the case when I was having my dinner while a soccer match was being transmitted on the TV. The second I looked at the TV, exactly 36 minutes and 36 seconds had elapsed since the beginning of the match. All of it was pretty wild, to be honest.

My final (as of this moment) great synchronicity with this cipher happened months later, during late November 2021.

On November 25ᵗʰ, I was searching the server where I had talked with NN_Solex for the first time, looking for messages from him to see if I could find the exact date when he had forked Gematro. I knew that it would be near April 29, the day when Sean Virroco told me about AQ, but even then I was wondering... "what if?". And I found the message that I was looking for:

Click to enlarge.

So Sean told me about AQ, even though the fork had been created the previous day. So I ran to the date calculator and saw how many days there were between April 28 (AQ added to Gematro; fork created) and June 3 (my first chat with NN_Solex):

Who would guess?! 36 days exactly. 😅

However, some other "strange" things happened during this day. You see, I found the exact date when AQ was added to a NN_Solex's fork of Gematro on November 25ᵗʰ. Add the day and the month and you get 11+25 = 36. On this day there were also 36 days left until the end of the year:

On that day I also received by mail my favorite card deck, a Lenormand deck which has (guess what?) 36 cards:

And in case the "message" hadn't been understood... on the same day, when I arrived at my work, and after noticing all these patterns involving the number 36, I was curious to know what was the worker's ID number of a colleague of mine — a beautiful woman I was "sort of in love" with. Well... you wouldn't imagine how I felt when I saw her card with the number... 36. I was speechless, for obvious reasons.

Of course, one could argue that the more you look for something, the more you'll see it — so if I was focusing my attention on AQ and Base-36 notation, it would be inevitable to "see" the number 36 more frequently than others. Could be. And yet...

Now, a word or two about:

Alphanumeric Qabbala:

its name & properties

At this point I should state that this is my absolute favorite cipher so far, and I've played a lot with it. It is also one of the most intelligently named ciphers that I've ever known, and the reason why I say this has to do with... well, its name, of course!

In this section we will learn how some names can be encoded with Gematria, so that they match pre-determined values. Alphanumeric Qabbala is the perfect example of a cipher whose names were willingfully encoded, so that they would be related specifically to the number 36 — for obvious reasons.

Let's start by its short name, "AQ". If you look closely, this cipher contains 10 Arabic numerals (from 0 to 9) and 26 English letters (from A to Z), and those are precisely the values of A and Q — the initials of the name of the cipher itself!

So basically the name of the cipher explains what it is:

AQ = 0123456789 + abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

(10 Arabic numerals + 26 English letters)

Click to enlarge.

The name "Alphanumeric Qabbala" sums 328 in the same cipher. Now, note how the sum of all divisors of 328 (including itself) is 630 — precisely the sum of all numbers from 0 to 35 (i.e. all digits of AQ):

And yet... even though "Alphanumeric Qabbala" is a really cool name for the above reason, there is yet another name that is perfect for this cipher, and that name is Alphanumeric Qabbalism:

Why is this relevant, then? It becomes VERY relevant once we notice that the decimal number 386 is written as "AQ" in Base-36:

From UnitConverters.net - Convert Decimal to Base-36.

From my previous text on this cipher, my Readers will remember that another name for this cipher is Anglossic Qabbala. The meaning of the term "Anglossic" may not be clear for my Readers, but I'll just say that it seems to be a neologism derived from Anglo~ (i.e. related to English) plus the Greek particle gloss~ which is related to "tongue" or "language"... so it would be just a fancy way of saying that this is a Qabbala for the English Language.

However, even in this case there is more than meets the eye. If you happen to use my GemCon calculator, you'll see that three of the ciphers that are enabled by default are: English Standard (also called "Extended"), Ordinal (the simplest modern English cipher, from A=1 to Z=26) and Reduction (also called "Pythagorean Numerology"). I like using those three ciphers together because they work as a kind of "octaves", with Standard being a higher octave of Ordinal, and Reduction being its lower octave. To these I added Alphanumeric Qabbala, because... well, you already know why, or else you wouldn't be reading this. 😅

When used together, those four ciphers yield some interesting results when applied to the names of the AQ cipher — which as we have seen, is related to Base-36 notation. "Anglossic" sums 360 in the Standard cipher and 36 in the Reduction cipher, while "Qabbala" sums 36 in English Ordinal, which is the value of "AQ" in Alphanumeric Qabbala.

Even by a mere coincidence, "Thirty-Sixth" sums 279 in AQ — the value of "Anglossic Qabbala" in the same cipher.

Other results not directly related to the number 36 but still worthy of note, are: "Alphanumeric Qabbala" which sums 157 in English Ordinal, matching the value of "Qabbalism" in AQ. And in English Ordinal, "Anglossic" sums 99 — the value of "Qabbala" in AQ.

At this point some of my Readers may be asking themselves: "What does this actually mean?". Well, besides the fact that this cipher seems to be prone to attract coincidences, the fact is that these names that were given to AQ were all heavily encoded so that they would all revolve around the number 36 — precisely the value of the number base from which AQ was derived. So in fact, what this means is precisely this: one can use Gematria creatively, in order to encode secret references in a word, phrase or text, so that what one intends to convey can only be "unlocked" (deciphered) with the correct "key" (cipher).

Take this example of such a ciphered riddle:

The name "Alphanumeric Gematria" is almost perfect;

In order to be perfect, you'd only need to add 1 to it.

Why?

I invite you to try to solve this. Read very carefully what I wrote up until this point, and the answer will be there. This can actually help you in spotting willingfully encoded things, provided that the clues are given and you can understand them.

* * *

Now, leaving aside the question of the cipher's name(s), let us turn our attention to the number 36 and its properties, and see what we can "do" with it.

Properties of Number Thirty-Six

Mathematically speaking, 36 is the first number (besides 1, by definition) that is both a triangular number and a square number. Let "N" be any natural number, and every number that can be written as "1+2+3+...+N" will be a triangular number, and every number that can be written as N×N will be a square number. So 36 is the 8ᵗʰ triangular number because it corresponds to 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 + 7 + 8, and it is the 6ᵗʰ square number because it corresponds to 6 × 6.

When I started experimenting with these properties of the AQ cipher, it was my intention to try to find some clue for a "pattern" in the English alphabet. After all, there are some different theories about how English is a "magical language" with a magically structured alphabet:

— In my first text about the Elizabethan/Baconian ciphers I wrote (regarding the "Kaye" ciphers) about how the modern English alphabet seems to be a "perfected" form of the old Elizabethan English alphabet. And Alphanumeric Qabbala becomes relevant in this context as well, since if you look closely, in both Kaye ciphers the letters of the alphabet are numbered from 10 to 35 — exactly like in AQ, leaving the impression that even the Kaye ciphers were connected to Base-36 notation — which seems to be hinted at in an excellent article by Peter Dawson (as are all articles written by him) in which he talks about Rosicrucian Mathematics (PDF — 681 KB, pp. 14 & 17).

My experiments with Alphanumeric Qabbala eventually led me to yet another conclusion. What if Arabic numerals were the "missing piece" that would allow us to find an actual "structure", as it were, in the English alphabet? After all, I couldn't help noticing that when we write all 36 alphanumeric characters (from 0 to Z) in the shape of a triangle, there are exactly 4 rows for the Arabic numerals, and 4 rows for the English letters, as if they were complementary series:

But there's another very intriguing detail about this. In The Secret Teachings of All Ages, in the chapter about Pythagorean Mathematics, Manly P. Hall quotes Plutarch (from "De Iside et Osiride": here's the online text, including the original Greek):

"The Pythagoreans indeed go farther than this, and honour even numbers and geometrical diagrams with the names and titles of the gods. Thus they call the equilateral triangle head-born Minerva and Tritogenia, because it may be equally divided by three perpendiculars drawn from each of the angles. So the unit they term Apollo, as to the number two they have affixed the name of strife and audaciousness, and to that of three, justice. For, as doing an injury is an extreme on the one side, and suffering one is an extreme on the on the one side, and suffering in the middle between them. In like manner the number thirty-six, their Tetractys, or sacred Quaternion, being composed of the first four odd numbers added to the first four even ones, as is commonly reported, is looked upon by them as the most solemn oath they can take, and called Kosmos."

This paragraph and the following explain some of the "divine" correspondences for the numbers according to the Pythagoreans. It also mentions that the Tetraktys, or Sacred Quaternion, represented by the number 36, was their most important symbol and was called Cosmos. And even though the most widely known form of the Tetractys corresponds to the number 10 (or 1+2+3+4), in this case, intringuingly, Plutarch says that 36 was also considered to be a Pythagorean Tetractys. I didn't know this before I read Hall's book.

In the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, verse 47, the same reverence is due to the Tetractys:

"I swear it by him who has transmitted into our souls the Sacred Quaternion, the source of nature, whose cause it is."

A simple form of the Pythagorean Tetractys.

A modern-day Tetractys, perfectly adapted to the English Alphabet.

The number 36 also seems to play a major role when it comes to sacred numbers in mythologies all around the world, which in many cases are multiples of 36. Take for example:

— 108 is a very relevant number in Hinduism, with specific mantras being repeated exactly 108 times. It equals 3×36, which means that it is written as 30 in Base-36 notation (meaning 3×36 + 0);

— In Jewish Qabalah, 72 is the value of the unspeakable Name of God when it is written in the shape of the Pythagorean Tetractys. 72 equals 2×36 and so is written as 20 in Base-36;

— In Jewish mysticism there's also the tradition of the Lamed Vav Tzaddikim, or 36 Hidden Righteous Men, according to which "there are no fewer than 36 righteous people in the world who greet the Shekhinah in each generation". According to this tradition, the world would come to an end if even one of them was missing.

— In Christian Eschatology, the number 144 (particularly as 144,000) has a fundamental role, representing the Servants of God, the number of souls to be saved on the day of Final Judgment. 144 equals 4×36 and it is written as 40 in Base-36;

— Many more examples of this exist, like the number of seconds in a day, 86,400 (864 = 24×36), a period of 1260 days that is referred to more than once in the Book of Revelation (1260 = 35×36), or the number of degrees in a circle (360 = 10×36).

Base-36 becomes even more interesting when we see how some numbers are written in it — particularly (in)famous triple-digit numbers like 666, 777, 888 and the like:

Click to enlarge.

Finally, as the number 36 is also a square number, I also thought about writing all 36 alphanumeric characters in the shape of a square:

And eventually... this actually gave me a different idea — and that's what I'm going to talk about now.

English Alphabet

and the Magic Square of the Sun

Many people know it as the Magic Square of Tiphareth, and it's basically a 6×6 square where all numbers from 1 to 36 have been inscribed, and structured in a way that the rows, columns and main diagonals all add up to 111. The total sum of all numbers is 666, the 36ᵗʰ triangular number.

Magic Square of the Sun.

I was always intrigued with this Magic Square since I first read about it, for a simple reason. You see, in terms of the sequence of numbers, all Magic Squares follow a symmetrical pattern, starting with the 3×3 Magic Square (the smallest possible Magic Square containing only natural numbers) and onwards — while the 6x6 square is the only square for which it is impossible to create a pure symmetrical pattern. In fact, it's quite ironic that while 6 is considered a perfect number, the magic square of 6×6 is always unperfected. It's almost like finding order out of chaos... if you know what I mean...

From Wolfram MathWorld (blue arrow added by me). Click to enlarge.

After a moment of contemplating how to adapt Alphanumeric Qabbala to this Magic Square, I had a thought: so this table contains all numbers from 1 to 36, right? What if I subtract "1" from each of those values, obtaining a series of values from 0 to 35, and then convert the numbers back to Base-36 (i.e. AQ)? So I did that, and this is what I got:

Magic Square for AQ.

Now, how exactly can we use this? One among many possible uses of this square is to use it as a sigilization technique.

In Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's "Three Books on Occult Philosophy", Book 2, chapter 12 (link), the author presented the sigils of the planetary intelligences & spirits, which were based on an ingenious sigilization technique. Using the example for the Sun and its 6×6 magic square, and applying this technique to the names of the solar intelligence (Nakiel נכיאל) and solar spirit (Sorath סורת), we start by finding first the corresponding values for the letters. Let's analyze "Nakiel" first:

"Nakiel" is written with the letters Nun-Kaph-Yod-Aleph-Lamed:

— The reduced value of Nun is 5;
— The standard value of Kaph is 20;

— The standard/ordinal value of Yod is 10;
— The value of Aleph is 1;
— And the reduced value of Lamed is 3.

In the case of "Sorath", written with the letters Samech-Vav-Resh-Tav, we have:

— Both Samech and Vav have a reduced value of 6;

— The reduced value of Resh is 2;

— And finally, the reduced value of Tav is 4.

Next, what we have to do is to locate those numbers in the magic square and draw lines joining those values, like this:

Colored sigils drawn by me. Click to enlarge.

Adapting this system to the English Alphabet, or more exactly the alphanumeric sequence 0-Z, we could create specific sigils for any word, name or phrase that we want. I must be honest with my Readers, though, and confess that I haven't explored this sigilization technique very deeply yet, even though I noticed a very intriguing pattern for the word "FEMININE" — because, you see, its sigil would be a simple straight line:

Besides this, which I believe is no more than a coincidence, in my early experiments with this technique there was only one other case that caught my attention. The cover of Simon's edition of the fabled (and often misunderstood fictional book called) Necronomicon contains a sigil that, somehow, is strangely similar to the alphanumeric sigil for "Necronomicon":

Apart from this, there isn't really much more to say about this sigilization technique, except that you can use it in every way you want. To find patterns, to design patterns, as a personal signature, as a magical symbol — the limit is literally your own imagination.

In the next part, but still keeping this alphanumeric magic square in our minds, let's talk about:

Cryptography & Alphanumeric Qabbalism

As we have seen, the sequence from 0 to Z can be inscribed in a 6×6 square, and what this actually means is that we can use this sequence as the basis for a cryptographic technique. Techniques like that already exist, however — and the first system that comes first to my mind is the ADFGVX cipher, which is based on a modern modification of the Polybius square.

In the modern ADFGVX cipher, a 6×6 square is used in which are inscribed all 36 alphanumeric digits from 0 to Z, while the lines and columns are encoded by the characters A, D, F, G, V and X, like this:

Please note that in this case, the letters have been ordered according to the "AZERTY" keyboard layout. Picture from DCode.fr.

However, as in the last section we've been working with a alphanumeric square derived from the Magic Square of Tiphareth, that's the layout I'll be using. Also, instead of using the letters ADFGVX for the lines & columns, I'll use instead the numbers from 0 to 5:

While the ADFGVX cipher is used according to a certain pattern of encryption (using a keyword, reordering columns, etc), the way how I use it is a bit different and much easier — which implies that it's also easier to decode. Anyway, here's how I use it:

I'm only using one word as an example because I want to make it simple for my Readers. So let's say we wanted to encode the word "QABBALA" using my method.

First, write the corresponding pairs of digits that correspond to its letters: first the number of the line, then the number of the column:

Q A B B A L A

12 11 45 45 11 32 11

Then, group those digits in a continuous sequence:

12114545113211

After that, break that sequence in half, dividing it into two strings:

1211454

5113211

And finally, decode the result, considering that the string above corresponds to the line of the (encoded) character, and the string below to its column:

1 2 1 1 4 5 4 (line)

5 1 1 3 2 1 1 (column)

↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓ ↓

T D A R 9 4 S

And so, the word "QABBALA" can be encoded as the alphanumeric string "TDAR94S" using my method as an example. But this is just one example among many possible others. As in Gematria, the limit of Cryptography is our own imagination. For example, instead of using the alphanumeric square as derived from the Magic Square of the Sun, we could instead use a keyword to reorder the characters inside the square (like the example above, following the "AZERTY" keyboard layout). So my suggestion is always to create your own method and to use whatever makes sense to you.

Another way of using the 0-Z sequence would be to apply it to what I call "Alphanumeric Athbash". For this method we would make the first alphanumeric character (0) correspond to the last (Z), then the second (1) to the second-to-last (Y), and so on and so forth — and basically replace every alphanumeric digit with its opposite.

If, for example, we wanted to encode the word "LANGUAGE" using this technique, it would correspond to "EPCJ5PJL". Please note, however, that substitution ciphers like this are very easy to crack using frequency analysis, so please be sure that your encoded messages cannot be broken by the wrong people. In most cases, a second layer of encryption will ensure that the message will most certainly be more difficult to decrypt.

And now let's talk about...

Finger counting and Alphanumeric Qabbalism

Another possible way of encoding the alphanumeric sequence (0-Z) is to use finger counting and Base-6 notation. As it is explained in the Wikipedia article on Senary (base-6) notation, particularly the section about finger counting:

"Each regular human hand may be said to have six unambiguous positions; a fist, one finger (or thumb) extended, two, three, four, and then all five extended.

If the right hand is used to represent a unit, and the left to represent the "sixes", it becomes possible for one person to represent the values from zero to 55senary (35decimal) with their fingers, rather than the usual ten obtained in standard finger counting. e.g. if three fingers are extended on the left hand and four on the right, 34senary is represented. This is equivalent to 3 × 6 + 4, which is 22decimal."

What this actually means is that we can represent all alphanumeric characters from 0 to Z=35 using the fingers of both hands. In order to make this clearer, let me show you yet another table:

Using this table as reference, and considering that the lines correspond to the fingers on the left hand, and the columns to the fingers on the right hand, we could represent the letter "A" (line 1, column 4) by raising 1 finger of our left hand, and 4 fingers of our right hand. Likewise, the letter "Z" (line 5, column 5) would be represented by all the ten fingers raised. Zero, then, would be represented with closed fists (i.e. literally zero fingers raised). In practical terms, this would be similar to a cryptographic substitution cipher, in this case using Base-6 notation as reference.

Next we'll be talking about...

Applying the alphanumeric sequence to Astrology

In this part I will explain how we can adapt the alphanumeric sequence to Astrology — or more specifically, how we can use the sequence to encode all main planetary positions in an astrological chart as two distinct alphanumeric strings.

The principle is simple: as there are 360 degrees in the circle of the zodiac, each degree can be made to correspond to an alphanumeric character from 0 to Z, as in the following image:

Click to enlarge.

In Astrology there is another division of the zodiac that is quite ancient, coming from the times of Kemet (ancient Egypt), in which the zodiac is divided in 36 equal parts, called the Decans. As there are exactly 36 alphanumeric characters from 0 to Z, each Decan can thus be associated with a unique alphanumeric character, in the following way:

Click to enlarge.

With these two tables we can encode any planetary position using only two characters, one for the corresponding degree, and another for the corresponding decan. For example, if a certain planetary position corresponds to the characters 9 (degree) and M (decan), then we know, by using the tables above, that that position corresponds to 15° Scorpio. But how would this work in practice?

Let's say we wanted to encode the planetary positions in a real astrological chart — and let's take as an example the chart of Aleister Crowley, as it is shown in Astro-Databank:

Click to enlarge.

Applying this technique to this chart, we would start by noting the planetary positions for the Sun, Moon, and the other planets of the Solar System (I'll include Pluto here as well). Then, we check in the two tables shown above to which alphanumeric characters those positions correspond, in terms of both degrees and decans:

Click to enlarge.

So basically what we have here is two alphanumeric strings that ultimately encode the date of birth of Aleister Crowley, by associating each degree and decan with a specific alphanumeric digit. And this is so because each degree of the zodiac corresponds to a unique combination of characters for the decans and the degrees; there aren't any two degrees that share the same pair of alphanumeric characters, using this method.

In the case of Crowley, those two strings are:

— JZMKTLVD35 for the decans;
— and JS7O41VVVH for the degrees;

Using these two strings simultaneously, and knowing to which planet (or astrological point) each of the characters corresponds to, it is possible to economize a lot of characters in order to encode the informations contained in an astrological chart. And with that information and the correct astrology software, it is possible to find to which date those astrological informations correspond, with a small margin for error.

The only negative aspect of this method is that it only accounts for the degrees, not taking into consideration the minutes and seconds of arc — so failing miserably when it comes to the details.

A way to circumvent this problem would be to keep the division of the zodiac in 36 equal parts (the Decans) and then subdivide each Decan in 36 equal parts, with each smaller part corresponding to 16'40'' (16 minutes and 40 seconds of arc), thus technically subdividing the Zodiac into 1296 or 36×36 equal parts. That way we would only need two alphanumeric characters to identify each small fraction of 16'40'', starting at 00 (0°00'00'' to 0°16'39'' Aries) and ending at ZZ (29°13'20'' to 29°59'59'' Pisces). This method has the advantage of using the same amount of alphanumeric characters as the previous, while allowing for greater detail when it comes to planetary positions.

And now, let us talk a bit about...

The revelation of AQ in the context of Thelema

My Readers will remember the series of articles I wrote about the Thelemic ciphers (parts I, II, III and IV), and I must say that for a very long time I was thrilled with English Qaballa (the "ALW" cipher, explored in Part I) and how it delivered some outstanding results (when compared to other Thelemic ciphers) when it was applied to Liber AL vel Legis, the Book of the Law.

However, after I knew about Alphanumeric Qabbala (in a text called Qabbala 101), I became very intrigued with it, because it showed that AQ also gave some quite curious results when applied to certain key terms and phrases used in Thelema. In fact, I became convinced that not only there was still much work to be done in order to show the validity of AQ in a Thelemic context, but I also thought — and I maintain the same opinion to this day — that Alphanumeric Qabbala may in fact be the ultimate Thelemic cipher, for a number of different reasons:

— AQ is an offshoot of Base-36 notation, which means that it includes exactly 36 alphanumeric characters (10 Arabic numerals and 26 English letters) that can be used as digits in a Base-36 numeration system. The fact that Aleister Crowley called himself "The Great Beast 666" and that 666 is the 36ᵗʰ triangular number, only lends substance to this possible connection;

— A number of key Thelemic elements deliver intriguing values when decoded through Alphanumeric Qabbala:

- "AL" = 31
("AL" is a key formula in Thelema, being part of the name of the Book of the Law. Crowley wrote the following: ""AL" is the true name of the Book, for these letters, and their number 31, form the Master Key to its Mysteries." — source. Even considering that Crowley was referring to the value of "AL" in Hebrew Gematria and Greek Isopsephy, it's quite noteworthy that the formula adds to the same value in Alphanumeric Qabbala.)

- "Thelema" = 127 (the 31ˢᵗ prime number) = "Number"

- "The Book of the Law" = 301

- "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" = 777

- The number 777 is written as LL in Base-36 notation (i.e. 21×36 + 21×1). "LL" can stand for "Liber Legis", "The Book of the Law" translated to Latin. Also, before Frater Achad found the key-word "AL" in his Liber Thirty-One, the Book of the Law was being called "Liber L". Only later did Crowley call it "Liber AL", as explained in the The New and Old Comments to Liber AL vel Legis. The letter "L" has the value 21, or 7+7+7 in Alphanumeric Qabbala.

From UnitConverters.net - Convert Decimal to Base-36.

- "Do what thou wilt" = 325 = "Aleister Crowley"

(325 is a numerical constant in the 5×5 magic square of Mars. Consider, in this case, how Horus is called "a god of War and of Vengeance" in AL III:3.)

- The full birth name of Aleister Crowley was "Edward Alexander Crowley", which sums 438 in Alphanumeric Qabbala. Considering that 36 is the 8ᵗʰ triangular number and 666 is the 36ᵗʰ, it's quite curious to note that the (decimal) number 438 is written as 666 in Octal (base-8) notation.

- "Aiwass" = 126 = "Horus"
(Aiwass is called "the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat" in the Book of the Law, which is but a title of the Egyptian god Horus as Harpocrates, the Child)

- The first words of the 1ˢᵗ and 2nd chapters of the Book of the Law are "Had" and "Nu" respectively, representing Nuit and Hadit, the two opposite principles of infinite expansion (the "circle") and infinite contraction (the "point"). Adding the value of both words, the total sum will be 93, the number of both "Thelema" and "Agape" in Greek.

- The first word of the 3ʳᵈ and final chapter of the Book of the Law is "Abrahadabra", the Word of the Aeon. It sums 156 in Alphanumeric Qabbala, which according to Crowley is the number of the goddess Babalon — the complement of Therion, the Beast.

There's a number of other interesting correspondences that one can find when using AQ in the context of Thelema, even though — and this is very important — many different ciphers may deliver equally curious results, so using numerical matches to prove our point may not always be the best of choices. Anyway... in my tests with this cipher while studying the Book of the Law, I looked for the values of specific words, names, phrases, and whole verses, and I noticed that there are only two complete verses that add up to 630 — the sum of all numbers from 0 to 35:

AL I:24. "I am Nuit, and my word is six and fifty."

AL I:66. "The manifestation of Nuit is at an end."

The word "manifestation" only appears once more in the very first verse of Liber AL:

AL I:1. "Had! The manifestation of Nuit"

So the text seems to hint at a connection between Nuit, whose word is six and fifty, and manifestation. And indeed, the value of "manifestation" in AQ is 263, the 56ᵗʰ prime number:

But there's yet another thing I wish to talk about at this time. All ciphers that have been adapted or developed to be used in the context of Thelema have been applied to some key riddles in The Book of the Law, namely AL II:76 and AL III:47, in order to have their "validity" verified. And as I'm proposing Alphanumeric Qabbala for decoding the Book of the Law, I will now show my own solution to perhaps the most widely known riddle in the Book of the Law.

Note carefully:

Every now and then (maybe more "then" than now), a new "Thelemic English Qabalah" pops out of nowhere, with someone claiming to have found the promised key that will solve all mysteries of the Book of the Law. While I enjoy certain ideas behind some of these systems — particularly the ones I've written the most about — I can't avoid feeling some discomfort when proposing this cipher as an important key to Thelema, simply because I'm not interested in repeating the same history that has already been written and rewritten by others.

* * *

My Solution to AL II:76

Here's the verses in question:

AL II:75. "Aye! listen to the numbers & the words:

AL II:76. "4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meaneth this, o prophet? Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever. There cometh one to follow thee: he shall expound it. But remember, o chosen one, to be me; to follow the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven; to look forth upon men, to tell them this glad word."

Four times the same message is repeated:

"4 6 3 8 A B K"

"2 4 A L G M O R"

"3 Y X"

"24 89 R P S T O V A L"

AQ = 0123456789 abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

(Letters come after the "numbers" — i.e. the numerals.)

I can't explain, however, why the same "message" would be repeated four times. However, what I do know is that the riddle contains exactly 28 numbers & letters, with 28 being a triangular number, just like 36. And if we organize the 0-Z alphanumeric sequence in the shape of a triangle, as we have seen before, there will be exactly 4 rows for the numbers, and 4 rows for the letters.

Starting with the numbers, we will see that there does seem to exist some kind of connection:

However, doing the same with the "words" (i.e. the letters) won't retrieve any noteworthy connection — besides the fact that the 2nd and 4th rows share exactly the same number of letters:

Even not trying to "justify" this finding with Gematria, let my Readers consider the following:

— The Law of Thelema, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" sums 777 in Alphanumeric Qabbala.

— Then, consider that in Crowley's book of numbers and letters, Liber 777, Crowley listed the ten sephiroth numbering them from 1 to 10, and then the twenty-two Hebrew letters (the "paths"), numbering them from 11 (Aleph) to 32 (Tav).

— If we were to adapt that system to the English Alphabet, listing first the ten Arabic numerals from 0 to 9, and then the twenty-six English letters from A to Z, we would end up precisely with Alphanumeric Qabbala: a continuous, logical and non-redundant alphanumeric sequence from 0 to Z=35.

* * *

I make no claims whatsoever about "my role" in this solution, as I think that's irrelevant — my intention is not to claim that I've found the "Key of It All" or that I am the "child of the Beast". In my opinion, that's simply stupid and immature, and won't lead you (or me, or anyone) anywhere. I do believe, however, that AQ may be an important key in Thelema, and what I'm doing here is simply to play along with it, and trying to make it become more widely known.

* * *

All of this, of course, can't be taken as "proof" that Alphanumeric Qabbala is an important key to Thelema — firstly, because many of these matches could be taken as being coincidental, and I think that most gematricists would agree with me on this conclusion. And secondly, because there's still much work to be done in this field, while at the same time the continuous proposal of ~~too~~ many ciphers to decipher the mysteries of Liber AL has made the topic a sort of "taboo" in the context of Thelema. So what I'm trying to achieve by writing this is, in fact, to show some ideas and then let my Readers work the rest by themselves. I am, of course, always interested in exchanging ideas about Gematria, and about this subject in particular — so if you, dear Reader, feel the need to get in touch and discuss some of these things, please do!

Now let's talk about...

"Dos" and "don'ts" with AQ

In this section I will try to explain how I personally use Alphanumeric Qabbala, which will be reflected by my suggestions for "dos" and "don'ts" regarding the work with AQ.

First of all, let's start with my suggestions for the "dos":

1) Use AQ whenever it makes sense to use an alphanumeric cipher, for example, in phrases or strings composed of digits (0-9) and letters (A-Z).

2) Use AQ with the English language! Besides the Standard, Ordinal and Reduction ciphers — which I view as being the main English ciphers — it also makes a lot of sense to use AQ for English words, phrases or specific terms, since it is perfectly adapted to the alphanumeric sequence which includes 10 Arabic numerals (from 0 to 9) and 26 English letters (from A to Z).

3) Use AQ in the context of Thelema (!!!). The work with AQ in this area has been extremely scarce, aside from some occasional discoveries that are shared here and there by some (very few) people, so I think it is about time that some serious work can be done with this cipher in the study of the Holy Books of Thelema — Liber AL vel Legis is just the beginning.

4) Use AQ to encode hidden references in your texts! In fact, that's one of my favorite ways of using Gematria. You can do this too, and it can be easy or difficult depending on which tools you use. I recommend using Gematro, which includes an "Encoding" tool as well as a link to an ever-growing list of public databases (check the "About" menu) — it will make your work a lot easier, and will give you hours of guaranteed fun.

Now let's talk about the "don'ts":

1) Don't use AQ whenever it does NOT make sense to use it, which should be fairly obvious, even though a brief explanation is needed. For example, I would never use AQ to try to "decode" a text written in Latin or Elizabethan English, for the simple reason that the alphabets used for these languages were different from Modern English. AQ, and its intricate connections to the number 36, only makes sense to be used with (1) a decimal system of numeration (0 through 9) combined with (2) the modern English alphabet with 26 letters.

2) Don't try to decode any random name or phrase with AQ — or with any other cipher, in fact! 😅 We always need to be very careful when "decoding" something, particularly if we're not sure that it was encoded in the first place. So things like looking for patterns in the English language while using AQ may or may not be fruitful, depending on what you want to do with it. If you're simply looking for patterns, I can guarantee that you'll find them — whether with Alphanumeric Qabbala, English Ordinal or Standard, English Qaballa or Agrippa's Latin cipher. The actual question is what does a numerical match actually "mean" — and it means only what you want it to mean. For example, some "alternative" interpretations of the Bible started by analyzing it with Hebrew Gematria (and Greek Isopsephy) and establishing connections between words and concepts based on numerical matches and/or geometrical patterns. So a numerical match is a means of encoding (not only decoding) something, and sometimes it can give you some great ideas. But don't search abusively for patterns and matches in search for a "proof" of something. Numerical matches don't prove anything per se — but they can be an intelligent way of saying more than what you're actually saying.

And last but not the least (whew!)...

Riddles — and some notes on this text

My intention in writing this text has been to show my Readers how we can use Alphanumeric Qabbala, and the 0-Z alphanumeric sequence in particular, in many different ways. The main method is, of course, Gematria: that is, adding the values of the letters composing a word, name or phrase, and analyzing the result through numerology, geometric or polygonal sequences, or even compare it with other words, names or phrases that share the same value. But there are other ways to use it, as we have seen, which include cryptographic & sigilization techniques, for example.

One of my favorite uses of Gematria is to encode secret references in my texts. And so, as the main subject of my blog is Gematria, in this text I took the liberty to leave some "scraps" or hidden references throughout the article, so that my most perceptive Readers would understand, in practice, one of the ways how I work with Gematria.

Every section of this text contains something that was purposefully encoded with Gematria. Starting with the title, "The wonders & magic of Alphanumeric Qabbala": is there anything "special" about it? How many words does it have? How many letters? What does it add to in Alphanumeric Qabbala? And why? You'll love it once you see it.

If you want to give it a try, let me give you some clues:

— all colored text is encoded;

— sometimes, differently formatted phrases can hide some references too.

In order to know if something was purposefully encoded or not, which is one of the key points when working with Gematria to "decode" something, is to remember the following: if it looks too good to be random, maybe it isn't random. However, in order to be sure about this, we always have to confirm our findings by noting (1) the context we're working on, and (2) if the ciphers we're using make sense to be used in that context.

So, in this specific context, the main cipher you need to use is Alphanumeric Qabbala... and maybe 2 or 3 more ciphers in some cases. 😅 Anyway, in any case, if you don't know it, be sure to get acquainted with Gematro, one of the best Gematria calculators out there, in order to both decode and encode whatever you want in your texts. It will make your work a lot easier.

In the meantime, as always, if any of my Readers wishes to get in touch and talk about anything related to Gematria or Cryptography (or any remotely connected subject), feel free to do so either by using the "Contact Form" on the right side of this blog, or by making a comment on any post you want.

Thanks for following my work, and... keep on decoding!

Luís Gonçalves

History of Ciphers (part 6) - Chaldean Numerology

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Mon, 26 Sep 2022 18:46:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this text I will explain to you some lesser known facts about the so-called "Chaldean Numerology". This is basically a rewriting and expansion of an older text that I wrote years ago, and my intention in re-publishing it (or at least the ideas contained in it) is tied to the following purposes:

    — To clear some confusions and myths surrounding this cipher;

    — To explain why "Chaldean" Numerology is not Chaldean, was never used by the Chaldeans, and is in fact a modern creation;

    — To explain the actual roots of this cipher within Hebrew Qabalah, particularly Hebrew Gematria;

    — To show the reasons why the number 9 isn't used in Chaldean Numerology, and why it wasn't a "sacred number for the Chaldeans" as it is so often repeated;

    — And finally, to tell my Readers that there isn't just one "Chaldean" Numerology, but in fact (at least) two different systems, coming from two different authors.

Hopefully, all of these subjects will be further studied in this...

History of Ciphers

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 6: Chaldean Numerology

Let's first talk about...

What is "Chaldean Numerology"?

I first read about Chaldean Numerology many years ago in Lloyd Strayhorn's book "Numbers and You" (check the author's website here). I still have a physical copy of that book, and even though it already has some loose pages due to some careless use, I still like this book a LOT and I've kept it safe on my bookshelf. It's a monster book on Numerology, and the work of its author was impeccable. I highly recommend it to my Readers who wish to study Numerology more deeply.

According to Strayhorn (pages 23-24):

"The Chaldean approach is very ancient and accurate. This system was developed by the Chaldeans of long ago, who once occupied the southern part of Babylonia. Because of their long and diligent study of the occult, the people of Chaldea became well known for their contributions to astronomy, mathematics and other sciences, particularly Astrology and Numerology. So adept were these Chaldean people in the metaphysical arts, that their name became synonymous with such studies.

The Chaldean system takes both your name and birthdate into consideration. The analysis of your name under this system uses only the name you are most known by, instead of your original name given at birth (a requirement of the Pythagorean system).

In the Chaldean system the numbers only go from 1 to 8, and not 1 to 9 — this means the transposition of the numbers assigned to the alphabet is different than in the Pythagorean counterpart. Below is the Chaldean chart:

As you may already have noticed, no alphabet letter was assigned to the number 9. The reason why the number 9 was omitted under this system was because the Chaldean felt the 9 was holy, sacred, and thus to be held apart from the rest. However, should your name or that of someone you know total 9, then the 9 remains. (...)"

I don't remember the specific year when I bought this book and saw this table for the first time, but I would presume it was sometime around the year 2000 or 2001, when I went to the University. And by that time I already had a deep knowledge of Jewish Qabalah and Gematria, and something... Well, something just didn't feel right in this explanation.

Where did this system come from?

As far as I was able to search, I believe that the first western numerologist talking about this specific system of Numerology was Count Louis Hamon, popularly known as Cheiro.

In his "Book of Numbers", Cheiro writes the following about this so-called "Chaldean" system:

"This ancient Chaldean and Hebrew alphabet sets out the number or value of each letter. It is the best system I know for this purpose; its origin is lost in antiquity, but it is believed that it was originated by the Chaldeans, who were masters in all magical arts, and by them passed to the Hebrews.

It will be seen that there is no number 9 given in the above alphabet, for the simple reason that those ancient masters of Occultism knew that in the "Highest Sphere" the number 9 represents the 9-lettered name of God, and for this reason no single letter was ascribed to it."

These two very paragraphs are very important, and we will be talking about what Cheiro wrote here, particularly the following points:

1. Was it really "Chaldean"?

2. (The real reason) Why the number 9 isn't used in Chaldean Numerology.

3. And finally: Why there isn't only one system of Chaldean Numerology.

1. Was it really "Chaldean"?

When I first saw this table of "Chaldean Numerology" it looked surprisingly familiar to me, even though I had never seen it before. And the reason why it looked familiar to me is because I had already seen it before — even though it wasn't used with the Modern English alphabet, but with the Hebrew alphabet instead.

In fact, in Hebrew Qabalah there is a table (related to another cryptographic technique) called Aiq Bekar, or Qabbala of the Nine Chambers, and it shows the letters of the Hebrew alphabet joined in 9 groups, in which each group corresponds to the reduced value of the letters according to Hebrew Gematria:

Click to enlarge. Note that the letters between parentheses represent possible pronunciations (or transliterations) of Hebrew letters.

This table can be more easily understood once we consider the values of the letters. For example, in group 1, Aleph has the value 1, Yod has the value 10, and Qoph has the value 100. All these values are reduced to 1 (by adding all the digits of the numbers), so all of them belong to the same group represented by the number 1. It's from the letters in the two first groups that the name "Aiq Bekar" (A-Y-Q, B-K-R) is derived.

Comparing this table with the "Chaldean" table, it thus becomes apparent that this numerological system does not come from the Chaldeans, but it is in fact an adaptation of the Hebrew Qabalistic system known as Aiq Bekar to the Modern English alphabet. This can be further confirmed if we look closely into which English letters correspond to which numbers, and then compare them with the corresponding Hebrew letters — for example, number 4 corresponds to the English letters D, M and T, and to the Hebrew letters Daleth, Mem and Tav.

How, therefore, was the equivalence made between English letters and numbers, if the Hebrew alphabet (and Aiq Bekar) was used as a model? From the explanations of several authors who use this numerological system (examples here, here and here), in Chaldean Numerology the values are given to the letters based on vibrational patterns — that is, the sound of letters. So, in other words, it's how the English letters are pronounced that dictates how their correspondence with Hebrew letters is made, and thus can their value be found.

Most of the numerical equivalents as found in this system can be confirmed through this rule. However, there seem to be some exceptions, since the criterion by which the correspondence between English and Hebrew letters was made is not always clear. This is particularly true in the case of the letters C, F, H, X and Y. For example:

— Both "E" and "H" were given the value 5, even though "E" derived from the Hebrew letter Heh (=5) and "H" derived from the Hebrew letter Cheth (=8). However, as the rule to Chaldean Numerology is to attribute values to the letters based on how they sound, the Chaldean attribution could thus be confirmed, since the letter "E" derived from the Hebrew letter "He", which has the /h/ sound. If instead we followed the genetic derivation of English letters from the Hebrew alphabet, "E" would be more reasonably given the value 5, and "H" would be given the value 8.

— Both "F" and "P" were given the value 8. In this case we can see how the rule of "pronunciation of letters = their value" works. As "P" derives from the Hebrew letter Peh (=80) which can also be pronounced as "F", it makes sense to give the same value to both English letters.

— "Y" was given the value 1. This again confirms the Chaldean pattern of giving values to the letters based on their sounds, since the letter "Y" can be a perfect transliteration of the Hebrew letter Yod (=10). Historically, however, the English letter "Y" is more tightly connected to the Hebrew letter Vav (=6), so in a Genetic (not sound-based) system of Numerology, "Y" would perhaps more correctly be given the value 6.

— Both "C" and "G" were given the value 3. This happens because the letter "G" derived from "C", and "C" itself derived from the Hebrew letter Gimel (=3), so it makes sense to give the same value to both letters. However, if the rule in Chaldean Numerology was really the vibration (i.e. sound) of the English letters, it would make more sense to compare "C" (and its hard "K" sound) with the Hebrew letter Kaph (=20), so it would be more reasonably given the value 2 instead of 3.

— And how about the letter X=5? This is the only English letter whose numerical attribution in Chaldean Numerology doesn't make any sense at all. In Hebrew Gematria, the only letters whose value can be reduced to 5 are Heh (=5), Nun (=50) and the final form of Kaph (=500) — and none of those letters are remotely connected to "X". So how was this numerical equivalence devised, exactly? I can't really answer that question because, honestly, I don't know. And it doesn't make sense to me. Anyway, we'll talk further about this when we talk about other systems of Chaldean (i.e. Kabbalistic) Numerology.

From these observations, it becomes clear that the method by which the numbers were assigned to the letters based on their sound wasn't always clear, and some numerical attributions are debatable at best — so they're thus open to discussion.

2. Why isn't the number 9

included in Chaldean Numerology?

From the observations presented above, it also becomes clear why the number 9 isn't used in Chaldean Numerology. In fact, number 9 isn't used in Chaldean Numerology because the Hebrew letters whose values are reduced to 9 (in this case, Teth & Tzaddi) didn't survive into our alphabet.

In fact, the Hebrew letter Teth (between CHETH / Greek Eta / Latin H, and YOD / Greek Iota / Latin I & J) doesn't exist in our alphabet. Likewise, the letter Tzaddi (between PEH / Greek Pi / Latin P, and QOPH / obsolete Greek Qoppa / Latin Q) didn't survive into our alphabet. So this is the reason why 9 isn't used in the modern "Chaldean" Numerology. It has nothing to do with special "powers" of the number 9, or with any supposed "fear" of it from the "Chaldeans".

In order to aid my Readers in better understanding this question, I will add a quick table for reference, where I show (1) the Hebrew letters, (2) their values in Hebrew Gematria, (3) the Greek letters derived from the Hebrew alphabet, and (4) the Latin letters derived (through Etruscan) from the Greek alphabet.

- Aleph (1) = Alpha = A
- Beth (2) = Beta = B
- Gimel (3) = Gamma = C, G
- Daleth (4) = Delta = D
- Heh (5) = Epsilon = E
- Vav (6) = [Digamma] = F (indirectly, also U, V, W and Y)
- Zayin (7) = Zeta = Z
- Cheth (8) = Eta = H
- Teth (9) = Theta = didn't survive into our alphabet
- Yod (10) = Iota = I, J
- Kaph (20) = Kappa = K
- Lamed (30) = Lambda = L
- Mem (40) = Mu = M
- Nun (50) = Nu = N
- Samech (60) = Xi = didn't survive into our alphabet
- Ayin (70) = Omikron = O
- Peh (80) = Pi = P
- Tzaddi (90) = [San] = didn't survive into our alphabet
- Qoph (100) = [Qoppa] = Q
- Resh (200) = Rho = R
- Shin (300) = Sigma = S
- Tav (400) = Tau = T

The remaining Latin letters, U, V, W, X and Y have to be treated apart from the others, since they don't have a direct connection with any Hebrew letter. However, it is widely accepted that the Greek letter Ypsilon (from which came the Latin U, V, W and Y) was derived from the Hebrew letter Vav, and that the Latin X came from the Greek letter Chi (pronounced as /ks/ in the ancient Euboean Greek alphabet).

