Occult Interpretation of Alphabets and Numerals

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Blavatsky Speaks Series · 11 pages

Eleven pages on the mechanics of symbolic interpretation, and one of the few places in the library where the actual techniques are named. The transcendental methods of the Kabbalah, she says at the outset, must not be mentioned in a public work — but its arithmetical and geometrical ways of unriddling symbols may be described, and they are: the three Zohar sections of Gematria, Notaricon and Temurah, together with the Albath and Algath, with readers referred to Cornelius Agrippa for more.

The second half turns to Pythagoras, and makes a claim about transmission rather than invention. His chief figures are listed — the square or Tetractys, the equilateral triangle, the point within a circle, the cube, the triple triangle, and the forty-seventh proposition of Euclid, of which he was the inventor — but with that one exception, she argues, none of the symbols originated with him: they were well known in India millenniums before, and the Samian sage brought them back not as speculation but as a demonstrated science, on the authority of Porphyry quoting the Pythagorean Moderatus. A footnote glosses the three Zohar methods usefully for a beginner: Gematria from the Greek grammateia, Notaricon comparable to stenography, and Temurah a permutation of the alphabet.

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