Witchcraft for Tomorrow by Doreen Valiente

Author:Doreen Valiente
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780719826955
Publisher: Crowood

9

The Witches’ Alphabets

Writing has always been a magical art. In Egypt Thoth, the god of esoteric wisdom, was regarded as the inventor of letters, the scribe of the gods. There was one writing in which sacred inscriptions were recorded, the hieroglyphic script, while another and simpler form of letters was used for more commonplace purposes. Similar conventions ruled in many other parts of the ancient world also.

Moreover, a number of ancient alphabets, as Robert Graves has shown in his book The White Goddess, contained various religious secrets. For instance, there might be a twenty-two lettered alphabet of which seven letters were vowels. This commemorates the fact that twenty-two divided by seven gives approximately the value of the mathematical term Pi, being the relationship of the diameter of a circle to its circumference.

The circle is the sign of infinity and eternity, while the diameter is emblematic of the finite and mortal. Hence this concept involved the relations between earth and the cosmos, between the macrocosm and the microcosm, or between the human and the divine.

The idea that letters are holy things and that written inscriptions hold sacred power survived into the present day in Tibet. Tibetan refugees have complained that the Communist Chinese invaders strewed the writings from pillaged shrines and monasteries upon the roads, so that the people could not come out of their houses, because in so doing they would have had to walk upon the sacred writings.

The Hebrew Cabbala is full of allusions to the mystic power of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The Cabbalistic treatise called the Sepher Yetzirah, or Book of Formation, says that God created the universe by means of the three forms of expression: numbers, letters and words. This treatise was first introduced to the non-Jewish world in 1552, in a Latin translation by William Postel. It divides the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet into three ‘Mother’ letters, corresponding to the elements of Fire, Air and Water; seven ‘Double’ letters, corresponding to the seven planets; and twelve ‘Simple’ letters, corresponding to the signs of the Zodiac.

In addition to this classification of the Hebrew letters, each letter also corresponds to a number. The first ten letters correspond to the numbers one to ten, the next eight letters correspond to the succeeding numbers, twenty to ninety, while the last four letters continue to count in hundreds, from 100 to 400. Five final forms of the letters bring the correspondences up through 500 to 900. By this means every word written in Hebrew has a numerical equivalent. Thus the sacred four-lettered name of God, IHVH, translated as ‘Jehovah’ in the English Bible though its actual pronunciation is unknown, has the numerical equivalent of twenty-six. I = ten, H = five, V = six, H = five.

The same system of equating letters with numbers applies to the Greek alphabet also, and to Arabic. Hence there are said to be a Hebrew Cabbala, a Greek Cabbala and an Arabic Cabbala. (This word is sometimes spelt Kabbalah or Qabalah).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.