There is more to this and we'll get to it in time, but for now I would like to direct my Readers' attention to the fact that there isn't only one system of "Chaldean" (i.e. Kabbalistic) Numerology but in fact — at least — two different systems. I only found the second one when I bought Harish Johari's book "Numerology with Tantra, Ayurveda, and Astrology".

3. Is there only one system of Chaldean Numerology?

Nope! In fact, in the book by Harish Johari I found yet another system of Numerology that is remarkably similar to Chaldean Numerology, even though it gives different values to three letters: C, H and X. This is the system as it appears in Johari's book, where he calls it the Unit System:

Later, I came to understand that this is the system more commonly used in Vedic Numerology, while for the western world the Kabbalistic system we know better is known as Chaldean Numerology. In fact, both Chaldean Numerology and Harish Johari's Unit System can be called Kabbalistic systems of Numerology, since both are ultimately derived from the Hebrew Kabbalistic technique known as Aiq Bekar. However, the differences between this specific system and Chaldean Numerology are very worthy of note, so I will elaborate a bit upon them:

— The letter "C" was given the value 2. This is one such example in which sound (i.e. pronunciation) prevails over genetic derivation, as in the explanations previously given about Chaldean Numerology. As the letter "C" can have a hard /k/ sound, it was in this case compared to the Hebrew letter Kaph (=20), instead of the letter Gimel (=3) from which both "C" and "G" were genetically derived.

— The letter "H" was given the value 8. This equivalence has an advantage over the Chaldean equivalence with the number 5. While in Chaldean Numerology the letter "H" was compared to the Hebrew letter Heh (=5) which sounds like "H", in this case both sound and genetic derivation are respected. And this happens because the English letter "H" was genetically derived from the Hebrew letter Cheth (=8), which can also be transcribed as a hard /h/ sound.

— The letter "X" was given the value 6. This equivalence makes much more sense than the Chaldean equivalence with the number 5. The Chaldean correspondence makes no sense at all, either by the sound of the letter or by its genetic derivation. In this specific system, however, the correspondence with the number 6 is much more reasonable, since the letter "X" came from the Greek letter Chi (=600), which in the ancient Euboean Greek alphabet was pronounced like the modern Greek letter Xi (=60). So an equivalence with number 6 is much more reasonable than the equivalence that is used in Chaldean Numerology.

The discovery of this system later led me into finding its source, which from my investigations seems to be a book written in 1920 by Sepharial (Walter Gorn Old), "The Kabala of Numbers". In the third chapter of this book, dedicated to Numerology, Sepharial shows the following table of numbers & letters:

This table is extremely pertinent in this investigation because:

— It shows how the correspondences were made between English and Hebrew letters, based on the sound of the letters;

— It clearly demonstrates the reason why the number 9 isn't included in Chaldean Numerology, since "Th" and "Tz" are possible transliterations of the Hebrew letters Teth (=9) and Tzaddi (=90) respectively, which didn't survive into our alphabet.

Some notes towards a "pure"

Genetic system of Numerology

In this section I will show my suggestion of a purely Genetic system of English Numerology — that is, a system that isn't based on how the English letters sound (and the connection between sounds and Hebrew letters), but instead on how the English letters derived genetically from the Hebrew alphabet.

The reason why I'm proposing a "pure" Genetic system of English Numerology is because the choice of the how the letters sound as a criterion for assigning them certain values can be dubious sometimes. See for example the letter "H". In Chaldean Numerology it has the value 5, since in this case the sound /h/ can be represented in Hebrew by the letter Heh (=5), while in Sepharial's Kabbalistic/Hebraic system it is assigned the value 8, since the Hebrew letter Cheth (=8) corresponds to a hard /h/ sound.

If, instead, we follow a method in which the English letters are assigned the values of the Hebrew letters from which they were derived, then each and every English letter will only have one possible value — that is, there won't be any margin for error or dubious correspondences.

Based on one of the tables shown above, in which I showed why the number 9 isn't used in Chaldean Numerology, we can thus create the following table of correspondences:

When comparing this system with Chaldean Numerology, some differences can easily be noted, namely regarding the letters F, H, X and Y. This happens because:

— Both letters "F" and "Y" are connected to the Hebrew letter Vav (=6). "F" is a direct derivation from the Greek Vau/Digamma (=6) while "Y" came from the Greek letter Ypsilon, which in turn was also derived from the Hebrew letter Vav. So it makes sense to assign both letters the value 6.

— "H" is assigned the value 8, because it derived directly from the Greek Eta (=8), which in turn came from the Hebrew letter Cheth (=8).

— And finally, letter "X" was assigned the value 6. In this case, however, there isn't a direct connection with any specific Hebrew letter; "X" derived directly from the ancient Greek Euboean letter "X" (=600) which sounded like /ks/, and was pronounced like the modern Greek letter "Xi" (=60). So it also makes sense to give "X" the value 6.

It's also possible to build a Genetic Greek system for the English alphabet, in which we consider how the modern English letters derived directly from the Greek alphabet. If my dear Reader has read my post on the Latin ciphers, this is basically a reduction table for the Æquicalculus cipher, which was also mentioned by John Opsopaus in this Biblioteca Arcana website (here, with further explanations here and here).

In this case I will suggest my Readers to visit John Opsopaus' webpage mentioned above, since it contains some valuable informations that will shed some light on the reasons for these numerical correspondences. I should mention, however, that in this case there is a number 9 in this table, for the simple reason that the letter "Q" is the only English letter that was derived from a Greek letter whose value is reduced to 9 — in this case, the Greek letter Qoppa, which has the value 90 (=9).

Suggested Bibliography

In this presentation I mentioned several sources which may be very useful for my Readers if they want to follow these studies. In order to make it easier for everyone, I'm leaving here a list of some of the books I learned from, as well as some useful links:

— STRAYHORN, Lloyd, "Numbers and You", Ballantine Books (1980):
[https://archive.org/details/numbersyounumero0000stra/mode/2up]

— HAMON, Count Louis ("Cheiro"), "Cheiro's Book of Numbers", Herbert Jenkins Ltd. (1926):
[https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.70770/page/n3/mode/2up]

— JOHARI, Harish, "Numerology with Tantra, Ayurveda, and Astrology", Destiny Books (1990):
[https://archive.org/details/numerologywithta0000joha/mode/2up]

— OLD, Walter Gorn ("Sepharial"), "The Kabala of Numbers", William Rider and Son, Ltd. (1911 - first edition):
[https://archive.org/details/SepharialTheKabalaOfNumbers1920/mode/2up]

— Links from John Opsopaus' Biblioteca Arcana:
   - Isopsephia Calculator:
   http://wisdomofhypatia.com/OM/BA/Isopsephia.html
   - Isopsephia Alphabet Charts:
   http://wisdomofhypatia.com/OM/BA/Iso-values.html
   - Some Notes on the History of Isopsephia (Gematria):
   http://wisdomofhypatia.com/OM/BA/SNHIG.html
    - Genetic Correspondences between Hebrew, Greek and Roman alphabets:
    http://wisdomofhypatia.com/OM/BA/JO-Alpha.html

Some Final Words...

It is my hope that this article has helped my Readers in understanding how "Chaldean Numerology" was created, and what were the bases behind its creation. This may have been perhaps the most technical article that I've written about the ciphers of Gematria to this day, and in fact it had to be that way. There is no way to understand a cipher if we are unable to explain it in all details and actually understand how it really works — and so, would there be a better way to explain it if not by deconstructing it and completely understanding its logic? Of course not. So that was precisely my plan from the first minute I wrote about this cipher.

I also didn't take my time in exploring any numerical correspondences with this cipher (or the others that were mentioned in this text) because I'm really not a fan of ciphers containing reduced values, so I never duly explored it. Instead, I preferred to leave that for other more pertinent occasions, and instead I've chosen to focus on explaining the bases behind this cipher and how it was created.

Perhaps one day in the future I will return to this. But not now.

For my next text(s), I will again focus on more than one cipher. One of them is Alphanumeric Qabbala, a cipher that I already talked about in a previous post. It's one of my favorite ciphers so far and, because of its nearly perfect mathematical properties, it allows us to "play" with it in many different ways. As my previous text on this cipher was highly incomplete, I will be dedicating a whole new text to this very curious cipher.

Another cipher that I will talk about is Satanic Gematria. Even though some people might think that this is a "bogus" cipher, it is actually quite interesting due to its very special properties and some eye-opening equivalences that we can find when using it. Also, as the origin of this cipher is virtually unknown, I think it is time to give this cipher the attention that it rightfully deserves.

Some surprises will await my Readers when they read these future texts, though, so stay tuned if you're enjoying my work! 😋

My best regards to all my Readers,

Luís Gonçalves

How I use Gematria

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Thu, 26 May 2022 15:12:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this new text I will explain to you how I use Gematria. I guess that this should have been one of the first texts being published in this blog, but as this kind of work will never be finished and always needs to be perfected, I've made the decision to talk a bit about my own studies & practice of Gematria.

I'm dedicating a text to this specific question because I feel that writing only about the history of ciphers may not be enough, so I thought about sharing a bit of myself with this text, explaining to my Readers my own perspective about Gematria, and above all, to encourage my Readers to be inventive regarding their own practices of Gematria.

Above all, Gematria is a cryptographic tool, and the reason why I'm calling it that way will become apparent to you, noble Reader, during this exploration of the true meaning of Gematria and some of its most interesting historical uses.

So... let's start by talking a bit about this lovely topic.

What is Gematria?

Gematria is one of three techniques of Hebrew Qabalah which are mostly applied to biblical texts, in order to extract secret meanings or occult correspondences from them. Each technique works in a different way:

— Gematria: the practice of assigning values to the letters of the alphabet and thus to words and sentences, based on an alphanumeric cipher. From this technique alone many considerations can be taken, namely concerning the mathematical and geometric properties of the values of the words, as well as the connection between words or phrases which share the same value.

— Temurah: a technique which rearranges the letters of a word or phrase, or exchanges letters for others using substitution ciphers. Some of these substitution ciphers are known as Atbash (exchanging the first letter of the alphabet for the last and vice-versa, like A⇄Z, B⇄Y, etc), Albam (exchanging the first letter of the first half of the alphabet by the first letter of the second half of the alphabet, like A⇄N, B⇄O, etc), Avgad (grouping the letters in interchangeable pairs, like A⇄B, C⇄D, etc), and others. However, there is a problem when adapting this technique to the English alphabet, which lies in the fact that the Hebrew script is an Abjad, i.e. an alphabet composed solely of consonants (or semi-vowels, in some restricted cases); so it is easier to make more sense from a string of random Hebrew letters than from a string of random English letters.

— Notarikon: a technique which involves noting the first letter, middle letter(s) or final letter of each word in a sentence, thus extracting a new word or phrase from it.

It becomes clear, then, that Gematria is a cryptographic technique designed either to decrypt or encrypt secret correspondences or references inside a text.

But how do these techniques work in practice, you may ask?

Let me show you some examples.

Gematria

One of the examples of the use of Gematria in the biblical texts that I like to talk about is the curious connection between the name "Moses" (משה) and the Name of God according to Exodus 3:14, "I Am That I Am" (אהיה אשר אהיה). In Hebrew Gematria, the values of these two names are composed by the same numerical digits in reverse order:

Likewise, the value of "Moses", 345, also matches that of "El Shaddai" (Almighty God):

In Jewish Qabalistic mysticism, Moses and his Staff seem to be somehow related to Metatron מטטרון, the Highest Angel who is also called "The Lesser YHWH". In a grimoire known as the Greater Key of Solomon, the First Pentacle of the Sun contains an artistic representation of the Face of Metatron, who surprisingly seems to have horns:

In a note to this Pentacle, Benjamin Rowe writes the following:

This singular Pentacle contains the head of the great Angel Methraton or Metatron, the vice-regent and representative of Shaddai, who is called the Prince of Countenances, and the right-hand masculine Cherub of the Ark, as Sandalphon is the left and feminine. On either side is the Name "El Shaddai". Around is written in Latin:– "Behold His face and form by Whom all things were made, and Whom all creatures obey".

Perhaps not by coincidence, there are many artistic representations of Moses which also depict him with horns — or "rays of light". Check this article for more information about this intriguing detail.

Some researchers have pointed out that 345+543 equals 888, which is the value of "Jesus" in Greek Isopsephy. And while there may be something to this, there's also another intriguing connection in the Old Testament, particularly in Genesis chapter 3, that I would like to briefly talk about. It has to do with the Hebrew word for the Serpent of Paradise, nachash נחש, which has the same value as moshiach משיח, "Messiah", in Hebrew Gematria:

This connection was first noted by Jewish qabalists who searched the Torah for clues and hidden teachings by applying qabalistic techniques to the sacred texts. Eventually this match inspired some ~~heretical~~ unorthodox views, like the one shared by Gnostic sects during the first centuries of the Common Era, that the Serpent of Paradise was in fact a mask of the Redeemer, the One who descended from the Purity of Pleroma (the Spiritual Fullness) in order to bring the hidden/forbidden knowledge to Mankind.

Other parallels exist in the biblical texts that equate the Serpent with the Messiah, like John 3:14-15, where it is written:

"And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life." (KJV)

This text refers to a passage in the book of Numbers 21:8-9 where God commands Moses to make an image of a brazen serpent and mount it on a pole; everyone who had been bitten by a snake and looked at that image, would be immediately healed. Eventually, that image gave origin to the symbol of Medicine, the Rod of Asclepius (not to be confused with the Hermetic Caduceus, which has an entirely different meaning):

Next comes...

Temurah

In the Bible there are at least two clear examples of the use of Temurah (substitution ciphers), both of which can be found in 51ˢᵗ chapter of the book of Jeremiah.

The first instance occurs in the verse Jeremiah 51:1:

"Thus saith the Lord: Behold, I will raise up against Babylon, and against them that dwell in Leb-kamai, a destroying wind." (NIV)

In the King James Bible, "Leb-kamai" (לב קמי) is translated as "the midst [=heart] of them who rise up against me", even though it is actually a cryptographic reference passing unnoticed to most eyes.

Applying the Atbash cipher to the name "Leb-kamai", replacing the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet for the last, the second for the second-to-last, etc, לב קמי (Leb-kamai) becomes כשדים (Kasdim), which means "Chaldeans".

The Atbash cipher. Each letter is replaced by its opposite letter according to the order of the Hebrew alphabet. This would be the cryptographic equivalent of the "Reverse" cipher that many of us know.

The second example of the use of Temurah in the Bible also occurs in the 51st chapter of Jeremiah, this time in verse 41:

"How Sheshak will be captured, the boast of the whole earth seized!
How desolate Babylon will be among the nations!" (NIV)

Applying the same Atbash cipher to the name "Sheshak" (which only shows up another time in Jeremiah 25:26) we see that Sheshak ששך becomes Babel בבל, precisely the Hebrew word for "Babylon".

Notarikon

In order to keep it simple, and since the main focus in this text will be Gematria, I will provide only one example of the use of Notarikon in the Biblical texts.

In the Hebrew text of Genesis 49:10, a certain "Shiloh" is mentioned. In fact, that verse contains three Hebrew words which, when their initial letters are noted, spell the name "Yeshu" ישו (Jesus).

"The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be." (KJV)

לֹא-יָסוּר שֵׁבֶט מִיהוּדָה, וּמְחֹקֵק מִבֵּין רַגְלָיו, עַד כִּי-יָבֹא שִׁילֹה, וְלוֹ יִקְּהַת עַמִּים.

Now let's talk about...

Using Gematria to decode

secret references inside a text

In my years of practicing Gematria, I always saw it as a powerful tool for decoding (or encoding) secret references inside a text. What this means is that, if I saw something "fishy" in a text (be it a misspelling, a weird name, or a phrase containing strangely capitalized words or differently formatted text) I would immediately apply some ciphers of Gematria to it and see if I could get some "interesting" results.

Many years ago, when I was excited with my decodes of the 1 Dollar bill with the Illuminati cipher, the first cipher I would always look at would be the Illuminati cipher. Later, as my studies progressed, eventually I would also look at the Baconian/Elizabethan ciphers, and nowadays, as I've become much more disciplined in my uses of the ciphers of Gematria, I always pay attention to the context first, and then I decide which ciphers I should apply to the texts in question.

In order to better explain what I mean with all this, let's look at an example of a secret reference I found inside a text regarding the Masonic legend of Hiram Abiff. You can find this text on this online PDF (69,2 KB) which contains an interpretation of the Ritual of the Third Degree. On page 4, first paragraph, you'll be able to see that there is a phrase that is suspiciously italicized and capitalized, showing us that it must be important:

(click to enlarge)

Now, knowing that this text is about Freemasonry, and that the Baconian/Elizabethan ciphers have been consistently used in a Masonic context throughout history, I wondered what would be the value of this sentence in the Elizabethan Simple cipher (A=1, B=2, etc, until Z=24, counting I/J as the same letter, as well as U/V). The result was more than satisfactory:

Coincidentally or not, the value of "Search for That Which Was Lost" in the Simple cipher is 287, which not only is a Baconian/Rosicrucian Seal number (together with 157) but it was highly encoded in the works of Sir Francis Bacon, in the Rosicrucian manifesto "Fama Fraternitatis", and also, even in Shakespeare's works. Knowing that many of Francis Bacon's writings were a major influence in Freemasonic teachings, it isn't surprising to see that this specific phrase was chosen precisely because of its numerical value. It is an unmistakable Masonic/Rosicrucian/Baconian signature.

One of the occurrences of 287 in Shakespeare is in the "monster word" Honorificabilitudinitatibus which only shows up once in all of Shakespeare's works. Its value in the Simple cipher is 287:

(click to enlarge)

In the Rosicrucian manifesto "Fama Fraternitatis", the same number is encoded in the measures of Christian Rosencreutz's crypt:

"In the morning following we opened the door, and there appeared to our sight a Vault of seven sides and corners, every side five foot broad, and the height of eight foot (...)"

   Please note:
   7 corners and 7 sides, each side being 5 x 8, which means:

   7 + 7×5×8 = 287

   287 is the value of "Fra. Rosie Cross" (Fraternity of the Rosy Cross) in the Rosicrucian Kaye cipher, and this also matches the value of "Fr. Christianus Rosencreutz" in the Elizabethan Reverse cipher:

According to a Masonic legend, St. Alban introduced Masonry in Great Britain in the year 287 AD.
(Remember that one of Francis Bacon's titles was Viscount St Alban...)

And last but not the least...

Now let's talk about another very pertinent question.

What is a numerical match?

In practical terms, a numerical match is when two words or phrases share the same value, when their total value is calculated according to one or more alphanumeric ciphers. There are two main types of numerical matches:

1. Same-cipher matches:

As the name indicates, this is the case where two phrases match their values in the same cipher. Usually this is the strongest kind of connection between two phrases, and it can be really useful in encoding secret references inside a text. In the examples given above, you could see how "Search for that which was lost" and "Honorificabilitudinitatibus" share the same value in the Elizabethan Simple cipher. That's a same-cipher match.

2. Cross-cipher matches:

This is a secondary, thus weaker connection between two phrases which share the same value in different ciphers. Usually this is only relevant if the ciphers are connected somehow (i.e. they belong to the same "family" of ciphers), or if there are strong reasons to note the direct equivalence. In the examples given above, my Reader will be able to see that "Francis Bacon" and "Fra. Rosi Crosse" share the same value (287) in two different but related ciphers — the Kaye and Modern Kaye ciphers. This is an example of a cross-cipher match.

Now the question rises: why are numerical matches important?

Numerical matches are important because they allow us to hide secret references inside a text by using certain names, phrases, etc, that actually mean something else. It's almost like a game of "hide & seek". You encode clues in a text, and only someone having the same key (=cipher) will be able to know what you really wanted to say.

Take the following example from The Canon by William Stirling (a pseudonym):

In this case, Stirling is talking about an intriguing symbolical connection between Orpheus and Jesus Christ, and he mentions the number 1275 (the value of "Orpheus" in Greek) as the reason why the two were connected.

In the following paragraph he mentions that the Greek names Achilleus and Odysseus add to 1276 and 1479 respectively, and if you subtract 1 from the first name and add 1 to the second, you get 1275 and 1480 — the first being equivalent to Jesus Christ, and the second being the exact value of the word "Christos" in Greek. However, Stirling never actually explains why 1275 is the equivalent of "Jesus Christ". In fact, only if we use Agrippa's Latin cipher will we be able to understand what he wanted to say:

And there are myriads of other possible uses of Gematria. You can look for patterns in our language while using Gematria, write poems where all lines add to the same value, hide geometrical riddles inside a text you write, etc, etc, etc. In fact...

(click to enlarge)

Take a look at this sentence:

Jesus, also called Joshua or Y'shua in Hebrew, the Messiah who was a preacher of the Gospel, rode a donkey into Jerusalem and taught in parables, died on a Cross for our sins.

My dear Readers obviously noticed that some of the words in this sentence were willingfully highlighted. That's an important clue which, however, would pass completely unnoticed for most people who were unaware of Gematria. What's so special about this sentence, then? Well... this is:

This, of course, is but a small part of everything you could do with Gematria. Obviously, other patterns can be found with other ciphers, and that's precisely one of the most interesting aspects of Gematria. You could spend hours, days, even months or years, finding significant synchronicities when applying the ciphers of Gematria to the English language.

An Example of possible creative uses of Gematria

At this point I'm going to show you one of many possible creative uses of Gematria as an encryption method.

This is a poem that was created by "Sean Virroco" (not his real name), the person who's behind my favorite Gematria calculator of all time, GEMATRO. This poem contains a secret, and it is only by using Gematria that we'll be able to decode its hidden message:

First of all, we will notice that the first letters in each line spell the word "GEMATRIA" when taken together. However, there is more to this than it seems, and the clue is given in the last two lines:

"In every line there's code, a number
And its signature — one hundred pi."

The first time that Sean showed me this poem, my first thought was not to calculate the value of each line, but instead to count the number of letters in each line. And I was pretty intrigued when I noticed that the total number of letters in the poem is 227, which could be considered to be a cryptic reference to the value of Pi (22/7 = 3.14).

However, this couldn't be the final answer, as the poem specifically states that the numerical signature contained in the poem is "one hundred pi". If the value of π (pi) is 3.14, then "one hundred pi" would correspond to the number 314, not 227. And if we look closely, what the poem is actually telling us is that every line adds up to a number, and that its value is "one hundred pi", that is, 314. And if we use the English Ordinal cipher, we will notice that that is precisely the case:

This is quite an ingenious exercise, to encode secret references inside a text by using Gematria as a cryptographic tool. At this time I would like to bring the attention of my Readers to a book that contains a lot of other similar exercises — even full poems going through several pages in which each line always adds up to the same value (!!!). That book was written in 1903 by Rev. Walter Begley, and its title is Biblia Cabalistica, or The Cabalistic Bible. It can be read and downloaded for free at Archive.org.

Experimenting with Gematria

to decrypt/decode secret references

Even though I already wrote about this in my first post about the History of Ciphers, I would like to recall some of the things I explained previously in that post. Since at this time I'm writing about "How I use Gematria", I honestly think that this will be a good idea.

By 2008, when I was studying secret societies, I stumbled upon a numerical cipher that was used by the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati. This cipher was uncannily similar to other two ciphers that were used by the time of Sir Francis Bacon — in fact, it seemed to be a cross between the Elizabethan "Simple" and "Reverse" ciphers:

By that time I was also reading about some "conspiracy theories" (?) that explained how the symbols in the 1 Dollar bill and the Great Seal of the United States contained Illuminati symbology. So... as I stumbled upon the actual numerical cipher of the Bavarian Illuminati, I thought: so, if that's the case, I'm sure that the Illuminati cipher will deliver good results when applied to the Great Seal of the United States. And in fact, I was more than surprised when I finally did it.

To my absolute surprise, I found out that the mottos in the Great Seal that contain 13 letters also add up to 169 in the Illuminati cipher, and 169 is 13 × 13. And the motto at the center of the 1 Dollar bill, "In God We Trust", which contains 12 letters, adds up to 168. If we add the "ONE" (1) below the motto to those values, we will obtain the values of 13, and 169, which again is 13 × 13.

Later I would also notice that "Novus Ordo Seclorum" adds up to 229 (the 50ᵗʰ prime number) in the Illuminati cipher, and that the value of "USA" is 50 — coincidentally, the number of states in the United States of America.

After this many curious discoveries followed, but by now my Readers should be able to understand how I used Gematria in this case. In fact, this was an absolutely uncharted territory, and it was only through experimentation that I was able to find these very curious patterns in the Great Seal of the United States, when applying to it the numerical cipher of the Illuminati.

Sometimes, it's experimentation itself which opens our "doors of perception" to other possibilities.

Some Final Words

Even though this was not an exhaustive explanation of all the possible ways how Gematria can be used (of which the limit is our own imagination), I believe that by now my Readers will have a good idea of how I personally use Gematria.

Of course, my Readers should always have in mind that I don't consider my methods to be the "only valid" ways of using Gematria. It's just how I work — and even then, I still didn't show every single way how I use Gematria. So, in my view, each and every person can find their own methods, and will be able to get more or less insights from the way how they use Gematria.

Gematria can be extremely fun to work with, while at the some time it can (in some restrict cases) be a powerful weapon. So, as in everything, Reason, together with Equilibrium and Respect for all, should always be our guiding principles when working with these tools.

I bid my Readers farewell, until we meet again for a fresh new text about the Ciphers of Gematria.

My best regards to All,

Luís Gonçalves

"History of Ciphers" (part 5) - Mathematical Ciphers

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Sat, 29 Jan 2022 19:30:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In the fourth part of the "History of Ciphers" (which was itself divided into 4 parts: 4a, 4b, 4c and 4d) we talked about how the Thelemic ciphers can be used to solve some riddles in the Holy Books of Thelema, particularly Liber AL vel Legis — The Book of the Law.

In this new fifth part we will talk about a different kind of ciphers. Contrary to all the ciphers we talked about before, these ciphers don't have any specific context to be used on* — instead, they are simply based on mathematical sequences of numbers, and as such I will be calling them the Mathematical ciphers.

* A word of caution is needed at this point. When I say that these ciphers "don't have a context to be used on", what I mean is that these are simply mathematical ciphers — so technically speaking, they aren't Baconian, Thelemic, or Masonic ciphers, but they do have a "right" context to be used on if you are using them to decode something that was willingly encoded with them. So, in a way, context is still of utmost importance even if you work with these ciphers — as with all ciphers of Gematria.

History of Ciphers

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 5: Mathematical ciphers

There are many kinds of mathematical ciphers, which in this paper I will divide into three categories:

1. The ones based on lists of specific types of numbers, of which I will highlight the Prime numbers sequence, which is perhaps the most well-known among these. I will also talk about an experimental cipher known as the Fibonacci cipher, which seems to have been devised very recently (i.e. already in the 21ˢᵗ century, possibly during the late 2010's).

2. The ones based on geometric/polygonal sequences, among which the most well-known are undoubtedly the Trigonal (or Triangular) numbers sequence, and the Tetragonal (or Square) numbers. As far as I can tell, these are probably the oldest of the mathematical ciphers. In my research about this kind of ciphers, I was able to trace them at least to the late 17ᵗʰ century, to Johann Henning's "Cabbalologia" (1683), but it's possible that there are still older sources for these ciphers. Henning's work about ciphers hides another nice surprise, however... and I will also talk about it in this paper.

3. The ones based on the lists of divisors of certain numbers. These are not very well-known or used in Gematria, even though I think that they can be of great value — besides, there are certain very curious factors about them that are worthy of note, and I will explain all of that to my Readers.

The way how these sequences are turned into Gematria ciphers is pretty straightforward: the first number in the mathematical sequence is assigned to letter "A", the following number to letter "B", and so on and so on, always following the alphabetical order of letters together with the respective numerical sequence.

With this explanation in mind, let us then explore these different types of ciphers.

Ciphers based on lists of specific types of numbers

Of these ciphers I will only highlight, in this section, the Primes and Fibonacci ciphers:

Cipher table from GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator.

The logic behind this cipher is pretty sound. As number 2 is by definition the first prime number, it is assigned to letter "A", the first letter of the alphabet; next, the second prime number is 3 which is assigned to letter "B"; and the sequence continues in the same way, so that the 26ᵗʰ letter of the English alphabet is assigned the 26ᵗʰ prime number, 101.

In this cipher, "Prime Number" sums 421, which is a prime number:

Further facts about this cipher:

To be honest with my Readers, at this time of writing I have no actual informations about (1) when was this cipher first used, (2) who devised it, or (3) any historical use of it, besides its presence in some modern calculators (namely the "Gematrinator").

So I'm not really sure of how I could further elaborate on the origins and history of this cipher. As it is based on a natural sequence of numbers (the prime numbers) it is, however, perfectly logical, and I don't see any inconvenience in using it for the purposes of Gematria. Anyway, I always advise my Readers to work with ciphers in a conscious manner, and that not all ciphers are "right" if you want to decode something with them. As always, context is king.

* * *

Next comes the Fibonacci cipher:

Cipher table from GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator.

The reasoning behind this cipher is this: for the first half of the alphabet we follow the normal Fibonacci sequence, from the 1ˢᵗ Fibonacci number (1) to the 13ᵗʰ (233), while for the second half of the alphabet the order is reversed. The reason for this reversal is that if we followed the Fibonacci sequence until the 26ᵗʰ Fibonacci number we would be left with a table with very large numbers, since the 26ᵗʰ Fibonacci number is 121393:

Cipher table from an offline derivation of Gematrinator. Click to enlarge.

In order to avoid exceedingly high numbers, the choice was made, then, to reverse the Fibonacci sequence for the second half of the alphabet.

Using the Fibonacci cipher, the numerical sum of "Filius Bonacci" (from which came the name "Fibonacci") is 666. This is very curious, to say the least.

And even more curious is that the number 666, as written in Revelation 13:18 in the text of the Biblia Sacra Vulgata (the Latin Bible), "Sexcenti Sexaginta Sex", also sums 666:

(click to enlarge)

Further facts about this cipher:

At this time of writing I'm not entirely aware of the circumstances behind the creation of this cipher. I do know, however, that two persons were instrumental in making this cipher come to life:

— The first person is Discord user Barni Yamum, from Germany, whose Fibonacci cipher was added to an offline derivation of the Gematrinator, in which it was called Barni Yamum's Fibonacci Cipher. From some past conversation I've read on Discord, Barni seems to have devised this cipher on his own.

Cipher table from an offline derivation of Gematrinator. Click to enlarge.

— The second person is YouTube user Lambda115, who shared the first video about the Fibonacci cipher and was instrumental in making this cipher more widely known. As far as I know, it was because of Lambda115's work that the Fibonacci cipher was added to the Gematrinator.

From what I was able investigate when talking with both Barni Yamum and Lambda115, they both told me that they devised this cipher. While at one side it is true that Lambda115 has explored this cipher a lot on his YouTube videos, and he was technically the first person who ever published a video talking about this specific cipher, it is also true that from some conversations with Barni Yamum on Discord, it became clear to me that Barni also devised this cipher on his own, without knowing about Lambda115's similar idea.

I strongly believe that both individuals may have had the same idea and came up with the same cipher. In fact, that happened to me as well in April 2021, when I devised an experimental system of Gematria inspired on the alphanumeric Base-36 numeration (0-Z), and just some days later I came to find out that the cipher that I thought I had devised, had already been used for many years before — at least since 1999 — under the name of "Alphanumeric Qabbala". So if I say that "I devised" a system of Gematria based on Base-36 numeration, I'm not running away from the truth — indeed I did devise it, since I genuinely didn't know that it existed before — but as later I came to understand, I was simply not the first person who did it. I believe that the same happened in this case, where both individuals came up with the same cipher, without knowing each other's work, and both being honest about having devised it. I don't have any reasons not to trust the words of these two individuals.

If this assumption of mine is wrong, however, I humbly ask my Readers who might have more to say about this, to please share all the informations you would consider to be relevant in this case. My purpose in this explanation, however, is not to know "who's right" and "who's wrong", but only to share what can be known for sure about the history of this still young cipher.

So, the next ciphers in line are the...

Ciphers based on Polygonal sequences

These are by far, for me, the most interesting of the Mathematical ciphers. I honestly thought until some time ago that, of these ciphers, only the Trigonal and Squares ciphers were used, and they were created very recently (I mean, in the 20ᵗʰ century tops). However, I was wrong in both of these assumptions, since:

— There were other Polygonal ciphers that were used in the past, including (besides the Trigonal and Squares ciphers) the Pentagonal, Hexagonal, Heptagonal, Octagonal, Enneagonal, and Decagonal ciphers (!!!)

— I was able to find a source for all these ciphers that came from the late 17ᵗʰ century: more precisely from 1683, the year when Johann Henning's "Cabbalologia" was published (link to online text here).

All these "new" Polygonal ciphers can be found in Henning's "Cabbalologia", even though in this case the ciphers are adapted to the Elizabethan English alphabet with 24 letters, in which I=J and U=V. As these ciphers are historically relevant, and not just "modern inventions" as I had previously thought, I will present the first two (Trigonal & Squares) using the following model:

— A link to the website of the OEIS (On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences) for the corresponding Polygonal sequence;

— The original cipher from "Cabbalologia" for the Elizabethan English alphabet;

— The corresponding cipher for the Modern English alphabet;

— Some correspondences for these ciphers (Trigonal and Tetragonal). Please be aware that I never duly explored these ciphers except occasionally, so I'll do my best to give some "food for thought" for these ciphers.

For the remaining ciphers, and in order to avoid making this a boresome presentation, I will simply present the polygonal ciphers that are adapted to the modern English alphabet. Their Elizabethan counterpart can be simply reproduced from these tables, while always remembering that in the Elizabethan English alphabet the letters "I" and "J" share the same value (since they were considered to be different shapes of the same letter), the same happening with "U" and "V".

So, in order, we'll begin with the Trigonal or Triangular cipher.

OEIS: https://oeis.org/A000217 (Triangular numbers)

Trigonal Cabbala for the Elizabethan English alphabet.

Trigonal Gematria for the Modern English alphabet.

This Trigonal or Triangular sequence is also very curious. The way it works may not be very clear at first sight, but it is actually quite logical and sound. In order to find the Nᵗʰ trigonal number, you just add all the natural numbers from 1 to N. For example, the first letter "A" is assigned the first trigonal number, which is 1; next, the letter "B" is assigned the second trigonal number, which is 1+2 = 3; then, "C" is assigned the third trigonal number, which is 1+2+3 = 6, etc, and the sequence continues until the 26ᵗʰ letter "Z" which is assigned the 26ᵗʰ trigonal number, or 1+2+3+...+25+26 = 351.

In the modern Trigonal cipher, "Maths" sums 528, which is a triangular number itself:

And in the Trigonal cipher for the Elizabethan English alphabet, "Trigonal Cabbala" (as it is named in "Cabbalologia") shares the same value as "Triangles":

* * *

Next comes the Squares (or Tetragonal) cipher:

OEIS: https://oeis.org/A000290 (The squares)

Tetragonal Cabbala for the Elizabethan English alphabet.

Tetragonal Gematria for the Modern English alphabet.

The logic behind this cipher is also easy to grasp. Each Nᵗʰ Square number is equal to N×N. Thus, the first letter "A" is assigned the value 1×1 = 1, the second letter "B" is assigned the value 2×2 = 4, etc, until the 26ᵗʰ letter "Z" which is assigned the value 26×26 = 676.

In the modern Tetragonal cipher, "Coding" sums 576, which is itself a square number:

And in the modern Tetragonal cipher, "A Square" sums 1296, which is the square of 36:

Following these two ciphers, which are by far the most well-known, I'll simply list the remaining polygonal ciphers as listed in Johann Henning's "Cabbalologia". Be aware however, dear Reader, that these are the ciphers for the modern English alphabet and they won't match with the ciphers as listed in "Cabbalologia", since in this book the ciphers were adapted to the Elizabethan English alphabet. In order to use them with that alphabet (which can depend on which historical context you're working on), you just have to remember that in that alphabet, the letters "I" and "J" were considered to be different shapes of the same letter, similarly to what happened with "U" and "V". So for the Elizabethan English alphabet, the numerical correspondences for the letters "I" and "J" will be the same, and likewise with "U" and "V".

* * *

http://oeis.org/A000326

http://oeis.org/A000384

http://oeis.org/A000566

http://oeis.org/A000567

http://oeis.org/A001106

http://oeis.org/A001107

* * *

What I found most interesting when I started exploring these ciphers was not noticing which numerical matches between words they supplied; instead, my first instinct when I found these ciphers was to which numbers made part of these polygonal sequences and their order, and I found some curiosities.

One of these coincidences has to do with the year and date when English Qaballa (the "ALW" Cipher) was discovered. As I explained in my first text about the Thelemic ciphers, EQ was discovered by James Lees on November 26ᵗʰ, 1976. Not only was this date highly symbolic, due to its specific connection to the numbers 11 and 26 (standing for the number of letters of the English alphabet, and the 11-letter cycle associated with the "ALW" cipher), but the year was equally relevant, since 1976 is the 26ᵗʰ octagonal number. And not only this, but 1976 also equals 26x76, again confirming a connection between the English alphabet (with 26 letters), the year ('76), and even pointing to the verse in Liber AL vel Legis which was being decoded when this cipher was discovered (verse II:76 — meaning November '76!).

Another such example is 666, which in Western (i.e. Christian) culture is known as the "Number of the Beast", based on the biblical text of Revelation 13:18. This number is the 36ᵗʰ trigonal number, while 36 is the 8ᵗʰ trigonal number. So there's a clear polygonal connection between these three numbers: 8, 36 and 666. But there's a manuscript version of the book of Revelation where the mentioned number is not 666 but instead 616. And is this number equally relevant from a polygonal or mathematical perspective? Well, in my opinion it isn't as "interesting" as 666, but nevertheless, 616 is both the 16ᵗʰ heptagonal number, and it is also the 9ᵗʰ 13-gonal number.

Some polygonal series also contain some interesting numbers. The number 287, for example, which I explored (though not exhaustively) in my text about the Baconian ciphers and which is deeply connected to some mysteries related to Sir Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare and Rosicrucianism, is the 14ᵗʰ pentagonal number, while 1717 (the year when the Great Lodge of England was founded) is the 34ᵗʰ pentagonal. And of course, 34 equals 17+17.

I've prepared, for quick reference, a spreadsheet with all polygonal series from the "simple" sequence to the 18-gonal numbers, up to the 52nd number in each series. Technically speaking all of these sequences could be used as ciphers, even though the ones which are more frequently used are, as explained before, the "Trigonal" and "Squares" ciphers.

Polygonal sequences — click to enlarge.

In the community of practitioners of Gematria who use it to "decode the news", as it were, I've seen some people showing their decodes about a possible UFO-related major event in 2022. As sometimes I also like to play the same 'game', I couldn't end this section if I didn't show my own ultimate 'decode' with the polygonal ciphers:

So there you have it! Haha 😜

* * *

A previously unknown "Extended" alternative cipher

for the English Alphabet, from "Cabbalologia"

Henning's "Cabbalologia" is interesting not only because of the polygonal ciphers that it contains, but also because of an alternative "Extended" cipher that can be used for the English alphabet. As far as I know there aren't many people using this cipher, so I believe that this will be a nice surprise, at least, for some of my Readers.

This is the "Alternative Extended" cipher as it appears in "Cabbalologia", which in this case is adapted to the 24-lettered Elizabethan English alphabet:

Adapting this cipher to the modern English alphabet with 26 letters, we would have:

Custom cipher table made with GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator.

My Readers will very easily understand the reasoning behind this cipher. Just like in Hebrew Gematria and Greek Isopsephy the values of letters are grouped in units (1 to 9), tens (10 to 90) and hundreds (100 to 900), so does English Extended follow the same pattern. This Extended Alternative cipher, however, has a 'twist', since after 100 the pattern changes — instead of counting in hundreds, first 100, then 200, etc, we continue to count in tens, going from 100 to 110, then 120, 130, etc. So this is the basics of this Extended Alternative cipher.

Unfortunately I haven't practiced enough with this cipher, so I'll just show the result that I got, by an absolutely random coincidence. The phrase "Six Six Six" sums 777 in Extended Alternative, and it shares the same value with other phrases:

Remember, however, that this only has meaning if you give it meaning. Coincidental "matches" like these don't have to necessarily "mean" anything, except when you use Gematria to encode your text, by using some specific phrasing that refer to other things that aren't present in your text. That's, in fact, one of the most arcane and genuine historical uses of Gematria, and one that is generally overlooked in modern times. My most sincere advice to my Readers regarding Gematria is this: don't take Gematria too seriously, or as means to "decode the Universe" — Use it, but don't abuse it.

Next ciphers in line are the...

Ciphers based on the divisors of a number

The first time I read about this type of ciphers was in a book by Maurice Bouisson that a friend offered me many years ago, called "Magia: Os seus Grandes Ritos e a sua História" (in English it is published as "Magic: Its History and Principal Rites").

In this book, Maurice Bouisson quotes the work of Raymond Abellio, "La Bible: Document Chiffré" ("The Bible: A Ciphered Document"), in which he writes, regarding the Hebrew alphabet:

   "There are 22 letters. There are also exactly 22 regular polygons that can be inscribed on the circle of 360 degrees, and whose angle at the centre is an integer number of degrees. Each letter corresponds to a polygon.
    All numerical science is based on the geometric structure of the circle.
    These polygons go from the equilateral triangle (3 sides, angle at the centre 360/3 = 120 degrees) to the polygon with 360 sides, whose angle at the centre is 1 degree. Putting between parentheses the number of sides, we also have, in order, the equilateral triangle (3), the square (4), the pentagon (5), the regular hexagon (6), the regular octagon (8), and following the regular polygons of 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180 and 360 sides.
    To each Hebrew letter must be assigned one of these numbers, in the order from 3 to 360."

I was absolutely blown away when I first read this. Not only was this an extremely ingenious way of decoding the Hebrew alphabet with the help of Geometry (coincidentally, a possible origin of the word Gematria), it also showed quite an intelligent way of attributing alternative values to the Hebrew letters based on the polygons that can be inscribed on a circle with 360 degrees. Based on this brilliant discovery, Raymond Abellio would further state that there would be two main systems of Gematria for the Hebrew alphabet — one of them being exoteric, that is, not secret, or publicly disclosed:

... and the other one being esoteric, i.e. secret, undisclosed to the public:

An interesting correspondence that I found while searching for R. Abellio's work has to do with the values of two Hebrew expressions: השמים (ha-shamaïm, "The Skies") and הארץ (ha-aretz, "The Earth"):

These two values correspond respectively to 38×7 and to 29×7, and using the same cipher, the value of "Eve" חוה is 29:

... and the value of Elohim (used as a title of God, even though it is a plural) is 83, the reversal of 38:

Unfortunately I never duly explored this cipher except on this occasion, so I won't be able to show any more curious discoveries with this system — for now. I would recommend, however, if my Readers are able to do it, to try getting a copy either of Maurice Bouisson's book "Magic: Its History and Principal Rites", or alternatively, which can be more difficult, of Raymond Abellio's "La Bible: Document Chiffré". I'm not sure if there is an English translation of this last work, though.

