The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 3 of 4: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and PhilosophyBlavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Religion
The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 3 of 4: The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy
Blavatsky, H. P. (Helena Petrovna)
Theosophy
To realise the full comprehension of the Deific and the Abstruse enjoyed
by the Ancients, one has to study the origin of the figurative
representations of their primitive Philosophers. The _Books of Hermes_ are
the oldest repositories of numerical Symbology in Western Occultism. In
them we find that the number _ten_(183) is the Mother of the Soul, Life
and Light being therein united. For as the sacred anagram Teruph shows in
the _Book of the Keys_ (Numbers), the number 1 (one) is born from Spirit,
and the number 10 (ten) from Matter; “the unity has made the ten, the ten,
the unity”; and this is only the Pantheistic axiom, in other words “God in
Nature and Nature in God.”
The kabalistic Gematria is arithmetical, not geometrical. It is one of the
methods for extracting the hidden meaning from letters, words, and
sentences. It consists in applying to the letters of a word the sense they
bear as numbers, in outward shape as well as in their individual sense. As
illustrated by Ragon:
The figure I signified the living man (a body erect), man being
the only living being enjoying this faculty. A head being added to
it, the glyph (or letter) P was obtained, meaning paternity,
creative potency; the R signifying the walking man (with his foot
forward) going, _iens_, _iturus_.(184)
The characters were also made supplementary to speech, every
letter being at once a figure representing a sound for the ear, an
idea to the mind; as, for instance, the letter F, which is a
cutting sound like that of air rushing quickly through space;
fury, fusee, fugue, all words expressive of, and depicting what
they signify.(185)
But the above pertains to another system, that of the primitive and
philosophical formation of the letters and their outward glyphic form—not
to Gematria. The Temura is another kabalistic method, by which any word
could be made to yield its mystery out of its anagram. So in _Sepher
Jetzirah_ we read “One—the Spirit of the Alahim of Lives.” In the oldest
kabalistic diagrams the Sephiroth (the seven and the three) are
represented as wheels or circles, and Adam Kadmon, the primitive Man, as
an upright pillar. “Wheels and seraphim and the holy creatures” (Chioth)
says Rabbi Akiba. In still another system of the symbolical _Kabalah_
called Albath—which arranges the letters of the alphabet by pairs in three
rows—all the couples in the first row bear the numerical value ten; and in
the system of Simeon Ben Shetah (an Alexandrian Neoplatonist under the
first Ptolemy) the uppermost couple—the most sacred of all—is preceded by
the Pythagorean cypher: one, and a nought—10.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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