The letters of the sacred alphabets (Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, runic, ogham and others), as they are used in esoteric practice, where each carries a name, a numerical value and a set of correspondences. Alphabetic numerology such as gematria and isopsephy depends on letters having values, and the Kabbalistic tradition attaches the twenty-two Hebrew letters to the paths of the Tree of Life. Each entry gives the letter, its alphabet, its value and what is attached to it.
Facts
Overview
- Entries in the Atlas
- 812
Origins
- Whose Classification This Is
- Four of the eight alphabets gathered here are Renaissance magical ciphers rather than scripts in ordinary use. Celestial, Malachim and Passing the River are set out by Agrippa as scripts of the angels, each of twenty-two characters answering to the twenty-two Hebrew letters. 1
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The Sacred Alphabets
This category holds the letters of the sacred alphabets (Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, runic, ogham, Enochian and others), as they are used in esoteric practice, where each letter carries not only a sound but a name, a numerical value and a set of correspondences. Alphabetic numerology such as Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy depends on these values, reading the number of a word as a key to its meaning.
In several traditions the letters are held to be more than signs: the Sefer Yetzirah treats the twenty-two Hebrew letters as the elements from which God formed the world, and the letters of many scripts carry mystical and magical weight.
Letters as Building Blocks
The idea that the letters of a sacred alphabet are the building blocks of reality, and that their combination and numerical value reveal hidden truths, runs through Kabbalah, Islamic letter mysticism (ilm al-huruf), and Greek and Gnostic speculation. In the Western magical tradition the Hebrew letters are also mapped onto the paths of the Tree of Life and the tarot trumps.
The atlas gives each letter its name, sound, numerical value and correspondences. The letters group by alphabet (Hebrew, Greek, runic, Enochian and the rest), and the ogham letters, grouped into aicmi, and the runes are also treated in their own categories.
Enter a year to compare these entries as the atlas records them at that moment. Leave it empty for the present. A year before the common era is entered with a minus sign, so 44 BCE is minus 44.