"No, really, they're just shadows..."
Aeon418 said:
Use gematria, and Understand. That's Binah, the sephira to which the Neschamah (spiritual intuition) is normally attributed.
So it's not gematria as a pure intellectual exercise. But one backed up by spiritual insight.
Aiwass/Crowley may not exactly be referring to Gematria in 1.25 as 2+5 =7 and the 7 Planets of the Hexahedron/METATRON also fit into 1.7 as a STAR (albeit a six-pointed One, but it would fit nicely in 1 1 as a key that includes six).
Gematria may provide some good anecdotes from time to time, but the barrage of ‘insights’ is enough to render them all meaningless....or worse. On the face of it, the idea of a quantifiable rationale organizing our words into divine formulas sounds appealing; and, I’ll admit, there do appear to be magical formulas encoded by a few key Hebrew words; but looking for the great chain being with a calculator and dictionary is surely a roadmap to the booby hatch - especially if One is invoking ‘the spirits’. It smacks of the sort of schizoid ‘logic’ that might impel a person into writing an over-arching theory of all & everything on their own walls....in poop.
I’m not trying to disparage your contributions to the field as I have gained some useful insights from this brand of ‘metaphysical mathematics’.
I just have to wonder, ultimately, if it’s somehow missing the point.
Of course, one could make the same case for my own cartomaniacal ‘strings of dashes, numbers, cards, etc.’; but at least I offer a view to these systems that correlates to observable phenomena. In fact, I find it odd that, being an etymologically inclined polymath, you seem to prefer scoffing at the implications of my findings rather than test the Tarot-as-calendar model itself to see if it actually works.
Or maybe Crowley intended us to compile a list of every word that equals 56, or some derivation thereof, map out their connections to one another, and form a religion around it. Call it, maybe, Elevengalical Qabalianity.
...but I doubt it.