Aeon418 said:
It's an interesting idea, but just like every other English Qabalah I've seen, it doesn't deliver the goods. A fact that Crowley himself had to admit in his own commentary on this verse.
Dwtw
That all depends on what you mean by 'the goods'. Without quantifying exactly what it is that you think a qabalah & gematria are supposed to achieve, this statement is meaningless.
Any gematria might prove fruitless if one does not know how to apply it, and all gematrias of the 1-26 value variety will have certain aspects in common. Thus, one has to have a list of qualifications to evaluate them. Without some 'targets' to reach, there is no point in preferring one over another except personal taste.
As for Crowley's own attitude, his initial response to this verse, in the 'Old Comment', was simply "Done. See Liber Trigrammaton." Which statement are we to believe, the older Comment or the newer one that said "no qabalah of merit has arisen therefrom"? The fact that neither he nor Norman Mudd nor C.F. Russell had any idea that the trigrams can be considered base 3 numbers is not too surprising, since counting in different number bases was not a common idea at the time. But even the BOTL itself says that he will not understand all its mysteries, so he may well have 'built better than he knew' when he attributed the English alphabet to the trigrams.
I suspect that initially, Crowley knew he had a great idea on his hands with Liber XXVII - one Holy Book providing the key to another Holy Book - but that when he didn't know how to implement it, he decided it was without 'merit'. Not much different than Einstein using the Cosmological Constant as a 'fudge', then lamenting that it was his biggest error, and decades later it being used again in physics to explain certain aspects of the Universe. So which of Einstein's attitudes toward the Cosmological Constant are we to believe? Was it a clever way to make his equations work out, or was it an ad hoc blunder? Success is your proof.
But to stay on topic, we are talking about a particular verse here, that prima facie says to the scribe and prophet, Crowley, that in regard to the letters of the English alphabet, he shall obtain the Order & Value, and find New Symbols. It doesn't say anyone else will do that. We can assume someone else might, and that's a separate issue of interpretation (general vs. specific referent of this verse). But the issue of whether Crowley himself fulfilled this verse (as the specific referent) can only be examined in the light of Trigrammaton, because that is the book wherein he claimed to do so.
He obtained a new order: I,L,C,H,X,T...
He (unknowingly) obtained a new value: 0,1,2,3,6,9...
He found new symbols: the trigrams.
The trick is, he "solved the first half of the equation and left the second unattacked". He solved the Order part, but didn't understand the Value part. He didn't realize that the 'new symbols' were really numbers. He put the letters in a new order, but did not realize that the value they gained thereby was not simply 1,2,3,4,5,6..., rather it was predicated on the ternary values of the trigrams. And by not knowing that he had found the true Value, he concluded that 'no qabalah of merit' had arisen from Trigrammaton. But he was doing exactly what he was supposed to do; solve one half of the 'order = value' equation, and leave the second half unattacked.
One fact is beyond dispute - Liber Trigrammaton is the only English gematria that Crowley handed down to us, (other than transliterated Hebrew, which is a different can of worms entirely). And in Crowley's own words, the book itself, (Liber XXVII), is the "foundation of the highest theoretical qabalah".
Litlluw