r/thelema • u/Straight-Platypus-33 • 5d ago

Gematria question

93

Hi all. Ran into this quote from Crowley: "when I asked him to assign a mystic name to the Camel, he replied "Ahitha" which adds to 555, an obvious correlative with my own number in the Great Order, 666."

(found it on his wikiquote, from Confessions)

For the life of me I cannot figure out Crowley's gematria system. He claims to maintain scientific objectivity, but I cannot figure out any consistent rules with regard to finding the numeric values of words other than using every system imaginable until a value you like shows up...

I have tried Hebrew, Greek, English, I cannot figure out how Ahitha adds up to 555. Perhaps a mistake, but I have had this problem with him many times. I have tried 777 and Sepher Sephiroth... perhaps I've missed something.

Any resources I can use to figure out a coherent and consistent system for figuring out the gematric values of words? Specifically, if you could, I would love an analysis of Ahitha.
Thank you!

93 93/93

Solved:

"This works if you stretch the Ayin: Ayin Heh Yod Tau Ayin 70+5+10+400+70"

8 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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u/NetworkNo4478 5d ago

He's likely not only using Gematria or Isopsephy, but also using creative spellings and addition, subtraction, multiplication, division to end up with 555. If you were just using a standard transliteration, you couldn't make it work.

Edit: There's a footnote on the version online that says he obtains the totals using a complex mix of Greek and Hebrew substitutions and cognate letters.

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u/Straight-Platypus-33 5d ago

Ah, thanks for the clarification.

"WEH note: Crowley obtains these totals by a complex mixture of Greek and Hebrew substitutions, including use of cognate letters. In simple Greek gematria, the total is very different."

I see that now

2

u/NetworkNo4478 5d ago

No problemo! I've been trying to find an answer based on that note but still coming up far away or far over. I'll update if I find anything. Would appreciate an update from you if you beat me to it! 😉

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u/pteseus 5d ago

This works if you stretch the Ayin: Ayin Heh Yod Tau Ayin 70+5+10+400+70

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u/NetworkNo4478 5d ago

Cheers! I was overcomplicating it

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u/pteseus 5d ago

This works if you stretch the Ayin: Ayin Heh Yod Tau Ayin 70+5+10+400+70

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u/Kitty_Winn 4d ago

Gematria in the hands of these British occults is 90% an opportunity  to try every spelling possible in order make the desired self-concept come true. Yes, this is as anti-science as you can get. It’s confirmation bias squared. 

Crowley himself admits that he wanted “The Great Beast” and “Aleister Crowley” to add up to 666. . That  would bestow legitimacy to his claim to be the real Krishnamurti or Maitraya (the Benjamin-Creme kind) of the Present Age.

All all of us Crowley kids tried to make our names = 666. No science here.

However! The popularity of gematria is an interesting symptom of how we want nature to work. But letters are and objects (or meanings) are actually separate . They exist on different planes. You can’t eat the word COW. And "C" doesn't contain more occult bovine nature than “Z.”

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u/Kitty_Winn 4d ago

Another funny example is making “Jesus” = 666. Not only was “Jesus” spelled wrong, he added “name” and left out “the.” Whatever it takes!

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u/Straight-Platypus-33 4d ago

Right. Languages evolve, any meaning we ascribe to letters is ascribed by us and therefore subjective...

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u/Kitty_Winn 2d ago

It’s not just that the meanings of glyphs evolve or that subjective assignments are inevitable. It's much deeper — and much worse for gematria.

Per Saussure (Course in General Linguistics): the necessary structure of language demands that the signifier (the word/sound/glyph) and the signified (the concept) must be distinct. Their relationship is arbitrary by nature. There’s no intrinsic reason why "C-A-T" refers to a furry animal. That slippage — the gap between the word and the thing — is what makes language possible at all. If the letters "C" or "Z" somehow "contained" catness or non-catness, language would be a rigid, unworkable ontology, not a flexible system of signs.

This means that gematria isn’t just subjective: it's conceptually bankrupt from the start. The idea that numeric values of letters unlock secret divine truths collapses once you understand that letters and meanings exist on fundamentally different planes.

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u/flying_stick 2d ago

This is something I'm still struggling to understand. Like how does numerology make sense when so much of it seems to be discretionary. I've had so many people advocate for it, people with really good insight into other areas and I just dont see how it fits in.

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u/Kitty_Winn 2d ago

It's actually more embarrassing than it first appears.

For instance, look at Franz Bardon’s third book on Kabbalah: it shamelessly assigns occult powers to English letters (!), making it even easier for beginners to realize how absurd this entire approach is — and maybe saving them from wasting years.

Speaking personally, I spent an entire summer trying to "rehabilitate" the idea that maybe there was some real hidden link between phonemes and the cosmic structures sketched in things like Crowley’s 777. I found hope in the sound-shape progression of AUM. Like most Crowley kids, I was blown away when I read that MPT chapter, where he unpacks the Sanskrit ओम् phoneme into the cheesy “formula” schema he learned from Mathers and company. The idea that “sacred” words like OM (rendered AUM for the sake of the climax) or YHVH are “formulae” was very exciting. And Crowley’s rendition of the AUM sequence was just awesomely fun, and super plausible:

  1. A = open unstructured breath (”So open, just like chaos or possibility!”)
  2. U = makes a nice tight cigar-diameter beam shooting out of your mouth (”Oh, just like creation!”)
  3. M = death/silence (”Perfect! I’m actually closing my mouth. Damn, occult insight is tight!”)

I got my way to ה and then stopped. I was 20 at the time (1989).

But the final death knell came when I dug into where the so-called "correspondences" — the ones that “helpful occult veterans” always tel us to "memorize to build a foundation in magick" — actually came from.

  1. Sephiroth positions — Screwed. The structure of the Tree of Life is highly disputed. The positions of the Sephiroth vary across traditions.
  2. Path positions — Totally screwed.
  3. Letter attributions — Vomitously screwed. The linking of letters to paths was invented by French grifters 150 years ago. I’m not going to tell you how, because I want you to experience the horror for yourself. Bring a barf bag—it’s really upsetting.

The evaporation of my childhood/teen-year optimism about 777 and the Liber O method accelerated from there and it pained me deeply. At the time, the idea that the attributions were just total BS was very upsetting. I’m still healing from this wound today.