Eventually this "Hebrew 360" cipher gave me an idea. Well, the number 360 has exactly 24 divisors, but the numbers 1 and 2 aren't included in the "Hebrew 360" cipher because they don't divide the 360° circle into polygons. However, what would happen if I used the complete series of the 24 divisors of 360 with the Classical Greek alphabet — which happens to have exactly 24 letters?

And so, the experimental "Greek 360" cipher was born:

Remembering that the Elizabethan English alphabet also had 24 letters, the same principle could be applied to it (I'll label this the "Bacon 360" cipher, even though it could more correctly be called "Elizabethan 360"):

Note that I=J and U=V, in the Elizabethan English alphabet.

In this case, however, we should remember two things: (1) that this is an experimental cipher, which means that I don't have any proofs that this cipher was used before; and (2) that it would only make sense to use this cipher in the right context, which could either be related to the historical period involved in our research, or to the subject that we're studying. It would make sense, for example, to explore this cipher in the context of the Elizabethan Era, or in the contexts of Rosicrucianism or Freemasonry, for example, since the Elizabethan ciphers have been consistently used in these contexts for centuries.

* * *

My work with this kind of ciphers didn't end up here, though. Regarding the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, I also thought that there could be yet another cipher for the alternative forms of these alphabets: one for the Hebrew alphabet including the 'soffit' (final) forms of the letters Kaph, Mem, Nun, Phe & Tzaddi, and one for the Greek alphabet which includes the obsolete letters Vau/Digamma, Qoppa and Sampi. Notice that these alternative forms of these alphabets contain exactly 27 different values...

So a question was raised in my mind: what is the smallest number that has exactly 27 divisors, including itself? And the answer to this question is the number 900, which by a coincidence happens to be the maximum value in both of these ciphers. So with this data in our hands, we can safely build two alternative ciphers for the Hebrew and Greek alphabets, where instead of having the units, the tens and then the hundreds, we'll have instead all 27 divisors of 900, from 1 to 900:

With a bit more imagination (which is already too fertile, I would say 😅) we could also apply this list of the 27 divisors of 900 to Agrippa's Latin cipher, which also uses the numbers from 1 to 900 (even though in the usual groups of units 1-9, tens 10-90, and hundreds 100-900):

In the future I may dedicate some time to finding qabbalistic patterns with these ciphers. For now, as I only devised them but never actually explored their potential, they will have to remain as references for my Readers. However, if anyone among my Readers finds some value in these experimental ciphers and decides to share their work with me... well, I will appreciate very much if you show me some of your own discoveries with them!

However, a final word is needed (again) about these ciphers based on the divisors of numbers. My Readers should be aware that these are all modern & experimental ciphers, which means that (as far as I know) they don't have any historical origins in the past — at least, excepting the cipher I called "Hebrew 360", which was first mentioned by Raymond Abellio. So in our work with them we should always take this into consideration.

To conclude...

Some Final Notes

I really hope that this presentation of the Mathematical Ciphers will give you, my dear Reader, a more solid knowledge on the origins of some of these ciphers. While some of them can be tracked to at least the 17ᵗʰ century, like the Polygonal ciphers, or the Extended Alternative cipher, others seem to be modern inventions and so should be properly called experimental ciphers. In fact, there are no limits to experimental ciphers, and anyone can create their own experimental cipher, be it Mathematical or not. In fact, I had many ideas that I didn't include in this presentation, or even in some of my previous texts, but I will expose some of them in some future papers.

For now, I will make a short pause in this series of articles about the History of Ciphers. Instead, I think that the time has come to write shorter, more specific articles — not only about the ciphers themselves, but also about the Practice of Gematria, as well as some examples of discoveries and curiosities that I've found in my work with Gematria and its many different kinds of ciphers.

If any of my Readers would wish to exchange a word or two with me, I humbly ask you to either use the "Comments" form at the end of this text, or the "Contact" form in the PC version of this blog (right menu).

I bid all my Readers farewell... for now.

Hopefully the next post will be a pleasant surprise. 😁

Luís Gonçalves

"History of Ciphers" (part 4d) - The Thelemic Ciphers (IV)

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 18:39:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this fourth exposition of the Thelemic ciphers, my approach will be entirely different from my previous texts. The reason for this lies in the fact that I never duly explored these ciphers, and also, as it is a really big number of ciphers that I will talk about (comparatively to the other topics), I've chosen to just give a simple description of each cipher and my own comments, without being too elaborate. A set of (mostly online) references will also be given for each cipher, so that my Readers can get more information directly from the respective sources, and not be limited by my own brief explanations.

There will only be one cipher that I explain more in-depth, as that cipher was devised by me in order to answer some of the riddles in Liber AL vel Legis — so, as you can imagine, I did explore it a lot. This will be the second time that I explain this cipher online. The first time was in a ~~fundamentalist~~ forum about Thelema, and it didn't... go as planned. 😅

With these words, let us get to the fourth and final (finally!!!) part of this history of the Thelemic ciphers.

History of Ciphers

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 4: The Thelemic Ciphers (IV)

In my first presentation of the Thelemic ciphers, I explained that since Aleister Crowley passed away in 1947, many people have tried to find their own "solutions" to the riddles of the Book of the Law; and since computers appeared, many, many ciphers were specifically devised (or in other cases, adapted/adopted) in order to accomplish this end. As there is an ever-growing number of these ciphers, this subject has become a taboo in most Thelemic circles. In some more fundamentalist cases, if you refer to any specific system of English Gematria as being a possible key to the mysteries of Liber AL, you will be ignored at best, or ridiculed at worst.

Please be aware, dear Reader, that the order in which I'm showing these cipher has nothing to do with their "level of importance". It was just the order that I've chosen, for no other reason except my personal preference.

The last of the ciphers presented in this text will be special, however. It is in fact my experimental cipher, that I devised while being inspired by the curious structure of James Lees' English Qaballa. As it is "my" cipher and the last one to be explained in this text, I will also talk a bit — not much — longer about it, since I explored it a lot more than all other ciphers in this text you're reading.

* * *

The first cipher I will mention is one that I've already (very) briefly mentioned in my second text about the Thelemic ciphers. I'm talking about...

Linda Falorio's "Liber CXV: The English Qabalah"

From Liber CXV: The English Qabalah, by Linda Falorio.

Author/discoverer: Linda Falorio (@anandazone).

Year of discovery: 1979, according to Kenneth Grant in "Hecate's Fountain" (1992).

Personal notes:

The method of discovery of this cipher is completely unknown to me. Linda Falorio seems to have taken into consideration a wide array of sources for some of these correspondences between letters and numbers. A source that seems to be extremely important in her work is Robert Graves' book "The White Goddess", which contains many ~~New Agey~~ reflections on the ancient Celtic "Tree alphabet" called Ogham and its connections with the cycles of Nature. Some of these numerical correspondences seem to be a bit arbitrary, and apparently they don't follow any specific order (except a rather vague connection with the Ogham alphabetic sequence).

In the table above, the values between parentheses correspond to the value of those letters in "sacred spellings".

Online sources:

— Liber CXV: The English Qabalah

— Exegesis of Liber AL

— The Letters and Their Values

— Book of Numbers (Gematria database)

* * *

Samuel K. Vincent's "English Qabalah"

Author/discoverer: Samuel K. Vincent (pseudonym of Emery Moreira).

Year of discovery: 2008.

Personal notes:

This system seems to have been based on the famous verses from Liber AL vel Legis:

"Aye! listen to the numbers & the words: 4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meaneth this, o prophet? Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever. There cometh one to follow thee: he shall expound it. But remember, o chosen one, to be me; to follow the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven; to look forth upon men, to tell them this glad word." (AL II:75-76)

The letter values seem to have been derived from this sequence, after applying it to the English alphabet, and using Hebrew Gematria as a basis for the values of the letters in the sequence of Liber AL. For example, the seventh character in the sequence from Liber AL is "K" = Hebrew letter Kaph = 20, so "G" (the seventh English letter) is given the value 20. And so on, and so on.

The alternative values are given to the values depending on them being "soft" or "hard" (as is the case of letter "C"), "balanced" or "averse" (the letter "L"), final or middle/initial (the letter "N"), and a lot of other special 'conditions' of the letters. The reason why some of these values were chosen isn't always clear, and an abundance of alternative values for the letters does not lend this system enough consistency, in my opinion.

Online sources:

— The English Qabalah

— The Key to the English Qabalah

— The Alphabet (or Roman Script)

— The Lexicon (Gematria database)

* * *

"The English Cabala - 111" by Perseverando

(a.k.a. "1=A=0" / LVX & NOX ciphers)

"The Order & Value of the English Alphabet" by Shane Clayton, 1995.

Author/discoverer: Shane Clayton (Frater Perseverando).

Year of discovery: 1995.

Personal notes:

After James Lees' English Qaballa (a.k.a. "ALW cipher"), this was perhaps the next system of Thelemic Gematria that I learned about. I really enjoyed it because of its simplicity. My Readers should know that this "cipher" is in fact two ciphers: one corresponding to the "order of the English Alphabet" (A=1), and the other corresponding to the "value of the English Alphabet" (A=0). Later, Clayton called these the "LVX" (Light) and "NOX" (Night) ciphers respectively. It's curious to note the similarity between "1=A=0" and the Gnostic name IAO — a detail which was of great importance to the author by the time of discovery of these ciphers.

Notice, however, that if you look closely into this table, the letters "Y" and "X" are switched. This is not an error and it seems to be derived from the author's interpretation of a part of the above mentioned riddle from Liber AL II:76 ["... Y X 24 89..." — number 89 is the 24th prime].

Using the NOX cipher, "The English Cabala" = 111.

Online sources:

— The English Cabala - 111 (archived — this is a must-read)

— The Numbers and the Words (archived — fairly big Gematria database)

— About The English Cabala - 111

— Liber A vel Follis - The Book of the Holy Fool (An inspired text received/channeled by Frater Perseverando on January 23, 1995.)

* * *

The "English Qabalah" of AREXZ 1496

(a.k.a. English Extended)

Custom cipher table made with GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator. Click to enlarge.

Author/discoverer: AREXZ 1496, also known as Tau Aleph, Bishop and founding member of the Ecclesia Gnostica Universalis (EGnU).

Year of discovery: most probably 2001.

Personal notes:

This is a very simple and straightforward system of Gematria, with much in common with Hebrew Gematria. It attributes values to the letters by following their natural order: the first nine letters correspond to the units, from 1 to 9; the following nine letters correspond to the tens, from 10 to 90; and the final eight letters correspond to the hundreds, from 100 to 800.

Obviously, this is the same system as the one we now know as "English Extended". Only the name is different.

Using this cipher, "AREXZ" = 1496.

Online sources:

— The English Qabalah of AREXZ 1496 (Gematria database)

— Other texts by AREXZ 1496 / Tau Aleph

* * *

"Mars Kamea English Gematria" by Frater RIKB

Cipher table by Frater RIKB (link).

Author/discoverer: Frater RIKB. I don't know his real name.

Date of discovery: April 2003, according to R. Leo Gillis in "Secrets of the Cipher Naughts".

Personal notes:

This cipher was devised from the Magic Square (in Hebrew: קמיע Kamea, meaning "talisman") of Mars, this being a table of 5×5 squares containing the numbers from 1 to 25, so that their sums by line, column and diagonal are always the same. Applying a clue contained in Liber AL:

"Paste the sheets from right to left and from top to bottom: then behold!" (AL III:73)

... and noting that there are 26 letters in the English Alphabet, Frater RIKB took A as Zero, and then found the remaining correspondences by pasting the "sheets" (i.e. the letters) "from right to left and from top to bottom", thus devising the Mars Kamea English Gematria.

Using this cipher, "Mars square" = 107 = "Letter" = "Fivefold".

Online sources:

— Mars Kamea English Gematria (contains a small Gematria database)

— Liber 244, The Book of Eternal Burning (PDF, 424 KB. Contains an analysis of AL II:76 with the Mars Kamea English Gematria)

* * *

The "Toavotea Key" by John Farthing II

Author/discoverer: John Farthing II (Frater Omnia Redementur).

Date of discovery: January 26, 2003.

Personal notes:

"Toavotea" stands for "The Order And Value Of The English Alphabet", no doubt inspired by a passage from the Book of the Law:

"Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto." (AL II:55)

The process of creation/discovery of this cipher seems to have been partly logical and partly intuitive, but it was mostly based on a study of the "grid" in the manuscript of the Book of the Law (image here). At this time of writing I am unable to understand all the reasonings behind this cipher and how these values were obtained.

Using this cipher, "Thelema" = 93.

Online sources:

— Exegesis 1: Toavotea Key (includes a calculator at the end of the page)

— Exegesis 2: Toavotea Key

— Exegesis 3: Toavotea Key

(All three links above provide a very large Gematria database)

— A Toavotea Decryption of Liber AL vel Legis, II:76

(Published in the Silver Star journal, issue 1, Spring Equinox 2004)

* * *

The English Qabalah by Frater Zephyros

(Liber 805 vel EQ)

Custom cipher table made with GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator. Click to enlarge.

Author/discoverer: Paul Rovelli (Frater Zephyros).

Year of discovery: (2010 maybe? Not sure about this)

Personal notes:

This cipher had as a direct inspiration the verse in Liber AL II:55 ("Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet"). The author interpreted this as meaning the order in which the letters appear in the text of the Book of the Law, thus finding this specific order for the letters (H A D T E M N I F S O U...). Then, similarly to Hebrew Gematria, the letters were given certain values: first the units from 1 to 9, then the tens from 10 to 90, and finally the hundreds from 100 to 800.

The fact that the first chapter of Liber AL is the only one which contains all the letters of the alphabet (the 2nd and 3rd chapters lack the "Z") may give some significance to this specific order. This is a very ingenious cipher, even though I haven't explored it deeply enough.

Using this cipher, "EQ" = 805.

Online sources:

— Liber 805 vel EQ (PDF, 584 KB)

— EQ Sepher Sephiroth (revised) (DOC, 502 KB)

(Large Gematria database; includes Liber AL enumerated)

— Thelemic Qabalah, Vol. IV - The English Qabalah (PDF, 3.2 MB)

(Includes the two texts above and some more)

* * *

Ron L. Adams' three Thelemic Numerologies

(HADT, NUTH & ABRH)

Custom cipher tables made with GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator. Click to enlarge.

Author/discoverer: Ron Lee Adams (Frater Sabaechit).

Year of discovery: unknown / undisclosed (?).

Personal notes:

I only know of one online resource for these ciphers, and it is the webpage of Ron Adams (see below). Even though these ciphers are nowhere explained, the reasoning behind them is sound. These ciphers, like the one mentioned above (EQ 805) are all derived from the order of appearance of the letters of the alphabet in the text of the Book of the Law:

— The HADT cipher corresponds to the first chapter, which begins with the words: "Had! The manifestation of Nuit". Ron associated it with Manifestation Magick.

— The NUTH cipher corresponds to the second chapter, beginning with the words: "Nu! the hiding of Hadit". Ron associated it with Revealing Hidden Mysteries;

— The ABRH cipher corresponds to the third chapter, which starts with the words: "Abrahadabra; the reward of Ra Hoor Khut". Ron called it The Reward of Horus the Avenger.

Note that of the three chapters, the first is the only one containing all the letters of the alphabet. The second and third chapters don't contain the letter "Z", so it was simply added to the end of the sequence in the NUTH and ABRH ciphers.

Using these ciphers:

— "Nuit" = 31 in the HADT cipher;

— "Hadit" = 31 in the NUTH cipher;

— "Ra Hoor Khut" = 62 (or 31+31) in the ABRH cipher.

(Note that "Thelema" = 93 in Greek Isopsephy = 31+31+31)

Online source:

— The Fourfold Secret of Liber AL (contains a Gematria database)

* * *

Qabalistic Permutations of the English Alphabet

(EQ-1 through EQ-25)

Author/discoverer: N/A.

Year of discovery: N/A.

Personal notes:

James Lees' English Qaballa is by far the most well-known of all Thelemic ciphers. It's structure is very curious and symbolically relevant because it is actually a permutation of the English Alphabet: from A=1 we count 11 letters until we arrive at L=2, continuing this cycle with W=3, etc, until P=26.

In fact, this cipher was one among many possible permutations of the alphabet that had already been explored in a Gematria program called Lexicon by the late Soror Ishtaria (archived references to it can be found here and here). Unfortunately, this software won't run in most modern computers. I was one of the lucky guys who used it for some time, and I had the opportunity of seeing all the (hundreds? thousands?) of permutations of the alphabet that this software allowed to use, even though the mostly explored cipher was, obviously, James Lees' English Qaballa / ALW cipher.

In my studies about Thelemic ciphers, I was recently inspired by this cipher in order to devise other ciphers that could also be derived from permutations of the English Alphabet. This can be done linearly and without interruptions only with those permutations whose cycle is neither a divisor of 26 (the number of letters of the alphabet) nor a multiple of its divisors. In so doing, I found exactly 11 ciphers (besides the Alphabet itself, here shown as "EQ-1") that matched that condition:

EQ-01: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

(English Ordinal / Simple English Gematria / Serial English)

EQ-03: A D G J M P S V Y B E H K N Q T W Z C F I L O R U X

EQ-05: A F K P U Z E J O T Y D I N S X C H M R W B G L Q V

EQ-07: A H O V C J Q X E L S Z G N U B I P W D K R Y F M T

EQ-09: A J S B K T C L U D M V E N W F O X G P Y H Q Z I R

EQ-11: A L W H S D O Z K V G R C N Y J U F Q B M X I T E P

(This is the cipher known as English Qaballa / ALW / NAEQ)

EQ-15: A P E T I X M B Q F U J Y N C R G V K Z O D S H W L

EQ-17: A R I Z Q H Y P G X O F W N E V M D U L C T K B S J

EQ-19: A T M F Y R K D W P I B U N G Z S L E X Q J C V O H

EQ-21: A V Q L G B W R M H C X S N I D Y T O J E Z U P K F

EQ-23: A X U R O L I F C Z W T Q N K H E B Y V S P M J G D

EQ-25: A Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N M L K J I H G F E D C B

Note that in each of these ciphers, the first letter is always A=1, and then it continues with the second letter being given the value of 2, etc, until 26. For example, in the case of EQ-5, we begin with A=1, then we count 5 letters to F=2, then K=3, etc, until we reach V=26.

The only finding that was worthy of note when I used these ciphers (yeah, I actually used all these ciphers, all at the same time — call me crazy!), was two words which have the exact same value in all these ciphers: "Isis" which sums 56, and "Aum. Ha!" (the final words in the Book of the Law) which sums 44.

(click to enlarge)

The equivalence between the name of the Egyptian goddess Isis and the number 56 was of special interest in a Thelemic context, since in a section of the Book of the Law, "Isis" seems to be alluded to as the word of Nuit, whose number is 56:

   "Now, therefore, I am known to ye by my name Nuit, and to him by a secret name which I will give him when at last he knoweth me. Since I am Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof, do ye also thus. Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt." (AL I:22)

   "But whoso availeth in this, let him be the chief of all!" (AL I:23)

   "I am Nuit, and my word is six and fifty." (AL I:24)

   "Divide, add, multiply, and understand." (AL I:25)

Working with these ciphers also showed me a very intriguing connection between EQ-21 (AVQ) and Joel Love's Cipher X, as both appear to share some similarities in their alphabetical sequences. Just compare Cipher X...

K F W R M D Y T A V Q H C X O J E L G B S N I Z U P

... with EQ-21:

A V Q L G B W R M H C X S N I D Y T O J E Z U P K F

... and you'll notice how there are groups of 3 letters following exactly the same order in both ciphers (ex.: "AVQ", "OJE", "ZUP", "DYT", etc).

Some time after I worked with these ciphers, I found that the website of Ron Lee Adams (already referred to in the previous section) also included calculators for these "EQ" ciphers — and more! 👀

In fact, it includes calculators for all permutations of the English Alphabet, from EQ-1 to EQ-25 (i.e. also including EQ-2, EQ-4, etc, which I didn't include in my list). Links to those calculators will be given right below.

Online sources:

— Quest for the English Qabala (EQ-1 through EQ-9)

— Quest for the English Qabala 2 (EQ-10 through EQ-18)

— Quest for the English Qabala 3 (EQ-19 through EQ-25)

* * *

My own experimental Thelemic cipher:

Abrahadabra Cipher / Elevenfold Qabalah (AC/EQ)

Custom cipher table made with GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator.

Author/discoverer: Luís Gonçalves.

Year of discovery: around 2008.

Personal notes:

Obviously, I'm the best person to talk about this cipher, as it was me who devised it. And in fact, that's why I left it for last. 😁

The name "Abrahadabra Cipher" was inspired by two things: firstly, the Law of Thelema ("Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law") has 11 words, just like Abrahadabra, the Word of the Aeon, has exactly 11 letters, so it served as a nice name for my cipher. And secondly, "Abrahadabra Cipher", written as "A.C.", can also serve for "Aleister Crowley", thus serving as a kind of 'homage' to the man who was behind the doctrine/religion/philosophy of Thelema.

The secondary name that I devised for this cipher was initially "Elevenfold Gematria", but more recently I re-baptized it as Elevenfold Qabalah, for some very specific reasons:

— The acronym "EQ" is used as a synonym for a lot of Thelemic ciphers (this same article is the proof of that);

— "EQ" sums 11 in AC/EQ:

— "Elevenfold Qabalah" sums 65 in AC/EQ, and 6+5=11:

Being based on a cycle of 11 numbers/letters, this puts this cipher in strict connection with James Lees' English Qaballa. In fact, if we write the letters corresponding to the numbers 1-8-4-11-7-3-10-6-2-9-5 in the AC/EQ cipher, we'll obtain the same order of letters as in English Qaballa:

A L W H S D O Z K V G R C N Y J U F Q B M X I T E P

The Abrahadabra Cipher / Elevenfold Qabalah also delivers some interesting results when it is applied to the Book of the Law, particularly to the first verses in each chapter:

"Had! The manifestation of Nuit" (AL I:1)

"Nu! the hiding of Hadit" (AL II:1)

"Abrahadabra; the reward of Ra-Hoor-Khut" (AL III:1)

Particularly, the names of the speakers in those chapters are numerologically relevant, since "Nuit", "Hadit" and "Ra-Hoor(-Khut)" all add to 31, and this matches the value of "Thelema" as well (and as we know, in Greek, "Thelema" = 93 = 31+31+31):

Likewise, the first words in the first and second chapters, both add up to 13 (a reflection of 31):

If we calculate the value of "Ra-Hoor-Khut", the 'speaker' in the 3rd chapter of the Book of the Law (usually considered to be the 'Lord of the Aeon'), we'll obtain a curious set of matches as well:

In my presentation of James Lees' English Qaballa, I also talked about a verse in which the number 56 is explicitly connected to Nuit:

"I am Nuit and my word is six and fifty" (AL I:24)

... and I also mentioned another verse where Nuit is called the "azure-lidded woman" and how that seemed to imply a reference to the specific order of the letters in English Qaballa (ALW) — and by extension, in AC/EQ:

"O azure-lidded woman, bend upon them!" (AL I:19)

In fact, "azure-lidded woman" sums 65, the reversal of 56. We've seen how reversals seem to be recurrent with this cipher:

Finally, the last words in the Book of the Law are "Aum Ha", and interestingly enough, they perfectly match the value of "New Aeon" — again, involving a reversal:

A negative characteristic in this cipher, however, is that it only contains low values (from 1 to 11 max.) so, like the reduction ciphers that I've explored in some of my previous posts, it allows for less effort in order to find a match. Of course, the easier it is to find a match, the less strength that match will have (mathematically / probabilistically speaking) — and my own experimental AC/EQ cipher also fails in that test.

Anyway, as my intention in writing about these ciphers is mostly to keep my Readers informed, and to let them know about other alternative ciphers, I took the liberty to talk about a lot of ciphers in this text — even some that I really don't like. As it is usually the case, I tend to avoid making judgments against any cipher, since I prefer my Readers to take their own conclusions, independently from what I might think or say.

Online source:

— The only online reference to this cipher is a single text that I posted on the "Lashtal" forums, on December 15th, 2008. It was the first and last time that I wrote about this cipher, at least on the internet. I must admit that my post was a bit clumsy and I wasn't taken very seriously — which anyway was more or less to be expected, since most systems of English Gematria aren't generally taken too seriously in a Thelemic context (except in some limited circles), when compared with their Hebrew and Greek counterparts. Anyway, here's this cipher again, 13 years passed, for everyone who wants to explore it further.

* * *

Concluding Remarks on the Thelemic ciphers

In this series of articles about the Thelemic ciphers I talked about several different ciphers that are mostly (but not only, in some cases) used in the context of Thelema:

— In Part 1, I explored the basic history and events leading to Aleister Crowley's channeling of Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law), the religion / doctrine / philosophy of Thelema, and how Liber AL contained many clues and riddles that seemed to imply that a system of English Gematria would be found in order to unravel its mysteries. One of the first progenies of this "quest" for an English Gematria was James Lees' English Qaballa, also known as the "ALW" Cipher (for all those using Gematrinator, it's the "ALW Kabbalah" cipher). It has nothing to do with Kabbalah, however, and the circumstances of its discovery and the events leading to it are all highly worthy of attention, and this cipher is truly a very strong candidate for a promised system of Thelemic Gematria. It delivers some strong results, even though I would contend that it is fairly easy to get "significant" matches with each and every Ordinal-like cipher (meaning: having only small values, usually between 1 and 26).

— In Part 2, I explored two ciphers mostly, even though I referred to 4 ciphers in that text. The two ciphers that I explored the most — without, however, doing them the justice that they deserve — were R. Leo Gillis' Trigrammaton Qabalah (the "LCH Kabbalah" cipher in Gematrinator) and Edgar Joel Love's Cipher X (called "KFW Kabbalah" in Gematrinator). Trigrammaton Qabalah has the merit of being directly inspired on Crowley's rough sketch(es) of a possible "English Qabalah", based on his own Liber Trigrammaton, while Cipher X is tightly connected to James Lees' English Qaballa, being a base-3 inversion of that cipher. Both of these ciphers are highly interesting, and the works of their authors didn't receive the treatment and further exploration that, in my opinion, they justly deserve.

The other two ciphers that I mentioned in Part 2 were David Cherubim's Thelemic English Qabalah, which is also called "English Sumerian" in Gematrinator, as well as Aleisterion's AngloQabalistic Key, which coincides with the more widely known English Ordinal, or Simple English Gematria. These two were only briefly explored — in fact, they should have been included in this fourth part, but anyway, there they are. 😅

— In Part 3, it was the time of two non-Thelemic ciphers to be explored in a Thelemic context. The first one was my all-time favorite cipher, and the one that was introduced to the world of Gematria through my work alone — the Illuminati Novice cipher. In fact, for many years I seemed to be the only ~~nutcase~~ researcher in the whole world who tried to bring people's attention to this cipher, and how it showed some curious patterns and "coincidences" when it was applied to the Great Seal of the United States (see my first text in this blog dedicated to it). So this time it was the time to apply this cipher to the context of Thelema, due to some synchronicities of symbolism and meaning that were to be found between Thelema and the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati.

The second cipher that I talked about in the third part was a cipher that came to my life in April this year, through a series of intriguing synchronicities and that became one of my most favorite ciphers of all times, due to its internal consistency and "non-redundancy": the Anglossic Qaballa (AQ), also known as Alphanumeric Gematria. This cipher isn't available in Gematrinator, even though it should, in my opinion. Just like the Illuminati Novice cipher, this is not, technically speaking, a Thelemic cipher — even though it is true that it delivers some eye-opening results when applied to the Holy Books of Thelema. This is mostly an experimental field to explore further, and it was started by the creator of this cipher: the "borderline philosopher" Nick Land, who wrote "Qabbala 101" (link here).

One of the first references to the AQ cipher that I know of, from the CCRU / 0[rphan] d[rift] collaborative work "Meshed Syzygy" (1999). Click to enlarge.

— In this 4th Part, I decided that there were many other Thelemic ciphers that also deserved to be mentioned, even though not as thoroughly explored as the previous ones. After all, wasn't I writing about Thelemic ciphers? What sense could there be in selecting only a few Thelemic ciphers, while ignoring the rest? So that's why I wrote this 4th part. I didn't explore any of these ciphers (excepting my own: AC/EQ) so I took the decision of giving only the essential information about each cipher, and giving some online sources for them, so as not to make my text unnecessarily long and boring. In so doing, I'm giving my Readers the opportunity to know other alternative/experimental systems of English Gematria, so that they (i.e. You) can explore them further, and maybe even experiment with other ciphers or techniques and see what results can be obtained with them. This can be highly enriching in our practice of Gematria. Experimentation is always welcome, but it should always be tempered with good sense.

* * *

Dear Reader,

I hope that this fourth part of my "History of Ciphers" has been enlightening to you: or at least useful in some sense.

In the next part I will be exploring the Mathematical Ciphers. This is a field where there is an incredible lack of information, allied to the fact that most of these ciphers are experimental. However, during these last weeks, while I was writing this same text, I came to find some historical sources for most of these ciphers (the oldest one that I know of is from 1683) — and as Gematrinator also includes some of these mathematical ciphers, I thought that a text like this would be necessary, so that our knowledge of these ciphers becomes more complete.

In the meantime, if any of my Readers wishes to send me a word or two, or even send me suggestions of ciphers to write about, I will be most thankful for receiving and answering your messages. You can do this by using the Contact Form at the right side of this Blog (PC version only), or by using the Comments section at the end of each blog post.

Please receive my kindest regards,

Luís Gonçalves

"History of Ciphers" (part 4c) - The Thelemic Ciphers (III)

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this third part of the History of Thelemic ciphers we will be talking more about two specific ciphers, which I have already addressed in Part II of this Thelemic series of texts. These ciphers are:

– The Illuminati Novice cipher. My Readers may think it is strange that I'm talking again about a cipher that I have already explored in my first text regarding the History of Ciphers. My justification for this will become apparent when I explain it to my Readers;

– The Anglossic Qabbala / Alphanumeric Gematria. This cipher hides some surprises and it will be of great interest in this specific Thelemic context. Even though it is used mainly in a context that has nothing to do with Thelema, the way how it shows some curious "synchronicities" in an analysis of Thelema and certain key Thelemic materials, is more than noteworthy and will thus be fully explored in this presentation of mine. My work with this cipher is still in its early days, but so far it has delivered some very, very curious results.

I also planned to make reference to other specific Thelemic ciphers. However, as the publication of this text was purposefully delayed for almost two weeks, those other ciphers will have to be explored in a fourth — and final... finally! — chapter on the history of the Thelemic ciphers.

With these words, let us then continue with the fourth part of...

Hystory of Ciphers

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 4: The Thelemic Ciphers (III)

In the first part of the History of Thelemic Ciphers, I talked about how English Qaballa was discovered in the context of the search for a "Key of it All" which would unravel the mysteries of Liber AL.

Eventually, my search for materials about English Qaballa led me to a book by Allen H. Greenfield, an occultist and UFOlogist, called "Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts". In this book, Greenfield explains how he used English Qaballa to decode the "strange" names in some esoteric UFOlogical movements, and comes to the conclusion that this would be the true "Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts", and that it would be the "key" to UFOlogy.

A word of caution is needed at this point. Even though I enjoy Greenfield's work and find it entertaining, I believe that it would be immature to consider EQ to be the "ultimate key" to Esoteric UFOlogy, based on the examples given by Allen H. Greenfield. The reason for this is that English Qaballa, as well as other ciphers that are used for the English Alphabet, uses low values (from 1 to 26 only), and so it isn't that difficult or improbable to find "meaningful" connections for any desired name, word or phrase. There are certain mathematical and probabilistic laws at play whenever we work with Gematria, and some of those laws can be more easily verifiable when we work with low-value ciphers (especially Ordinal and Reduction ciphers):

– Words/phrases with the same number of letters will be more likely to share the same value (thus demonstrating that it isn't always the "concept" or "meaning" behind a word or phrase that is important, but instead its structure and the specific letters that compose it);

– The most probable value of a word/phrase in an Ordinal or Reduction cipher can be easily predicted by considering (1) the number of its letters, and (2) the mean value of each letter in that specific cipher. This mean value can be obtained by calculating the total sum of all letters of the alphabet divided by the number of letters (26 in the Modern English alphabet). For example, using Serial English (A=1, B=2, ..., Z=26), the mean value of the letters is 351/26 = 13,5. Multiplying 13,5 by the number of letters of a word returns its most probable value in Serial English. In other words, if you have a list of words that share the same number of letters, it's quite probable that you'll find some "matches" in that list – regardless of the meaning of those words or phrases. It's very important to keep this in mind. Context is fundamental in Gematria.

One of the examples given by Allen H. Greenfield in "Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts" is the case of the well-known "contactee" George Adamski who claimed to have been visited by a Venusian alien called Orthon, on November 20, 1952. According to Adamski's own words, Orthon was a "long-haired visitor from the sky calling for peace on Earth and good will" (Greenfield, pg. 23), and according to English Qaballa, "ORTHON" = 68 (EQ) = "JESUS":

Applying the same principle, one could use any Ordinal cipher to find equally "meaningful" connections. If we use the Elizabethan Simple cipher, for example, which I have already addressed in my text about the Baconian ciphers, we will be surprised to note that the name "Orthon" seems to point to Aleister Crowley himself (remember that the "Orthon" episode supposedly happened 5 years after A.C. had passed away):

"ORTHON" = 85 (Bacon Simple) = "ALEISTER" = "THERION" = "KO YUEN"

In fact, here we have the alien's name "Orthon", Crowley's first (adopted) name "Aleister", one of his titles ("Therion" meaning "Beast" in Greek), as well as "Ko Yuen", the pseudonym he used when writing Liber 157, The Tao Teh King.

Correspondences and "matches" like these are often ludicrous and deceive more than they enlighten, so we've got to be extremely careful when taking "conclusions" based solely on numerical matches using Gematria. Particularly, using certain ciphers out of their natural context (when/where applicable) can be especially misleading.

Anyway, it was precisely this type of exercises that kept me engaged in reading Allen H. Greenfield's book. Even though I didn't always agree with the methods and the conclusions that the author took from his discoveries, I felt that I could replicate those results – or even find better results – by using another cipher. As at that time I was deeply involved in my studies about the Bavarian Illuminati and their numerical cipher, my next step was easily predictable:

Why not using the numerical cipher of the Illuminati to "decode" stuff? I had already managed to find some astounding patterns when I applied it to the Great Seal in the 1 Dollar bill, so now was the time to start using it in other contexts. So yeah... in a way, I also used the numerical cipher of the Illuminati out of its natural context, even though I had some "strong" reasons to do it. I'll elaborate more on that in a few moments.

I had read all materials about English Qaballa that were available to me, and I thought how extraordinary it was that a single cipher like that was able to deliver some extremely curious results in the analysis of the Holy Books of Thelema, and more specifically of Liber AL vel Legis. What would happen if I used the numerical cipher of the Illuminati in trying to decode the same Thelemic materials?

And then, in 2009 I wrote an article. 😁

"Liber AL vel Legis and the Illuminati Cipher"

This article was published on June 15, 2009 on my ~~long abandoned~~ blog called Ciphers & Symbols of the Illuminati. It was later to be published in Volume 2, Issue 2, on the Summer Solstice 2010 edition of Silver Star – A Journal of New Magick.

Today, looking again at my text, I confess that it is a bit clumsy on some parts, even though the overall idea was good. If I were to write it now I would most certainly write it in a different way, and possibly with more interesting "matches".

The reason why I felt compelled to use the Illuminati Cipher in "decoding" Liber AL vel Legis has mostly to do with a very important (though frequently underestimated) symbol in the religion/philosophy of Thelema – the Circumpunct, or a Circled Dot:

The Circumpunct, or a Point within a Circle. A traditional symbol of the Sun since ancient times, and the official symbol of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati.

The importance of this symbol in the context of Thelema may not be immediately grasped, but in order to explain it to my Readers I would like to recommend the reading of my own article from August 2009 The Real Symbol of the Illuminati (greatly based on Terry Melanson's excellent book "Perfectibilists – The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati": link here). I would also like to quote some passages from Kenneth Grant's masterful book "The Magical Revival", which will no doubt enlighten the meaning of this all-important symbol in the context of Thelema:

[Speaking about Carl Kellner's O.T.O. – Ordo Templi Orientis]

    "This Order also included the Hermetic Brethren known as the Illuminati, headed in the eighteenth century by the notorious Adam Weishaupt, whose work, though still incalculable, is of undoubted significance in relation to the present magical revival.

   Jean Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830) founded the Order of the Illuminati on May 1, 1776. He adopted the symbol of the Point within the Circle to represent the Current that found expression through him. He formulated the basic principles of the Order in terms very similar to those which Crowley uses in Liber Oz.

   The "Lost Word" in Weishaupt's system, is "Man". The recovery of this Word required that man should find himself again; that the redemption of humanity is to be effected through and by man; that man should govern himself and throw off the shackles of alien powers and controls. In a word, he should become a king in his own right, by virtue of his own primal inheritance.

   Later, in Crowley's system, the idea of the "kingly man" became paramount; it is synonymous with being a Thelemite, i.e. one who has discovered his True Will (thelema) and is capable of doing it. Hence, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

   When Crowley assumed control of the O.T.O., he chose as its motto Deus est Homo (God is Man), and in Liber Oz he declares "There is no God but Man". It was to Man that his Manifesto was addressed, when, in the middle of the Mediterranean in 1924, he declared Thelema (Will) to be the Word of the Law, in accordance with what had been revealed to him by Aiwaz in Cairo, twenty years previously."

Some paragraphs afterwards, Kenneth Grant writes:

"The Point within the Circle, the symbol of the Illuminati, is not only the hierogram of the Sun and of the god Horus, but, in Crowley's system, is also symbolic of the union of Nuit and Hadit, which are emblematic of Consciousness and its projection as a ray of light.

The union of the Circle (Nuit) and the Point (Hadit) formulates their "child", or combined wills, expressed as Ra-Hoor-Khuit. The Circle and the Point also represent the abstract expressions of Love and Will, twin components of the magical equation known as the Law of Thelema."

We have seen in the previous texts about the Thelemic ciphers that Crowley's Book of the Law (Liber AL vel Legis) is divided into three chapters, with each one being represented by a specific Thelemic 'deity', which is also its respective 'speaker':

– Chapter 1: represented by Nuit, the ever-expanding circle;

– Chapter 2: represented by Hadit, the infinitesimal point and "centre of the wheel";

– Chapter 3: represented by Ra-hoor-khuit, the Solar Child of Nuit and Hadit; the Lord of the Aeon; the Sun ⊙.

It certainly isn't a coincidence that this online version of Liber AL vel Legis has the symbol of each deity right at the start of each respective chapter: first the circle, then the dot, and finally the circled dot or circumpunct.

In my studies of languages and their alphabets I remembered that the Greek letter Theta Θ (corresponding to the Hebrew letter Teth ט) wasn't always written the same way: in fact, in ancient times it was sometimes written as a point within a circle, or as a crossed circle. There are many examples of Greek tetradrachms (a "tetradrachm" was a coin used in ancient Athens) where, besides the Owl of Athena, we can see the three letters Alpha-Theta-Epsilon (A-TH-E) – and the letter Theta has a distinct circle-dot configuration:

Athenian Owl Tetradrachm: from Ancient Art & Numismatics.

Now, why would this be important in the context of Thelema?

Well... Thelema (Θελημα, "will") begins with a Theta, as does Therion (Θηριον, "Beast"), the "Beast 666" which was incarnated by Aleister Crowley himself. Besides, in Crowley's own rearrangement of traditional qabalistic correspondences for the Hebrew alphabet, the letter Teth corresponds to the Tarot card of "Lust" (the traditional "Strength"), which shows the goddess Babalon, or the Scarlet Woman, riding upon the 7-headed Beast from the biblical text of Revelation – and this is more than fitting to Aleister Crowley's doctrine / religion / philosophy of Thelema. The qabalistic value of the letter Teth written in full (טית) is 419, which is another key number in Thelema, and just one more ("one to follow thee"?) than 418, the Word of the Aeon – Abrahadabra. Another primitive form of the Hebrew letter Teth, the crossed circle, is also specifically mentioned in the verse III:47 as the "circle squared":

The "circle squared" in the manuscript of the Book of the Law.

The first time I noticed these "coincidences" was when I was staring at the Holy Sigil of Aleister Crowley's Fraternity of the A∴A∴, in which two alternative forms of the letter Theta/Teth can be seen:

In the upper part of this sigil we can see a crossed circle 𐤈, which was the Phoenician shape of the later Hebrew letter Teth. And at the centre of the sigil, in the middle of the seven 7's, the modern shape of the Greek letter Theta appears: θ.

With all these synchronicities, and the seemingly obvious connection between Thelema, the Illuminati, their official symbol of the Point within the Circle, and the letter Theta/Teth, my most logical conclusion was to apply the numerical cipher of the Illuminati to the text of this same sigil. And the result was... quite interesting!

Cipher table from GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator.

[Notice that I'm writing the V's in the sigil as U's. As the Illuminati Cipher doesn't differentiate "U" from "V", giving the same value to both letters (as it is based on an older form of our own alphabet), this difference doesn't affect the final result.]

What's interesting about this number it that 343 is the product of 7×7×7 – and the same sigil discloses another very clear reference to the number 7, by repeating it exactly seven times. In fact, the seven 7's refer to the formula of Babalon, whose number (in both Greek Isopsephia and Hebrew Gematria) is 156:

The most interesting aspect of this, however, is that if you add the letters of BABALON, which can also be seen in the Holy Sigil of the A∴A∴, the final result is 418 – which is the value of Abrahadabra, the Word of the Aeon!

(click to enlarge)

Another phrase where I tested the numerical cipher of the Illuminati was the motto of the A∴A∴, "The method of science, the aim of religion". This motto first appears in Aleister Crowley's The Equinox:

Source: Scans from Aleister Crowley's The Equinox.

Using the Illuminati Cipher, this motto shows an intriguing connection with the Greek letter Theta, which as we have seen corresponds to the Circumpunct – the real symbol of the Bavarian Illuminati – and it perfectly symbolizes Crowley's own Scientific Illuminism.

(click to enlarge)

Certainly not of less interest is the fact that in Greek, the words Theta (the Greek letter Θ) and Helios (the Sun) share the same value. The Circumpunct, or Circled Dot, is an old – and almost universal – symbol of the Sun.

