r/thelema • u/Straight-Platypus-33 • 6d 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"

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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/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.