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To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.magick From: joecosby@SPAMBLOCKmindspring.com (Joe Cosby) Subject: Re: Gematria, Language, and Kabbalah (was Numerology question) Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2001 02:23:48 GMT harahunched over a computer, typing feverishly; thunder crashed, hara laughed madly, then wrote: >consider Israel Regardie. one could make the case that this was >what he was doing (participating in the co-option of Kabbala >toward Hermetic goals (Golden Dawn, later Crowleyism), Well in a sense. Mermetic magic though, in practice, by the middle of the second millenium was largely influenced by Kabbalism. To the Christian-believing world, the idea that the Jews had the ultimate secrets of God and the universe made a lot of sense. By the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, I think western occultism and kabbalism were already inextricable. >and yet >he was Jewish by name and genetics/culture as far as I know. >Regardie edited out Crowley's text in "777" which was >anti-Jewish and offensive to him. IMO it is pretty embarrasing, downright childish. The difference between what was politically correct in Crowley's time and Regardie's was pretty radical. >>>> or associate numbers with english letters, >>>> the entire process is arbitrary. >>> >>> nothing arbitrary about the sequence A-Z or 1-26; neither is there >>> anything arbitrary about A-I/J-R/S-Z and 1-9/10-90/100-800, which >>> system is used in Hebrew (and apparently Greek) gematria. > >> arbitrary in that with english the letter and number symbols are >> different, you can correspond them however you'd like, and with >> hebrew the letters and numbers are the same symbol. the >> letter/number association is built into the system. > >while I agree that the letters were and are used as numbers, there >is, as far as I know, no absolute way to identify letter-number >correspondences except through traditional selection. for example, >Stan Tenan (an interesting Jewish fellow whose expostulations on >Hebrew letters, their origins, and the signicance of Torah text >and that of Kabbalists are very intriguing) wanted to assign >numbers to the letters, he chose to use the modern 27 letter >alphabet (5 final letters) and pair them with a TRINARY system >beginning with zero because of his interest in spatial coordinates. >he regards the initial aleph not as a formal letter at all, but >as a composite of Beth and Tzadde. there are alternatives. > >combine with this the fact that the simultaneous usage of letters >and numbers occurs in other cultures (e.g. the Greek, which also >used gematria, about which we are speaking and perhaps the >precursors to this type of Jewish numerolinguistic) and you start >having to select not only a system of assignment but also a >LANGUAGE. why select Hebrew rather than Greek, for example? >why select either rather than an older one that used gematria, >or one that did not? > My own opinion, anyway ... I think the main advantage of basing a system of numerology on Hebrew is simply because so much work has been done with it already. I think Greek or Arabic certainly have as valid, if not a more valid, claim to at least age, certainly validity. I use quite a few words in English, a lot in Greek, a small handful from Arabic. I suppose it's largely a question of what you're expecting/wanting to get out of numerology. To me it seems like there are patterns to be found in anything, and that all these patterns, followed far enough, can reveal an underlying structure of our minds/reality. That's roughly the paradigm I use when I'm doing it. So I don't really believe that one language is going to 'work' and another isn't. I think the patterns will always be found in language. To me then, the fact that Hebrew is a foreign language is preferable. I have to study each word and I can't just attribute meaning to it by reflex. The fact that Hebrew is, in ways, more primitive is also preferable. The simple pattern of consonants in an alphabet which is closer to a more primal pictographic language seems more appropriate, closer to the 'primal pattern'. -- Joe Cosby http://joecosby.home.mindspring.com "All's I can say is that I don't want the stupid CapitolOne card, I want whatever sort of credit card the Vikings are using." Kibo Sig by Kookie Jar 5.98d http://go.to/generalfrenetics/
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