I also noted the value, using the Illuminati Cipher, of the transliterations of the names of the two letters, "THETA" (Greek) and "TETH" (Hebrew), and those have clear Solar associations too:

These two tables, of course, do not necessarily "prove" that the letters Theta and Teth are related to the Sun, since we are analyzing foreign names by their modern Latin transliteration, not by how they're written in their native languages. The exception here is obviously "Theta" and "Helios" written in Greek, which share the same value in Greek Isopsephia. Anyway, I present these last two tables to my Readers merely as a curious coincidence that is worthy of note.

As soon as I started analyzing Crowley's Liber AL vel Legis more coincidences and synchronicities started to emerge. I'm not showing all of them, as that would be tedious and needlessly repetitive (they're already mentioned in my old/abandoned blog). However, I must address at least two of them, which I believe will attract my Readers' attention.

After I searched for more clues in Liber AL regarding this Thelemic/Illuminati connection to the letter Theta and the Circumpunct, I noted especially verses 49 and 50 of the third chapter:

"I am in a secret fourfold word, the blasphemy against all gods of men." (AL III:49)

"Curse them! Curse them! Curse them!" (AL III:50)

In Crowley's commentaries to this verse, Crowley notes a probable connection between the "secret fourfold word" and the Law of Thelema "Do what thou wilt" (4 words). However, as it seems to me, "Do what thou wilt" wouldn't be fitting to the description of a "fourfold word". Instead, in my interpretation back then, I imagined that the word "Theta" (with 4 letters in Greek, thus a "fourfold word") would be quite fitting to this description, as I noted in my text from 2009:

"The secret fourfold word is Θητα, Theta (4-lettered in greek), which is the blasphemy against all gods of men because it represents the Point in the Circle, the Lord of the Aeon, and the Word of the Law ("Thelema", beginning by a greek Theta). Besides, the three sentences in AL III:50 (3x "Curse them!") have a total value of 318, according to the Illuminati Cipher, which is the value of Theta written in full (Θητα), according to Greek Isopsephia."

[From: Liber AL vel Legis and the Illuminati Cipher by Luís Gonçalves, 2009]

(click to enlarge)

Another of the verses of Liber AL where I applied the numerical cipher of the Illuminati was the following one:

"I am Nuit, and my word is six and fifty." (AL I:24)

It is usually believed that "six and fifty" refers to "NU", which sums 56 in Hebrew Gematria and is the first word of the second chapter of the Book of the Law. In fact, it's curious to note that the first chapter of Liber AL (corresponding to Nuit) begins with the word "HAD", while the second chapter (corresponding to Hadit) begins with the word "NU". Crowley's own Old and New Commentaries on the Book of the Law make this mathematical puzzle clearer, and the verse following this one gives some clues as to how this puzzle should be solved:

"Divide, add, multiply, and understand." (AL I:25)

The Illuminati Cipher, however, gives a simple solution, as "six and fifty" (56) is precisely the value of the word "NUIT":

Another example of the use of the Illuminati Novice cipher in the 'decoding' of the Book of the Law is right at the beginning of the first chapter, where the intelligence that dictated Liber AL to Aleister Crowley in 1904 presents him/itself:

"Behold! it is revealed by Aiwass the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat." (AL I:7)

In his commentaries to this verse, Crowley writes:

    "Hoor-paar-Kraat or Harpocrates, the "Babe in the Egg of Blue", is not merely the God of Silence in a conventional sense. He represents the Higher Self, the Holy Guardian Angel. The connexion is with the symbolism of the Dwarf in Mythology. He contains everything in Himself, but is unmanifested.

   (...)

   But the "Small Person" of Hindu mysticism, the Dwarf insane yet crafty of many legends in many lands, is also this same "Holy Ghost", or Silent Self of a man, or his Holy Guardian Angel.

   He is almost the "Unconscious" of Freud, unknown, unaccountable, the silent Spirit, blowing "whither it listeth, but thou canst not tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth". It commands with absolute authority when it appears at all, despite conscious reason and judgment.

   Aiwass is then, as this verse 7 states, the "minister" of this Hoor-paar-Kraat, that is of the Saviour of the World in the larger sense, and of mine own "Silent Self" in the lesser."

How curious it is, then, that using the Illuminati Cipher, the phrase "minister of Hoor-paar-kraat" shares exactly the same value as Crowley's own birth name!

The name "Aiwass" itself is of great interest, since it shows with a motto that Crowley used X° (Rex) of the O.T.O.. Coincidently, it also coincides with the name of the qabalistic Spirit of the Sun, Sorath (סורת), whose number in Hebrew Gematria is 666.

(The name "Bafomitr" is an alternative spelling of "Baphomet", and it was obtained by Crowley during the Amalantrah Working.)

But the name "Hoor-paar-kraat" is also very interesting from a gematric point of view, since its value in the Illuminati Cipher is 169, or 13×13, and it can thus represent the "Unity of Unities" since "One" in Hebrew is Achad, which sums 13. In my article from May 2008, "Ciphers of the Illuminati and the One Dollar bill", I had already come across this number, as it is the value of the only two mottos in the 1 Dollar bill that have 13 letters, as well as of "Eye in the Pyramid" and "Eye in the Triangle":

And with this I conclude this section about my use of the Illuminati Cipher in the context of Thelema. I invite my Readers, however, if they're interested in pursuing this research further, to take a look at my text: Liber AL vel Legis and the Illuminati Cipher.

Concluding Remarks on the Cipher of the Illuminati

At this time some of my Readers will ask: "So, is the cipher of the Illuminati a Thelemic cipher?" My answer will be a definite NO. As far as I know, the first person using the Illuminati Cipher to "decode" Thelemic materials was me, when I wrote the article that I previously mentioned. Nor are there any reasons to associate this numerical cipher to Thelema, except in a symbolical level — and that's precisely the reason why applied it to the Holy Books of Thelema in the first place.

Besides an obvious connection between Thelema and the doctrines of the Illuminati, as explained by Kenneth Grant in "The Magical Revival" (whose valuable quotes were included in this text of mine), there is also an intriguing connection between the Circled Dot (the official symbol of the Illuminati), the three "speakers" of the Book of the Law (Nuit = the Circle, Hadit = the Dot, Ra-hoor-khuit = the Circled Dot), and the Greek letter Theta which is the initial of the word "Thelema" — as well as the Hebrew letter Teth, which represents the union of Babalon and the Beast.

So when I saw all these intriguing symbolical connections, I thought that maybe I should give it a try. My work with the Illuminati cipher in a Thelemic context is far from complete, though, so obviously this is a work in progress.

Giving then a more detailed answer to the question presented in this section:

1. Is this a Thelemic cipher? No, it isn't.

2. Can this cipher be used in a Thelemic context? Well, from some of the things that I've presented in this text, I would argue that yes, the Illuminati cipher can be used in a Thelemic context. However, this will always be the result of a personal choice, so obviously, what is valid for me may not be equally valid for all my Readers. So, can it actually be used in a Thelemic context? I'll let you decide the answer to that question, my fellow Reader. 😉

* * *

The following cipher I'll be talking about is one that came to my life with a number of curious "coincidences" and synchronicities. My work with it was absolutely feverish from the very first moment I found that it was actually being used by someone (for some reasons that I'll explain in due time). Technically speaking, even though it is not a "Thelemic" cipher, it surely does deliver exceedingly interesting results when applied to a Thelemic context – so that's the reason why I'm writing about it in this text of mine.

Fasten your seat belts! I present you...

Anglossic Qabbala

(Alphanumeric Qabbalism)

This specific cipher has become absolutely fascinating for me from the first time I read about it, and I'm pretty sure that most of my Readers will enjoy (or at least be intrigued by) this presentation of mine. Even though the context where this cipher is most frequently used has nothing to do with Thelema, the fact is that not only it is perfectly logical from an alphanumeric point of view, but it also delivers some quite extraordinary results in the context of Thelema. So, if I was writing about Thelemic ciphers, and as this cipher is hardly known outside of the context where it is usually used, I guessed that it would be a nice finding to most of my Readers who are more into the practice of Gematria.

The best way to explain what this cipher is, is by talking about numeration systems first.

As we all know, our modern numeration is by definition a positional base-10 (decimal) numeration system, which of course uses ten digits from 0 to 9 to represent numbers. What this means in practical terms is that a numeral written in our base-10, like for example 365, is to be interpreted as 3×10² + 6×10¹ + 5×10º, or 300+60+5. In other words, the decimal value of a digit is to be calculated according to its position inside a numeral, and that position always corresponds to a specific power of 10 (i.e., 10, 10×10, 10×10×10, etc). That's why we count in tens, hundreds and thousands.

Other numeration systems exist, of course, and we have plenty examples of them. One such example comes from France, where the names for the numbers 70, 80 and 90 show a clear influence of an anterior vigesimal (base-20) numeration system. Their names in French (as spoken in France) are:

– 70 = soixante-dix (literally, "sixty [and] ten");

– 80 = quatre-vingts ("four twenties");

– 90 = quatre-vingts-dix ("four twenties [and] ten").

Other cultures have used and continue to use a base-20 numeration. The Sumerians and Babylonians, for example, used a base-60 numeration system, which has left its influence in the modern counting of minutes and seconds in groups of sixty.

There are many other numeration systems, of course. In fact, there can be as many numeration systems as there are numbers. Binary or base-2 numeration (using 1's and 0's only), for example, is the basis of computing and telecommunications, while Base-16 (hexadecimal), with its sixteen digits from 0 to F (=15) is also widely known and used.

This last numeration system I mentioned is of special interest in this case. Hexadecimal (base-16) numeration obviously needs sixteen different digits in order to express numbers, which we don't have in our numeration (because it's decimal). The answer to this problem lies in using letters of the alphabet as numerical digits, which in this case are the letters from A=10 to F=15, in order to make a total of sixteen different digits in base-16, from 0 to F.

Some of my Readers might wonder at this point: How about we use 0 to 9, and all the letters of the alphabet, as numerical digits? My answer is: that's precisely the point in regards to Base-36. And how does that work?

Base-36 (Hexatridecimal or Sexatrigesimal – there are some different opinions regarding its "correct" name) is elegantly fitting to the modern English alphabet, as it uses the Arabic numerals from 0 to 9, as well as all the letters of the alphabet in order to achieve a total of 36 numerical digits. In fact, Base-36 can be seen as a harmonious continuation of Hexadecimal (Base-16) in the sense that it continues the same numerical sequence from A=10 to F=15, and then to Z=35.

In mid December 2020, me and Saun Virroco (the creator of GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator), during one of our subversive-creative-highly-technical conversations, talked about Gematria and the meaning of "numerical matches" in non-decimal bases, and Base-36 was precisely one of the subjects we talked about. My interest in Base-36 numeration arose when I read an article called Understanding Base-36 Math, where a part of the text immediately caught my attention:

"By using the base-36 number, massively bigger numbers can be referenced with an economy of size. While a two digit number gets you to 99; ZZ, a two digit Base-36 expression gets to 1295. Z,ZZZ,ZZZ is the base ten equivalent of 78,364,164,095.

With that seven digit number under base-36, you can reference every person alive and almost every person who was ever alive with their own unique 7-digit number."

This was extremely significant in a lot of ways. In some of my previous texts, particularly the one about the Latin ciphers, I talked about 666: the "Number of the Beast". This number is of special interest in this case because it holds a deep connection with the number 36. If you add all natural numbers from 1 to 36, you get 666: or, in other words, 666 is the 36ᵗʰ triangular number (that's why roulette is called the "Devil's game", by the way). When I read this excerpt I immediately recalled the biblical text referencing the same number:

"And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: / And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. / Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."

[Revelation 13:16-18, KJV]

Actually... the practical meaning of the "Mark of the Beast" would become quite apparent if, one day in the future, we received a singular "World Citizen ID Code" composed of 7 digits in Base-36. But that's just me thinking out loud... 👀

So... some days before the actual moment of 'discovery' of Anglossic Qabbala I thought about using just the alphabetical part of this numeration as a system of Gematria. At that time I actually misnamed this cipher by baptizing it "Hexadecimal Qabalah", since 'hexadecimal' refers to Base-16, not Base-36. The correct name would have been "Hexatridecimal Qabalah".

Custom cipher table made with GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator.

Then, in a completely unexpected way, Saun Virroco told me on April 29, 2021 that someone had 'forked' his calculator, adding a cipher called "Anglossic Qabbala", as well as a link to some 2004 blog with further informations on that cipher.

The link pointed to a post titled Qabbala 101: Part 1 in the Hyperstition blog. In this text, a short (and to the point) explanation is given about Anglossic Qabbala:

"The basic tool of August Barrow's 'Anglossic Qabbala' is the Alphanumeric Gematria.

Since this numerization of the Neo-Roman alphabet merely continues the procedure now familiar from Hexadecimal (A = 10 ... F = 15), it proved elusive to qabbalists expecting a traditional gematria.

As Reza [Negarestani] has explained in his introductions to the Abjad, these traditional systems (whether Hebrew, Greek, Farsi or Arabic) have distinctive typical features:
(1) They substitute letters for numerical values, overcoding numerals where they exist.
(2) They code for discontinuous numerical values, typically 1-10, then 20, 30 ... chunked in decimally significant magnitudes.

In contrast, Barrow's Gematria is a continuous nonredundant system, supplementing the numerals 0-9 with numerized letters from A (= 10) to Z (= 35), treating the 0-Z alphanumeric sequence as a numeral succession, corresponding to the numerals of a modulus 36 notation."

Leaving aside the reference to "August Barrow", whose name I had never heard before, I was completely blown away, as in fact this was a perfect explanation of my own thoughts about what I had called the "Hexatridecimal Qabalah".

Anglossic Qabbala, or Alphanumeric Gematria, or Alphanumeric Qabbala as it is more frequently called ("AQ" for short), is precisely based on Base-36 numeration, but using only the correspondences for the letters for the purposes of Gematria:

Cipher table from GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator.

Some time later I learned that this text called "Qabbala 101" was written by Nick Land, an English philosopher considered to be the 'father' of a fringe philosophy known as Accelerationism and one of the co-founders of the CCRU – Cybernetic Culture Research Unit together with Sadie Plant. He's also a writer of horror fiction, and to my knowledge, he has profusely used Anglossic Qabbala throughout many of his works. In fact, Land is the only source for AQ that I know of.

When I started studying these things, it all seemed... quite unusual, to say the least! All of it seemed so strange, schizophrenic and alien, that I thought that it could actually be dangerous for anyone unprepared to deal with this, or with a weak mind – an opinion which, in a way, I continue to uphold to this day. That was actually one of the reasons why I wasn't sure if I should write about this cipher, in the first place.

I'm not a fan of Accelerationism, and to be honest with my Readers, I can't really enjoy most of Nick Land's works. However, something that I quickly realized is that the CCRU Writings are all heavily coded with Alphanumeric Qabbala, and I started seeing patterns all over the texts, including the "strange names", neologisms and "curious" spellings of words. In fact, it is the mathematical and alphanumeric, as well as the "Lovecraftian" aspects of the CCRU materials – including Hyperstition, the Numogram, Tic Xenotation, etc (link) – as well as Nick Land's own work with numbers (see One Two Many: On Nick Land's Numbering Practices), that kept me curious. Anyway, this is an extremely vast material and I wouldn't like to spend too much time with these explanations. If my Readers are interested in pursuing these studies, I can only warn you that it can be heavy, dirty, and seem markedly alien to your own "common sense" – but that's precisely how it should be from its own point of view. These are not light readings.

Strictly speaking about Anglossic Qabbala, there are a number of questions that could be asked about this system of Gematria. Namely:

1. Where did this cipher come from?

2. Why 'Anglossic Qabbala'? What does 'Anglossic' mean?

3. Are there other names for this cipher? And if so, which ones?

4. Why would AQ (and Base-36) be relevant in the context of Thelema?

All of these questions will hopefully be answered in this text of mine.

1. Where did this cipher come from?

From what I've presented before, Nick Land seems to be the sole source for the use of AQ as a system of Gematria. However, in "Qabbala 101" Land mentions the name "August Barrow" in connection with this cipher, a name that didn't seem familiar to me. After searching for both of the names, "August Barrow" and "Anglossic Qabbala", I was only able to find materials from either Land or CCRU, nothing more. The CCRU Writings only mention "Barrow" three times, and on one of those occasions it simply says: "18th century occultist August Barrow". And that's all the information given about "Barrow".

At first I was really confused about this, until I understood that "August Barrow" was a "hyperstitional carrier" and so, not a "real" historical person – depending, of course, on how you define "real".

In this case, the name "August Barrow" should have a meaning. First I noted the initials of the name: if we write the name as "A.B.", that could stand for the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: Alpha+Beta (obviously, the origin of our own word "alphabet"). And this seemed to be the original intention, as both "August Barrow" and "English Alphabet" share exactly the same value:

I had also noted another very curious correspondence using the same principle, because the initials of the name of this cipher (AQ) give a total sum of 10+26 = 36, which is precisely the numerical base behind the creation of this cipher. A similarly significant correspondence happens if we use the name "Alphanumeric Gematria", since A+G equals 10+16 = 26, which is the number of letters in the English Alphabet.

I would recommend my Readers, however, to always use "AQ" when you're referring to this cipher, as it is the most common acronym for this cipher, and it also beautifully describes what Anglossic Qabbala is all about:

— A=10, representing the ten Arabic numerals from 0 to 9;

— Q=26, representing the twenty-six letters of the English Alphabet.

... thus perfectly illustrating that AQ was formulated from Base-36 numeration.

2. Why 'Anglossic Qabbala'? What does 'Anglossic' mean?

The word "Anglossic", as well as "Anglossia", only occur once in the CCRU Writings. In the CCRU Writings, the term "Anglossic" is referred to as the gematric value of a word using AQ. And in the CCRU Glossary, "Anglossia" is defined as "Language of the Angels" and the "mystical telos of the English language". The first time I read the cipher's name I thought that it referred to the English language (by a subtle reference to the Germanic people of the Angles, or the Anglo-Saxons), but the reference to "angels" could still be an anagrammatic reference to the Angles – and thus to the English ("Angelic") language.

There is more to this than meets the eye, though, as the value of "Language of the angels" hides a curious 'secret'. In fact, the total sum of this phrase corresponds to the total sum of all natural numbers from 1 to 26, thus showing a clear connection with the 26 letters of the English Alphabet:

The part about the "mystical telos" (i.e. ultimate purpose) "of the English language" is also especially revealing...

And this is especially revealing because 666 is the 36ᵗʰ triangular number. So this is another connection with Base-36 numeration, and its connection with Alphanumeric Qabbala.

Well... by now you should be able to understand my interest about the mathematics and Gematria contained in the CCRU Writings. This is just a very small part of all the gematric riddles contained in these writings. 😁

3. Are there other names for this cipher? And if so, which ones?

I've only known three names for this from the sources I mentioned before: "Anglossic Qabbala", "Alphanumeric Gematria", and "Alphanumeric Qabbala". The last one is perhaps the most common, even though Anglossic Qabbala is equally used. In any case, regardless of the spelling that we choose to use, the acronym "AQ" has become widely used as a reference to this specific cipher.

From a Thelemic point of view, however, "Anglossic Qabbala" seems to be especially relevant, as its total sum equals 279, or 3×93, a key number in Thelema:

I wasn't able to find any "meaningful" connection for any of the other two names, except "Alphanumeric Qabbala" = 328 (AQ) = "Number of Letters" – which in this case could have a double meaning.

However, there was a fourth name for AQ that I found in the Hyperstition blog and it is absolutely... brilliant.

In a post called Problems and Mysteries, in the comment section, there was a brief discussion / disagreement on how "AQ" should be called. In two comments written on December 22, 2004, Land wrote:

"(...) [I'll use AQ, for Alphanumeric Qabbalism, until one of you guys comes up with something better]

PS. Of course, since AQ = 36, maybe no one will."

This is fascinating, even though it looks misleadingly simple, for two reasons. As we have seen before, the AQ cipher was created from the base-36 numerical notation, so it is highly significant that "AQ" totals 10+26 = 36. However, there is more to this than it looks, and we can only see "beyond the appearances" once we calculate the value of Alphanumeric Qabbalism:

And why is this important? It becomes astonishingly meaningful once you find out how the number 386 is written in Base-36:

386 = 10(A)×36 + 26(Q)×1

So... not only do the initials of "Alphanumeric Qabbalism" (AQ) sum 36, which represents the actual origin of Anglossic Qabbala (Base-36), but the gematric value of that name also corresponds to "AQ" when converted to Base-36. This was actually one of the most satisfying discoveries I made while studying Anglossic Qabbala, and it surely shows some of Land's ingenious uses of AQ in order to encode numerical clues in his texts.

I wondered, however, about where did the unusual spelling of "Qabbalism" come from. And I found one – only one – source where the exact same spelling is used: Manly P. Hall in his "The Secret Teachings of All Ages", an author that, by some strange coincidence, I had already talked about a lot in my text about the Baconian ciphers. In this book, in a chapter dedicated to the Fraternity of the Rose Cross, Hall used the expression "Rosicrucian Qabbalism" – and while there isn't any clue in the text that this could refer to any system of Gematria, I found it really interesting that "Rosicrucian Qabbalism" shares the same value as "Alphanumeric Qabbalism" in AQ:

In my text about the Baconian ciphers I wrote about two Baconian/Rosicrucian ciphers known as the "Kaye" ciphers. There are two different Kaye ciphers: one is called the "Bacon Kaye" cipher and is adapted to the Elizabethan English alphabet of 24 letters (where I=J and U=V), containing two extra signs ("&" and "et"); the other one is called the "Modern Kaye" cipher and is adapted to the Modern English alphabet of 26 letters.

Bacon Kaye

Cipher table from "Baconian-Rosicrucian Ciphers" (PDF - 2,56 MB)

Cipher table from GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator.

The importance of these ciphers (and this correspondence between phrases) in this context lies in the fact that, just like Anglossic Qabbala, these two ciphers also comprise values from 10 to 35, thus making it possible to use them as a (~~cryptic Rosicrucian?~~) Base-36 numeration system. The only difference between these ciphers and AQ is that in the Kaye ciphers the alphanumerical sequence begins at the 10th letter of the alphabet (K=10 in Elizabethan English, J=10 in Modern English), while in Anglossic Qabbala the alphanumerical sequence begins with A=10.

Table by Luís Gonçalves – click to enlarge.

If any of my Readers has read the CCRU Writings, it will also be interesting to note that an anonymous (hyperstitional?) William Kaye is mentioned several times in those texts.

I will also take this opportunity to show another curious detail. The specific spelling of "Qabbalism" sums 157 in the AQ cipher, and that is a known Rosicrucian/Baconian Seal number of Sir Francis Bacon:

However, I must make it clear that I don't believe that there is any direct connection between Anglossic Qabbala and a hypothetical secret Rosicrucian Base-36 numeration system. This was simply something that seemed to me to be extremely interesting, so I thought that I should share it here with my Readers.

4. Why would AQ (and Base-36) be relevant in the context of Thelema?

Up until this point I've only talked about Anglossic Qabbala outside of a purely Thelemic context, which was something that I had to do if I wanted to talk about the 'history' of this cipher. However, the question remains: "Why would this cipher, and Base-36, be relevant in the context of Thelema?".

Well, first of all there is a basic numerical 'coincidence': AQ was devised from Base-36 numeration, and the sum of the first 36 integers (1+2+3+...+36) is 666. Didn't Aleister Crowley call himself the "Beast 666"? And isn't 666 a peculiarly important number in the doctrines and symbolism of Thelema? That alone is worth noting if we are trying to make sense from any possible connection between AQ and Thelema.

But there's also a curious geographical coincidence. According to the Wikipedia article on the CCRU, when this collective had to withdraw from its space at (or claim affiliation with) Warwick University, it started to operate from a flat in Leamington Spa – precisely the place where, in 1875, Aleister Crowley was born.

If we apply this cipher to the Holy Books of Thelema, particularly to Liber AL vel Legis, some curious patterns emerge. I ask my Readers to please note that this is a disconnected series of findings using AQ, meaning that there isn't any specific order in which I'll show them – except when it is logical to show some findings together.

Some of these discoveries were already covered by Nick Land in Part 1 of Qabbala 101, while some others have been the result of my own research. I invite my Readers to read Mr. Land's text, as it surely contains some very pertinent informations in a Thelemic context.

First of all, let's look at the name of the Book. In my first text about the Thelemic ciphers, I explained how Frater Achad (Charles Stansfeld Jones) found an important "Key" to the Book of the Law in the Hebrew words AL (meaning "God") and LA (meaning "Not"), and how it were his discoveries that led to the Book of the Law being renamed from "Liber L vel Legis" to "Liber AL vel Legis".

This word "AL" sums 31 in Anglossic Qabbala, which exactly coincides with its value in Hebrew Gematria:

This number 31 is doubly meaningful because:

1. The AQ value of the word "Thelema" is 127, the 31ˢᵗ prime number;

2. Number 31 is the eleventh prime number, and 11 is of extreme significance in the context of Thelema (about this, read David Cherubim's article "Thelemic Numbers and Words"). The number 11 is referred to more than once in the Book of the Law, and the Law of Thelema contains eleven words:

Oh... and yeah, it sums 777. 😁

Using the initials of the first title of the Book of the Law, "Liber L" or Liber Legis" (LL), we find that it is the expression in Base-36 of the decimal number 777 (converter here):

In Qabbala 101, Land also notes the following:

«"Why did Crowley entitle his book of qabbalistic essays '777'?" asks Barrow-Scholar Peter Vysparov.

This question seems to point to the most astounding qabbalistic datum of modern times, the alphanumerically rigorous gematria equation:
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law = 777
One remarkable feature of this equation is that neither Crowley not any of his followers explicitly recognized the exact qabbalistic identity of the Thelemic Law (as stated in The Book of the Law, Liber AL vel legis) to the numerical index of modern qabbalism (777 & Other Qabalistic [sic] Writings). This relates intriguingly to the topic of secrecy (of which more elsewhere).»

Notice how he writes "[sic]" after "Qabalistic", as if it was wrongly spelled. If instead we use the word "Qabbalistic" (with two B's, as in Anglossic Qabbala, or Alphanumeric Qabbalism), we'll see something... curious!

In fact, 496 is the sum of all natural numbers from 1 to 31, thus showing a connection with "AL" = 31, the key to the Book of the Law.

But the number 777 was also used by Frater Achad as the Hebrew qabalistic equivalent of his initiatic motto V.I.O.O.I.V. (Unus in Omnibus, Omnia in Uno). Achad also used the motto Parzival, which in Hebrew Gematria sums 418. By an enormous coincidence, his own full name, usually written as Charles Stansfeld Jones, sums 418 in Anglossic Qabbala (!!!):

His actual full name was, however, Charles Robert Stansfeld Jones, and the AQ total of this name is 550. Even though this may not seem to be relevant, the question is that, qabalistically speaking, 55 is the mystic number of Malkuth, the 10ᵗʰ sphere of the Tree of Life, meaning that it is the total sum of all natural numbers from 1 to 10. Multiplying 55 by 10, the total value is 550. And this becomes very significant in the case of Frater Achad, since he took the Oath of the Abyss while he was still a Neophyte (1=10° - Malkuth) being afterwards, symbolically speaking, "cast out into Malkuth" again, as he himself wrote in his Liber 31.

Another curious connection for Frater Achad lies in the total sum of the word "Achad": in AQ, its value is 62 (or 2×31), which precisely corresponds with Achad's dual key of AL+LA!

I also noted other curious equivalences. Taking the fundamental part of the Law of Thelema, we find that it matches (at least) a most interesting name and one phrase from the Book of the Law:

It actually matches the name of Aleister Crowley himself, as well as the phrase "one to follow thee" (referring to the Child of the Beast, i.e. Frater Achad).

Besides "Do what thou wilt", there's another statement that is of major importance in the Law of Thelema: "Love is the law, love under will".

Frater Achad also used the magical motto "Tantalus Leucocephalus" as X° O.T.O., which by another coincidence happens to match Crowley's own full birth name!

I have no idea of what's going on here, but this surely is... tantalizing!

But what is really interesting in this connection is the following: the decimal number 438 is written as 666 in Base-8 (octal).

Now, if my Readers have been following my series of articles about the History of Ciphers, you may remember that in Part 3: The Latin Ciphers I also wrote about the number 666, and Beatus of Liébana's list of the eight names of the Antichrist. This connection between the numbers 8 and 666 has a strong geometrical basis, since:

→ The 8ᵗʰ triangular number is 36;

→ The 36ᵗʰ triangular number is 666.

So that is the reason why I thought that this detail should be noticed. I understand, however (and some of my Readers may rightfully claim the same) that the number written "666" in base-8 is not the same number as "666" written in base-10, and that is absolutely true. However, I would contend that even if we're talking about different numbers and different numerical bases (which we are), both numerical representations consist of a triple repetition of the same numerical digit. So even if there isn't any real "match" in terms of numerical correspondence, there is an actual correspondence in terms of the numerical digits used to represent those otherwise unrelated numbers.

* * *

Proceeding to an analysis of Aleister Crowley's magical mottos, we find that at least three of his better known mottos share the value of Heru-ra-ha, which is the name of a Thelemic composite deity, composed by both Hoor-paar-kraat (the "passive" aspect of Horus) and Ra-Hoor-Khuit (the "active" aspect of the Lord of the Aeon):

* * *

The Book of the Law begins with the words:

"Had! The manifestation of Nuit" (AL I:1)

And in verse I:24, Nuit says:

"I am Nuit and my word is six and fifty"

It is thus curious to note that the word "Manifestation" sums 263, which is the 56ᵗʰ prime number – and by an intriguing synchronicity, it's also the value of Leamington Spa, the birth place of Aleister Crowley himself:

Coincidently, the words "six and fifty" from AL I:24 sum 236 in AQ, which is a perfect numerical anagram of 263 in Base-10:

Don't forget, however, that "numerical anagrams" usually only work in one specific numerical base, so this can be considered to be a mere coincidence.

* * *

In the first chapter, verse 7 of the Book of the Law, it's written:

"Behold! it is revealed by Aiwass the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat."

In this case, it's curious to note that "Aiwass" shares the same value as "Horus", the Lord of the Aeon whose passive aspect is Hoor-paar-kraat:

Another correspondence is to be noted, as "Aeon of Horus" matches the value of "Heru-pa-kraath", another spelling for Hoor-paar-kraat that appears in AL II:8:

* * *

To conclude this section about Anglossic/Alphanumeric Qabbala, there is a little detail in the Book of the Law that surely deserves to be mentioned.

Just like each chapter of Liber AL has a divine speaker, each of the three chapters also begins with a word which is connected to the speaker itself:

— The first chapter (dedicated to Nuit) begins with the word "Had":

AL I:1. "Had! The manifestation of Nuit"

— The second chapter (dedicated to Hadit) begins with the word "Nu":

AL II:1. "Nu! the hiding of Hadit"

— The third chapter (dedicated to Ra-Hoor-Khut) begins with the word "Abrahadabra":

AL III:1. "Abrahadabra; the reward of Ra Hoor Khut"

When I wrote about the Illuminati cipher I quoted Kenneth Grant's explanation about how the Circumpunct, or Circled Dot, which was the official symbol of the Illuminati, is intimately connected to this "Thelemic Trinity":

— Nuit is represented by the unmanifested Circle. The word beginning her chapter, "Had", corresponds to the manifestation of Nuit;

— Hadit is represented by the Dot. The word beginning his chapter, "Nu", corresponds to the hiding of Hadit;

— Ra Hoor Khut is represented by the Circled Dot, or the union of the symbols of Nuit and Hadit. His word is Abrahadabra, the Word of the Aeon.

It is thus curious to note, then, that the sum of both "Had" and "Nu" gives 93, the value of "Thelema", whose initial letter is Theta — in old times written as a Point within a Circle...

... and the word beginning the third chapter of the Book of the Law, the Word of the Aeon of Horus, returns instead, quite unexpectedly, the sacred number of the Goddess Babalon, 156:

And this is absolutely remarkable. You see, my Reader... for some Thelemites who are not Crowleyites (meaning: who are not fundamentalist and who don't see Crowley as the "perfect Prophet" of their Religion), the third chapter of the Book of the Law is in fact a blind, as parts of it come to contradict some things that are written in the first and second chapters of Liber AL.

Thanks to my friend Skye Love Hill, I've come to know one such group which has an "unorthodox" view on the Book of the Law and the role of Crowley as the Prophet of Thelema. That group is the Heru Ma'at Lodge, whose Facebook group contains the following introductory text:

    «Like Nema and the original Horus Ma'at Lodge, we also incorporate an earlier work variously known as Liber L, Liber AL, or the Book of the Law, which was channeled by Aleister Crowley in 1904. Many modern magicians have deemed this book to be a New Aeon Tantra.

   The Book of the Law contains a blind, a misdirection aimed at preventing the unworthy from properly understanding and applying the book. This blind is the entire third chapter of the book, a violent rant purporting to be the words of the god Heru, a claim of godship which is explicitly denied by the speaker Nuit in the first chapter of the book itself. [AL I:21 "... I am Heaven, and there is no other God than me, and my lord Hadit."]

   Aleister Crowley fell for this blind, using the third chapter of the book to exalt himself as a "prophet" and to found an order dedicated to promulgating hatred against the prophets known as Jesus and Mohammed along with their followers, as well as followers of Hinduism, Buddhism, and the religions of Tibet, Mongolia, and China. The Heru Ma'at Lodge recognizes this third chapter as a blind, rejects Crowley as a prophet along with his interpretation of the Book of the Law and his concept of True Will.»

I entirely subscribe to most of these conclusions. However, let it be made perfectly clear that neither the Heru Ma'at Lodge nor the Horus-Maat Lodge have any connection whatsoever with this Alphanumeric Qabbala. As such, my own considerations on the value of the word "Abrahadabra" being 156 (connecting it with Babalon) don't actually serve as proof for this different (but in my view, legitimate) perspective of the HML on the third chapter of Crowley's Liber AL.

* * *

Concluding remarks on the Anglossic Qabbala

In writing this series of articles about the History of Ciphers, especially this section on the Thelemic ciphers, I have no doubts that some people would think that I'm talking about "too many ciphers". Given the fact that on one side of the Thelemic spectrum we have Thelemites who consider the subject of an English Gematria almost a religious taboo, and on the other side we have Thelemites who are dedicated to work with a single system of English Gematria (and reject all others), my intention in writing this series of articles is precisely to let everyone know about the different opinions about English Gematria in the context of Thelema. In this way, every single system of Thelemic Gematria can be explored, and its pros and cons be known by any student of Thelema who seeks to embark on this kind of exploration. So if any of my Readers would think that I've been talking about too many ciphers... wait until you see my next (and hopefully final) text on the Thelemic ciphers. 😁

My personal opinion about this subject is that, from all the ciphers that I've talked about in a Thelemic context, English Qaballa seems to be the most convincing, and it answers quite elegantly to many of the riddles in Liber AL. However, my most honest advice to my Readers is to never take any system of Gematria too seriously, either in a Thelemic or in any other context. Sometimes, the true beauty of a system lies in looking at it from various perspectives and see what each one of them has to offer. And in my view, that is precisely the case when we explore the numerical secrets behind Liber AL vel Legis and the Holy Books of Thelema. However, caution must be taken when working with Thelemic ciphers outside of their natural context. This is something that I will always, always, make reference to, since the practice of Gematria always involves responsibility, as well as an inquisitive and especially discerning spirit.

Why did I choose to talk about Nick Land's Anglossic Qabbala, then? Well, not only his first(?) text referring to AQ did also make reference to a lot of Thelemic stuff (the Law of Thelema, the particle "AL", and some others), but from my own findings I've also been able to dig some 'pearls' while applying this cipher to a Thelemic context. So, how could I not talk about this cipher, if my latest texts have been entirely dedicated to Thelema and its ciphers?

Even in this case, there is this question of "context" that I'm always referring to. Some of my Readers may still ask at this point:

— "Is Anglossic Qabbala specifically a "Thelemic" cipher?"

No, it is not. From what I've explored about this question, I strongly believe that it was Nick Land who devised/discovered this cipher and then applied it in the CCRU Writings.

— "So, if this cipher isn't specific to Thelema, and if its discoverer never had any connection with Thelema, what is in fact the natural context of this cipher?".

Well... apparently, it doesn't have any specific context to be used on. I mean, it is mostly used by people who are more or less involved in the study of the CCRU materials, Hyperstition, and other related things, but nevertheless, I think that it is more or less safe to assume that it can be used in a Thelemic context by all the reasons that I've shown in this text, even though neither Thelema nor any Thelemic scripture have directly inspired its discovery — contrary to what happened with English Qaballa (EQ), for example. However, I also do believe that it can be used outside of a Thelemic context. "How exactly" is something that I can't really answer at this moment — but I ask my Readers to always pay attention to one important detail: if you try to "decode" stuff with this cipher on any given context, be sure to note if what you are trying to decode was willingfully encoded; otherwise you'll just walk around in circles and may be misled during that process. Work with Gematria, but don't take it too seriously. Or else... practice some coincidence engineering with this cipher, and use it to encode secret correspondences in your texts. I've done that a lot in this text about AQ... just so you know.

(Am I not talking about Gematria, after all?) 😈

In the next (and final) part dedicated to the Thelemic ciphers, I will be giving a simple introduction to each one of the ciphers that I'll be talking about. It won't be a massive text like the previous ones were, and it will contain all, or most of my sources for each one of those ciphers. This actually serves two purposes: (1) it gives my Readers all necessary informations about the ciphers, using other sources besides my texts, and (2) it saves me some space in my already big texts. 😅

Until the next part, then!

I send you all my warmest regards,

Luís Gonçalves

"History of Ciphers" (part 4b) - The Thelemic Ciphers (II)

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Thu, 15 Jul 2021 23:50:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In my previous text about the Thelemic Ciphers I tried to give a succint account on how the English Qaballa (EQ for short) came to be found, the clues leading to its discovery, the astounding "coincidences" or synchronicities that were present in its discovery, as well as a whole array of techniques that can be used with EQ. I've chosen to divide these texts about the Thelemic ciphers into two parts, because I was much more familiar with EQ than with any other Thelemic Cipher, so the text about EQ (including all the historical details related to it) would be much longer than the rest.

Anyway, a discussion about "Thelemic Ciphers" would never be complete if we didn't explore other systems of Thelemic Gematria that can be equally interesting, at least from a historical and symbolical point of view. Even though, in my opinion, the EQ is the most interesting and noteworthy system of Thelemic Gematria (besides Greek Isopsephia and Hebrew Gematria) and it includes a complete Qaballa, it is but one of the many Gematria systems that were either conceived or discovered with a specific intent to unravel the mysteries of the Book of the Law.

In order to explore this rich Universe within the study of the Holy Books of Thelema, let us then begin the second part of this study.

History of Ciphers

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 4: The Thelemic Ciphers (II)

In this second part of the History of the Thelemic Ciphers, I will start by talking about Liber Trigrammaton (PDF - 627 KB), one of the Holy Books of Thelema which is a fundamental key to understand at least two of the ciphers that I'm going to explain next – while it is important in the context of English Qaballa itself. It is also the original source for one of Crowley's first attempts at achieving the "Order & Value of the English Alphabet" – so a presentation of this type would never be complete without duly explaining what this book is about.

(click to enlarge)

Liber Trigrammaton, or "The Book of the Trigrams of the Mutations of the Tao with the Yin and the Yang" was written by Crowley in December 1907. It is composed by 27 figures, called the Trigrams, each one being accompanied by a short text or sentence. Each Trigram has three lines, which can be of three types: Tao (a dot ●), Yang (a line —), or Yin (a broken line – –). You can thus notice how this is remarkably similar to the Chinese oracle of the I Ching, which is also called the "Book of Mutations" and also has Trigrams – which in this case are only eight, since they don't include the 'neutral'/zero element (Tao), only Yin and Yang. This was an outstanding innovation by Crowley and I personally find it extremely curious.

Here's the first four Trigrams from a PDF I got from Scans from Aleister Crowley's The Equinox. This is a very good source on Thelemic materials, and if my Readers like it and are interested in it, I suggest a donation to the project, here.

(click to enlarge)

Before elaborating further on this book, there are some intriguing factors regarding it that must be addressed in due time:

→ Contrary to the I Ching with its binary-like polarity of Yin (passive) and Yang (active) lines, Crowley's Trigrammaton adds a third, neutral element – the Tao (●). By doing this, the number of Trigrams is increased from 8 (2×2×2) to 27 (3×3×3). As the English Alphabet has 26 letters, just one less than the number of Trigrams in Trigrammaton, it is possible to establish correspondences between the Trigrams and the letters of the alphabet. We'll talk about this in some moments;

→ Why the specific order of the Trigrams in Liber Trigrammaton? The Trigrams don't seem to follow a linear or logical order in this book, even though there seems to exist some kind of symbolical connection between the shapes of the Trigrams and their corresponding texts. The book is very intriguing and truly deserves a thorough study. I would also invite my Readers to give a thorough look through Liber CLVII, the Tao Teh King as translated by "Ko Yuen" (Aleister Crowley) as is elaborates further on the teachings concerning the Tao, which is an underlying principle in Crowley's innovation of Liber Trigrammaton, when comparing it with the Trigrams of the I Ching.

→ Being based on 3 symbols or types of lines (Tao, Yang & Yin), Liber Trigrammaton suggests a kind of base-3 numeration. Just like in our base-10 numeration we use the ten digits from 0 to 9, so does base-3 use the three digits 0, 1 and 2. Associating Tao (●) with Zero, Yang (—) with 1, and Yin (– –) with 2, it is thus possible to convert all 27 Trigrams to decimal numbers from 0 to 26. This is actually the basis for the "rediscovery" of one of the systems of Thelemic Gematria that I will explain next.

Crowley would call Liber Trigrammaton "the ultimate foundation of the highest theoretical qabalah" (source). Based partially on the shape of the letters and their resemblance to some of the Trigrams, as well as the sounds of the letters and their pictorial symbology, Crowley managed to create a correspondence between the English Alphabet and the Trigrams of Liber Trigrammaton. This he did in order to fulfill an injunction given in the Book of the Law:

"Thou shalt obtain the Order & Value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto." (AL II:55)

In this case, the "symbols" would be the Trigrams of Liber Trigrammaton. However, in his New Comment to the Book of the Law, Crowley would later come to the conclusion that:

"The attribution in Liber Trigrammaton is good theoretically; but no Qabalah of merit has arisen therefrom. I am inclined to look further into the question of Sanskrit Roots, and into the Enochian Records, in order to put this matter in more polished shape."

In fact, Crowley never actually devised a system of Gematria based on Liber Trigrammaton, having simply attributed the letters of the English Alphabet to the Trigrams – not following any particular alphabetical logic or sequence, and without actually giving any specific value to the letters based on that correspondence.

It would be long after Crowley had passed away that a man worked further on Crowley's draft of an English Gematria, and a new system of Thelemic Gematria emerged. The man's name is R. Leo Gillis, and the system is called the Trigrammaton Qabalah. For all those who use the "Gematrinator", this is the cipher which is usually – though wrongly – called "LCH Kabbalah".

