Numerology and sacred alphabets

If you want to understand numerology, you have to understand what numerologists are trying to do.  They are trying to make a link between on one hand modern day names and dates, and on the other hand millennia-old secret wisdom.  In particular, they’re trying to link their numerological interpretations with a sacred alphabet.

Now some numerologists might not be aware of what they’re doing.  They perhaps regard numerology as a complete system, that doesn’t have to be questioned or analysed.

However in the early Twentieth Century it was very important to be able to connect numerology with ancient alphabets.  This is quite clear if you read the numerological works of Sepharial and Cheiro.

So what do I mean by a sacred alphabet?  It’s an alphabet that has mystical significance, because it has a direct connection with religious or spiritual knowledge.

There are going to be lots of claims about what constitutes a sacred alphabet, but the big three must surely be Sanskrit, Hebrew and Greek.  Sanskrit is the language of the Vedas, Hebrew and Greek of the Old and New Testaments.

Sanskrit is certainly very important, and numerological systems based on Sanskrit tend to emphasise the important of sound.  This is hardly surprising, given the significance that Hinduism attaches to the recitation of mantras.

Yet Sanskrit is outside the main Western tradition, and in this article I want to focus on the Greek and Hebrew alphabets.

Both of these alphabets can be directly linked with number.  Alpha, the first letter of the Greek alphabet, is equivalent to 1; aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, is also equivalent to 1.  As you go through the order of the alphabet, the numbers get bigger.  So the second letter of the alphabet is 2, the third 3.  Yet after the tenth letter, the numbers go up in increments of 10, in both alphabets.

This means that the tenth letter of the alphabet, which is yod in the Hebrew alphabet and iota in the Greek, had 10 has its equivalent.  The eleventh letter, respectively kaph and kappa, is equivalent not to 11, but to 20.

Numerologists like Cheiro regarded Hebrew numerology with mystical awe, and they wanted to apply it to the modern-day Latin alphabet.  This was a big problem, because the Hebrew alphabet only has twenty-two letters.

In many cases, the numerologist would have to use his or judgement to decide how best to convert someone’s name to its Hebrew equivalent, so as to derive the right number.  This was no good for the mass market, which is why the current system of Western numerology was adopted.

However simplicity has a price.  Once numerologists stopped trying to convert to the Hebrew alphabet, they were losing touch with their own tradition.  Any claims about a millennia-old method were no longer valid.  They then had to re-invent their own mysticism, focusing on Pythagoras rather than the Kabbalah.  But that’s another story.

Copyright © 2010 Archie Dunlop

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