Some curious ideas assailed my mind last night as I lay down to sleep. As often happens, I felt a compulsion to investigate a little deeper, and to stick something on my X account – the place where I basically dump some of the madness going on in my mind.
I had been fiddling around with Crowley’s core formulation from the Liber AL ve Legis – Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Sticking it into a numerology calculator revealed a few interesting hits, none of them especially new on their own, but I’d not seen them together before.
Well, those three big hits look pretty meaty. English Ordinal (EO) is the most basic EN cipher; Reverse Ordinal (RO) is its inversion; and Alphanumeric Qabbala (AQ) is essentially EO+9. Had Crowley channelled some piece of hardcore mathematical wisdom here? Something he was at the time unaware of?
Having mentioned this on a thread, I retired to sleep (again) but didn’t get far. Might it be that this wasn’t as exciting as all that, my mind seemed to be asking? The number 37 sprang to mind, because of course that is the highest divisor of the number 111, and hence any other similar triplet (repdigit) – 222, 333, 444, etc.
My addled brain tried to count the number of letters in Crowley’s famous dictum. Yes, it was 37. I got back up and returned to the laptop. Because there were 37 letters in the maxim, it was inevitable that the AQ value would be precisely 333 greater than the EO value because all the letters in AQ have values precisely 9 above those of EO. But what about the correspondence between EO and its inverse, RO?
After a little fiddling around, and some input from another X-bound devotee of these arts, I realised that any 37-letter string would give exactly 999 when the EO value and the RO value were added. Why? Because of 37 being the highest divisor of 111 and because English has 26 letters. We’ll look at that lower down.
Armed with this insight, my mind left Crowley and moved on to ascent technologies. In Jewish Kabbalah, they are very fond of ladders. There was even a Rabbi called the Baal HaSulam – the Master of the Ladder. And of course, in Genesis 28, Jacob famously perceives a mystical ladder in his dreams, stretching from earth to the heavens above.
Now, what does a ladder have? It has rungs – steps that lead from the bottom to the top. Particularly in Christian-Greek mystical thought, those rungs are considered to be inner states of consciousness. Some are mundane and some deeply mystical. God plants you in one of the more mundane ones. But if you manage to attain enough inner fluidity, through spiritual or meditative practices, you develop the capacity to move onto other rungs of this inner ladder – up and down as you please. These rungs get assigned number values, typically in the range 111 – 999, to indicate how high on this ladder of inner states they are.
This is why 37, as mentioned, is such a significant number in the context of mystical ascension. It is the highest divisor of all of them, 3 x 37 being 111. This number underpins the Hebrew version of Genesis 1:1, which has numeral value 2701 – 37×73. Furthermore, the 37th triangular number – 703 – is the value of the Hebrew word Ahben (Aleph, Beth, final Nun), meaning “stone,” which in Kabbalah refers to the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s also the number of Yechidah in Kabbalah – the term assigned to the innermost aspect of the soul.
Within the Greek New Testament, over 500 different names of Jesus have been shown to have Greek number values that are multiples of 37. Meanwhile, in the King James Version of the English Bible, the RO value of Genesis 1:1 is 777, again of course divisible by 37.
To see an example of this usage of triple digits (repdigits) in the context of Christian Greek mysticism, let’s take a look at a rather dodgy looking character from a book called The Apocalypse Unsealed – an old mystical interpretation of the Book of Revelation.
The text on the right of the picture articulates some of the rungs of the ladder that Christian mystics believed existed.
So what might access to this ladder confer upon the adept? Essentially, it allows them to move from very grounded, animalistic states of consciousness – such as one might encounter in a prison for example – to the very rarified states that one might find in an ashram or perhaps among the angels. In an early form of Jewish mysticism – Merkavah Mysticism – it even meant that one might be able to pay a visit to God, the dude who oversees the simulation (or whatever).
Okay, now let’s move onto our good old English language. Traditionally, EN is not regarded as an especially mystical language. We think of Hebrew and Greek as mystical languages but EN is generally seen as something altogether more day to day and functional. Hebrew and Greek, having 22 and 24 letters respectively, are well known to numerology fans. Both went through a phase where each letter had a number value and so the words of say, The Torah or the Greek New Testament, are well recognised as having meaningful numerical correspondences between each other. But English?
English has 26 letters and, curiously enough, that makes it way better for formulating words that might access the rungs of our mystical ladder, as perhaps you have already spotted. Why? Because 37 x 26 + 37 x 1 = 999. This means that any phrase with 37 letters in EN, when the EO and RO values are added, must give 999. Furthermore, if you take either of these two ciphers and add a multiple of 3 to them, then the value of your 37-letter phrase will increase by one of these repdigit numbers – 111, 222, 333, etc. So if you find a string of 37 letters which sum to, say, 444 in EO, then the same phrase must sum to 777 in AQ and 555 in RO.
For example, say we wanted to find a cipher that would make Crowley’s famous 37-letter maxim sum to 666 – the number of the beast. Not a problem! We know that it has the value 444 in English Ordinal (EO). So all we need to do is to use a cipher where each letter’s value is two multiples of three higher than in EO. EO runs… a=1; b=2; c=3… z=26. So we need to add 6 to the value of each letter viz… a=7; b=8…. z=32. Stick that cipher in Python or Notepad++ and run Crowley’s aphorism through it and, hey presto, it will come out as 666. This simply can’t happen with an alphabet that does not have 26 letters. Meaning that Greek and Hebrew can’t do it. It can only happen where the number of letters in the alphabet, plus 1, equals a multiple of 3.
But why does this matter? Well, alphabet and language can be considered as programs that run in our frontal lobes. Like any program, they create subsidiary effects adjacent to their core function, in the case of language – communication and meaning. If your frontal lobes run on EN, they are running a program that also relates to mystical states and ascension, regardless of whether you are aware of this or especially want it. Might this be a part of the reason why the English language has slowly come to dominate global minds, aside of the more obvious ones relating to commerce and the legacy of empire. It just might!
Thank you for reading.