The Trigrammaton Qabalah ("LCH")

In the first place I should clarify something in terms of terminology. According to R. Leo Gillis in his exceedingly interesting The Book of Mutations:

   "Within the study of number mysticism, there is a large component devoted to the “literal qabalah”. This aspect of the qabalah scrutinizes sacred texts in terms of their numerical value. Traditionally, this is done with the use of three tools: temurah, notariqon, and gematria.

   Temurah is simply the rearrangement or replacement of letters in a word, based on some formula. Notariqon is the use of letters in a word as anagrams. Neither of these plays a significant role in the TQ [Trigrammaton Qabalah].

   The last category is gematria, which is the replacement of letters with numbers so that words might be given a numerical value. Generally this is done by adding together the assigned value of all of the letters in a word. This art plays a very large role in the TQ, under the heading of the Trigrammaton English Gematria, or TEG."

Thus, Gematria is just a part of the Trigrammaton Qabalah, the whole qabalistic system that also includes "Astrology and magic squares, the tarot and runes, divination and arithmology, the Tree of Life and sacred geometry, Taoism and the I Ching".

So, while technically speaking we will actually be talking about the Trigrammaton English Gematria, for the sake of simplification I will sometimes also use the term Trigrammaton Qabalah (TQ) whenever I refer to this specific system of Gematria. However, it is important to know the difference between the terms and what they refer to, so this explanation from Gillis is more than timely.

One of the innovations in R. Leo Gillis' work is that he used the Crowleyan correspondences between the letters of the alphabet and the Trigrams, and then devised their numerical equivalents by treating the Trigrams as numbers written in base-3. By doing that, he found the following table of values for the English Alphabet:

I must confess that I never duly explored Trigrammaton Qabalah in my studies of the Holy Books of Thelema. The reason for this is twofold, but none of it has to do with R. Leo Gillis' excellent work:

1. The original correspondences between the Trigrams and the letters of the English Alphabet, as devised by Crowley, didn't follow any alphabetical or logical sequence, contrary to what we've seen in my previous text about the English Qaballa and its 11-letter cycle. Most of the times the correspondences were based on the similarity between the shapes of the letters and the shapes of the Trigrams, while other times there was simply no linking factor except arbitrary/subjective conjectures.

2. Those correspondences were not definitive. In the Windram copy of Thelema (PDF - 5,47 MB) which includes Liber Trigrammaton, it can be seen that Crowley's work on these correspondences was still speculative, with some letters having been crossed out and replaced by others.

Notwithstanding these arbitrary factors that I don't like in the origins of the Trigrammaton Qabalah, R. Leo Gillis' work in "The Book of Mutations" is worthy of being thoroughly studied, and he surely shows some quite curious patterns in his discoveries. Even if I not always agree with his methods, just the work that he had in studying all the mathematical patterns using the Trigrams and base-3 notation, how those interlace with his own discoveries using the Gematria of TQ, and all of his analysis of the Holy Books of Thelema, all of that deserves my deepest respect and admiration. Just remember that Gillis' book contains an astounding total of more than one THOUSAND pages of original research and experimentation, bridging a LOT of stuff. And I mean a LOT.

One interesting concept that R. Leo Gillis uses and I find very interesting is the concept of Antigrams. Antigrams are pairs of Hexagrams (combinations of two Trigrams) where the "Yang" lines in an Hexagram correspond to "Yin" lines in the other, and vice-versa. The "Tao" or "dot" lines don't have any opposite. By associating each Hexagram with a number written in Base-3, it is thus possible to find curious connections between numbers based on the analysis of their corresponding Hexagrams – and respective Antigrams. One such example is shown on pages 16-17 of R. Leo Gillis' "The Book of Mutations", and it is based on a sentence contained in one verse of the Book of the Law:

"For he is ever sun, and she a moon." (AL I:16)

In the Trigrammaton English Gematria, this sentence can be divided into two parts:

Using this converter, the decimal number 198 is written as 021100 in base-3, while the number 153 is written as 012200 in the same base. These base-3 numbers are then converted to the following Hexagrams:

Image © R. Leo Gillis, The Book of Mutations, page 17.

And these are perfect Antigrams! According to Gillis, "No more perfect explanation of the antigram concept can be found than this textual evidence", and I agree.

In his work with Trigrammaton Qabalah, R. Leo Gillis also made an interesting discovery regarding the total numerical value of the Book of the Law and its connection with the Trigrams from Liber Trigrammaton. As he explains this a lot better than I would, it will be better if I simply quote his words verbatim from "The Book of Mutations", pages 10-11:

   "Using Trigrammaton English Gematria, the entire contents of Liber CCXX – including all the English letters, numerals, verse-numbers and foreign letters – is 267,696. This number has some very interesting properties, and can be found hidden in the sequence of trigrams in Liber XXVII.

   The 27 trigrams of Liber XXVII, in the order in which they appear, have the following decimal equivalents:

   0, 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 18, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 19, 20, 12, 15, 21, 24, 13, 14, 16, 22, 17, 23, 25, 26.

   The first three of these numbers are the trigrams of 0, 1, 2, or Tao, Yang, Yin. These are the three fundamental digits of the Base 3 system, and form the first set. This initial set will not be used in the calculation that follows.

   The second set are the four trigrams that follow, each with only one Yang or Yin line; these are the four elements of Fire (3), Water (6), Air (9), and Earth (18).

   The third set are the next nineteen trigrams, representing the 12 Zodiac signs, the Sun and six of his planets.

   The last set is the final trigram, the one that has no English letter, the number 26.

   Summing up the members of these sets, we have:

   3, 6, 9, 18 = 36

   4, 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 19, 20, 12, 15, 21, 24, 13, 14, 16, 22, 17, 23, 25 = 286

   26 = 26

   We can then multiply these numbers and get an amazing result:

   36 × 286 × 26 = 267,696

   This product, (derived solely from the sequence of the trigrams in Liber XXVII) is exactly the same number as the gematria total of the contents of Liber CCXX, (derived by the TEG). The fact that these two numbers are precisely the same is either a result of deliberate design, or a staggering coincidence."

In sum, Gillis' work is absolutely worth being studied and given a thorough look.

I sense, however, that as I didn't explore TQ / TEG enough, particularly all the numerical patterns that emerge when using both Gematria and the Trigrams of Liber Trigrammaton, what I can do best right now is to point some of the discoveries that I myself have been doing while using the Trigrammaton English Gematria only. I warn my Reader, however, that I haven't made much research in this area, while at the same time I honestly do invite my Readers to look further into Gillis' works, as well as into his online blog – especially the posts identified with the tag #trigrammaton-qabalah.

One of the most interesting connections I found while using TQ is related to the motto Perdurabo ("I will endure"), chosen by Crowley on the occasion of his Neophyte initiation in the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, on November 18, 1898 (remember, this was 6 years before the receiving of the Book of the Law, in Cairo):

It's curious that Crowley's motto, "Perdurabo", would match the value of "Aeon of the Child", which is the Aeon that Crowley would innaugurate in 1904 with the receiving of the Book of the Law. The "Child" ruling the Aeon is Harpocrates, Horus as Infant, which is called Hoor-paar-kraat in the Book of the Law.

The association with the Circumpunct ⊙ (quite literally, a Point within a Circle!) is also worthy of note, since the infinite circle and the infinitesimal dot are respectively the symbols of Nuit and Hadit, the 'speakers' in the first and second chapters of the Book of the Law. The union of their symbols in the Circumpunct thus represents the 'speaker' in the third chapter, Horus, the "Lord of the Double Wand of Power" (AL III:72). In fact, this was the reason why some 10 years ago I endeavored to apply the Illuminati Novice cipher in 'decoding' the Book of the Law, for some reasons that will become apparent by then. I will share some of my results in this series of texts dedicated to the History of Ciphers.

Applying Gillis' technique and converting the number 128 to base-3, we arrive at Hexagram 011202. Its corresponding Antigram is Hexagram 022101, which corresponds to the decimal number 226:

How curious it is, then, to notice that 226 is the value of "Number of the Beast", the number (666) that was a fundamental part of Crowley's life since his childhood.

Also worthy of being referred to in this context is the fact that the (in)famous "Number of the Beast", 666, is in the Qabalistic Tradition considered a Solar number, corresponding to the sixth sephirah of the Tree of Life, Tiphareth (the Sun). And the traditional symbol of the Sun is... the Circumpunct!

Now let's take a look at the two verses indicated in the table previously given:

AL II:64. "Oh! thou art overcome: we are upon thee; our delight is all over thee: hail! hail: prophet of Nu! prophet of Had! prophet of Ra-Hoor-Khu! Now rejoice! now come in our splendour & rapture! Come in our passionate peace, & write sweet words for the Kings!"

AL II:65. "I am the Master: thou art the Holy Chosen One."

Note how "I am the Master" are the words of Hadit, the 'speaker' of the second chapter of Liber AL, while the title "Holy Chosen One" is applied to the Great Wild Beast (Crowley), the "Prophet of Nu":

The "Great Equinox" refers to the Equinox of the Gods in 1904, and "babe in an egg" is a symbolical imagery that is related to the Lord of the Aeon, Horus as Infant (Harpocrates) – see The Vision and the Voice – The Cry of the 1st Aethyr.

This cipher also delivers an interesting result when applied to the string of numbers & letters in Liber AL II:76, since the total sum is 351, the result of 0+1+2+3+...+26 – and thus of all the 27 Trigrams in Liber Trigrammaton and their respective values:

To conclude this section about the Trigrammaton Qabalah, I'll use the name of this cipher itself in order to show you something quite curious:

* * *

Trigrammaton Qabalah isn't, however, the only system of Gematria in which Liber Trigrammaton plays an important part.

In my previous post about the English Qaballa, I've talked about a book by Cath Thompson, titled "All This and a Book", where she wrote about the origins of English Qaballa. In one of her other books, "Finding New Symbols" which was also published by Hadean Press, Cath explains how the letters of the English Alphabet can be associated with the Trigrams of Liber Trigrammaton, by associating each Trigram with a number written in base-3. Then, taking the numerical correspondences for the letters of the alphabet according to English Qaballa, each letter is thus attributed to one specific Trigram.

There is, however, a fundamental difference from Trigrammaton Qabalah. While in TQ the counting begins with the letter I=0, in EQ the numerical sequence begins with A=1, so this leaves the zeroth Trigram 0-0-0 without any alphabetical correspondence (while in TQ the Trigram without a letter is Trigram 2-2-2, corresponding to the decimal number 26). In English Qaballa, the Tao Trigram represents the zeroth/27th "letter" of the English Alphabet – Silence, the Tao, or the Way.

Table by Luís Gonçalves – click to enlarge.

This table of correspondences between the letters of the English Alphabet (based on EQ) later led to the discovery of an alternative system of Gematria. This is one of the least known systems of Thelemic Gematria, and one that I found to be extremely interesting once I understood the "logic" behind it. It's quite surprising that so many people in the "Gematria" community (particularly those who use the "Gematrinator") use this cipher indiscriminately and out of its natural context, without even knowing its real name, who created it, and how it was supposed to be used.

I'm talking about Cipher X, which is also called in the 'Gematrinator' the "KFW Kabbalah" (???). The man behind Cipher X was a man of genius whose legacy, as far as I can tell, has mostly remained in obscurity even within Thelemic circles. His name was Edgar Joel Love.

E. Joel Love's Cipher X ("KFW")

I only found Cipher X about one year or two ago, through the posts of Tom Chaudoin, Joel Love's heir in terms of magickal legacy, in a discussion group about English Qaballa. Tom Chaudoin is one of the men behind the N∴O∴T∴, the New Order of Thelema, whose origins are intimately connected to Frater Achad's writing of "Q.B.L. or the Bride's Reception", a document in which Achad proposed to revise the traditional qabalistic Tree of Life in order to fit the cosmological model of the emerging Age of Aquarius.

While I don't know much about the history of the N∴O∴T∴, I invite my Readers to read about some of the history of the Order, as well as a short biography of E. Joel Love, here. There aren't many available materials about Joel Love's legacy, even though – in my opinion – there are strong reasons to talk about this specific method of English Gematria.

After reading the Blog of the New Order of Thelema, it became apparent to me that Joel Love's work never received enough attention because, due to a series of complicated circumstances, his notebooks were never passed on to his magical heirs, Fabio S. Cruz and Tom Chaudoin. I can only guess how frustrating it can be, to see our Magical Teacher pass away, and then being completely unable to go on with his work and legacy. However, I've seen some of Tom Chaudoin's work in a deck he's working on, based on Joel Love's teachings, as well as on English Qaballa, Love's Cipher X and Liber Trigrammaton, and I can assure that it is extremely interesting. I will definitely be one of its buyers, whenever it becomes available to purchase.

So this is why I'm talking about Cipher X and Joel Love. And even though I'm pretty sure that this cipher is nothing but a very small part of Joel Love's legacy, I think that by talking about this I will be able to bring more people's attention to this cipher, and by that to Joel Love's work as well.

I must admit to my Readers that I am less than qualified to talk about Joel Love. I never met him or talked with him, and I only read a little of his work many years after he passed away. However, what I can talk more easily about is how Joel Love devised/found Cipher X, based on some of his investigations and findings, so that my Readers can, at least, understand the reasoning behind it.

One of the ciphers that was studied by Joel Love was R. Leo Gillis' Trigrammaton Qabalah, along with all of Willis' work with the Trigrams, Base-3 numeration, Geometry, as well as everything that goes along with it (remember, Gillis' work with Trigrammaton is massive, and my presentation of his cipher only explains a tiny part of his work).

In my introduction to Joel Love's Cipher X I already talked about how, similarly to Trigrammaton Qabalah, English Qaballa associates each letter of the English Alphabet to a Trigram and its corresponding number (in base-3 and decimal). I'm not really sure of who first built that association (for EQ), but I know that Love worked on it. I invite my Readers to thoroughly read and explore Joel Love's original commentary on Liber Trigrammaton. He treated each Trigram as a set of coordinates (x, y, z) in a "cube of space", and by doing that he alloted each letter of the alphabet to a specific position in that cube, according to its equivalences in English Qaballa:

Image by Edgar Joel Love.

In this image, the EQ order of the letters starts at the lower left corner (with Zero=000) and then goes upwards, from the front to the back and from left to right (A=001=1, L=002=2, then W=010=3, H=011=4, etc). The red lines correspond to the order of the Trigrams as they appear in Liber Trigrammaton.

In the website of the New Order of Thelema, there's a nice explanation of how Joel Love came to discover Cipher X. It also contains some important informations on Joel Love and his works (which I would love to explore and study), so I'll reproduce it here for my Readers:

    Joel Love's innovations with various ciphers would fill a huge volume unto itself, and the body of research that he amassed in his lifetime is so vast that it is even still it is being examined and cataloged. But what stood forth early on was his immense work with Liber 27 and the deep mathematical and cosmological analysis of it to which he would commit two decades of his life. It became apparent early on to Joel that the trigrams in Liber 27 represented Base Three numbers. However, when calculating the straightforward series, the cipher solution does not arrive at ALW, but an alternate cipher. Joel had a fondness for puns and limericks and was adept at reading metaphor, so he looked at the last line of Liber 27:

   "Therefore was the end of it sorrow; yet in that sorrow a sixfold star of glory whereby they might see to return unto the stainless Abode; yea, unto the Stainless Abode."

   To Joel 'seeing to return' meant 'going backwards' through the trigram sequence, which, mathematically, suggested a process of inversion. Base operations can be easily inverted, so Joel merely took the ALW cipher, converted it to Base Three, and then inverted it. The result is Cipher X:

Table from GEMATRO - Gematria Calculator.

The close connection between English Qaballa and Cipher X (which is thus a base-3 inversion of EQ) can be best understood by the same table I already gave you – but now with some extra information:

Table by Luís Gonçalves. Click to enlarge.

And now my Readers can understand why in the first image some letters were colored red, as those are the letters that share the same value in both EQ and Cipher X. Notice how their Trigrams (and their equivalent numbers written in base-3) are symmetrical.

This process of inversion also seems to be aluded to in the text of Liber Trigrammaton itself, as the tenth line of text is attributed to two symmetrical Trigrams:

And then, by finding this new sequence encoded in Liber Trigrammaton, Joel Love made another startling discovery. If he made a graphic containing the values of the letters of the alphabet according to the two ciphers simultaneously, the end result would be a cube, exactly like the other one shown some paragraphs above:

Image by Edgar Joel Love.

Notice how the letters sharing the same value in EQ and Cipher X draw a perfect line across the graphic:

Image by Edgar Joel Love.

Another discovery by E. Joel Love which is quite astonishing is the strange connection between English Qaballa, Roman numeration, and the number 666.

In his short but brilliant text "666 and English Qabalah" (link), Love found that by calculating the EQ value of a number written with Roman numerals, and then calculating again the EQ value of the result, successively repeating the process, all numbers – without exception – would fall into one of three closed loops:

69 = LXIX = 69
58 = LVIII = 81 = LXXXI = 91 = XCI = 58
68 = LXVIII = 103 = CIII = 82 = LXXXII = 114 = CXIV = 68

Then, if you calculate the sum of the Roman numerals composing each of these loops, you'll notice that their sum is equal to the sum of their respective EQ values (!!!):

LXIX = 69

LVIII + LXXXI + XCI = 230

LXVIII + CIII + LXXXII + CXIV = 367

And finally, if you add the eight Roman numerals composing the three closed loops, their total sum (in Roman numeration) will again coincide with their total value in English Qaballa. And what a better total value could there be?

LXIX + LVIII + LXXXI + XCI + LXVIII + CIII + LXXXII + CXIV = 666

After reading this, I thought about looking for Thelemic phrases, sentences or names, adding to any of these key values. While my work in that area has not been exhaustive in the slightest, I have managed to find some pretty interesting correspondences, both for English Qaballa and Cipher X. The number 367 (total value of the third closed loop), for example, is the value of:

While only the number 367 is highlighted in this table, notice the other values too. Number 343 is 7×7×7 (the value in Cipher X of the very first verse of Liber AL), while the EQ value of "Love is the law, love under will" is 279, which is 3 x 93. We have seen in my first text dedicated to the Thelemic ciphers, that 93 is the value of both "Love" (Agape) and "Will" (Thelema) in Greek Isopsephia, so these synchronicities are surely more than noteworthy.

Anyway, there's something more that I would like to say about this strange connection between English Qaballa and Roman numeration. You see, after making all necessary calculations, I found out that if you use the same process for the Roman numerals, but using Cipher X instead of EQ, there will be no closed loops – instead, every single number will always (always) lead to 69, regardless of the number of times that the same operation must be made. The only two "special" cases are numbers 3 and 69, both leading (simultaneously in EQ and Cipher X) to 69 itself:

3 = III = 69 [EQ & Cipher X]

69 = LXIX = 69 [EQ & Cipher X]

* * *

My Readers may have noticed that, although I'm writing the name of EQ as "English Qaballa", Joel Love used a different orthography and wrote "English Qabalah". And while the EQ 'purists' could argue that "English Qaballa" was the original name of that cipher (an opinion which I absolutely subscribe), the fact is that in Joel Love's Cipher X, the value of "English Qabalah" is quite... curious!

In fact, this is the number of verses in Liber AL – which is precisely the book that inspired the creation of the majority of the Thelemic Ciphers. And what about the name of Love's cipher, "Cipher X", according to its own value?

It matches perfectly with the value of "Liber AL"!

Now, another interesting "clue" that I found during this week. I was searching the internet for the name "Joel Love" in order to get more informations about this man and his work. And I managed to find an archived page, owned by Joel Love, called The English Qabalah of Joel Love. It doesn't have much information, but it does contain some qabalistic clues within a short introductory text:

As a life-long student of Crowley and several of his students, I find myself a few heretical turns from the Caliphoxy of Nethelema. My personal discoveries are often helpful to others working through the "Three Ordeals" of the magical tradition. This path is laid out in Liber AL and the other Holy Books of Thelema. Frater Achad said "The way is prepared". With this information and some direction by others having already walked this path, the ordeals needed for full initiation are getting easier to attain as time progresses.

Reading and rereading the works of Frater Achad, Crowley's Magical Heir, (in particular Liber XXXI) led me to believe that swearing "The Oath of the Abyss" was my next logical step. It was one of the most profound and odd experiences of my life. I attest that by my actions, I now claim the title of Magister Templi, Nemo and knowing myself to be the perfect Fool, take my place as a Master of Understanding.

As to the title of Magus, look at my personal qabalistic work, read the Holy Books and I think that you will see the veracity of my claim, and if it be so, then let my word be "Choose".

Agape,

joel

First, note the name of the webpage: "The English Qabalah of Joel Love":

I couldn't grasp why this specific value was chosen by Joel Love (I'm pretty sure he chose it, even though I can't prove it), but as it is an "exact" value – as well as the result of 20×20 – I thought that I should leave it here. Anyway, one thing that I can say about this number is that in Hebrew Qabalah, 400 is the value of the letter Tav, which corresponds to the 21st Major Arcanum of the Tarot, "The Universe". Coincidently, the original shape of the letter Tav was a Cross – like an "X", as in "Cipher X".

Secondly, note the strange expression, "Caliphoxy of Nethelema". I haven't delved much into the history of Thelemic organizations, but as I far as I can understand, this refers – in a depreciative sense – to the Caliphate O.T.O. of Grady Louis McMurtry. The choosing of this "strange" name by Joel Love is quite appropriate, since its value (in both English Qaballa and Cipher X) is 279, or 3×93, the value of both "Thelema" (Will) and "Agape" (Love) in Greek Isopsephia:

Joel Love also refers to the "Three Ordeals", which are likewise referred to in the Book of the Law:

AL I:50. "There is a word to say about the Hierophantic task. Behold! there are three ordeals in one, and it may be given in three ways. The gross must pass through fire; let the fine be tried in intellect, and the lofty chosen ones in the highest. Thus ye have star & star, system & system; let not one know well the other!"

This strongly suggests the famous alchemical formula for the creation of the "Stone of the Wise" or the "Philosopher's Stone". Note how in the text of Liber AL, the Three Ordeals are called the "Hierophantic task":

"Woman of Whoredom" shouldn't be a surprising equivalence, as it is a powerful symbol / goddess in the context of Thelema, being BABALON, the female counterpart of the Great Wild Beast. And according to Joel Love's Liber Porta Arcana, the Scarlet Woman (which is another name for Babalon) is also connected to the "Mark of the Beast" – because if you write it in Hebrew as ShNI AShE (שני אשה), its value will be 666.

Next, note that Joel Love mentions Frater Achad, who was, as we have seen in my first text about the Thelemic ciphers, the Magical Heir of the Beast (Crowley). The value of this name couldn't be more revealing:

I included English Qaballa here for a very specific reason. You see... the number 93 is, as we have seen a number of times, a very important (or "the" most important) number in Thelema. And the number 117 is extremely curious too, because if you look again at Joel Love's Cube that I included in this section about Cipher X, you will notice something very, very interesting – the letters of the alphabet that share the same value in both English Qaballa and Cipher X, have a total value of 117!!!

My Readers may have noticed that earlier I said that these letters draw a straight line across Joel Love's graphic of the Cube with the letters and their values in EQ and Cipher X. Even though this is a different line that is being referred to, I couldn't avoid thinking about the text in Liber AL:

AL III:47. "This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine. Let him not seek to try: but one cometh after him, whence I say not, who shall discover the Key of it all. Then this line drawn is a key (...)" [bolds and underlines by me]

In English Qaballa, 117 is the value of both "Order & Value" and "Letters" (remember the text of AL II:55 - "Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt obtain new symbols to attribute them unto."), as well as of "Aleister" and "Aeon of Horus". In Cipher X, 117 is value of "Circle+Dot" (a graphical representation of the union of Nuit and Hadit in Horus, the Solar/Martial Conquering Child, and the Lord of the Aeon) as well as of "The Great Work" and, as it happens in EQ, "Aleister". Some quite astonishing 'coincidences'.

To conclude this short analysis of the text in Joel Love's webpage, I ask my Readers to take special notice of the Word chosen by the Magus Love:

As to the title of Magus, look at my personal qabalistic work, read the Holy Books and I think that you will see the veracity of my claim, and if it be so, then let my word be "Choose".

Could there be a more appropriate Word for a Master of the Temple?

And now, to conclude this presentation of Joel Love's Cipher X, I would like to show my Readers something that I'm sure they will find very, very interesting. It's about the famous riddle in the Book of the Law, in verses 75-76 of the second chapter:

AL II:75. "Aye! listen to the numbers & the words:"

AL II:76. "4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meaneth this, o prophet? Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever. There cometh one to follow thee: he shall expound it. But remember, o chosen one, to be me; to follow the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven; to look forth upon men, to tell them this glad word."

Calculating the sum of the values of verse II:75 and the riddle in II:76, we come to a curious number:

(click to enlarge)

777 was, of course, the number chosen by Frater Achad, the Magical Heir of the Beast (Crowley), as it equals the total of his initiatic mottos V.I.O.O.I.V. / O.I.V.V.I.O.

He was the "one" [in Hebrew: "achad"] "to follow thee" [Crowley, the Beast 666], and he did in fact expose a major Key to the Book of the Law, through the findings that he wrote down in his Liber 31.

The number 777 will become especially relevant when we turn our attention to other known Thelemic ciphers. But for now, let us turn our attention to David Cherubim's Thelemic English Qabalah, which has also become known as "English Sumerian".

* * *

David Cherubim's Thelemic English Qabalah

(a.k.a. "English Sumerian")

First of all I should tell my Readers that the original name of David Cherubim's cipher was not "Thelemic English Qabalah", but simply "English Qabalah", as can be seen on the archived website of the Order of the Thelemic Golden Dawn, founded in 1990 by the late David Cherubim (1967–2017).

The reason why I'm not using "English Qabalah" as the name of this cipher is because it would be extremely confusing (particularly to all those who are not entirely familiar with this type of ciphers) to differentiate Jim Lees' English Qaballa (the "ALW" cipher) from David Cherubim's Thelemic cipher. Besides – and this may be surprising for some of my Readers – these two ciphers are not the only ones that were called "English Qabalah" by their creators/discoverers. There's also Linda Falorio's English Qabalah, as well as Samuel K. Vincent's English Qabalah – and all these ciphers are completely different from one another.

So in order to avoid any confusion between the cipher of David Cherubim and Jim Lees' English Qaballa (note the specific orthography with a "Q", one "B", and two "L"s), I chose to use the name of "Thelemic English Qabalah" (or "Thelemic EQ") whenever I refer to Cherubim's cipher. Yet, even this is a very poor misnomer, since technically speaking, all Thelemic ciphers function as a type of "English Qabalah", so in a sense, all of them can be called Thelemic English Qabalah. As I have worked with Jim Lees' ALW cipher a lot more than with any other Thelemic cipher, I have (kind of) "solved" this issue by using either "EQ" or "English Qaballa" whenever I refer to the ALW cipher alone, and more elaborate/detailed names whenever I refer to other similarly named Thelemic ciphers.

The second information that my Readers must know is that, technically, the Thelemic English Qabalah looks exactly like the cipher widely (though inaccurately) named "English Sumerian". Both ciphers are the same as English Ordinal multiplied by 6, so that A=1×6=6, B=2×6=12, C=3×6=18, etc.

I first knew "English Sumerian" some years ago, in a Christian(?) website, in which the author(s) tried to prove that this was some kind of ultimate Christian Gematria which would unveil many of the mysteries behind Religion, as well as a whole set of conspiracy theories regarding the future "Mark of the Beast".

The reasoning behind "English Sumerian" is faulty at its best. According to another website, the "Sumerian Code" is based on the ancient Sumerian numeration system which, unlike our modern decimal (base-10) numeration, was based on the number 60. This part is historically accurate – that the Sumerians used a base-60 numeration system – but the connection between "English Sumerian" and a base-60 numeration system is not, and never was, satisfactorily explained. The justification seems to lie in identifying 60 with 6, since supposedly "zero is a redundant non-number". Anyway, mathematically speaking, base-60 is not the same as base-6, and the Sumerians did not use a base-6 numeration system, but in fact a base-60 numeration system. So no, Zero is not redundant, and the justification thus seems to be completely invalid and nonsensical. It would be the same as stating that Base-2 (binary) is the same as Base-20 (vigesimal), which of course is completely untrue.

David Cherubim's reasoning for his own Thelemic English Qabalah is, however, completely different, and it is in fact very interesting from a Thelemic perspective.

According to David Cherubim in his essay English Qabalah: The Key of it All:

"In Liber AL, II, 55, it is written in the Voice of our Lord Hadit: "Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto." The English Alphabet has 26 letters, whereas our traditional Magical Alphabet, the Hebrew Alphabet, has only twenty-two letters. The twenty-two letters of the Hebrew Alphabet are linked with the twenty-two Paths of the Qabalistic Tree of Life and with the twenty-two Atu of Thoth (Major Arcana of Tarot). The 26 letters of the English Alphabet also pertain to the twenty-two Paths, which connect the ten Sephiroth on the Qabalistic Tree of Life, and also to the four secret Paths of the Ageless Tree, which also connect certain Sephiroth on the Tree. The order of the English Alphabet, as indicated in verse 55 of Chapter II of the Book of the Law, pertains to the proper arrangement of the 26 letters of the English Alphabet on the Qabalistic Tree of Life. Their value, as indicated in this same verse, denotes a new system of Numerology. The new symbols of this same verse denote the four secret Paths of the Tree of Life, which, till this day, have remained hidden in the Sanctuary of Occult Wisdom. But the Tree of Life is incomplete without the addition of the four secret Paths, and therefore we must now expound upon these four Mysteries to make whole that which was partial.

The making visible of the four secret Paths on the Tree of Life gives birth to a new Tree to accord with the English Alphabet, which is our Magical Alphabet for the New Aeon of Horus. This new Tree of Life, which incorporates the English Alphabet of 26 letters rather than the 22 letters of the Hebrew Alphabet, gives us 36 Paths of Wisdom in all (10 Sephiroth and 26 Paths). The sum of the numbers of 36 is 666, the Great Number of the Sun. Also, 36 is the Mystic Number of the Sephira Hod or the sum of 8, which is the number of Thoth-Hermes-Mercury, the Logos or Word of the Gods, and the Lord of Magick, Occult Science and Tarot."

Image by David Cherubim. Reproduced here for informational purposes only.

Cherubim noted also that by multiplying by 6 the ordinal numbering of the letters of the alphabet, the English Alphabet thus becomes the magical alphabet of the Sun and Moon:

The order and value of the English Alphabet is simple yet profound in nature. The order pertains to the Paths of the new Tree of Life, which are linked with the 26 letters of our Thelemic Alphabet. The value of each letter is a multiplication of Six, the sacred number of the Beast (The Sun). 26 multiplied by 6 produces the number 156, which is the sacred number of Babalon (The Moon). The English Alphabet is the Magical Alphabet of the Sun and Moon. The value of the English Alphabet begins with the number of the Beast (The Sun) and ends with the number of Babalon (The Moon).

At this point I won't delve into much detail about this specific cipher. However, I would like to point a nice qabalistic clue that David Cherubim left in the title of his short – but exceedingly interesting – presentation of his own Thelemic English Qabalah.

Notice the title of the paper, "English Qabalah: The Key of it All":

AL I:39-40. "The word of the Law is Θελημα. / Who calls us Thelemites will do no wrong, if he look but close into the word. (...)"

David Cherubim also added to his article his own database of Thelemic names, sentences, words and phrases, so as to show all the interesting synchronicities that happen with the use of this specific cipher. I honestly invite my Readers to duly explore it, here.

Now, a word or two about...

* * *

Aleisterion's AngloQabalistic Key

(a.k.a. English Ordinal)

I already knew this cipher by other names, like English Ordinal, Simple English Gematria, and Serial English. However, I only knew about this specific Thelemic use of this cipher when I first read R. Leo Gillis' excellent 55-page text called "Secrets of the Cipher Naughts – A Survey of Solutions to Liber AL verse II:76". Unfortunately I have no way of giving my Readers a direct link to this work, since it is rightfully protected by Copyright laws and cannot be freely distributed or reproduced without authorization from the Author. So I'll just leave the reference here for my Readers, since it is a very complete work, and a timely reference in this study of Thelemic ciphers.

I admit that I don't know much about Aleisterion – not even his real name. However, I do know the website containing The Writings of Frater Aleisterion 777 and I've read some of his texts, namely "The AngloQabalistic Key" (PDF - 446 KB). In this text, Aleisterion explains how the simple Serial English cipher explains many of the mysteries of Liber AL. This cipher was called by him the AngloQabalistic Key, or AQBL Key for short – which exactly corresponds to the cipher more widely known as English Ordinal:

Applying this cipher to the riddle in AL II:76 delivers an interesting result, if we also include the previous sentence in AL II:75. As we have seen previously, the exact same value can be achieved by using Edgar Joel Love's Cipher X:

(click to enlarge)

This became quite revealing, at least for Aleisterion, since at least 10 years before he made this discovery, he had already chosen the name "Aleisterion" – which sums 777 in Hebrew Gematria:

Frater Aleisterion, similarly to Frater Achad whose initiatic motto also added to 777 (thus being "the one to follow" the Beast 666), also claimed to be the Child of the Prophet, and that he was the one whose coming was prophesied in the Book of the Law. Personally, even though I do like some of Aleisterion's work, I consider this to be a type of "Achad syndrome", where one looks for fulfilment through the Gematric study of one's own initiatic mottos in order to "justify" some claim – whatever the claim it is. This, unfortunately, has happened a lot – and continues to happen from time to time – so my Readers can surely understand why in most "puritan" Thelemic circles the search for a promised "Key of it All" has become a taboo.

To fulfill our own ego through the analysis of the Gematria values of our own names, titles or mottos, can be a dangerous trap – and indeed, at a certain point the Book of the Law seems to warn against this. Please note the last sentence in this verse:

AL III:47. "This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine. Let him not seek to try: but one cometh after him, whence I say not, who shall discover the Key of it all. Then this line drawn is a key: then this circle squared in its failure is a key also. And Abrahadabra. It shall be his child & that strangely. Let him not seek after this; for thereby alone can he fall from it."

And also:

AL I:44. "For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect."

* * *

Concluding Remarks for the History of

Thelemic ciphers, part II

In this second part of the Thelemic ciphers, it was my purpose to give my Readers some studying material mostly about the ciphers ~~inaccurately~~ known as "KFW Kabbalah" (actually Cipher X) and "LCH Kabbalah" (actually Trigrammaton Qabalah), since those two ciphers have been used indiscriminately and outside of their natural context (Thelema), particularly by all those who use the "Gematrinator" calculator. As it was my intention to dispell some myths and disinformation about these ciphers, it seemed to me that talking about their history and how they came to existence would be a favor that I would be doing to my Readers, by giving them a missing information, and it would be also a humble homage that I should do to the people whose brilliant works should be acknowledged whenever we talk about these ciphers.

I'm pretty conscious that in this part of my presentation I dedicate most of my time to Edgar Joel Love's Cipher X. That is not to say that I didn't find any value in the other ciphers, which is manifestly wrong. However, as Cipher X is a base-3 inversion of English Qaballa (ALW), and as I've worked a lot with EQ, it was inevitable for me to explore Cipher X more thoroughly than the others.

This second part of the History of Thelemic ciphers is not the last part of this series dedicated to these specific ciphers. In fact, in the next text I'll be talking about some other ciphers that are used specifically in the context of Thelema – and even though I'm not going to explore as many ciphers as I previously planned, I will give my Readers (whenever I see fit) links with all necessary informations in order to let my Readers better understand those Thelemic ciphers.

The next part of the Thelemic ciphers will be mostly dedicated to two ciphers:

– The Illuminati Novice cipher, already explored in my very first post about the History of Ciphers, and how I used it to unveil some "mysteries" in the Book of the Law;

– The Anglossic Qabbala, also known as Alphanumeric Gematria. This cipher will probably be the most "polemical" cipher that I'll talk about, and my own (still young, though absolutely feverish) experience with it has been full of strange synchronicities and "coincidences". I also knew it in a very, very strange, and rather creepy, context which I don't like – but the intriguing results that it presents in a Thelemic context are too curious to be left unnoticed and unmentioned.

Dear Reader, at this time I can do nothing but genuinely thank you for joining me in this study of the History of Thelemic ciphers. There are some upcoming surprises, and I honestly hope that this Blog of mine can be a powerful tool in your (and everyone's) hands, in order to boost our own work with Gematria.

If at any time one of my Readers wishes to get in touch with me, please feel free to use any of the contact forms that are available in this Blog – either by using the "Contact Form" at the right side of this Blog, or by making a comment on any of my posts. Just remember that all comments are public – and moderated.

My warmest regards to all my Readers,

Luís Gonçalves

"History of Ciphers" (part 4a) - The Thelemic Ciphers (I)

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Wed, 26 May 2021 11:52:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this fourth part of "History of Ciphers" we're going to explore the Thelemic ciphers, particularly the three ciphers that are known as "Kabbalah" ciphers by all those who use the "Gematrinator" calculator – which means the "ALW", "KFW" and "LCH" ciphers. The cipher that will be most explored in this presentation will be the English Qaballa ("ALW"), since that is the Thelemic cipher that, in my opinion, most deserves a deeper study.

Some of those other ciphers which will also be explained and briefly explored, are E. Joel Love's Cipher X ("KFW"), R. Leo Gillis' Trigrammaton Qabalah ("LCH", originally devised by Crowley), as well as David Cherubim's Thelemic English Qabalah (which is nowadays misnamed "Sumerian" Gematria).

The exploration of these ciphers will be divided into several topics:

– What are these ciphers, and how/why did they come to exist;

– What are the real names of these ciphers;

– Who created (or discovered) these ciphers;

– How most of these ciphers were used in the study of the Holy Books of Thelema, particularly the Book of the Law ("Liber AL vel Legis");

– And also some other ciphers used within the specific context of Thelema;

Important Note:

It is my duty to apologize to my Readers for having taken so long to finish this text. The reason for this is that there have been some changes in my personal life, and my time (and disposition) to write haven't been the same as they were before. Anyway, as this "mission" to talk about the origins and history of the ciphers is very important for me, I couldn't simply stop there. In fact, I already have some ideas for some future posts... or something more.

I have also taken the decision of dividing this 4th part of "History of Ciphers" into two parts: the first entirely dedicated to the ALW cipher (English Qaballa), and the second being dedicated to other systems of Thelemic Gematria. As such, and with no time to loose, let us then begin with this new presentation about the History of the Thelemic Ciphers.

History of Ciphers

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 4: The Thelemic Ciphers (I)

The Thelemic ciphers are a whole world apart from this Gematria practice of "decoding Reality" – and they're a whole bunch of ciphers too, because since Aleister Crowley's receiving of the Book of the Law in 1904 virtually everyone who has been involved with Thelema has, one time or another, wondered what would be the true meaning behind certain riddles in Liber AL, particularly the famous passage in AL II:76.

I sense, however, that some previous explanations are necessary about what all of this means, particularly to all those who don't know what the Book of the Law is, what "Thelema" is, or even who Aleister Crowley was. As I presume that some of my noble Readers may not know this (which is perfectly natural), that will be precisely the starting point of this presentation.

While in this presentation of the Thelemic ciphers a thorough study of the philosophical bases and principles of Thelema is not, for the time being, strictly necessary, I'm adding links to some key terms so that my Readers can use more materials to complete their own research and studies on this field.

The Great Wild Beast – Aleister Crowley

It's curious that in the previous part of this series, I mentioned several times the number 666 and some of the "mysteries" surrounding it, and now I'm talking about Aleister Crowley, who styled himself as "The Beast 666". I actually didn't plan this nor did I do that on purpose – I guess it's this natural sequence of texts about the History of Ciphers that sometimes shows interesting numerical and symbolical connections between the texts themselves. If you've read all my previous texts, you may have noticed that some things are mentioned in more than one text: albeit in different ways, or highlighting different aspects of the same things.

Aleister Crowley was truly a defiantly unconventional man – in all possible ways of interpreting these words. I could never explain if I loved him or hated him, and that same feeling remains until this day.

One of the most famous (and funny?) photographs of Aleister Crowley. The gesture he's doing with the arms is the sign of "Vir", one of the "N.O.X." signs in Crowley's Order of the A∴A∴. His closed hands with the thumbs curved up resemble two horns, while his arms and fancy hat resemble the two columns of the Temple.

Born on October 12, 1875 as Edward Alexander Crowley, "Master Therion" was a poet, magician, artist, writer, painter, libertine, social critic, mountaineer, spy, chess player, and self-proclaimed prophet. Having rejected his parents' fundamentalist Christian faith, he followed his interests in Western Esotericism. Crowley was a man of extremes – there was no middle ground for him, and in fact, it seems that Crowley only knew how to live life at its maximum, going from one obscene extreme to another obscene extreme. When he created the religious movement / occult philosophy of Thelema, he called himself "The Great Wild Beast 666", among other names and titles, and by the time of the scandal at the Abbey of Thelema there was even a newspaper that referred to Crowley as "the wickedest man in the world". In my opinion, however, Crowley was not an entirely "evil" man as some people continue to believe and preach. I mean, he was not a saint either, even though he wrote his own autohagiography. 😁 According to Martin Booth in his book A Magick Life: A Biography of Aleister Crowley, Crowley was "self-confident, brash, eccentric, egotistic, highly intelligent, arrogant, witty, wealthy, and, when it suited him, cruel". I will also add that he was a brilliant and extremely intelligent man, but ~~a lot of times~~ sometimes his Ego was bigger than himself. In fact, it seems to me that very frequently Crowley was more of an illuminated trickster, having no problem whatsoever (in fact, indulging himself) in shocking the Christian society of his time, while at the same time he was a profound thinker who left a precious legacy through his writings. Crowley has been hailed as one of the greatest occultists and magicians of the 20th century, and after having read some of his texts and noted his maturity and responsibility in this area, I cannot but fully agree with that affirmation. It is undeniable that he had an outstanding influence in the fields of Religion, Esotericism and Magic, particularly after his death, to this very day.

In the year 1904, in one of his visits to Cairo, during his honeymoon with Rose Edith Kelly, Crowley "received" a book that would be the foundational stone of his new doctrine of Thelema.

Thelema and the Book of the Law

In the days 8, 9 and 10 of April in the year 1904, precisely between midday and 1 P.M., a voice from a non-corporeal intelligence called Aiwass dictated the The Book of the Law to Aleister Crowley. This was the result of a series of involuntary trances into which Rose Edith Kelly, Crowley's wife, had entered, that urged her husband to prepare for supernatural communications.

This Book heralded the coming Aeon ("Age") of Horus through the proclaiming of the Law of Thelema: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", and also: "Love is the law, love under will". The Thelemic doctrine of the Aeons states that the history of Mankind can be divided into three Eras or Aeons, each one corresponding to a type of magical formula and/or religious expression. The Aeon of Horus, inaugurated in 1904 with Crowley as its Prophet, was to supersede the Aeon of Osiris, the Dying God, and to have as its central message and ultimate purpose the finding of one's True Will.

