A Brief Timeline of English Qabala

Hermetic Qabala gave way to a slow ingress of English Qabala that now refers specifically to the interpretation of the letters of the Roman script or English alphabet via an assigned set of numerological significances. There are various systems of EQ.

The first system of English gematria was used by the poet John Skelton in 1523 in his poem "The Garland of Laurel."

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa applied the concept of arithmancy to the Latin alphabet in 1533 in the 2nd book of his Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Agrippa mapped the letters in accord with the Latin alphabet's place-value at that time

English numerology plays prominently in Sir Thomas Browne's 1658 literary discourse entitled The Garden of Cyrus. Throughout its pages, the author attempts to demonstrate that the number five and the related quincunx pattern can be found throughout the arts, in design, and in nature – particularly botany.

The next reference to an English gematria was made by Willis F. Whitehead in his 1899 book, The Mystic Thesaurus, in which he describes a system he called "English Cabala."

John P. L. Hughes issued The Hidden Numerical Significance of the English Language (1952), or, Suggestive Gematria, based on his lecture at Holden Research Circle on July 4, 1952. William Eisen described a system related to the Spiritualist Agasha Temple of Wisdom in his two-volume The English Cabalah (1980–82).

William G. Gray proposes another system in his 1984 book, Concepts of Qabalah, more recently republished as Qabalistic Concepts. This system includes attributions of the English letters to positions on the Tree of Life.

Michael Bertiaux's Angelic Gematria is in his masterful Voudon Gnostic Workbook (1989). David Rankine described a system of English gematria using prime numbers which he calls Prime Qabalah, in his book Becoming Magick (2004).

New Aeon English Qaballa and Trigrammaton Qabalah

In November of 1976, English magickian James Lees (1939–2015) discovered Aleister Crowley's alleged order and value of the alphabet known simply as EQ (e.g., English Qaballa), as in EQ-ALW, EQ-11, or NAEQ (New Aeon English Qaballa). Lees decrypted an original hand-written page of Liber AL vel Legis referred to by Thelemites as The Book of the Law following an intense and extensive spree of ceremonial magick.

This spree included performing the evocations from the Key of Solomon, completing the 6-to-18-month working described in The Book of Abramelin via the Bornless Ritual, then successfully invoking his Holy Guardian Angel for its Knowledge and Conversation, ascending the Middle Pillar of the Tree of Life, and culminating with what is known as crossing the abyss by confronting the demon Choronzon at the threshold of Da'ath.

The most developed interpretation of Crowley's work, Trigrammaton Qabalah (TQ), was first published by R. Leo Gillis in 1996, and subsequently released as The Book of Mutations in 2002.

This system is based on one of the Holy Books of Thelema by Aleister Crowley in 1907, called Liber Trigrammaton, sub figura XXVII -- Being the Book of the Mutations of the Tao with the Yin and the Yang, which are 27 three-line glyphs known as 'trigrams', composed of a solid line for the Yang, a broken line for the Yin, and a point for the Tao.

Crowley called Liber Trigrammaton, "the highest theoretical qabalah."

By attributing 26 Roman script letters to the trigrams of this work, Crowley felt that he had fulfilled the injunction to "obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet", as noted in his 'Old Comment' to The Book of the Law. However, he also wrote that, "The attribution in Liber Trigrammaton is good theoretically; but no Qabalah of merit has risen therefrom."

In the book, correspondences are created with many forms of divination such as the I-Ching, Tarot and runes, as well as isopsephy and gematria, the Tree of Life, Western and Vedic astrology, kameas, and the Platonic solids. A primary feature of this Qabalah is a new understanding of the Cube of Space and its 26 component edges, faces, and vertices, which equals the number of letters in the English alphabet.

Lettered Numerals in Phylogenic History

The first recorded instance of any kind of numerology is an inscription on the wall from the 8th century BCE commissioned by Assyrian king Sargon II. It says: "the king built the wall of Khorsabad 16,283 cubits long to correspond with the numerical value of his name."

Later, the Greek Milesian numerology system of the Pythagorean tradition in the 6th century BCE, was developed by Pythagoras of Samos, who practiced isopsephy, the Greek predecessor of Hebrew gematria. The Milesian system was widely used during Alexander the Great's reign (336–323 BCE) and was adopted by other cultures throughout the Hellenistic period. It was officially adopted in Egypt during the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (284–246 BCE).

The earliest evidence of Hebrew letters as numbers dates to 78 BCE; and gematria is still used in Jewish culture to this day. Initially, rabbinic literature used gematria to augment interpretions of passages in the Torah and other rabbinical texts.

Following the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE, departures from the beliefs of the state church were classified as civil violations within the Roman Empire. However, isopsephy remained in use in the conservative Greek Orthodoxy.

Some alchemical theories were closely related to numerology. For example, Arab alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan (died c. 806−816 CE) framed his experiments in an elaborate numerology based on the names of substances in the Arabic language.

Numerology Methods of the Modern World

Numerology systems assign numerical values to letters of an alphabet called a cipher.

Examples include the abjad in Arabic, gematria in Hebrew, and isopsephy in Greek. These entail the practice of assigning mystical meaning to words based on numerical values and on connections between words possessing equal value.

The Mandaean number alphasyllabary is also used for numerology (Mandaic: gmaṭ aria). The Book of the Zodiac is an important Mandaean text on numerology.

In the Pythagorean method (which uses a kind of place-value for number-letter attributions, as does the ancient Hebrew and Arabic system), the English letters of the modern Latin alphabet are assigned numerical values ranging from 1 through 9.

Pythagorean numerology

1 a j s
2 b k t
3 c l u
4 d m v
5 e n w
6 f o x
7 g p y
8 h q z
9 i r

More recently, vulgar numerologists have settled on the "Chaldean" system, the "Indian" system, and the aforementioned "Pythagorean/Greek" system, the lattter two of which are often confused with one another even though they use completely different alphanumeric values. The Chaldean and Indian systems use digits 1 through 8, while the Pythagorean (and Hebrew) system use all ordinal digits 1 through 9, which reflects the reduction style of EQ-A1 where A=1, B=2, C=3, etc. to Z=26, except we reduce all two-digit numbers to a single digit. It's the EQ of the 26 English letters.

Chaldean and Indian numerology

1 a i j q y
2 b k r
3 c g l s
4 d m t
5 e h n x
6 v u w
7 o z
8 f p

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