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Agrippa gave value to the English letters without trying to transliterate them from Hebrew or Greek, so L is 20, rather than 30 (for Lamed), M is 30, rather than 40 (for Mem) and N is 40, rather than 50 (for Nun). This cipher is sometimes erroneously labelled as “Jewish” or “Hebrew” by popular numerology calculators, such as Gematrix and Gematrinator. A third type of gematria is known as ‘Ordinal’ gematria; this assigns a numerical value to each letter according to its place in the alphabet rather than its individual value. For example, ‘A’ would be equal to 1, ‘B’ would be equal to 2 and so on. This system can be applied just like Hebrew or Greek gematria but produces different results due to its unique numbering system. Word-based numerology probably began in 8th century BCE Mesopotamia; Greeks practised isopsephia (letter-based calculation) from the 5th century BCE. Hebrew gematria only arrived in c.100 BCE, yet soon grew in complexity. Unsurprisingly, it became an indispensable tool of Jewish mystics (kabbalists) down the ages. Indeed a search on the “Google” internet search engine reveals over 106,000 references to gematria on the World Wide Web, a great number of these sites deal with Christianity, witchcraft, and general (non-Jewish) mysticism. Numerous contemporary Jewish books have been published about gematria as well as assisting the reader to find his own gematria equivalencies. For instance, one such book, Sefer Gematrikon (Jerusalem, 1990) provides gematria equivalents for the numbers 1 to 1,000. Numerical equivalents are given to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet in digital ascending order from Aleph, the first letter, equivalent to 1 until Yod, the 10th letter, equivalent to 10. From there on, the letters ascend by 10s, until Kopf, the 19th letter which equals 100. If you beloved this article and you would like to acquire much more data with regards to web site kindly check out our web-site. The last three letters Resh, Shin, and Taf ascend by 100s, leaving us with Taf equal to 400. This is one of the devices used in Kabbalah to explore deeper dimensions of Hebrew words. The great Kabbalist Rabbi Yitzchak Luria used this method extensively to reveal hidden meanings in the Torah text. Gematria is the calculation of the numerical equivalence of letters, words, or phrases, and, on that basis, gaining, insight into interrelation of different concepts and exploring the interrelationship between words and ideas. Skeptics, however, have noted that gematria can be employed as “proof” to support diametrically opposing positions, depending on the words and phrases one chooses to highlight and calculate. A somewhat tongue-in-cheek illustration of this involved an attempt to predict the 2016 United States presidential election through the gematria of the candidates’ names. The author of the article showed how this line of reasoning could be used just as easily to predict the victory of either candidate.