While the two Thelemic mottos I've shown above have been severely misunderstood on many occasions as supposedly meaning the same as "do whatever you want to do" / "all is lawful", the following explanation is given in the Book of the Law:

This Book lays down a simple of Code of Conduct.

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."

"Love is the law, love under will."

"There is no law beyond Do what thou wilt."

This means that each of us stars is to move on our true orbit, as marked out by the nature of our position, the law of our growth, the impulse of our past experiences. All events are equally lawful – and every one necessary, in the long run – for all of us, in theory; but in practice, only one act is lawful for each one of us at any given moment. Therefore Duty consists in determining to experience the right event from one moment of consciousness to another.

Each action or motion is an act of love, the uniting with one or another part of "Nuit"; each such act must be "under will"; chosen so as to fulfil and not to thwart the true nature of the being concerned.

The technical methods of achieving this are to be studied in Magick, or acquired by personal instruction from the Master Therion and his appointed assistants.

[The Book of the Law - Liber AL vel Legis, centennial edition, Red Wheel/Weiser, 2004]

A further reading that will no doubt be of great value to anyone who wishes to know what it means to find one's own "True Will" in practical terms, is Liber II – The Message of the Master Therion.

At this point, the Reader surely has noticed the importance given in Thelema to the discovery of our own "True Will". In fact, "will" is precisely the meaning of the Greek word Θέλημα (Thelema), and as shown in the mottos above, "Love" is also a fundamental part of the Thelemic formula. Also, if you have studied Thelema before, you may have noticed that most Thelemites (the name given to the followers of Thelema, according to AL I:40) tend to use "93" at the beginning of a letter or message, and "93, 93/93" at the end. In fact, this has to do with the numerical values of the words "Thelema" [Θέλημα, "Will"] and "Agape" [Αγάπη, "Love"], which both add to 93 in Greek Isopsephy:

The meaning behind the "93" and "93, 93/93" thus becomes clear:

– "93" stands for "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law";

– "93, 93/93" stands for "Love is the law, love under will".

Other numbers are of special relevance in Thelema, like 418 (the value of Abrahadabra, the Word of the Aeon), 11 (the number of letters in "Abrahadabra", and the number of words in the phrase "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law") and, of course, 666. Other numbers are also relevant in a Thelemic Gematria context, like 156, 333, 419, and 718, but for the time being it won't be necessary to delve too deeply into these mysteries.

The Numerical Structure of Liber AL

For anyone using Gematria, the Book of the Law ("Liber AL") is an absolute treasure trove. It contains many riddles, wordplays, in-jokes, and enigmatic passages that, no doubt, suggest the use of some cipher(s) and secret correspondences. I highly recommend the study of this book, as well as of Crowley's works, since I believe that the study of the Book can never be completed without the study of the Man behind it.

First of all, some words on its structure:

– The Book of the Law (full text with preliminary notes here) is composed of three chapters, each one having as "speaker" a specific deity of the Thelemic "pantheon". Those are, in order, Nuit (represented by an infinitely vast circle), Hadit (represented by the "core of every star" and the point in the center of the circle), and Ra-Hoor-Khuit (a Solar/War God, the Lord of the Aeon).

– Each chapter has a different number of verses: the first chapter has 66 verses, the second has 79, and the third has 75, making a total of 66+79+75 = 220 verses. This is the reason why another name for this book is "Liber CCXX" or "Book 220".

– Due to certain clues in the text of Liber AL, particularly AL III:47, the printed editions of this book usually come with a copy of the original manuscript of the Book of the Law. The original manuscript has 65 pages plus the title page, and this too seems to be important from a numerological point of view. The number 65 is the value of "Adonai" in Hebrew Gematria, which is another name given to the "Holy Guardian Angel" or "Higher Self", even though the definitions of H.G.A. differ widely in the occult world. The number 65 is also important since it is one of the key numbers of the Magical Square of Mars, and Mars (as well as the Sun) seems to be a valid planetary correspondence for Horus as Ra-Hoor-Khuit, the Lord of the Aeon. Adding the title page to the 65 pages of the manuscript gives the result 66, which is the 11th triangular number (i.e. 1+2+3+4+...+11 = 66), and the number 11 is of great importance in the context of Thelema. The "Word of the Aeon", Abrahadabra, has 11 letters, just like "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law" has 11 words.

Besides its numerical structure, the Book of the Law also contains many riddles that deserve to be addressed – at least part of them, as the whole set would need a whole book to properly explain it. That will be precisely the subject of this next section.

The Riddles and Prophecies of Liber AL

The Book of the Law is truly an enigmatic scripture. It contains many riddles, qaballistic puzzles and word-plays, that have been addressed (in part) by Crowley himself in his old and new Comments to Liber AL. As the Book of the Law was "received", not authored, by Crowley, it's curious to note that Crowley himself wasn't able to solve all these riddles during his lifetime. In fact, the Book of the Law seems to contain some predictions about a "Child" of the Beast who would come to unravel the mysteries of the Book of the Law:

   I:54. "Change not as much as the style of a letter; for behold! thou, o prophet, shalt not behold all these mysteries hidden therein."

   I:55. "The child of thy bowels, he shall behold them."

   I:56. "Expect him not from the East, nor from the West; for from no expected house cometh that child. Aum! All words are sacred and all prophets true; save only that they understand a little; solve the first half of the equation, leave the second unattacked. But thou hast all in the clear light, and some, though not all, in the dark."

* * *

The next one is perhaps the most famous riddle of Liber AL, having originated all types of conjectures and wild guesses – and also, the reason why most systems of Thelemic Gematria have been created. So I will talk about it more than once. 😉

II:75. "Aye! listen to the numbers & the words:"

II:76. "4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L. What meaneth this, o prophet? Thou knowest not; nor shalt thou know ever. There cometh one to follow thee: he shall expound it. But remember, o chosen one, to be me; to follow the love of Nu in the star-lit heaven; to look forth upon men, to tell them this glad word."

* * *

And this next verse is the only text from Liber AL that in one version of the manuscript is superimposed on a grid. There seems to be some sort of "disagreement" about the importance of this grid and if it was in the original manuscript or not (source here), but as it is important in this presentation, I will leave it here for my Readers. This is one of those "unforgettable" verses in the Book of the Law.

III:47. "This book shall be translated into all tongues: but always with the original in the writing of the Beast; for in the chance shape of the letters and their position to one another: in these are mysteries that no Beast shall divine. Let him not seek to try: but one cometh after him, whence I say not, who shall discover the Key of it all. Then this line drawn is a key: then this circle squared in its failure is a key also. And Abrahadabra. It shall be his child & that strangely. Let him not seek after this; for thereby alone can he fall from it."

These verses alone already give us a lot of food for thought. There are many more riddles in the Book of the Law, though. But as you can see, Liber AL seemed to prophesy that not all riddles of Liber AL would be divined by "the Beast" (Crowley), while at the same time stating that "one cometh after him", who would also be the "child of thy bowels" (i.e. Crowley's 'child'), and that it would be him "who shall discover the Key of it all".

Indeed there was such a Child, "& that strangely", who would indeed find the "Key of it all"... or at least a fundamental part of it. And that Child was Charles Stansfeld Jones, who would later become known as Frater Achad. Quite a curious, excentric fellow.

The Child of the Beast – Frater Achad

Born on April 2, 1886, Charles Stansfeld Jones, a.k.a. Frater Achad, has remained one of the most controversial personalities in the history of Thelema. While Crowley himself genuinely believed that Achad was the "Child" that was promised in Liber AL, for the reasons that I'll explain in this section, it is also true that eventually Crowley and Achad parted their ways, with Achad actually proving by his life that he wasn't prepared to assume the role that he was supposed to assume – that of the Magickal Heir of the Beast.

In my view, Frater Achad was a perfect "vehicle" for the Child prophesied in the Book of the Law, but his powerful Initiation without all necessary preparations eventually made him a slave to his own Ego and delusions of grandeur.

A well-known photo of Charles Stansfeld Jones, who also used the mottos "Frater Achad", "Parzival", "V.I.O.O.I.V.", "O.I.V.V.I.O.", etc., as a member of Crowley's A∴A∴ and of the O.T.O.

On June 21, 1916, shortly after Frater Achad became a Neophyte (the basic degree corresponding to "Malkuth" or 1=10° in the Qabalistic Tree of Life) in Crowley's "Order of the Silver Star" or A∴A∴, Achad took the Oath of the Abyss, that is, that of a Master of the Temple, literally skipping all preparatory levels from 2=9° to 7=4°, instantly reaching level 8=3° (Magister Templi).

According to Kenneth Grant in "The Magical Revival" (more info here):

    «CROWLEY's Magical Son, Frater Achad - Charles Stansfeld Jones - was the living proof that The Book of the Law issued from a praeterhuman Intelligence that used Crowley as a focus for its influence. On the other hand, Achad seems also to have been a classic example of the type of insanity that overtakes an individual who binds himself by a Magical Oath beyond his Grade. (...)

   Frater Achad took the Oath of a Master of the Temple (8º=3# A.'.A.'.) that is to say, vowed to interpret everything that occurred to him as a particular dealing of God with his soul, in Vancouver B.C., on June 21, 1916.

   When a person takes such an Oath, the psychological effect - as may be imagined - has profound consequences. The world appears in a light totally different to that in which it is seen by the ordinary individual. Every incident becomes charged with a particular significance; every and any chance event is vividly felt as bearing a direct and personal relationship to the person who experiences it; a vast and cosmic pattern begins to formulate itself in the mind so that the most trivial event appears charged with portentous meaning.»

When Achad informed Crowley that he was to attain the degree of Master of the Temple, Crowley was taken by surprise. The reason for this was that exactly 9 months before Charles Stansfeld Jones was unexpectedly "born" as "Babe of the Abyss", Crowley had conducted a series of sex-magical operations with Soror Hilarion (Jeanne Robert Foster) in order to beget a child. The woman, however, never became pregnant, and apparently the sex-magical operations never had any visible result – at least in order to conceive a physical child. It also became all the more meaningful because the motto chosen by Jones as a Neophyte of the A∴A∴ was "Achad" (אחד), which means "one" in Hebrew and sums 13 in Hebrew Gematria – thus Crowley realized that Achad could very well be the "one to follow thee", and his Magical Child that would unravel the mysteries of the Book of the Law. In fact, in the original manuscript of the Book of the Law, in verse I:55 which mentions the "child of thy bowels" who would "behold the mysteries" in Liber AL, the word "he" is underlined, meaning that somehow this word was important. Using the Ordinal cipher for the English Alphabet, we thus find that "he" sums 13, which is precisely the value of Achad ("one") in Hebrew:

At this time, Frater Achad sent Crowley a copy of his essay Liber 31 (link to PDF here), in which Achad explained an important key to the Book of the Law through the [Hebrew] words AL ("God") and LA ("Not"), both of which total 31 in Hebrew Gematria (one third of 93, the value of "Thelema"), as well as all the numerical/qabalistic hints that seemed to indicate that Frater Achad was indeed the promised Child. To these discoveries by Frater Achad, Crowley replied with a now famous message, written in a postcard:

\ = 418. "Thou knowest not." Your key opens Palace. CCXX has unfolded like a flower. All solved, even II.76 & III.47. Did you know π = 3.141593? And oh! lots more!" (sgd.) AL'AIN the Priest....666

In fact, the "Key" found by Frater Achad is the reason why the Book of the Law, which was previously called "Liber L vel Legis", was later renamed by Crowley as "Liber AL vel Legis".

Above we can see the Lamen of Frater Achad with all his main initiatic mottos and their respective numerical values (which Achad also explains in his Liber 31):

– V.I.O.O.I.V. or O.I.V.V.I.O., standing for Unus in Omnius, Omnia in Uno (or reversed). When transliterated to the Hebrew alphabet, these words sum 777 in Hebrew Gematria. It's curious, then, to note that Crowley's number as the "Beast" was 666, and the number of his "Child" Frater Achad was 777. In Thelemic Qabalah, 777 is the total sum of the Paths in the Tree of Life from Kether (the Crown) to Malkuth (the Kingdom); this is called the "Path of the Flaming Sword":

– Parzival, the "Fool" from Arthurian legends, with its value 418, matching the value of the "Word of the Aeon", Abrahadabra. "Parzival" also matches in a very interesting way with one specific verse from Liber AL, as it has 8 letters, begins with the Hebrew letter Peh which sums 80, and the total value of the word is 418 (AL I:46. "Nothing is a secret key of this law. Sixty-one the Jews call it; I call it eight, eighty, four hundred & eighteen"):

– And Achad, the name by which Charles Stansfeld Jones used more extensively during most of his life, sums 13, the value of AHBH ("Love") in Hebrew, and is the reverse of 31, the value of AL / LA, the "Key" to Liber AL. The number 31 is also one third of 93, which as we have seen earlier, is the value of both Thelema ("Will") and Agape ("Love") in Greek Isopsephy:

Achad's Liber 31 is very interesting. Even though all the details contained therein would need a longer text in order to explain all its mysteries, and all the qabalistic correspondences that it contains, I strongly recommend my Readers to study Qabalah through the works of Aleister Crowley, because somehow they truly contain many pearls of wisdom. Also, I don't want to stray too much from the main subject of the Thelemic ciphers, so that's why I'm not elaborating much on all those details.

The reason why Achad's Liber 31 was important, however, has to do precisely with the Key that Frater Achad found (the word "AL") that, in part, unraveled some riddles in the Book of the Law. In one note to Liber 31, dated October 31, 1918, Achad writes the following:

"Then I noticed another very important thing. I was wondering why A and L should be chosen, or rather why L, the 12th letter of the Hebrew alphabet should follow A, the first."

He also noted that "LAW" (from "The Book of the LAW") could represent the union of Nuit and Hadit (the 'speakers' in the first two chapters of Liber AL) in Horus in his double aspect as Ra-Hoor-Khuit and Hoor-paar-kraat, represented by a double Hebrew letter Vau (=W), which in Crowley's Thoth Tarot corresponds to the Hierophant, the "Lord initiating" (AL I:49).

By writing this, Achad was very close to finding the true "Key" to Liber AL. However, his discoveries towards a Key to decipher the Book of the Law were actually never complete, and it would be necessary to wait some decades until 1976, when James Lees unexpectedly found a "Key" to Liber AL – the English Qaballa.

The English Qaballa ("ALW")

I must be honest with my Readers at this point. I was never able to get any informations about James Lees, or Jim Lees as he was affectionately called by his friends and colleagues. Years ago, as I began studying English Qaballa, I got some pieces of information here and there, but nothing too elaborate or profound. Most of the detailed information I got about Lees and the discovery of the English Qaballa was from my friend Cath Thompson's excellent book called "All This And A Book" published in 2018 by Hadean Press. It's a wonderful story and I highly recommend this book to my Readers if you're willing to study this further.

Long story short, in 1974 Jim Lees (Brother Leo) created a magickal group known as the O∴A∴A∴ (Order of the Silver Star) with three friends who were interested in the occult. In February of 1976, Lees began a nine-month magickal retirement, and by the end of November he and his colleagues decided to work on the riddle of AL II:76. This is the well-known sequence of letters and numbers that I have referred to earlier:

4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y X 24 89 R P S T O V A L

As Jim Lees was well-versed in Hebrew Gematria, he and his friends tried to solve this riddle by experimenting with numbers and letters, and somehow, all separate calculations resulted in a wrong value for the sequence: 286. Jim Lees would notice that this was "the wrong result, but the right answer as far as AL was concerned". Lees noted that 286 was the result of 22x13, which reflected the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet as well as the importance of the Moon in Judaism. However, there was more to it, because 286 was also the result of 26x11, which in turn reflected the 26 letters of the English Alphabet as well as an association with the number 11, "which is mentioned more than once in the Book of the Law".

Jim Lees thought that if 13 showed a key to the Hebrew Alphabet, then 11 could indicate a Key to the English Alphabet. Thus, Lees counted every 11th letter of the alphabet, starting with A=1, and then found the following sequence:

According to Cath Thompson (which I have confirmed through other sources) this cipher was discovered precisely on November 26, 1976. Please note the date: it will become especially revelatory in some moments.

Now you can understand why I said that Frater Achad was very near to finding a new English Qaballa, because, like he said, just like in "AL", "L" (Lamed) is the 12th letter of the Hebrew alphabet and follows "A" (Aleph), the 1st Hebrew letter, so is the English "L" the 12th letter of the English alphabet which follows "A", the 1st English letter. And if you continue the sequence, from A to L, counting every 11th letter, the next letter in the sequence will be "W" – thus forming ALW, which not only is an anagram of LAW, but it is also very clearly alluded to in the Book of the Law!

"O Azure-Lidded Woman, bend upon them!" (AL I:19)

The are many interesting factors about this specific cipher, though, and all of them deserve to be duly explored in this presentation:

→ The time of discovery of the English Qaballa was extremely interesting. It was on November 26th that the EQ was discovered, and if you write the date as 11/26, you get a very clear reference to the 26 letters of the English Alphabet, as well as the cycle of 11 that is inherent to the cipher;

→ And it was November 1976. Writing the date as 11:76 [II:76] gives us exactly the verse of the Book of the Law where the riddle can be found.

Another of the curiosities about this sequence is that it can also be derived from the "grid" in the manuscript of Liber AL vel Legis that I have mentioned and shown before, and all the clues in the text are in fact fulfilled by this cipher. Quoting Cath Thompson from All This And a Book:

«More significant later on was the discovery that it had been encoded in the manuscript all along, on Sheet 16 of the third day’s dictated handwriting in Crowley’s notebook; the inexplicable grid on that page gives the Key when one fills in the common alphabet in columns from “A” in the top left corner. The Qaballistic Order and Value then appear on the diagonal as indicated in the text, "...then this line drawn is a key... and Abrahadabra." (AL III:47). Abrahadabra is a word of 11 letters, another pointer towards the Key.

Furthermore, the diagram itself is a map of the location of the discovery of the Key. The line drawn is in actuality a public road; the circle squared represents an area which had been named Rosy Cross by some unknown property dealer who bought the land after a successful bet on a race horse of that name, and Lees’ home where the Key was discovered is in the position of the word “whence” upon the grid.»

There's still another very curious detail in this, as the text from the Book of the Law says "... then this circle squared in its failure is a key also", and in the manuscript, the "circle squared" falls in the square corresponding to the letter "K", whose value is 9 according to the English Qaballa. The "square" of 9 is 81... and that is precisely the value of "Rosy Cross"! According to Cath Thompson, the grid was actually a map of where the Key would be discovered, and "Rosy Cross" was the name of the area corresponding to the place where the squared circle was drawn, in the manuscript of Liber AL.

If you continue the sequence of letters in the grid, from top to bottom and from left to right, you'll notice that the circle squared in its failure also intrudes into the adjacent square which is allotted to U=17. Adding the values of both letters that correspond to the squares containing the circle, K=9 and U=17, gives 26 which is the number of letters in the English Alphabet.

The English Qaballa also answers the riddle in Liber AL II:76, since the string of letters and numbers has a total value of 351 – which is equal to the sum of the values of all letters of the English Alphabet:

Some years later, Jake Stratton-Kent wrote in an article called "Cipher of AL" (which can now be found in the book Thus Spake Magnus Dictus by Hadean Press), where he showed another interesting pattern in the Book of the Law, which seems to support the English Qaballa. He noticed that in the manuscript page containing the "strange" string of letters & numbers, that string is divided into two lines, the first line having 17 letters & numbers, and the second having 11. The second line begins with an "X", suggesting multiplication, and multiplying 17 x 11 gives 187, which is the value of "ENGLISH ALPHABET" in English Qaballa. Not only that, but the words "in its failure" (referring to the squared circle) in the grid of the manuscript, also share the exact same value:

4 6 3 8 A B K 2 4 A L G M O R 3 Y = 17 numbers & letters

X 24 89 R P S T O V A L = 11 numbers & letters

Jake Stratton-Kent also noticed another thing which is very, very interesting. In AL II:55 there is a clear instruction to obtain the "order & value" of the English Alphabet. Quoting JSK from The Serpent Tongue: Liber 187:

    «(...) Which brings me to Chapter II verse 55, another key verse of Liber AL in which that phrase occurs:
   'Thou shalt obtain the Order & Value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto.'
   This is a strange verse containing ambiguity and apparent faults in grammar. What is meant by 'them'? 'English Alphabet' is a single whole; the text does not say 'the letters of the English Alphabet' (or does it?). So 'them' must refer to the 'Order & Value'.
   This is interesting as a Qaballistic 'in-joke', because the phrase ORDER & VALUE = 117 = LETTERS; so in fact the sentence can be read: 'Thou shalt obtain the <letters> of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto'.»

The English Qaballa also answers many other riddles in the Book of the Law. In the first chapter, verses 22–24, we can read the following:

   I:22. Now, therefore, I am known to ye by my name Nuit, and to him by a secret name which I will give him when at last he knoweth me. Since I am Infinite Space, and the Infinite Stars thereof, do ye also thus. Bind nothing! Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & any other thing; for thereby there cometh hurt.

   I:23. "But whoso availeth in this, let him be the chief of all!"

   I:24. "I am Nuit, and my word is six and fifty."

   I:25. "Divide, add, multiply, and understand."

Notice how Nuit says that she has a "secret name", and how the capitals in the same verse form the name "Isis" (the wife of Osiris in Egyptian Mythology). Notice too how the value of "Isis" is 56, and if we divide and multiply the value of "Nuit", we have 56 too (7 x 8 = 56).

In the first part of this text I talked about the significance of the number 93 and its connection with Thelema ("Will") and Agape ("Love"), which both add to 93 in Greek Isopsephy. I also explained how the sentence "Love is the law, love under will" is usually abbreviated to "93, 93/93", standing for the words "Love", "love" and "will". The English Qaballa also throws a different light into this equivalence, since its total value is 279, or 3 x 93:

Applying the English Qaballa to the Book of the Law will also show many other interesting patterns and curious correspondences, and in fact the continuous work and research of some people with this specific cipher has led to the development of a whole new esoteric structured system, with its own rules and principles. The books of the previously mentioned authors Cath Thompson and Jake Stratton-Kent are the proof that there seems to be something more to this system than mere "coincidence".

In this next section, we will now turn to some of the techniques used with English Qaballa, which – remember – are always used in the context of Thelema, specifically of the study of the Holy Books of Thelema.

The Techniques of English Qaballa

My main source for this section is a short text titled "The English Qaballa" by Frater Alav from QBLH, and it can be read online here.

1. Gematria:

This is the method that we all know. It basically consists in comparing words or phrases sharing the same value. For example, "Love" sums 44 in English Qaballa,and this is the same value of "Aum Ha", the last words of Liber AL. 44 is also the value of "Solar Hawk" and "Hawk Lord", a very direct reference to Horus as Lord of the New Aeon. And finally, 44 is also the value of "EQ", obviously standing for "English Qaballa":

2. Notarikon:

This technique derives acronyms from phrases, and it can be further expanded by noting (a) the first letters in the sentence, or (b) the last letters in the sentence, which would represent its form of manifestation. The example that Frater Alav gives in his text is the sentence "Love is the law, love under will":

– "LITLLUW" = 73 = "Power"; From where? "ESEWERL" = 97 = "Warrior Lord"

Another example of the Notarikon technique can be seen in the above mentioned verse of Liber AL, where Nuit is equated with the "Infinite Space & Infinite Stars", thus giving us the word I.S.I.S. (Isis), whose value is 56 ("I am Nuit and my word is six and fifty").

3. Mystic Numbers:

This is related to what we usually know as the "Triangular Numbers". For example, the Mystic Number of Seven, which in the qabalistic Tree of Life represents Venus (Netzach), is 1+2+3+4+5+6+7 = 28. In English Qaballa that is the value of "Holy" and "Ankh" – an Egyptian hieroglyph that resembles the astrological symbol of Venus. ♀

4. Anagrams:

The name says it all. In the Holy Books of Thelema we can find many words that are anagrams of others; for example "hours" = 45 = "Horus", or "arms" = 39 = "Mars".

5. Counting Well:

As far as I know, this is a completely original technique originated with English Qaballa. It's based on verse III:19 of Liber AL ("count well its name, & it shall be to you as 718").

This technique is used to "count well" the value of two words. The way to proceed in this technique is first to multiply the value of one word by the number of letters of a second word; then do the same with the second word (i.e. its value multiplied by the number of letters of the first word); and finally add both results. The conventional notation for this technique is the sign "%". Here's a pratical example:

– LOVE (2+7+10+25) = 44

– LAW (2+1+3) = 6

Value of "LOVE" (44) x Letters of "LAW" (3) = 132

Value of "LAW" (6) x Letters of "LOVE" (4) = 24

Adding both values, 132+24 = 156, the value of BABALON in Hebrew Gematria.

Which means: LOVE % LAW = 156

Other examples:

– AZURE % LIDDED = 718

– AUM % HA = 93

– SUN % MIDNIGHT = 666

– ABRA % HADABRA = 418 (precisely the value of "Abrahadabra" in Hebrew Gematria)

6. Reward (Number Reversal):

This technique is based on the first verse of the third chapter of the Book of the Law:

AL III:1. "Abrahadabra; the reward of Ra Hoor Khut"

Calculating the values of both "Abrahadabra" and "Ra Hoor Khut", we reach the conclusion that one is the reversal of the other, so in English Qaballa the "Reward" of a number is the same number reversed.

Now I want to show you how these techniques work in practice, by giving you a very concrete example.

In the examples given for the Anagrams, the number 45 (=Horus) is of special interest in light of a verse in the Book of the Law:

AL II:23. "I am alone; there is no god where I am."

Also note that this verse is in the second chapter, whose 'speaker' is Hadit, the infinitesimal point in the center of the circle which is Nuit. Note too that the verse begins with the words "I am alone" (note AL-ONE):

Now, the "Reward" of 94 is 49, which is the value of:

English Qaballa? ALW Cipher? NAEQ?

In this part of the History of Ciphers, I have chosen to refrain from using others names that are usually given to this cipher. Among those, the most prominent ones are "ALW Cipher" and "NAEQ" (standing for New Aeon English Qabalah) – and recently, since it was added to the "Gematrinator" calculator, it has also been called, though rather strangely, "ALW Kabbalah" (?!?!).

None of these names is the original name of English Qaballa. I don't know much about the uses of the others names, but as far as I can tell, the name "NAEQ" was coined by Gerald Del Campo, and "ALW Cipher" was coined by Allen H. Greenfield, who used this cipher in his "study" of UFOlogy and other "strange" stuff – while leaving behind the pure Thelemic context where this cipher was found and first used.

I like using the name "English Qaballa" for at least two reasons:

1– It was the original name of this system;

2– It contains Frater Achad's dual key AL-LA in the word "QabALLA", thus functioning as a kind of homage to Achad's work that later led to the discovery of English Qaballa.

My Reader should also know that while "NAEQ"/"ALW" is usually seen as simply a system of Gematria, the "niche within a niche" that uses English Qaballa views it as a complete Qaballistic system, that is, a complete Qaballa. If my Reader happens to read any of the books by Cath Thompson and/or Jake Stratton-Kent on the EQ, you will understand what I want to convey through this (see for example JSK's "Tree of Hadit" and "Tree of Manifestation", in The Serpent Tongue: Liber 187).

Some Final Remarks on the English Qaballa

There are many other techniques used in English Qaballa, and not all of them are only related to Gematria, anagrams, "counting well", or finding the "reward" of any given number. In fact, English Qaballa has evolved into a valid Initiation method which is totally consistent with the doctrine of Thelema – even though I must say that, generally speaking, English Qaballa (or any other system of English Gematria) isn't taken too seriously in Thelemic circles. It seems, as a friend once told me, to be "a niche within a niche".

The reason for this is easy to grasp once you understand that since Crowley received the Book of the Law in 1904, many people that became interested in studying the riddles in Liber AL also tried to find their own solutions to it, particularly to the strange string of numbers & letters in AL II:76, as well as to the meaning of the "grid" of AL III:47.

Since computers appeared, there have been many experimental systems of English Gematria showing up from every side of the globe, all of those supposed to be the "Key of it All" and to (finally) answer all the mysteries of the Book of the Law.

   At this time of writing, I can count at least twelve or thirteen ciphers that were created specifically to answer the riddles in Liber AL, while some other ciphers used with the same purpose are also known by other more familiar names, like for example:

    – Aleisterion's "AQBL" or AngloQabalistic Key [PDF] (actually English Ordinal);

    – David Cherubim's Thelemic English Qabalah [archived] (actually the so-called "English Sumerian" cipher, or English Ordinal x6);

    – AREXZ 1496's English Qabalah (actually English Extended).

With such an enormous (and ever-expanding) amount of ciphers used to decipher the Book of the Law and the Holy Books of Thelema, it is comprehensible that some people won't take any of these systems seriously. In fact, there are forums about Thelema where you can be BANNED if you mention ANY type of English Gematria. The usual reaction will be "Another one?!?!"

It is my opinion, however, that the English Qaballa is a pretty strong candidate for a promised "Key of it All" (in Thelemic terms), given that it answers quite ellegantly to many mysteries and riddles in the Book of the Law, particularly AL II:76 and AL III:47. Also, the fascinating history behind it and the astounding "coincidences" that were present in its discovery are, for me, more than noteworthy.

In the Next Part of "Thelemic Ciphers"...

I will be talking about some lesser known systems of English Gematria that are specifically used in the context of Thelema, which will ~~possibly~~ include:

– E. Joel Love's almost unknown or ill-understood Cipher X ("KFW"); what it is and how Joel Love devised it, and also some of my own findings while studying it;

– The Trigrammaton Qabalah ("LCH"), who created it, who made it more widely known, and some of its uses;

– David Cherubim's Thelemic English Qabalah, and how it creates four extra paths in the Tree of Life, in order to accommodate the 26 letters of the English Alphabet;

– Gerald Suster's Key C=7, as well as George T. Mortimer's Key D=7, and the resulting Key C+D;

– The Anglossic Qabbala and some of its peculiarities;

– Some lesser known systems of Thelemic Gematria (brief mention);

– ~~Shameless self-promotion:~~ My own "adventure" in using the Illuminati Novice cipher to decode the Book of the Law.

I ask my Readers to remember that I don't know as much about these other systems as I know about English Qaballa (ALW), so in fact that was one of the reasons why I decided to divide this part of "History of Ciphers" into two segments – one entirely dedicated to EQ (in my view the most important), which is already BIG, and the other dedicated to all the other systems.

Dear Reader, if you liked what you've read so far and want to read more, I can only thank you for having joined me in this adventure in knowing the History of the Ciphers, and to keep reading my articles until this point. This Blog – and my Work – wouldn't make any sense if there wasn't any "you" there reading them. In fact, it is because of YOU that I am writing this. So... Thank YOU once again. 😊

My best regards to You,

Luís Gonçalves

"History of Ciphers" (part 3) - The Latin ciphers

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 23:02:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this third part of "History of Ciphers", I will be talking about some well-known systems of Latin Gematria, in particular:

– The so-called "Jewish" (actually Agrippa) cipher and its true origins;

– The first time I saw this cipher and its specific use in an oracular (divinatory) context;

– The Latin cipher used by Beatus de Liébana, a Spanish monk and theologian who lived during the 8th century A.D.;

– An example of the use of Beatus' Latin cipher in his "Commentaria in Apocalypsin" (Commentary on the Apocalypse), particularly in his list of the "Names of the Antichrist";

– Some brief considerations on how these two ciphers (Agrippa & Beatus) reflect different stages of evolution of the Latin alphabet;

– The cipher known as English Extended (the reason for this cipher being included here will become obvious by then);

– The Latin Ordinal and Reduction ciphers;

– Other known Latin ciphers;

As in the other parts of this series, I will also provide some examples of uses and personal explorations of these ciphers, as I believe that by showing our work, others can have new (or different) ideas and try to explore different areas, or even different approaches.

This being the case, let us begin this study of the Latin ciphers.

History of Ciphers

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 3: The Latin Ciphers

We'll begin by mentioning the so-called "Jewish" cipher. This cipher is presented in the following way in Derek Tikkuri's Gematrinator:

As was the case with the "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis" ciphers that were briefly dealt with in the previous post, there are some problems with this cipher, namely the fact that this is not a "Jewish" cipher, and that the ampersand (&) is wrongly attributed the value 800. However, contrary to what most people who've had doubts about this cipher would think, this "strange" sequence of letters does in fact have an internal consistency and logic, and that too will hopefully be explained with all detail in this text.

In order to explain that, however, it is necessary to tell you some of my story with this peculiar cipher.

A Cipher and an Oracle – The "Hand of Fatima"

I first knew the "Jewish" Latin cipher, albeit in a different form and not knowing "what" it was, in 1994, in a book which I still own called "A Magia dos Números" (in Italian, "Magia dei Numeri", or "Magic of the Numbers") by Jorg Sabellicus, a pseudonym of Sebastiano Fusco. This was the first contact I had with Numerology, and it was a really good one. This book wasn't as elaborate as most modern books about Numerology but it had all the essentials, and its highly curious descriptions of the symbolical and occult nature of numbers are absolutely fascinating. Besides, its appendix contained a number of numerical oracles that seemed to be some centuries old, and that I never, ever, was able to trace to older sources. Well, at least not until some time ago. I don't doubt that the sources of all these oracles exist, however, and in fact I was able to trace one of the numerical ciphers in these oracles to a book that was first published in the early/mid 16th century.

Of these oracles, the only one that will be of interest in the context of the Latin ciphers is the one called the "Hand of Fatima". Even though I didn't know of any available information in English about this oracle, in these last few days I was able to find one; so the earliest English reference to this oracle that I know of at this time of writing is The Encyclopedia of Occult Sciences, published in 1939 by Robert M. McBride and Company (pages 417-419).

The historical informations about how this oracle came to existence are contradictory at best. The book I have from Jorg Sabellicus tells that it was an originally Arab oracle and that the numerical correspondences for the Arabic letters were adapted to the Latin alphabet by Count Cagliostro. The Encyclopedia I indicated before tells, instead, that Count Cagliostro "found" this oracle in an old manuscript in the Castle of Saint Leon. Be that as it may, the most important factor in this oracle which ultimately allowed me to discover its true origin, is its table with the values of the letters of the alphabet – shown in the shape of a Hamsa, a well-known palm-shaped amulet that is believed to symbolize good luck, and to protect against the evil eye:

You may notice the similarities between the cipher here being reproduced and the "Jewish" cipher we talked about earlier. At this time I'll ask you not to focus on the differences between them, as that will be treated later in this text. Instead, I ask you to read carefully the following description of the oracle and, above all, to either use it wisely or don't use it at all. You'll understand why I'm saying this.

The functioning of this oracle is rather simple. In order to find a person's life, character, abilities or destiny, we add the values of the letters contained in the (full / birth) name of this person. That will be that person's individual number. Then the interpretation is done by first analyzing the hundreds, the tens and then the units. The thousands are usually discarded except 1000, which means "Ambition", and some combined numbers like 24, 313 or 1260, are also interpreted. In Sabellicus' book the example given is the name of John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

A page from my old copy of Jorg Sabellicus' book, already with loose pages and lacking the cover.

Going through the table of meanings of the numbers and analyzing this specific number, we can thus extract the following path or destiny connected to the name "John Fitzgerald Kennedy". Be aware that this is not a copy of the meanings as shown in the link I just gave you, but instead my translation of the meanings as found in Sabellicus' book. There are differences between them:

1000 = "Ambition";

900 = "Brave soldier, cross, decoration";

34 = "Suffering, woe, sacrifice";

30 = "Marriage, fame";

4 = "Courage, liberality, power".

I was so amazed with this interpretation of JFK's name that I immediately tried with other names. The first one I picked was "Titanic", since by that time I had just learned about the events leading to the well-known disaster:

Using the table of meanings:

200 = "Irresolution";

60 = "Widowhood";

2 = "Destruction, death, catastrophe".

WHOA! When I saw this I didn't even have words to describe what I was feeling. After that I tried another name that is not indifferent to any of us – "Adolf Hitler":

I was immediately intrigued by the presence of this "curious" number, 222. So I decided that I should read the interpretations for all three numbers. The total of the name is 303:

300 = "Burning faith, philosophy";

3 = "Mysticism, meditation, platonic love".

The first name, "ADOLF", sums 81:

81 = "Inclination towards the fine arts, intellectual culture";

80 = "Disease, healing, long existence";

1 = "Passionate character, ambition, zeal".

And the final name, "HITLER", sums 222:

200 = "Irresolution";

22 = "Invention, prudence, mystery";

20 = "Sorrow, severity, austerity";

2 = "Destruction, death, catastrophe".

Obviously, after all of this I HAD to try other names. My own name, the name of my father, my mother, my brother, the pretty girl next door... well, every single full name I was able to grab. This turned out to have a good side, and a really bad side to it. The good aspect is that this was the first system of Latin gematria I had contact with. I was studying the Hebrew Qabalah and some numerical patterns in the Greek New Testament, and this book showed me that there was also a system for the Latin alphabet, so I used it a lot and made a lot of calculations and discoveries with it.

The really bad aspect of all this is that you can become fascinated with these apparently "prophetic matches", as it were, and become an easy victim of the false doctrine that the future of a person can be "guessed" through her name alone; and, even worse, if you happen to belong to the "unlucky ones" whose individual number ends in "2", you will be constantly worried that some accident or catastrophe might happen in your life. Please DON'T do that. Use your tools wisely, don't become their victim; and keep focused on your work but always without attachment. Probabilistically speaking, 1 person in each 9 has an individual number ending in "2", and it is quite improbable that their lives will all be connected to some type of disaster or catastrophe. Or it may happen the opposite. This oracle may show you how brilliant your "destiny" would be, and you may expect very positive things that will never happen. You have to be extremely cautious about this. So if you want to use this oracle, you are free to use it the way you want. But my advice is to always use it with caution, moderation and responsibility, and to never fall prey to the belief that this oracle allows for "future prediction" and is always right. I've been there and I've done that, so I know what I'm talking about. The only such oracle we have is in our brain, but we still don't know how to use it.

* * *

Getting back to the cipher as shown in this oracle, it's notorious its similarity with the "Jewish" cipher; however, there are still certain differences between them. The "Jewish" cipher contains &=800 and W=900, while the "Hand of Fatima" cipher contains "Hi"=800 and "Hu"=900. I'm calling it the "Hand of Fatima cipher" because that was essentially my only source for a system of Latin Gematria that I knew for a lot of years... until one day, during my researches into the occult arts, I came to see this cipher again, where these strange combinations of letters ("Hi" and "Hu") were duly explained. It was in Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, first published in 1533 AD.

Agrippa's Latin cipher

In his Second Book "Of Occult Philosophy", in the chapter 20 called "What numbers are attributed to letters; and of divining by the same", Agrippa presents the following system of Latin Gematria:

Agrippa explains:

"(...) But those numbers which are deputed to each letter, we have above showed, in the Greek, and Hebrew letters, the alphabet being divided into three classes, whereof the first is of unities, the second of tens, the third of hundreds. And seeing in the Roman alphabet there are wanting four to make up the number of twenty-seven characters, their places are supplied with «J», and «V», simple consonants, as in the names of «John», and «Valentine», and «hi» and «hu», aspirate consonants, as in «Hierom», and «Huilhelme», although the Germans for «hu» the aspirate use a double vv; the true Italians, and French in their vulgar speech put «G» joined with «U» instead thereof, writing thus, «Vuilhelmus», and «Guilhelmus»"

In other words, as the (Classical) Latin alphabet only had 23 letters, there were needed 4 extra letters in order to fill the three orders of numbers: 9 units, 9 tens, and 9 hundreds, just like it happens with the Hebrew and Greek alphabets. In fact, the Classical Latin alphabet looked like this:

A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T V X Y Z

In the Latin alphabet you should remember that both "I" and "J" were considered the same letter, as well as "U" and "V" – that's why in Latin we can write either Ianuarius or Januarius for "January", and both Lux or LVX for "Light". So basically, what Agrippa did was to take the order of the letters in the Classical Latin alphabet, from A to Z, and give them the values 1 through 500 (units first, then tens, then hundreds). After that sequence he added the "extra letters" in the Latin alphabet – first the letter "J" (the consonant that corresponds to the vowel "I"), then the letter "V" (the consonant that corresponds to the vowel "U"), and finally two aspirate sounds that correspond to these two letters: "Hi" and "Hu". Agrippa also adds that the for the aspirate sound "Hu" the Germans use the letter "W", so in the modern alphabet we can safely exchange "Hu" for "W" – just like it happens in the so-called "Jewish" cipher.

The aspirate "Hi" sound, corresponding to the number 800, was used in some specific Latin names, like "Hierosolyma" (Jerusalem) and "Hieronymus" (Jeronymo), but as that combination of letters does not make much sense in most of the modern languages, that value and combination of letters can be safely discarded. That's why in the MasonCode webpage, Agrippa's Latin cipher is depicted in the following way:

The author(s) of this brilliant webpage also left the following explanation:

"The Latin based code appears a bit irregular when presented in this way. The reason for this is that it is based on the 23 letter Latin alphabet. The additional letters ‘J’, ‘V’, ‘Hi’ and ‘W’ (‘Hu’) were recognised as representative of separate sounds and used to increase the alphabet to 27 letters – and three tiers of nine digits."

Now that we understand the real logic behind this cipher (first the Classical Latin 23-letter alphabet, then the extra 4 letters), it now becomes clear how absurd it is to use an ampersand (&) in place of "Hi" in the so-called "Jewish" (actually Agrippa's) cipher:

On a second thought... I can almost imagine how this strange "Jewish" equivalence came to be. What it seems to me is that whoever had the idea of adding this "Jewish" cipher to the Gematrinator took this interpretation quite literally, since after the Latin alphabet they literally added "J V & W"!!! 👀

... which makes sense! LOL! In fact, I even thought about baptizing this cipher the "Jv&wish" cipher, instead of "Jewish"... 😂 I'm sorry, this is so funny that I couldn't resist!

In terms of our modern alphabet, this is a much better way of presenting this cipher:

Note that the place corresponding to "Hi" in this case is void, as it should be, since it corresponds to a combination of letters that only makes sense specifically in the Latin language. However, even in Latin this combination was frequently interchangeable with a simple "J" or "I", so one could either write "Hierosolyma" or "Jerosolyma" (Jerusalem), and both forms would be equally valid.

If, for example, we're calculating the value of the English word "high", we will obviously NOT going to use "Hi"=800, but instead H=8 plus I=9, since it doesn't make sense to analyze an English word using Latin rules of orthography. So that is the reason why the place corresponding to 800 is kept void.

Some examples of the use of Agrippa's cipher

Very recently, when I bought a fresh new copy of Sabellicus' book containing the oracle of the Hand of Fatima, I also discovered something... peculiar. It's nothing extraordinarily interesting, but during all these years that I had this book, I had never, ever, calculated the numerical value of the pseudonym chosen by this author. Also, I never knew the origin of it, and it was in this new copy that I found that the name "Jorg Sabellicus" was in fact inspired on Georgius Sabellicus, a charlatan and a self-proclaimed wizard from the 16th century who styled himself as Faustus Junior and "prince of necromancers". Some people believe that the historical Georgius Sabellicus was the model for the well-known tragical history of Johann Georg Faust, who "sold his soul to the devil".

How curious it is, then, that Sabellicus' name adds to 888 (a thrice repeated number like 666), and his title "Faustus Junior" adds to 1666! The author's pseudonym, "Jorg Sabellicus", also seems to have some connection with the name "Georgius Sabellicus", since if we divide its total sum into two parts and add them, the final result is 11 + 77 = 88.

This number, 1177, also corresponds to Janus Pater, a title of the Roman god of doors, passages, and beginnings, which gave its name to our month of "January" – and which in Stregheria (Italian Traditional Witchcraft) is associated with Dianus, the Horned God who is the male consort of Diana, the goddess of the Moon and of hunting. Remember that Sebastiano Fusco, or "Jorg Sabellicus", is Italian, and he has written about Witchcraft (although not specifically about Stregheria, as far as I know):

Speaking of Faust and the Devil, it's curious to note that in Agrippa's Latin cipher, two of the Latin names of the Christian Devil share exactly the same value:

A similar thing happens with the name "Jesus" and the Latin word "Veritas" meaning "Truth":

Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which means "house of bread", which of course is made from cereals. Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture, fertility and grain crops, is the origin of the word "cereal":

And speaking about Jesus... It is widely known that one of the mottos (or the main motto) of the Society of Jesus – the Jesuits – is "Ad Maiorem Dei Gloriam". In researching about the possible origins of this motto, I came to read the article about the Society of Jesus in the Latin Wikipedia (Vicipædia) and I found something that is NOT found in the English Wikipedia... or, in fact, in most English webpages about the Society of Jesus across the Internet. This is what the Latin Wikipedia says at a certain point:

This can be very loosely translated as: «The motto of the Society is "(Everything) For the greater glory of God" whose letters can be written as AMDG or OAMDG». As I tend to prefer the Latin ciphers when I'm analysing Latin texts (for obvious reasons), I immediately calculated the value of this complete sentence:

This, if course, can be just a coincidence. However, it is strange that this motto is much less known that the more usual "Ad maiorem Dei gloriam", to the point of being largely ignored in most cases – while it has such an interesting numerical correspondence in this Latin cipher.

* * *

To conclude this part about the cipher of Agrippa, I should explain to my Readers that even though this was the first system of Latin Gematria that I knew, I wasn't always completely satisfied with it. In fact, the strange order of having first the 23-letter Classical Latin alphabet and then the extra letters didn't seem completely "right". So what I did was to study the evolution of the Latin alphabet and then try to devise a more "logical" system of Latin Gematria. And after I finally devised it, I was amazed when I found that it already existed, even though it was called by a strange name. "Beatus of Liébana" was it called... and it became my absolute favorite system of Latin Gematria.

The Latin cipher of Beatus de Liébana

First of all, who was Beatus de Liébana? Saint Beatus was Spanish monk, theologian and geographer who lived in what is now the modern region of Asturias (Northern Spain) during the 8th century A.D., and is best known by his "Commentaries on the Apocalypse" (Commentaria in Apocalypsin). You can read more about some of the fascinating manuscript copies of this book here and here. I first read his name in John Opsopaus' Isopsephia Calculator, as well as in his Alphabet Charts. In these pages, the letters of the Latin alphabet are given the following values:

If my Reader has understood the logic behind the Agrippa cipher, this table will look much more reasonable, as it is clear that in the "Beatus" cipher the extra Latin letters (J V and W) are treated as equal to the letters from which they came. Thus:

– "J" came from "I", so both have the same value = 9;

– "U" and "V" were originally the same letter, so both = 200;

– "W" was also derived from the letter U/V, so it is given the same value as U/V.

Beatus' "Commentaries on the Apocalypse" contains a very interesting section about the "Names of the Antichrist", and that section contains a clear example of the use of Beatus' Latin cipher.

One of the "Tables of the Antichrist", in one of the manuscript copies of Beatus de Liébana's "Commentaries on the Apocalypse". Click to enlarge.

On the section about Revelation 13:18, where the "Mark of the Beast" and the "number of its name" are mentioned, Beatus de Liébana writes the following:

    «This is he who is named with seven names, for the seven heads that are the seven kingdoms subjected to him; and he will have an eighth name, which we have said above is ACXYME, the name in which will be made the mark on the hand and on the forehead. And by your charity, let us explain these seven names.

   One is EVANTAS — that is what is called “serpent” in Latin, for the one who deceived Eve first.

   He has the second name DAMNATUS, for the one who brought in great damage to the world.

   He has the third name ANTEMUS — that is, abstemious to strong drink — that is, wine — as if abstaining from wine.

   He has the fourth name GENSERICUS, from the Gothic tongue. [Gaeseric who invaded Africa.]

   He has the fifth name ANTICHRISTUS in all tongues.

   He has the sixth name TEITAN, from Greek.

   He has the seventh name DICLUX [DIC LUX = “say light”], from Latin, by which name we understand the Antichrist is expressed through an antiphrasis [using a word to mean something opposite to its usual meaning]; presuming to call himself “light,” he “transfigures himself into an angel of light” (2 Cor. 11:14) — he who will be deprived and cut off from supernal light.»

(Source: Beatus of Liebana's Bloggentary)

All of these names can be decoded through three different systems in order to arrive at the number 666. Six of these names are decoded with Greek Isopsephia:

One name is decoded with Roman numeration ("Dic Lux" = DCLXVI = 666):

And finally, the remaining name is to be decoded with Beatus' Latin cipher:

You will notice that in this last example, the Beatus cipher delivers exactly the same value as the Agrippa cipher, as these two ciphers are exactly equal except in the case of the letters "J", "V" and "W". So only in the case that a word or name contains any of these letters is it justified to use both ciphers and check the numbers they give, as they will invariably deliver different results.

You will also notice that in this case, Saint Beatus had to use a different orthography for "Antichristus" (Latin for "Antichrist") as the usual word would not deliver the specific number 666. However, there is more to this than meets the eye, and it was only some few days ago, while I was writing this text, that I found something extremely interesting about this. It seems that sometimes things happen for a reason, and it is only when we need answers that they come to us. That's exactly what happened this time.

This makes part of a "larger picture" which I will unveil later in this text. In order to do that, however, it is necessary that I talk first about the Latin Ordinal and Reduction ciphers, so that's exactly what I'm going to do now.

The Latin Ordinal and Reduction ciphers

In my work with the Latin ciphers I came to understand that, just like these "Extended" (i.e. with units, tens and hundreds) ciphers were used for the Latin alphabet, so there were its corresponding Ordinal and Reduction ciphers. I like to imagine the connections between these ciphers as a kind of "fractal construct", where the smallest part reflects the All, so I *do* use the Extended, Ordinal and sometimes the Reduction Latin ciphers. As I said in previous posts, however, my use of Reduction ciphers is very, VERY limited, as the small range of its numbers (from 1 to 9 only) allows for easy "matches", probabilistically speaking, even if there isn't any real match between words or names.

These are the Ordinal and Reduction ciphers corresponding to the Agrippa Key:

And these are the Ordinal and Reduction ciphers corresponding to the Beatus cipher:

(Congratulations to Saun Virroco for his amazing work on his fresh new GEMATRO – Gematria Calculator. My work would never be possible without the tools you gave us.)

I know at least two historical examples of the use of two of these ciphers: Agrippa Reduction and Beatus Ordinal. The first example of the use of Agrippa Reduction comes from the book "The Kabala of Numbers" by Sepharial (Walter Gorn Old), published in 1920, where he mentions a "Pythagorean" system that looks exactly like Agrippa Reduction. This is the way that it appears in the PDF I have of this book (link here):

There are two things that must be said about this table. The first thing is that this table contains a very clear error, since two lines are repeated – I just can't tell if it looks like this in the original book, as I don't have the original (only a modern PDF copy). A more correct rendition of this table, based on the explanations contained in Agrippa's "Three Books of Occult Philosophy", would be this:

It's clear that this table is a reduced table of the Agrippa cipher, as the two combinations of letters "Hi" and "Hu" can easily demonstrate. And the second thing that I should mention about this table is the fact of it being called "Pythagorean" by Sepharial. Any student of Numerology will notice that this table is very different from the "Pythagorean" table that is nowadays applied to the modern English alphabet. The reason for this is simple to grasp, once you understand that the Alphabet we all know didn't always have the same shape or number of letters. And so it becomes apparent that a "Pythagorean" table of correspondences between letters and numbers is merely a Reduction table that can be used either for the Classical and/or Medieval Latin alphabet (as is the case of Sepharial's table) or for the modern English alphabet (as is the case in the more widely known modern "Pythagorean" table). Hopefully this will help you, my dear Reader, to dispel some myths and fantasies surrounding modern "Pythagorean" Numerology.

* * *

The second historical use of these ciphers that I know of is what we currently call the "Beatus Ordinal" cipher. This cipher was in fact older than Saint Beatus de Liébana, and it was used and explained by the Venerable Bede (also called in Latin Beda Venerabilis) in his book "De Temporum Ratione" ("The Reckoning of Time"). Bede, or Beda, was an English Benedictine monk who lived in the 7th/8th centuries A.D., and his name is referred to in John Opsopaus' online Thesis Calculator in conjunction with the cipher bearing the same name – which, as I've said before, is technically equal to "Beatus Ordinal". The Venerable Beda's cipher is so interesting that it deserves its own dedicated section.

"Beatus Ordinal" and the cipher of Beda Venerabilis

In his book "The Reckoning of Time" (read about it here), Saint Bede wrote the following:

«There is also a second type of computation worked on the joints of the fingers which, since it pertains to the reckoning of Easter, will be more conveniently explained when we have arrived at that point. From the kind of computation I have just described, one can represent a sort of manual language, whether for the sake of exercising one’s wits, or as a game. By this means one can, by forming one letter at a time, transmit the words contained by those letters to another person who knows this procedure, so that he can read and understand them even at a distance. Thus one may either signify necessary information by secret intimation, or else fool the uninitiated as if by magic. The method of this game or language is as follows. When you wish to show the first letter of the alphabet, hold up ‘‘one’’ with your hand; for the second, ‘‘two’’; for the third, ‘‘three’’ and so on in that order. For example, if you wish to warn a friend who is among traitors to act cautiously, show with your fingers 3, 1, 20, 19, 5 and 1, 7, 5; in this order, the letters signify caute age [‘‘act cautiously’’]. It can be written down in this manner, if greater secrecy is demanded.»

In other words, what Beda is explaining is a substitution cipher that can be used to deliver messages in two ways: either by making with the hands certain gestures that correspond to numerical values (and thus convey the corresponding letters of the alphabet), or else by writing down the values of the letters "if greater secrecy is demanded". As by the time that the Venerable Bede lived there were no "J", "V" or "W", we can thus conclude that these values match with those present in the Beatus cipher. But which hand signs were these? In the same book there are some graphical representations of these gestures, of which a modern depiction can be seen here:

(click to enlarge)

And here's an original depiction, as found in one of the manuscript copies of this book:

To be honest with you, dear Reader... I can't even make some of these hand gestures, so I guess it will be improbable that someday you'll see me transmitting some secret message by making these hand gestures! LOL. However, this "gesture" cipher is of great historical value, while it could also be used to decode some "strange" hand signs that can be seen everyday, everywhere (in the case that those represent a willingful use of this, or another similar, cipher) so that's why I'm presenting it to you. The more we know about these ciphers, the easier it will be for us to "decode" the reality surrounding us.

Now that I've presented this cipher to you, it's time for us to return to the Beatus cipher... and a "riddle of the Antichrist".

The Antichrist, the Number of the Beast, and the Evening Star

From the section of this text about the Latin cipher of Beatus de Liébana, you'll remember that I wrote the following:

«You will also notice that in this case, Saint Beatus had to use a different orthography for "Antichristus" (Latin for "Antichrist") as the usual word would not deliver the specific number 666. However, there is more to this than meets the eye, and it was only some few days ago, while I was writing this text, that I found something extremely interesting about this. It seems that sometimes things happen for a reason, and it is only when we need answers that they come to us. That's exactly what happened this time.»

In fact this was something that really intrigued me for some time... until very recently. To be honest, I thought it was like "cheating", using a different (and grammatically incorrect) orthography for the word "Antichristus" ("Antichrist" in Latin) in order to achieve the desired number: 666. However, what I found recently showed me that the word "Antichristus" is also connected to the number 666 in a very specific and curious way.

During my studies of these Latin ciphers, I noticed a curious correspondence between the Latin words "Antichristus" (Antichrist) and "Vesperus" (Evening Star):

"Vesperus" is a valid alternative to "Vesper" meaning the same thing: Venus as Evening Star. I thought this was extremely curious from a symbolical point of view, since in the Bible, more specifically in the book of Revelation, we can read the following:

«I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.» (Revelation 22:16, KJV)

In this verse, Jesus is unequivocally connected to the "Morning Star", which is another name for Venus when it appears in the sky before the Sun rises. In this way, if Jesus is the "bringer of light" (just like Venus as Morning Star announces the "birth of the light"), it makes sense if the Antichrist is connected to the Evening Star – thus being symbolically compared to the "bringer of darkness". In fact, the Latin word "aversus" meaning "facing away" or "hostile", sums 666 in the Beatus cipher!

The surprises, however, didn't stop here. In Greek, the word for "Evening Star" is Hesperos (Ἓσπερος). Linguistically speaking, however, this was not the original form of the name. In fact, prior to the extinction of the (now obsolete) Greek letters Vau/Digamma, Qoppa and Sampi, the name Hesperos was originally written as Ϝέσπερος (wesperos), which ultimately led to the Latin word Vesperus (source). And guess what? In Greek Isopsephia, the value of this word is... 666 !!!

So there seemed to be something "fishy" here! I went back to the words "Antichristus" and "Vesperus" which both add to 730 in the Beatus cipher, to see if there was "something special" about the number 730 that I could be missing. Well... hell yeah! You see, using only Mathematics, the number 730 has EIGHT divisors, and the sum of those 8 divisors is 1332 – which is 2 x 666:

Not only that, but the number 730 (in our base 10 numeration system) is written as 1332 in base 8 !!! Notice how both Ϝέσπερος and Vesperus have 8 letters each? And notice how Beatus de Liébana gave a list of eight names of the Antichrist? Maybe, only maybe, this was NOT a coincidence.

At this time I couldn't believe my eyes. It was too good to be true... however, there it was for all to see. This "riddle", however, doesn't end here.

I am one of the fortunate guys who has had the priviledge of having been using a fantastic tool for Gematria before its official release. That tool is called Gematria for Truth and it's being developed by my friend Greg, and I can do nothing but acknowledge the superb work he has been doing. This tool will revolutionize everyone's work with Gematria, and it has already revolutionized my own work, particularly concerning the gematrical analysis of the Bible, which is one of the tools in that software that I have used the most. The results have been absolutely... amazing!

So I wondered if there were more surprises about this, and I configured "Gematria for Truth" to search in the King James Bible for verses adding up to 730 (the value of "Antichristus") in the Latin ciphers. There was one that immediately caught my attention:

«And when the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.» (Revelation 20:7, KJV)

(click to enlarge)

And with this, I rest my case!

Other known ciphers based on the Latin alphabet

In this section I will only briefly refer to other Latin ciphers. I won't explore them by giving practical examples as, to be honest with you, I have never ever worked with them. My main source for these ciphers is John Opsopaus' Isopsephia Alphabet Charts, which I highly recommend to my Readers.

This first cipher is called by Opsopaus Æquicalculus (a Latin literal translation of the Greek word "Isopsephia") or Genetic System, in that "it assigns numerical values to Roman letters on the basis of the Greek letters from which they were derived". I've only worked this cipher a couple of times, but never long enough to get satisfying results with it, so I'll just leave here the table of correspondences for my Readers' future reference:

John Opsopaus also mentions another "Common System" which he explains that was in use during the 10th and 11th centuries, but this cipher is so confusing and lacking an internal logic that I won't even bother explaining it. Like Opsopaus rightly says, it seems to have been modelled after the Hebrew numerical assignments to the letters, even though "not entirely successfully". From what I've studied about the evolution of the Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets, I entirely subscribe to his words.

There is another cipher that is very well-known nowadays, and this paper wouldn't be complete if it wasn't mentioned in this article. It's the English Extended cipher, which can also be found in the "Gematrinator" website as well as in a ton of other websites dedicated to Gematria, under a variety of different names. My Readers may be curious as to why I say that this paper, dedicated to traditional Latin ciphers, wouldn't be complete without mentioning a modern cipher like English Extended. Well, the fact is that just like the Beatus and Agrippa ciphers are Extended ciphers for the classical-late Latin alphabet, the English Extended cipher is an Extended cipher for the modern English alphabet. So that's why this paper wouldn't be complete without mentioning this cipher. It is quite simple to memorize and it follows the same method after which the Agrippa and Beatus ciphers were modelled: first the units, then the tens, and finally the hundreds, in alphabetical order:

Right now, as I was writing these words, I decided to give this cipher a try in Greg's Gematria for Truth software, and I searched the King James Bible for any string of words, verse, or even sole words, adding up to 666, 730 or 1332 (= 2 x 666), and the result was... quite curious! We all know that verse from Revelation 13:18 that mentions the (in)famous Number of the Beast. The result is self-explanatory:

(Have I mentioned before that the number 1332 has exactly 18 divisors – or 6+6+6?)

Final words – and my own uses of the Latin ciphers

By the time you're reading this, it will be apparent to you that I tend to work with the Latin ciphers whenever the Latin language is involved – for obvious reasons. As I live in Europe, more specifically in Portugal, there are a lot of modern cities that were previously Roman cities with their own Latin names. Paris, for example, was called Lutetia, while London was called Londinium. Some of the modern names of the cities even resemble their ancient Latin names, like for example Vienna of Austria and its Roman equivalent Vindobona, or the towns in my own native country: Braga (Portuguese) and Bracara Augusta (Latin), or Aveiro (PT) and Aviarium (Latin). The inhabitants of the Portuguese town of Santarém, for example, are called escalabitanos, which has nothing to do with the modern name of the town, but in fact with the original Roman name of this city, which was Scalabis. I like to calculate the numerical value of some of these ancient Roman sites, as well as known phrases in Latin that are still used nowadays. The example I gave in this text of the Jesuit motto "(Omnia) ad maiorem Dei gloriam" is a nice example of this. I am also doing my own research within the Vulgata (the Latin Bible) while using the Latin ciphers, and this, I believe, will bring some very interesting results. In fact, it already has given some pretty satisfying results.

Regarding the English Extended cipher, that cipher I don't use it ONLY with Latin names or sentences, as it is a modern cipher and it is perfectly apt for being applied to any language that uses the modern Latin/English alphabet. However, I would never use the modern English Extended cipher to analyse Latin words or sentences, as the Latin alphabet contained fewer letters than the modern alphabet, so it wouldn't make sense to mix the two systems. I tend to keep very strict criteria about this, as in my opinion it is fundamental to use the ciphers in the right context. That is something that I always give the utmost importance to.

* * *

My dear Reader, I sincerely hope that this paper has given you enough "food for thought", and maybe some new ideas about how you can use your ciphers. If at any time you have any question, or would like to share your own ideas, or even if you would like to talk with me about anything that I wrote, please feel free to send me a word or two. I am more than willing to talk with my Readers, as that will always be an enriching experience for me too. This blog would never make sense without my Readers – and that means YOU. You are a fundamental key to this Blog too.

In the next part of this series "History of Ciphers", I will be talking about the Thelemic Ciphers. There are the ciphers that are known, for all those using the "Gematrinator", as the so-called "Kabbalah" ciphers: the "ALW" cipher, the "KFW" cipher, and the "LCH" cipher. In the next part I will be explaining some of the history behind these ciphers, as well as letting you know who created (or discovered) them, the true names of these ciphers, and, of course, the right context to use them.

Until then! 😊

My best regards to You,

Luís Gonçalves

"History of Ciphers" (part 2) - The Baconian Ciphers

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 19:47:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this second part of "History of Ciphers" I will be talking about the ciphers of Sir Francis Bacon, including:

– the two base Elizabethan ciphers, called Simple & Reverse;

– the Modern English ciphers;

– the Elizabethan and Modern Kaye ciphers;

– Francis Bacon's Biliteral Cipher (not related to Gematria);

– some thoughts on the two case-sensitive ciphers commonly called "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis", and the possibility of those being based on Baconian Cryptography – not Gematria.

While doing this, I will also provide all fundamental bibliography and sources, so that you, my Reader, can do your own research, so that, if possible, we can exchange ideas and both of us learn. And like I did in the first part, I will also provide you with some personal investigations so that my text doesn't become too tedious and my Reader's thirst for knowledge and inquisitive spirit may be further encouraged.

Thus, let us further investigate these ciphers, and begin to join the pieces of some centuries-long puzzles...

History of Ciphers

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 2: The Baconian Ciphers

I only began to work with the Baconian ciphers several years after I started using the Illuminati Novice cipher. In fact, it was my research with the Illuminati cipher that eventually led me to the ciphers of Sir Francis Bacon, and it was after that that my work with the Illuminati cipher gained a new momentum, and my investigation became much more focused. Now you understand why I began this series of articles with the Illuminati ciphers, and now I'm focusing on the ciphers of Sir Francis Bacon.

In my search for clues about a possible historical use of the Illuminati cipher to encode certain correspondences and "coincidences" in the Great Seal of the United States, I came to discover a small but most curious book by Manly P. Hall called "The Secret Destiny of America". I must confess that Manly P. Hall was always one of my favorite authors in this kind of subject. I always had that "strange" feeling that the author knew more than he said, like when you're reading a text and you start to realize that it conveys more than it says. There are many precious little gems in Manly P. Hall's books, if we know why, how and where to search.

In this brilliant book Manly P. Hall explains how the colonization scheme of America followed a "Great Plan" destined to make the United States the "New Atlantis" of a New Age, a glorious Western Democracy which, like a lighthouse, would rise and prevail amongst "the ruins of a materialistic and selfish world". Hall also explains how this specific Plan followed the purposes of known (and unknown) Secret Societies which were established in America 150 years before the Declaration of Independence of the United States. This Plan was inspired, among other things, on Francis Bacon's work New Atlantis, an unfinished novel describing:

"(...) a utopian civilisation, living in peace, friendship and charity in an island called Bensalem (’Son of Peace’), and having, as its "lanthorn", an order or society of philosophers formed into a college "dedicated to the study of the works and creatures of God", and for the "finding out of the true nature of all things, whereby God might have the more glory in the workmanship of them, and men the more fruit in the use of them".

Basically the novel suggests a kind of morally decent and friendly utopian society, governed by a democratically elected parliament with a sovereign head of state, in which exists an organised body of science known as Salomon’s House, guided by divine Providence and dedicated to discovering the mysteries of heaven and earth, and to charitable purposes. The novel presents, in a semi-allegorical way, Bacon’s vision of how he thought or hoped his Great Instauration might work. This is summed up by a Father of Salomon’s House, who declares in the book that "the end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible". [emphasis mine]

(From: Francis Bacon Research Trust).

But there's also a very curious detail in Bacon's novel that I think shouldn't pass unnoticed, and it is the fact that it is an unfinished novel. This is a very important detail and is of a great semiotic significance. Still drawing from the same source I previously linked to:

Rawley [Bacon's chaplain, friend and literary executor] informs us that "His Lordship thought also in this present fable to have composed a frame of Laws, or of the best state or mould of a commonwealth", but that the work was left unfinished because Bacon felt it more important to turn his attention first to putting together examples of his natural history. Interestingly, however, the background of the story references and uses Plato's account of old Atlantis given in his Critias and Timaeus, which was also left unfinished. Indeed, all of Bacon’s work was left unfinished; for, as Bacon said in a letter to his friend, Toby Matthews: "My great work goes forward; and after my manner, I alter ever when I add. So that nothing is finished till all is finished". [emphasis mine]

This is an extremely important detail. And it's curious that the last words in Lord Bacon's "New Atlantis" are "[the rest was not perfected]", meaning that this work towards Perfection is always incomplete, unperfected, until in the end everything is perfected. Remember what I wrote in my previous article, about the USA and Bacon's utopian "New Atlantis", in relation to the Great Seal of the United States? Notice that unfinished pyramid in the Great Seal? Maybe from now on you'll look at it with different eyes...

Hall's very explicit references to Francis Bacon and the influence of his "society of unknown philosophers" on the establishment of the first American democracy, inevitably led me to the conclusion that maybe I was missing the "big picture" by focusing only on the Illuminati and their cipher, and so I began studying the works and philosophy of Sir Francis Bacon himself, as well as his connections... if you know what I mean. Not only was this an extremely important step for me, it also clarified many interesting connections that I previously didn't know about. In fact, I discovered that there were patterns in all of this, all of which revolve around the Perfectibility of Man, which is the most sublime meaning behind Masonic rituals and doctrines, as well as the ultimate goal of the Fraternity of the Rosy Cross – which both had a very important, although sometimes underestimated, influence on the creation of the United States of America. And both were, one way or another, greatly influenced by that great English philosopher, scientist, and master of the English language, Sir Francis Bacon himself.

Reading Manly P. Hall's intriguing "The Secret Destiny of America" led me to immerge myself in reading his most powerful masterpiece, titled "The Secret Teachings of All Ages". This is where I found the ciphers of Sir Francis Bacon.

The two Elizabethan basic ciphers:

Simple & Reverse

In this book, Manly P. Hall devotes a whole chapter to Cryptography, explaining 7 different types of ciphers:

– The Biliteral cipher;

– The Pictorial cipher;

– The Acroamatic cipher;

– The Numerical cipher;

– The Musical cipher;

– The Arbitrary cipher;

– and the Code cipher.

A detailed description of all these ciphers is unnecessary at this point, but those of special interest for us will be the Numerical cipher (for obvious reasons) and, later in this text, Francis Bacon's own innovation in the field of Cryptography – the Biliteral cipher.

As was the case of the Illuminati cipher that we examined in the previous post, the main ciphers used by Sir Francis Bacon were based on the Elizabethan English alphabet with 24 letters, "I" and "J" being considered to be different shapes of the same letter, as well as "U" and "V". In the Simple cipher the letters are replaced by numbers in ordinal sequence, so that A=1, B=2, etc, counting both "I" and "J" as 9, and both "U" and "V" as 20, until Z=24. The Reverse cipher, as the name indicates, simply reverses this order, by counting "Z" as 1, "Y" as 2, until A=24 (also not forgetting the I/J and U/V equivalences).

These are the two basic Baconian, or Elizabethan, ciphers. In this article, whenever I refer to the value of a word according to a specific cipher, I will use (S) for the Simple cipher, and (R) for the Reverse cipher. Manly Hall explains that they can be used either as a substitution cipher – exactly like the Illuminati cipher was used originally – where the letters are replaced by their corresponding values, or as a system of Gematria, by calculating the total sum of those values.

There was also a third cipher, known as the "Kaye" cipher, which was not specifically mentioned by Sir Francis Bacon in any of his works, but was instead discovered or decoded by a certain Mr. Clifton while studying some works related to Shakespeare, Sir Francis Bacon, and the Rosicrucian Fraternity. I will refer to this cipher as (K). Its sequence seems to begin with "K" (the 10th letter of the Elizabethan English alphabet) being given the value 10, and then counting forwards from that letter. It is practically identical to the Simple cipher in the case of the letters from "K" to "Z", but the number 26 is added to the letters from "A" to "I/J", so that "A" becomes 27, "B" 28, etc, until "I/J"=35. The "gap" between Z=24 and A=27 is filled by two extra signs, "&"=25 and "et"=26, which were obtained by the discoverer of this cipher in the process of decoding it.

This table from Baconian-Rosicrucian Ciphers (PDF).

I cannot ignore the fact that there was some controversy about this cipher in the past, and I encourage my Readers to read about it too, and for that I would like to recommend to my Readers issue 119 of Baconiana, the official journal of the Francis Bacon Society. It contains at least two articles mentioning the Kaye cipher, one criticizing it and the other one further exploring and explaining the logic behind it. I strongly believe that to know our ciphers, we should always compare all valid opinions about them, be they good or bad. Anyway, while the sequence in this cipher may seem strange at this point, its inherent imperfection can have a very important symbolical meaning, and we will talk further about this idea when we get to the Modern English ciphers.

As a dedicated cryptographer that Lord Bacon was, these were the basic tools he used in order to conceal hidden messages and meanings, particularly his personal marks and special numbers. One of Lord Bacon's most special numbers was the number 33, since that's the value of the name "Bacon" in the Simple cipher, while in the Kaye cipher 33 is the value of the letter "G" (this will sound familiar to all those who study Freemasonry). In fact, there is a very curious particularity about the name of Francis Bacon, since in the Simple cipher the two words "Francis Bacon" divide their total value into thirds:

2/3 of 100 = 66,666 ≈ 67 = "Francis" (S)

1/3 of 100 = 33,333 ≈ 33 = "Bacon" (S)

It's curious to note that in various occasions Sir Francis Bacon used different forms of his name and titles, with specific hidden meanings based on their own numerical values. It wouldn't be surprising, thus, to notice that most of his works contain some type of gematrical signature, like in the example of his most emblematical novel, the "New Atlantis". In this novel a ship is blown off course and becomes lost, eventually arriving unexpectedly in an island called "Bensalem" (Hebrew for "Son of Peace"). In the Simple cipher, "Bensalem" = 67 = "Francis", while in the Reverse cipher, "Bensalem" = 133 matches the values of both "Baron Verulam" and "Rosi Crosse" in the Simple cipher, both titles associated with Lord Bacon.

There seem to exist certain curious patterns in Sir Francis Bacon's numbers, particularly some type of connection between numbers with a difference of 100 (one hundred) between them. We have seen that "Francis Bacon" equals 100 in the Simple cipher, and even Manly P. Hall mentions some of numerical connections in "The Secret Teachings of All Ages":

"In Baconian cryptograms, all page numbers ending in 89 seem to have a special significance. The 89th page of the Comedies in the 1623 folio of "Shakespeare" shows an error of type in the pagination, the "9" being from a considerably smaller font than the "8". The 189th page is entirely missing, there being two pages numbered 187; and page 188 shows the second "8" scarcely more than half the size of the first one. Page 289 is correctly numbered and has no unusual features, but page 89 of the Histories is missing. Several volumes published by Bacon show similar errors, page 89 being often involved."

Manly P. Hall's reference to the number 89 as being especially highlighted in the cryptograms of Shake-speare's "First Folio" is rather curious, as that is precisely the value of the name "Verulam", used as part of Lord Bacon's title as Baron Verulam of Verulam.

The name of the title itself is strange. Bacon was given this title by King James I of England in 1618. Normally it would be simply "Baron Verulam" or "Baron of Verulam", referring to the Roman town of Verulamium. However, by adding an extra "Verulam" it indicates a description of the bearer of this title, and it's interesting to note that in Latin, veru means "javelin" (a light spear), while lam means "thrash". Thus, a Spear-Shaker, or Shake-speare. There is a lot of interesting symbolism to this and this will be dealt with later in another text. However, this is a very curious reference and I thought I should leave it here.

In Bacon's novel "New Atlantis" the head of the government of Bensalem is called "Salomon's House", and alternatively, "Solamona's House", as well as the "College of the Six Days' Work" (note that "Six Days" conveys the idea of a perfected Creation). Note the strange forms of the otherwise more familiar name "Solomon". The numerical values of "Solamona's House" perfectly match those of "Unfinished Work" in both the Simple and Reverse ciphers, while the value of "Salomon's House" in the Illuminati cipher is 157, a well-known Baconian signature that matches the values of "Six Days' Work", "William Tudor I", as well as "Fra. Rosi Crosse" in the Simple cipher. These are all names that are deeply connected, one way or another, to Sir Francis Bacon. It is believed that Sir Francis Bacon was a legitimate son of Queen Elizabeth I, and that by 1574 Lord Bacon had become the head of the Rosicrucian Order – hence the title "Fra. Rosi Crosse", which can stand for either "Frater" (Brother) or "Francis" Rosi Crosse.

It's curious to note too that in the Illuminati cipher, the value of "Solamona's House" is 169 (13 x 13), the same value of "House of Solamona" in the Simple cipher, and of "House of Solomon" in the Reverse cipher, while in the experimental Illuminati Reverse cipher, "Viscount St. Alban" sums 169, as does "Elizabeth I". At this time you might want to give a look at my previous post on the ciphers of the Illuminati, particularly the section about the 1 Dollar bill.

If you've read my post on the ciphers of the Illuminati, you have seen my explanation of how the total number of letters in the reverse of the 1 Dollar bill is 141, which coincides with the values of "Francis Bacon", "New Atlantis" and "Newfoundland" in the Illuminati cipher. Well, that is true. But it is also true that if you add the four numbers "1" in the four corners of the reverse of the 1 Dollar bill to 141, you get 145, and that is the value of both "New Atlantis" and "Unfinished" in Bacon's Simple cipher. Remember that unfinished pyramid in the Great Seal of the United States? That's right.

Evolution of the English language and the Modern English ciphers

In Hall's "The Secret Teachings of All Ages", the chapter immediately before the one explaining the Simple & Reverse ciphers is called "Bacon, Shakespeare and the Rosicrucians", and contains a wealth of information on Baconian cryptography, Lord Bacon's influence on (or authorship of?) the Shakespearean plays, as well as the possibility of him being the editor of the King James Bible. Regarding this subject I should remember my Readers that there are no "absolute proofs" of any of this, even though some of them are pretty convincing; however, I can also say that from what I've studied about these issues, it seems quite likely that:

1. Bacon, and possibly others, had a very important role in the writing of Shake-speare's First Folio, published in 1623, even to the point of having very specific Baconian signatures in the form of numbers, seals, cryptographic designs, etc, appearing all over the Shakespearean First Folio, published in 1623;

2. Even if Bacon was not the sole editor of the King James Bible (which would be improbable in my opinion), I believe he did insert coded messages, as well as Rosicrucian and Masonic symbolism, into the 1611 publication of the King James Bible.

At this point I won't go into much detail about these two subjects, as I want this text to be more focused on the ciphers themselves. However, I can and will recommend some bibliography to my fellow Reader (besides Manly P. Hall's books), so that you can do your own personal investigation about this and achieve your own conclusions, independently from what I might say or believe.

– "The Lost Secret of William Shakespeare" by Richard Allan Wagner (link to author's website here), which also explores a possible Baconian influence on the King James Bible, among many other things;

– "An Enquiry into the Authorship of the Works of William Shakespeare" by Joel Dias-Porter (PDF here);

– The invaluable website of the Francis Bacon Society;

– All essays in the website of the Francis Bacon Research Trust;

– The website Light-of-Truth is very complete with examples of uses of Lord Bacon's ciphers and is very curious, to say the least, from the point of view of Gematria.

It's undeniable that both the King James Bible and Shakespeare's Plays marked a great transformation in the English language. English wouldn't be as it is today if it weren't these two great literary works. That being the case, this text wouldn't be completed too if we didn't explore the form into which the English alphabet developed – or, in other words, was perfected.

And with that, I present you the two Modern English ciphers that correspond to the Elizabethan Simple & Reverse ciphers, which are English Ordinal (EO) and Reverse Ordinal (RO):

While I tend to work more with the Elizabethan ciphers in the context of Baconian studies, the Modern ciphers should not be underestimated since that is the alphabet that we use nowadays, and we have plenty of examples of modern uses of these ciphers ("Gravity Falls" and Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol" come to mind). Also, sometimes these ciphers tend to show some interesting correspondences that escape us if we use only the Elizabethan ciphers. Like we did with the name "Francis Bacon" in the Simple cipher, noting its curious numerical pattern, we can do the same with the modern English Ordinal cipher:

In fact, just like it happened in the Simple cipher, in this case the two words "Francis" and "Bacon" also divide the total value into thirds:

2/3 of 105 = 70 = "Francis" (EO)

1/3 of 105 = 35 = "Bacon" (EO)

But more important than this, in this case, is the fact that the total sum, 105, equals 3 x 5 x 7, and these are key numbers in the first three degrees of Freemasonry, the origins of which could have been interlaced with the life, works, vision and knowledge left by Sir Francis Bacon himself. According to the Masonic Lodge of Education:

"3:5:7: These are the steps in Masonry. They are the steps in the Winding Stair which leads to the Middle Chamber and they are the number of brethren which form the number of Master Masons necessary to open a lodge of:

Master Mason: 3

Fellow Craft: 5

Entered Apprentice: 7

These are the sacred numbers."

Other such examples can be seen in the names "Franciscus" (the Latin form of Bacon's first name), which hides one of the Baconian Seals, the number 157, as well as "William Tudor". Also, the name "Royal Society", which was founded in 1660 in England in order to "realise Bacon's vision of experimental science as a collective activity undertaken for the good of the state" (source) sums 157 in both Bacon's Simple cipher and the modern Reverse Ordinal cipher. This number 157, together with 287 (note that 157+287=444), are known as the two Baconian Seals, connected to the "Fra. Rosie Cross" (Fraternity of the Rosy Cross), and have been extensively explored in the two webpages Light-of-Truth and SirBacon.org, and I would also recommend the article called "The Fra. Rosie Cross Cipher 287" (direct link to PDF), by the Francis Bacon Research Trust. I highly recommend those links to my fellow Readers.

In "Shakespeare"'s First Folio printed 1623, "page 136, in the first scene of Act V of Love's Labor's Lost the long 27 lettered word honorificabilitudinitatibus appears on line 27 and is the 151st word in ordinary type. Adding 136+ 151 the sum is 287. In the Simple Cipher this word totals 287" (source). In Bacon's Reverse cipher, this is the value of both "F. Bacon W. Shakespeare" and "Fr. Christianus Rosencreutz" (the name of the mythical founder of the Rosicrosse as it appears in the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz). In the Kaye cipher, 287 is the value of "Fra. Rosi Crosse" and "William Tudor I":

You may have noticed that I referred to one "William Tudor". Who was this William Tudor? Actually the question is not "who was", but instead "who wasn't" ("to be, or not to be" comes to mind). According to the theory proposing that Sir Francis Bacon was in fact the son of Queen Elizabeth I, his true name wouldn't have been "Francis Bacon" as he was called, but instead "William Tudor I", or even "Francis Tudor". And it's curious, to say the least, that in Bacon's Simple cipher, "Francis Tudor" shares the same value as "Fra. Christian R+C" (the almost mythical founder of the Rosy Cross Fraternity), as well as "Franciscus Bacon", a signature that was used several times by Lord Bacon.

This reference to the number 141 may seem familiar...

It is well known that Lord Bacon sometimes used different forms of words, even of his name, in order to convey secret meanings and correspondences. It's curious, then, that in a letter sent by Francis Bacon to King James I, for relief of his estate (source), Lord Bacon signed his letter "Fr. St. Alb.", standing for "Francis St. Alban" (he was Viscount St. Alban). Its values in the Simple and Reverse ciphers match exactly those of both "William" and "Tudor" in the same ciphers:

Also, in a Newfoundland stamp featuring a portrait of Francis Bacon and the words "The Guiding Spirit in Colonization Scheme" (this was already addressed quite superficially in the previous post), it is curious to note that the name chosen for that stamp was "Lord Bacon". In the modern Reverse Ordinal cipher, its value exactly matches that of "New Atlantis": You may recall from the previous post that in the Illuminati cipher, "Francis Bacon", "New Atlantis" and "Newfoundland" all shared the same value. The difference between 159 (the value of "New Atlantis" in Reverse Ordinal) and 141 (the value of "New Atlantis" in the Illuminati cipher) is 18, or 6+6+6. Can you spot the "6 6 6" in this stamp?

Do you recall my reference to the "College of the Six Days' Work" in this same text? I wrote "Six Days" three times then. 😉 And since we're talking about this, now is the perfect time to show you the other missing cipher in this text about the Baconian ciphers: the Modern Kaye (MK) cipher.

At this time it will become apparent to my Readers why I spoke about the Elizabethan Kaye cipher being imperfect, needing two extra signs ("&" and "et") to fill the sequence from K=10 to I/J=35. You see, it really makes sense to interpose two extra signs in the Kaye cipher, since those two extra signs left room for the two new letters of the English Alphabet, "J" and "V", after it was perfected to its present form. You can see that in the Modern Kaye cipher there is no need for extra signs, having the 10th letter of the alphabet (in this case, "J") being valued as 10, and following a perfect ordinal sequence until I=35. I have to thank my friend Casey for bringing this up to my attention.

So, in other words, in the way I perceive them, the Kaye and Modern Kaye ciphers can thus illustrate the process of Perfecting the Alphabet as an analogy of the Perfectibility of Man, a process that was so dear to the utopian, prophetic vision of Francis Bacon. And this is why I use so many times the terms "perfect", "perfected" and "perfectibility", as well as "imperfect" and "unperfected" or "unfinished". These terms are of extreme importance and are always used with a specific intention. If you, my dear Reader, have at any time studied the rituals and doctrines of Freemasonry, you will certaintly understand how this is connected to "building the Temple of Solomon", or the "Rough Ashlar" and the "Perfect Ashlar". These are architectural terms used symbolically. And this idea becomes increasingly significant if we remember the connection between the names "Francis Bacon" and "William Tudor I". Let's compare the two ciphers, Kaye and Modern Kaye:

You may recall at this time that the last words in Francis Bacon's New Atlantis were "[the rest was not perfected]". Not only is this a signature of Sir Francis Bacon, it also demonstrates that just like the Society he was trying to change, Francis Bacon was not perfected as a Man, since (according to this theory) he was born of Royal blood but never actually fulfilled his true purpose and vision during his lifetime. Also, notice on which ciphers deliver which results. In the 'imperfect' Kaye cipher (that is, "from an unperfected point of view") William Tudor I would be the Perfected Man. In the 'perfect' Modern Kaye cipher (which means, "from a perfected point of view"), Francis Bacon was not perfected. It actually fits the theory!

Now, a word or two about...

Reduction Ciphers

In Baconian studies I've come to watch some authors using what is known as Reduction ciphers. These ciphers are essentially the same as Ordinal ciphers, with the difference that the ordinal value of the letters is reduced to a single digit, for example, 19 is reduced to 1, since 1+9 = 10; 1+0 = 1.

As we have an Ordinal sequence for the Elizabethan English alphabet (the "Bacon Simple" cipher) and an ordinal sequence for the Modern English alphabet ("English Ordinal"), there are two Reduction ciphers that can be used for each of these alphabets. There are usually called "Bacon Short" (the Elizabethan version) and "Pythagorean Numerology" or "Full Reduction" (the Modern version).

As there are Reverse ciphers, so there are also their respective Reverse Reduction ciphers. The logic is the same as these, noting only that Z=1, and that in the Elizabethan cipher the letters "I" and "J" share the same value, as do "U" and "V".

I must make it clear to my Readers that I do not use Reduction ciphers. This is just a question of personal criteria, but I must resort to the laws of probabilistics and mathematics in order to defend my position. The question, which I have addressed already in another post, is that these ciphers use very small values, so it becomes really easy to find "significant" matching values... even if there aren't any real matches.

In terms of probabilities, the easier it is to get any number, the less significant it is in terms of real "match". Unfortunately, the Reduction ciphers fail miserably on this test, so in order to keep my findings as strong as possible, I prefer not to leave "loose ends" – so I don't use Reduction ciphers of any type. However, as in the Reduction ciphers the values of the letters are reduced to a single digit, it may be interesting to note the sequence of those values, and maybe not their total sum. Note for example how the letters in "CAVANI", the name of a well-known Uruguayan professional footballer, are reduced to 3-1-4-1-5-9 in the modern Full Reduction cipher, which are the digits of Pi to the 5th decimal house (3,14159):

This does't "mean" anything about Cavani himself, necessarily. But that specific name, or any other fitting that pattern or another, could be consciously used in strategic occasions in order to leave a specific "signature". This, of course, should always be done with caution, as those kind of "signatures" may not always be intentional signatures. I assume the Reader has enough good sense to distinguish one situation from another.

Now that I've explained to you all the major ciphers that can be used in Baconian studies... let's get to the funny part. =)

"Riddle, Riddle..."

In this section I am going to show you how these ciphers work in practice.

This example is a cryptographic riddle I found in Manly P. Hall's "The Secret Teachings of All Ages", involving both types of ciphers: Elizabethan and Modern. You see, since I first read Hall's books I always had that strange feeling that he knew more than he said, and that some specific ways of writing certains names seemed to show that he was using some kind of Gematria in order to conceal information in his works. In fact, it was while reading his book "The Secret Destiny of America" that I came across a possible clue that I already explained in Part 1 of this series of texts, regarding the "Order of the Quest" and the Illuminati.

In "Secret Teachings", Hall explains the Simple (Elizabethan cipher) in the following way:

"The most simple numerical cipher is that in which the letters of the alphabet are exchanged for numbers in ordinary sequence. Thus A becomes 1, B 2, C 3, and so on, counting both I and J as 9 and both U and V as 20. The word yes by this system would be written 23-5-18. This cipher can be made more difficult by reversing the alphabet so that Z becomes 1, Y 2, X 3, and so on. By inserting a non-significant, or uncounted, number after each of the significant numbers the cipher is still more effectively concealed, thus: 23-16-5-9-18. The word yes is found by eliminating the second and fourth numbers. By adding 23, 5, and 18 together the sum 46 results. Therefore 46 is the numerical equivalent of the word yes. According to the simple numerical cipher, the sum 138 is equal to the words Note carefully. Therefore in a book using this method, line 138, page 138, or paragraph 138 may contain the concealed message. In addition to this simple numerical cipher there are scores of others so complicated that no one without the key can hope to solve them."

Apparently there is nothing strange about this explanation. Hall explains the Simple and Reverse ciphers, how they can be used as cryptographic ciphers (used to conceal messages), and how they can be used as Gematria ciphers (calculating the total sum of the letters). As I like to confirm all correspondences that I find, especially in the case of Manly P. Hall, I went to confirm the values. The word "yes" really sums 46 in the Simple cipher, as Hall explains. However, the words "Note carefully" do not add to 138 like he says, neither in the Simple cipher nor in the Reverse cipher.

My intuition told me this was important. Someone who knew the Elizabethan / Baconian ciphers as well as Manly P. Hall did, would not make such a mistake in such a simple matter. If he missed any letter when calculating, it would not deliver the sum 138 either (I tested all possibilities).

The words with the wrong value invite us to pay attention. "Note carefully". It surely looked like a riddle, but what should I make of it? There seemed to be some type of clue about this in the paragraph immediately following this one, as in that paragraph Hall talks about Francis Bacon, his ciphers, his connections with William Shakespeare, and how certain specific pages in his works were wrongly numbered. He gives many examples of this:

"Authors sometimes based their cryptograms upon the numerical value of their own names; for example, Sir Francis Bacon repeatedly used the cryptic number 33 – the numerical equivalent of his name. Numerical ciphers often involve the pagination of a book. Imperfect pagination, though generally attributed to carelessness, often conceals important secrets. The mispaginations found in the 1623 folio of “Shakespeare” and the consistent recurrence of similar errors in various volumes printed about the same period have occasioned considerable thought among scholars and cryptogrammatists. In Baconian cryptograms, all page numbers ending in 89 seem to have a special significance. The 89th page of the Comedies in the 1623 folio of “Shakespeare” shows an error of type in the pagination, the “9” being from a considerably smaller font than the “8.” The 189th page is entirely missing, there being two pages numbered 187; and page 188 shows the second "8" scarcely more than half the size of the first one. Page 289 is correctly numbered and has no unusual features, but page 89 of the Histories is missing. Several volumes published by Bacon show similar errors, page 89 being often involved."

So if the words "Note carefully" were wrongly numbered in the Baconian ciphers that Hall explained, I wondered what would be their values in the Modern ciphers. And suddenly it made perfect sense:

You see, these are the two Baconian Seal numbers that we've talked about before, and these are specifically related to Sir Francis Bacon. Not only that, but the values of these words match those of "William Tudor" AND "Francis Bacon" in both of these ciphers:

So what did Manly P. Hall actually do here? This was a masterful "trick" by Hall. While he explained the Elizabethan ciphers and gave (willingfully) a wrong value to the words "Note carefully", he actually used the Modern ciphers in order to hide a crystal clear reference to Sir Francis Bacon himself. If we didn't use the modern ciphers the riddle would obviously pass unnoticed. As far as I know this is the first time that this riddle in Manly P. Hall's work becomes public knowledge. So this is just one perfect example of how sometimes authors use both the Elizabethan and the Modern ciphers.

This simultaneous use of the Elizabethan and Modern Gematria ciphers is further supported by the uses of another well-known Baconian cipher, which is used in Cryptography (not related to Gematria), and which also has two versions: one based on the Elizabethan English alphabet with 24 letters, and the other based on the Modern English alphabet with 26 letters. Both versions of this cipher are used to this day. I'm talking about Lord Bacon's magnificent Biliteral Cipher.

Baconian Cryptography – The Biliteral Cipher

In my studies about Sir Francis Bacon I came to know a very interesting cryptographic (actually steganographic) cipher that was invented by the man himself: the Biliteral cipher, also known as Bacon's cipher.

This cipher, not related to Gematria, is used solely to conceal messages within an apparently "normal" text. To use this cipher is necessary to use four alphabets: two alphabets with two different shapes for the capital letters, and other two alphabets with two different shapes for the small letters. Each specific shape of a letter corresponds to either "a" or "b", and it is this string of A's and B's that allows us to decipher the message. Kind of a binary code, but with letters instead of numbers. This is an example of a Biliteral Alphabet from Bacon's "De Augmentis Scientiarum", as used in the Biliteral Cipher:

And this is an example of a message that was enciphered with the Biliteral. Notice the different shapes of some letters, like the small E's, D's and O's.

Thus, in order to decipher one such message, one would need only to note which letters correspond to "a", and which letters correspond to "b". Being left with this string of A's and B's would allow us to decipher it, based on one of two tables. This is the equivalence between the letters and the sequences of A's and B's for the Elizabethan English alphabet (which Lord Bacon used):

And this is the same cipher for the Modern alphabet:

In this modern age it is more difficult to use this cipher since nowadays there is a much greater standardization of the types of letters and fonts than there was, say, by the time of "Shakespeare" and the printing of the King James Bible. There are many solutions to this, one of them being using capitals and small letters to stand for "a" and "b", like this example:

"tHIs fANcy tEXT CAN acTuAlLy Be a CIPHereD mEsSAge"

Another method, which is much more difficult to decode (and to encode too) is to divide the alphabet in two halves, with the letters from "A" to "M" (in the ciphered message) corresponding to "a", and the letters from "N" to "Z" corresponding to "b". With a little work it can be done, though.

In the example I gave above the ciphered message was encoded with the modern table of the alphabet. Assuming all capitals correspond to "a" and all small letters correspond to "b", we decipher the message by following these steps:

1. First, delete all spaces and punctuation marks:

tHIsfANcytEXTCANacTuAlLyBeaCIPHereDmEsSAge

2. Then, convert all letters to either "a" or "b" (capitals="A", small letters="B"):

tHIsfANcytEXTCANacTuAlLyBeaCIPHereDmEsSAge
baabbaabbbaaaaaabbababababbaaaabbbababaabb

3. Next, join those A's and B's in groups of five:

   tHIsfANcytEXTCANacTuAlLyBeaCIPHereDmEsSAge
   baabbaabbbaaaaaabbababababbaaaabbbababaabb
   baabb.aabbb.aaaaa.abbab.ababa.bbaaa.abbba.babaa.bb

4. And finally, decipher the message (with the table for the modern alphabet):

   tHIsfANcytEXTCANacTuAlLyBeaCIPHereDmEsSAge
   baabbaabbbaaaaaabbababababbaaaabbbababaabb
   baabb.aabbb.aaaaa.abbab.ababa.bbaaa.abbba.babaa.bb
   T     H     A     N     K     Y     O     U     -

The two final letters in the ciphered message can be safely discarded, as they don't complete any sequence of 5 a's and b's. The ciphered text thus appears: "THANK YOU".

If you were one of the lucky ones who saw this blog of mine in its very beginnings, you may have noticed that I too added a "test post" with Bacon's Biliteral cipher. I will leave that one for you to decrypt. 😋

Just note that in this example capitals are A's and small letters are B's, while the table used to decipher the message is based on the Elizabethan alphabet (as shown in the page from Bacon's "De Augmentis Scientiarum".

And now you may be wondering... why am I explaining this cipher, which is cryptographic and not related to Gematria, in this post and blog which are both dedicated to the ciphers of Gematria? Well, not only was this cipher created by Francis Bacon, it is also extremely relevant in the studies of his works (for obvious reasons) as well as in the studies of possible "Baconian" influences in Shakespeare's "First Folio", printed in 1623. About this subject I believe that, like I said in the case of the Kaye cipher, we should read all opinions about this subject, either in favor or against, so that we can have a more clear image of it in our minds and achieve our own opinions, after we study it ourselves. I invite you to read Elizabeth Wells Gallup's "The Bi-literal Cypher of Sir Francis Bacon discovered in his works" as well as William Friedman's "The Shakespearean Ciphers Examined". In my opinion, I believe there are good indicators that Francis Bacon may have had a large influence in the Shakespearean Plays (which does not depend on Bacon's Biliteral cipher), and he could even be the "brain" behind it, but I think it's quite improbable for Francis Bacon alone being "Shakespeare" – even though he was known as a "concealed poet". Besides, some ciphered messages in Shakespeare really do point to Sir Francis Bacon, as you can see in this summary of most convincing Bacon ciphers in Shakespeare.

This subject about Shakespeare and Francis Bacon is absolutely fascinating and surely deserves a deeper study. A study along those lines will be left for a future article, after I finish this series of texts about the History of Ciphers. It will also contain some extra details about:

– Baconian cryptography in his own works and in Shakespeare's works;

– The "Alphabet of Nature" and some curious numerical patterns it shows;

– The symbology of Athena-Minerva, the Knights of the Helmet, and the meanings of "William" and "Shakespeare";

– and possible Baconian influences in Freemasonry's rituals, doctrines and symbols.

For the time being, I can't finish this article without mentioning two Gematria ciphers that have been named after Francis Bacon, even without having any connection whatsoever with this man – or with any other person that I know of, in fact, except the one responsible for adding them to an online calculator.

The (bogus) ciphers "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis"

When I first knew Derek Tikkuri's Gematrinator calculator, I noticed that it contained some ciphers that I had never heard before, and others that were either badly named or were being used out of their natural context – or both. I will dedicate some of my time to clarify some of these questions, since I strongly believe that in order to use ciphers in Gematria you have to know what you're doing as well as what you're using.

Two of those "mysterious" ciphers are called "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis" and are in fact case-sensitive ciphers: that is, they give different values to the letters depending if those are capitals or small letters.

There are several problems with these ciphers:

– First of all, I have never ever known of any historical Baconian cipher used for the purposes of Gematria that differentiated capitals and small letters;

– Secondly, there are no clues whatsoever about who made up these ciphers, where or if they were published or talked about elsewhere, besides the "Gematrinator";

– After being questioned about the origin of these ciphers, the only reply I got from Derek Tikkuri (the owner of the "Gematrinator") was something like "I don't remember where I got them from", "there's definitely something to them", and "they're perfectly logical". He also claims to have built "lots of evidence" over time that they work. Well, they can be as logical as you want them to be, and you can build all the evidence that you want, but the question remains that no source was ever given for these ciphers, and whether they are really related to Lord Bacon or not. No book, no website, no author, no research, no sources, nothing. Derek doesn't know, and I don't know either. So why are people calling them that way? Or, even better, why did Derek Tikkuri add these ciphers to his "Gematrinator"? Is it because they're "logical"? And where's the logic in calling them "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis", if there is not a single reference in any of Francis Bacon's works to any of these ciphers – at least that I know of?

– The fact that these are case-sensitive ciphers has originated all kind of variations in the manner of writing names, depending on the desired value (for example, writing common words with capitals if that fits the purpose). This may not be a problem if people are consistent in the use they make of capitals and small letters, otherwise it is total chaos.

In fact, there is a reason why I'm talking about these ciphers after I talked about Francis Bacon's Biliteral cipher. You see, after some time thinking about these ciphers, and reading the section about cryptography in Manly Hall's "The Secret Teachings of All Ages", I've come to understand how these ciphers came to exist. In fact, it seems to me that these two ciphers, "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis", were inspired on Bacon's Biliteral Alphabet which is used with the Biliteral cipher – but with a twist, since the Biliteral cipher is a cryptographic cipher (used to conceal messages in ciphered texts), while these two ~~bogus~~ ciphers are used in Gematria.

Look at those ciphers again. Now look at Bacon's Biliteral Alphabet:

Got it? So basically, I'm guessing that someone who didn't understand a thing about Cryptography saw this Biliteral Alphabet and assumed that it was a description of a case-sensitive system of Gematria, and then those two 'baconian' ciphers were born out of nowhere. Then, if this person wasn't Derek (I'm also assuming he wasn't) what Derek did was simply to accept them as being self-evident, and added them to his calculator. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do: to add ciphers to your calculator without knowing who created them and where they came from.

My most sincere advice to the Gematria community is, first, to be aware that the name of these ciphers is wrong and has no connection whatsoever with Sir Francis Bacon. If you want to use it, call it "Case-Sensitive Cipher Nr. 1" and "Case-Sensitive Cipher Nr. 2", but PLEASE don't call them "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis". That's not a service to Truth. (Note to Derek: you're not promoting Knowledge by doing this, but in fact you're promoting disinformation. Please, do NOT help spreading disinformation.) In fact, I know of one webpage where this different name has been adopted – and with my full support. In this case, the "Francis Bacon" cipher is called the Case-Sensitive Classic Gematria. Which is a great name! Why call it by a name that has nothing to do with it?

Besides, and this is my personal opinion, in all of the occasions that I've read about ciphers used by Francis Bacon, all of those ciphers attributed a single value to a single letter, independently of whether it was a capital or a lower case letter. You have seen in this text that this was obviously the case. So, let it be clear that I have nothing against the use of these ciphers. However, I am strongly opposed to calling these ciphers by the names they are being called. "Case-Sensitive cipher" is a great name for them, and it doesn't fail in terms of being faithful to the Truth.

Some final words...

Contrary to what it may seem, I spent a lot of time writing this text. I actually didn't plan it before I started writing it (I almost never do), so in some cases I had to rewrite some sections and reorganize others. It isn't still as perfect as I wanted, but it contains a lot of information and sources already so as to make it possible to my Readers to do their own research and to extract more from what I've written. There is still much to explore, and with this text I actually intend to inspire my Readers to search further, not to take my words (or anyone's, in fact) as granted.

If you have found this text to be useful in your research, or if you have found anything related to these subjects and would like to share your ideas, please do share them. I will be delighted to hear what you have to say, dear Reader, and I hope to learn from you too.

In the next text of these series we will be talking about the Latin ciphers, which includes: the Agrippa cipher (mistakenly called "Jewish"), the Latin cipher used by Beatus of Liébana, some notes on Beatus' "Commentary on the Apocalypse", examples of traditional / historical uses of the Latin ciphers, as well as a very curious oracle that uses the Agrippa cipher, which I found in 1994 in a book about Numerology. I don't know of any English sources explaining that oracle, so... stay tuned! There will be something new. 😉

My warmest regards to all my Readers,

Luís Gonçalves

"History of Ciphers" (part 1) - The Ciphers of the Illuminati

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Fri, 19 Feb 2021 00:03:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

In this series of posts called "History of Ciphers", I will do my best to give you some pertinent informations on some of the ciphers we know and use (at least some of them), including their origins, specific bibliography for your own future reference, as well as my own considerations about how some of them "should" be used, and in which context. I said "should" because you must never forget that obviously this is my opinion and my methods, and you shouldn't necessarily take it as an absolute "truth". I will also tell you some personal stories with these ciphers, so that you can understand some of the reasoning behind my conclusions. I strongly believe that by doing that, without being too elaborate or tedious, you may have a richer experience in reading my posts. Of course, if at any time you wish to exchange some ideas with me, or to make any comments or suggestions you'd like, you can always use the Contact Form on the right side of this blog (web version).

To begin this series, we will begin with a cipher that I found most interesting since the day I first saw it, and became even more interesting after some years had passed: the Illuminati Novice cipher.

The reason why I'm beginning with this cipher is threefold. Firstly, it's a way of introducing some of my work with this specific cipher. Secondly, it serves as a nice introduction to the ciphers of Sir Francis Bacon, which will be dealt with in the second post of this series. And thirdly, it serves to show that this is no "conspiracy theory" cipher, but instead a very real historical cipher, used by a real historical secret society, and in my view, should be at least studied before (or if) it is discarded as "just another cipher".

* * *

HISTORY OF CIPHERS

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 1: The Ciphers of the Illuminati

In the previous post I wrote very briefly about how I came to know this cipher. This is the cipher I have been using consistently since early 2008. My work with the Illuminati cipher is long, sometimes disappointing, and sometimes highly rewarding. I first read about it in a text about the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, I don't remember exactly which, but it explained that this cipher was given to the Novices (a degree of the Illuminati) to be used in their correspondences from that moment onward, in order to conceal the real names of people, places, or specific expressions. Later I've come to collect some valuable sources about this cipher, including, in chronological order:

– Arkon Daraul's "A History of Secret Societies";

– Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus!" Trilogy (more on that just ahead);

– Terry Melanson's excellent book "Perfectibilists";

– and the absolutely fundamental "The Secret School of Wisdom", edited by Josef Wäges and Reinhard Markner, and translated by the late Jeva Singh-Anand.

It should be noted, however, that this cipher was not originally used as a type of Gematria (i.e. adding the values of the letters), but instead as a simple substitution cipher, where each letter was replaced by its corresponding value. Thus, if we were to use this cipher the same way, we would write "21.8.4.18.5.12.20.15.19." instead of "Weishaupt", the name of the founder of the Bavarian Illuminati. When I read this I also didn't use it immediately as a system of Gematria – instead I kept it in my personal records, for my future reference.

"Der schon bekannte Chiffre des Illuminaten-Ordens" ("The well-known cipher of the Illuminati Order"), taken from Einige Originalschriften des Illuminatenordens (1786): LINK

The Illuminati Novice cipher, from Saun Virroco's Gem Calc Project at GitHub.

You may notice that in this cipher – as it happens in the Baconian/Elizabethan ciphers, which will be explored in the next post of this series – the letters "I" and "J" share the same value, as do "U" and "V". This has to do with the fact that in the Latin alphabet, the letter "J" was originally an alternative form of the letter "I", the same happening with "U" and "V", which were originally the same letter. In the King James Bible, for example, which was published in 1611, you will notice that in the dedication page it refers to the future King James I of England as Prince Iames (link here). Likewise, the letter U/V was written as "u" in the middle of a word, and as "v" in the beginning (for example, "saue" and "vpon" would be the way we would write "save" and "upon", using the same orthography).

Robert Anton Wilson and the "Illuminatus!" Trilogy

Some time after I knew about this cipher, I came to see it again in Appendix Beth of Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus!" Trilogy. While this Trilogy was intended to poke fun at the paranoia and conspiracy theories in the world at the time it was written, I believe that, paradoxically – as was always characteristic of R.A.W. – he used the Illuminati Cipher to encode some numerical clues (or in-jokes?) in this book specifically. You see, along the book there are ciphered messages using another substitution cipher of the Illuminati that is purely cryptographic, not related to Gematria. This is the cipher that was used in the Illuminati Masonic degree of Scottish Knight. It uses an option of two symbols for each letter of the alphabet, in order to increase the difficulty in deciphering the message.

The third ciphered message in R.A.W.'s "Illuminatus!" Trilogy.
The concealed text reveals the message: "May Day the Rising Hodge arrives".

This "glyph cipher" also seems to have its secrets, but for now let's continue with the explanation on how I think that Robert Anton Wilson used the Illuminati Novice cipher. First, if you've read the "Illuminatus!" Trilogy, you should have noticed that it is STUFFED with references to the numbers 5 and 23:

Guess what? 115 equals 5 x 23. And here's another one:

The first ciphered message in R.A.W.'s book is "Hail Eris" (Eris was the Greek goddess of Discord – not our app though =)). The second ciphered message, which is rather humorous, reads "Never whistle while you're pissing". Apparently there wouldn't be anything interesting about this, except the following:

These are very specific references to multiple 7's, as 70 equals 7x10, while 343 equals 7x7x7. I honestly can't image what would be the intention of Robert Anton Wilson in choosing specifically these sentences with these specific values, but the fact is that there seems to have been some very conscious encoding with the Illuminati cipher. Even the third ciphered message in the "Illuminatus!" Trilogy, which was already addressed, seems to have its numerical secrets, as the value of "Rising Hodge" is precisely one third of the value of the whole sentence:

312 = 3 x 104. Also, note the following division of words:
– "May Day th" = 104
– "e Rising Hodg" = 104
– "e arrives" = 104

Curiously enough, half of 312 is 156, and that is precisely the value of "Adam Weishaupt", the man who founded the Bavarian Illuminati on May Day 1776. There is a very curious kind of geometry in this ciphered message, which is based on the proportions 1/2 and 1/3 (remember the 5's and 23's I mentioned earlier?). And this comes to confirm the clue given by R.A.W. in the book:

"Thus any computer can break the cypher [...] but only the Illuminated can read the code behind the cypher and know what (or who) the Rising Hodge is."

I guess this counts as a successful code breaking. Don't you?

So basically, after studying these patterns in R.A.W.'s masterpiece, I decided that I should give it a try, and I seriously pondered the possibility of using it as a system of Gematria. You must remember at all times what I wrote earlier, however – that the Illuminati themselves never used this cipher as a system of Gematria, but only as a simple substitution cipher. It was only after I read R.A.W.'s book that the idea came to me... and I will never regret that decision.

The 1 Dollar bill & the Illuminati Novice cipher

And then, I had an intuition. So we're talking about the Illuminati, right? The 1 Dollar bill has been such an object of study and conspiracy theories (the All-Seeing Eye, the Pyramid, the Illuminati, well... you know)... so how about I use this cipher in order to try to find some "synchronicities" or "coincidences"? It would surely be ironic. And please note: I am definitely NOT a conspiracy theorist – even though I do believe in conspiracy practices.

Seems tempting... doesn't it?

I immediately set foot to find the value of the mottos in the 1 Dollar bill, and I was stunned when I noticed that the only mottos having 13 letters ("E Pluribus Unum" & "Annuit Coeptis") also sum 169 in the Illuminati cipher, and that is 13 x 13. Not only that, but right in the center of the reverse of the 1 Dollar bill we can read the motto "In God We Trust", containing 12 letters, and right below it the word "ONE". If we add "ONE" (1) to the 12 letters of the motto, the result is the number 13; and if we add "ONE" (1) to the value of the same motto using the Illuminati cipher, the result will be 169, which again is 13 x 13.

These findings eventually led me to writing my first (somewhat awkward) presentation of the Illuminati cipher in a 1-page text called "Ciphers of the Illuminati and the 1 Dollar bill", which was first published on May Day 2008. From that moment onward I was able to make many decodes with it which I think have proven its validity. Anyway, these aren't the only "coincidences" that I've noticed in the Great Seal of the United States. One other very interesting detail about the reverse of the Great Seal (the one with the pyramid) is that it looks suspiciously similar to another pyramid, which was drawn in a carpet that was used in the Illuminati Minerval assemblies. Notice how there are two letters besides the Illuminati pyramid, just like there are two words above the US pyramid; also, there are three (stones?) below the Illuminati pyramid, as there are three words below the US pyramid. There is a difference of exactly 2 months and 3 days between the founding of the Bavarian Illuminati (May 1, 1776) and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America (July 4, 1776).

Source: Tom Hiddell's very informative webpage IlluminatiRex.com.

The letters "D.P." near the Illuminati pyramid stand for "Deo Proximo". In some earlier sketches of the Great Seal of the United States we could read the words "Deo Favente Perennis".

Also, note how above the Great Seal stand the words "Deo Favente" only. Remember how the letters "D.P." in the Illuminati pyramid stand for "Deo Proximo"?

And perhaps not a coincidence...

Coincidence or not, the Washington Monument is precisely 169 (13 x 13) meters high (approx. 555 feet).

But there are other interesting patterns in the reverse of the 1 Dollar bill, and one of them has to do with the total number of letters in it:

– "The United States of America" = 24 letters;

– "One Dollar" = 9 letters;

– "In God We Trust" = 12 letters;

– "ONE" = 3 letters;

– four times the word "ONE", in each of the corners = 4 x 3 = 12 letters;

– "The Great Seal" (below the Great Seal's reverse) = 12 letters;

– "of the United States" (below the Great Seal's obverse) = 17 letters;

– "Annuit Coeptis" = 13 letters;

– "Novus Ordo Seclorum" = 17 letters;

– "MDCCLXXVI" = 9 letters;

– "E Pluribus Unum" = 13 letters;

Total number of letters: 24+9+12+3+12+12+17+13+17+9+13 = 141.

At this time this number won't be especially meaningful to you, but by the time you read the next post, to be dedicated to Francis Bacon's ciphers, you will get a more perfect picture of what I am implying here. In the meantime I invite you, dear Reader, to research about these names, to see if what I'm showing you resonates with any intuition that you might have about this.

Still with me? Now read the words of Manly P. Hall in his masterpiece "The Secret Teachings of All Ages". A single paragraph says it all:

In "The Secret Destiny of America", Manly P. Hall specifically mentions an "Order of the Quest" which was, according to him, responsible for bringing to life the plan described by Bacon in his "New Atlantis", by creating the first American Democracy. Well, in the Illuminati cipher "Quest" = 81 = "Illuminati", and that would mean that the Order of the Quest mentioned by Hall was in fact the Order of the Illuminati:

In case we still have some doubts, the value of "United States of Atlantis" in the Illuminati Novice cipher is 287, a well-known numerical signature for Lord Bacon himself:

When I found this I had serious doubts about my mental sanity. These can all be coincidences, and I don't say they aren't. However, there seem to exist too many "curious" "coincidences" with this cipher that prevent me from stop using it. I believe that by now you will at least be intrigued with this cipher.

In time, you will also feel the need to navigate between some of my posts in this series about the History of the Ciphers, as each one has specific keys, and sometimes small riddles that will keep you motivated and engaged. As I said in another occasion, I like to make my Readers think. =)

The Illuminati Novice cipher and the ciphers of Sir Francis Bacon

At this time you may wonder what is the connection between Sir Francis Bacon and the Illuminati cipher I've been talking about until now. Even though a dedicated presentation of Bacon's ciphers will be left to the next part of this series, I feel that I must give you a preliminary explanation of why some of my discoveries and intuitions led me this way. First of all, there is a striking similarity between the Illuminati Novice cipher and Francis Bacon's Simple & Reverse ciphers:

If you have studied the works of Sir Francis Bacon, you'll be aware of his passion for Cryptography, and you will understand that, in fact, the Baconian ciphers work in group, not separated. That's exactly my opinion, but I include the Illuminati cipher there as well. Some ciphers really do work in group. I use the Illuminati and Bacon ciphers because it makes sense to use them together. Francis Bacon himself used the Simple, Reverse and Kaye ciphers (more on these in the next part). At the same time, the Illuminati cipher seems to be a mixture between Bacon's Simple and Reverse ciphers, besides the fact that there exist some striking similarities in terms of symbols and objectives between Sir Francis Bacon and the Illuminati – namely the supreme and sublime purpose of the Perfectibility of Man, or their connection to Minerva/Athena, the Goddess of Wisdom and “Spear-Shaker”, whose symbol was an Owl, which was so important to Bacon and was also a fundamental part of the doctrines and symbols of the Bavarian Illuminati. I don’t know of any actual connections between the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati and Sir Francis Bacon. However, I do believe that Sir Francis Bacon's works may have been an important inspiration to the Bavarian Illuminati, and that the Illuminati cipher was inspired on Bacon's ciphers. So that's why I use them together.

Eventually, after comparing the Illuminati cipher with the ciphers of Sir Francis Bacon, I thought that there should be a complementary cipher to the cipher of the Illuminati, just like Bacon's Simple cipher is a reflection of Bacon's Reverse cipher. And so, the Illuminati Reverse cipher was born. I ask you to remember, though, that this cipher has no historical antecedents, and so you should always use it with caution. Personally I am convinced of its validity, but that's a conclusion that each one of my Readers should take, based on their own work (or not) with these ciphers.

The Illuminati Scottish Knight cipher – Some personal notes

As I explained earlier, Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus!" Trilogy contained the numerical cipher of the Illuminati... but it contained yet another substitution cipher that replaced each letter of the alphabet by one of two symbols or glyphs, at choice. Now, that specific cipher, which I will call the "glyph cipher", was, as I found out later, used in the Illuminati Masonic degree of Scottish Knight. There were some variations of this cipher with slight differences between them. This is the version of the glyph cipher (together with the numerical cipher) as it appears in RAW's "Illuminatus!" Trilogy, Appendix Beth:

Despite the names that are here given to the ciphers, those were not the original names. The numerical cipher (here called "Zwack") was simply the Illuminati cipher used in the degree of Novice; while the two sets of glyphs, here called "Weishaupt" and "De Molay", were both part of the cipher that was used in the Illuminati Masonic degree of Scottish Knight. This variation of the cipher coincides with the one given in Arkon Daraul's "A History of Secret Societies".

And this is a more "standardized" form (I would say "correct", by comparing it with other versions) of the same cipher, taken from Tom Hiddell's webpage containing the Illuminati cipher fonts at IlluminatiRex.com.

It may seem strange, but contrary to what most wild theories say about the Illuminati and their symbols in the Great Seal of the United States, the Eye in the Triangle (the "Eye of Providence") actually never was a symbol of the Bavarian Illuminati. In fact, it was the Circumpunct, or Circled Dot (⊙), which was used as the official symbol of the Order in the private correspondences of its members.

In the documents of the Illuminati, the Order was always represented by a Circumpunct ⊙, a well-known symbol of the Sun, the Monad in Pythagorean mysticism, and also the All-Seeing Eye of God. Kind of ironic, isn't it?

You may have certainly noticed that in the Illuminati glyph cipher, one of the two symbols that represent the letter "S" is precisely the Circumpunct. There are some interesting connections about this, but I'll list only two of them:

1. The value of the letter "S" is 18, or 6+6+6, in the Illuminati Novice cipher, and its symbol is the Circumpunct, or Circled Dot, which for centuries has been a traditional symbol for the Sun. In Hebrew Qabalah 666 is precisely considered a Solar number, representing the name of the Spirit of the Sun, Sorath (סורת);

2. Here's a neat trick. A dot is represented in the Illuminati Scottish Knight cipher as something like a six (6). Right? Three dots, thus, look like three sixes. 666. Right? Now... in the Morse code, three dots correspond to the letter S, which in the Illuminati Novice cipher corresponds to 18, or 6+6+6.

To complement this, I would like to leave here the words of Terry Melanson in his wonderful book "Perfectibilists – The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati", page 218:

"The chosen date of May 1^st for the Order's birth also has semiotic significance. Traditionally, May Day celebrations are a remnant of fire and sun worship, variously known as Beltane in the British Isles, and Walpurgisnacht in Germany and northern Europe. Weishaupt was aware of these "fire festivals" on the first of May, and instituting his Order on that day – in tandem with professing fire worship as the religion of Illuminism – was, symbolically speaking, a stroke of genius."

Conclusion – And my personal uses of this Cipher

By now it should be apparent to you that I tend to use this cipher in some very specific contexts, which tend to include studies related to certain Secret Societies (Illuminati, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the works of Francis Bacon, etc). Nowadays I tend to pay much more attention to context when working with the ciphers, as it was precisely when I strayed from this "focus on the context" that people did not take me seriously. Yes, like a lot of people who work with ciphers, there was a time when I used this cipher to try to decode everything – and while that can be an interesting exercise, it can become seriously flawed and misguiding when we loose the focus. The same happens with any cipher. This is very important, and it's something that everyone should seriously ponder upon. Focus, objectivity, impartiality, even looking for errors or dubious factors in our own findings, are always, always, extremely important. If you want to prove yourself right, try to prove yourself wrong first. That alone will make a BIG difference in the quality and inner consistency of your own work.

Speaking only for myself, I think these ciphers (including the Illuminati and Baconian ciphers) tend to show more specific connections in the questions regarding Sir Francis Bacon, the Fraternity of the Rosy+Cross, Freemasonry, Bacon's New Atlantis, the creation of the United States of America, and – in my specific case – a possible historical use of the Illuminati cipher to encode certain correspondences and "coincidences" in the Great Seal of the United States. However, the implications of this are enormous.

"Coincidences" like the ones I showed you can really be coincidences. However, there are cases, like a cryptographic riddle I found in Manly P. Hall's most famous book (to be exposed in the next part of this series) where these are numerical signatures that are there for a reason, not just mere coincidences. Now, if someone involved in the creation of the Great Seal of the United States used the Illuminati cipher to encode hidden messages in it, what would the implications of that be? I'm only sharing this because I think this should be known, so that anyone with more knowledge than me on the Bavarian Illuminati and the events leading to the creation of the Great Seal can find some effective clue about this. That would be quite enlightening about the mission of the USA, as Manly P. Hall wrote in "The Secret Destiny of America"... but I seriously doubt it could would be widely shared in the media. "The people is already satisfied with enough conspiracy theories – we don't need to tell them the truth." Isn't that how it works? Please note that as I said before I do not consider myself a "conspiracy theorist" (even though I do believe in conspiracy practices). I know that some of my readers will find it strange when I say this, while I'm writing an article on Gematria, the Illuminati, the 1 Dollar bill, and, after all, the possibility of a conspiracy involved in (a) the creation of the United States and (b) the design of the Great Seal. This shouldn't be seen as a contradiction, but in fact, what I'm doing here is showing possibilities, not undeniable proofs of anything. However, the reason why I'm doing this is because there are people who know a LOT more about this than me, and if those people are willing to share what they know, I am more than willing to learn and to read what you have to say. That's why we are here, after all. To learn and to cooperate with each other.

My dear Reader, I hope this text has brought you some "food for thought". In the next post I will be covering the ciphers of Sir Francis Bacon, including:

1. the Simple & Reverse ciphers;

2. the "Kaye" ciphers;

3. Bacon's Biliteral cipher;

4. the true origin of the ciphers currently known as "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis", in Derek Tikkuri's "Gematrinator" calculator;

5. and also, some discoveries that me and my friend "Casey" from Discord have made while studying this stuff. =)

In the meantime, please feel free to send me a word or two.

Your opinion, my fellow Reader, is very much appreciated.

My best regards to all,

Luís Gonçalves

Some words about Me and the path towards this Blog

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 17:56:00 +0000

Dear Reader,

My name is Luís Gonçalves, I'm 39 years young, and I currently live in Portugal, which is my native country. I've been studying Gematria roughly since 1994, when I first had contact with Hebrew Qabalah through a book by Thierry Lenain called "La Science Cabalistique" (The Cabalistic Science). I had also contact with other ciphers, and one of the first I knew was the one that is now mistakenly called "Jewish", in a book by Jorg Sabellicus named "La Magia dei Numeri" (The Magic of Numbers). More on that specific cipher and that very curious book will be left to a future dedicated post.

By that time my Father was running a Hotel and so I had the opportunity to know and talk with some of our clients. One of them, a man from Spain called Bartolomé, once offered me a page from a magazine which contained a table with the evolution of our alphabet - beginning with Phoenician, then Hebrew, Primitive Greek, Classical Greek, Etruscan, the Classical Latin alphabet, and finally the Modern Latin alphabet. This table really caught my attention and ultimately it was a great influence in my study of the alphabets and languages of the world, greatly contributing to my understanding of the origin of some of these Gematria ciphers. Knowing the different shapes of the letters in the various alphabets also meant for me a special interest in Cryptography – or the ability to hide messages within messages.

A table just like this one came to my hands in 1994/1995,

and it completely changed my life since then.

My work with English Gematria began when I started studying Aleister Crowley's doctrine of Thelema and the mysteries and riddles in his Liber AL vel Legis, "The Book of the Law". This was around 2004. This was a very enriching period for me in terms of Gematria, as I came to know every kind of ciphers based on the English Alphabet, all of them supposed to be the "Key of It All" by their own creators. One of the main ciphers I knew and caught my attention was Jim Lees' English Qaballa (EQ), which really seemed to answer some of the riddles in Liber AL, especially the enduring riddle of AL II:76. That's the cipher that is now being called ALW Kabbalah, as well as "New Aeon English Qabalah" – "NAEQ" for short. A nice review of these "English Ciphers" used to decode Crowley's "Book of the Law" can be found in R. Leo Gillis' short but very informative e-book "Secrets of the Cipher Naughts". That cipher will be further explored in a dedicated post.

Between 2004 and 2008 I dedicated some of my time to studying Secret Societies, including Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the Knights Templar, and perhaps the most "blasphemous" and controversial of them all, the ill-understood Bavarian Order of the Illuminati. A series of investigations, reading about conspiracy theories and conspiracy practices, even diving into the humorously insane universe of Discordianism and Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus!" Trilogy, and finally coming to study the Illuminati through their own texts (1), eventually lead me to start using the cipher of the Illuminati in "decoding stuff". That's another story that I will leave for one of the following posts in this Blog.

Well... long story short, last year or so I was searching for Discord servers about Gematria, in order to be able to talk with people that shared the same interests, and I ended up entering in Derek Tikkuri's "Gematrinator" Discord server. In this server I learned that there was this thing of "decoding Reality" by the use of alpha-numerical ciphers that, when used together, showed some interesting patterns and synchronicities that supposedly explained Reality as a sort of "Numerical Matrix" construct. While this was not the way I was used to work with Gematria, I decided to give it a look so that I could learn something about this "method". To be honest with you, my dear Reader, I wasn't (and still am not) convinced that some of those numerical "matches" would survive a serious mathematical and probabilistic analysis, particularly when it comes to the Reduction ciphers. These ciphers have such low values (from 1 to 9 only) that it makes it very easy to find "significant" matches in virtually anything.

One of the first things I noticed that really annoyed me was seeing people using any cipher indiscriminately and out of their natural context, as well as other ciphers ~~that appeared out of nowhere~~ that were never explained to the ones who used them. I really am not against anyone using any cipher they want. However, my experience with ciphers tells me that if you want to be taken seriously when you work with alpha-numeric ciphers such as these, you've got to know what you are working with. If anyone asks you for more informations about a specific cipher and you can't answer that but you still use it, what chance will there be that your work will be seriously considered and studied? That's precisely what happened in Derek's server: everyone used the available ciphers, but only a handful of them really understood the ciphers they were using. Derek himself was unable to answer some very simple questions about his "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis" ciphers, for example, so you can certainly understand that a natural "friction" happened between me, who insisted that the ciphers should be studied before being used, and Derek Tikkuri. Eventually I was kicked from the server for complaining about being forbidden to use the ciphers I use, the way I use them, even after explaining beyond any doubt the roots and uses of "my bogus ciphers", as Derek called them. While I can't say it was an overwhelmingly enriching or interesting experience in terms of quality and learning, I did learn some things and made some new interesting friends.

So after all of this had happened, here I am with this Blog, believing that a Blog like this is absolutely essential if you want to know more about specific ciphers, their history, and their use. I also believe that a contribution from someone who doesn't use these ciphers the same way as you possibly do, can be an enriching experience for both of us. That's why I'm giving the Readers of my Blog the right to send me messages or even commenting on my posts – because I want to learn from you too, and I don't consider myself a "truth owner", but instead a "truth seeker", just like you. So if my future posts become a good source of study for you, or if you notice some glaring error in any of my posts, I will be thankful if you leave me a word or two. As I said once to a friend of mine: Conflict can be highly enriching for all involved if it is a source of learning, instead of a source of sorrow and resentment.

With this in mind, I send you all my best regards.

Luís Gonçalves

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(1) I can recommend two very good books that throw a more realistic light over the history and true nature of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, their rituals and the inner teachings that were passed on to their members. The first one is Terry Melanson's "Perfectibilists – The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati", and the second is the outstanding "The Secret School of Wisdom", edited by Josef Wäges and Reinhard Markner, and translated by the late Jeva Singh-Anand.

"Time brings forth the hidden Truth"

noreply@blogger.com (Luís Gonçalves) — Sun, 14 Feb 2021 12:57:00 +0000

"Tempore patet occulta veritas" ("Time brings forth the hidden truth") emblem printed in the book "Of prayer and meditation" written by the Spanish monk, Luis de Granada (1504-1588). The book was printed in London in 1596 and was very popular. The identical emblem was printed on the title page of Francis Bacon's "New Atlantis" (1627).

These are good words to use in the beginning of this blog. Not only do they illustrate perfectly my intention in creating this blog, they are also a homage to Sir Francis Bacon, whose works and ciphers have become a major influence in my own studies.

This blog is destined to all those who work with Gematria, that is, any kind of alpha-numeric cipher, in order to "decode the Organic Matrix of Reality". Particularly, if you know what Gematrinator is, and if you know who Derek Tikkuri and Zachary Hubbard are, then this blog is for you.

Even though my work with Gematria does not follow the same lines as the work of these authors, the fact is that many people are still unaware of where many of the ciphers they work with actually come from:

– What is the logic behind the "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis" ciphers, and are they really connected to Sir Francis Bacon?

– Where did the "Jewish" cipher come from? Why do some people call it the Agrippa cipher, and others call it a Latin cipher?

– What's the "Illuminati cipher" and why is it called that way?

– What are the "ALW", "KFW" and "LCH" ciphers and who created them?

That is the kind of questions I will be going to answer in this blog. Not only that, but I will explain how I personally use those ciphers, and also what I think is the right context to use them. This is something I always give the utmost importance. I always try to use my ciphers in the right context, which is always connected to their historical origin, the context where they were originally used in, and how they were used.

This is an absolutely necessary discussion if anyone wishes to use the ciphers of Gematria. To know your tools means to know your work, and that alone can make a huge difference between an excellent decode and an arbitrary/subjective/misleading decode.

So, with the help of Reason and Understanding, let this blog be a shining light to all those who seek to know their tools, in order to more easily bring their work to perfection.

In the service of Truth,

Luís Gonçalves