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Subject: Toward a Digital Gematria
                                                           brad thales         
 
        In the ancient Greek and Hebrew alphabets, letters not only represent
letters of the alphabet, but numbers as well.  This process of assigning 
numbers to letters is known as gematria. Kabbalistic tradition and those 
which borrow from it came to use gematria as means of esoteric interpretation
of texts.  This is done by summing the values of each letter of a word.  
The mystic or magickian then finds another word with an equivalent sum.  By 
the nature of having equal gematric sums, the two words maintain a mystical 
connection or correspondence.   Many practitioners maintain personal 
archives of correspondences for use in their own esoteric interpretations 
or magickal rituals,  as well as publishing them for use in secret 
magico-mystical orders or even for the general public.   
        For the modern seeker who wishes to use this technique, a few 
problems present themselves. Most modern alphabets do not represent 
numbers in addition to letters.  This leaves one with two options:  learn 
ancient Greek or Hebrew or make due with your modern alphabet by arbitrarily 
assigning number to the letters.  Since many people do not wish to 
dedicate afew years to learning an ancient language(others do!), they proceed 
with the second option.  For the sake of this endeavor, I will assume the 
English language and the Roman alphabet.  The typical approach is to assign 1 
to A, 2 to B, and so on until 26 to Z. For many people, this system seems to 
have favorable results despite its somewhat arbitrary nature.  Personally,  I 
find this approach a bit dull and simplistic considering the possibilities 
of human creativity.  An useful alternative to this approach could not 
escape the arbitrary nature of human-constructed systems, but possibly 
accentuate the connections between words by exploiting a common framework 
or medium by which language is experienced. 
        In the Age of Information, the task of finding a common medium is 
relatively easy.   Unless you have been living with the !Kung San of the 
Kalahari for the past 25 years, you are probably painfully aware of role 
of computers in modern life, especially in the area of information 
dispersion.  Most information and language that you experience has in some 
way passed through a computer.  Almost all printed media is now prepared on 
computers.  This includes books, newspapers, magazines, and signs in public 
places.  With the expansion of the Internet and computer networks in general, 
it becomes more and more difficult to not in some way come in contact with 
the digital essence.  You may not be responsible for producing these things 
or you may not even like computers, but most information and objects you 
interact with on an everyday basis have been molested by the digital 
god.  You are inescapably  surrounded by it.  In order for you to even read 
this, you must come in contact with the digital essence which is responsible 
for the physical manifestation of these words.  Even anti-tech anarchists 
like John Zerzan and the infamous Unabomber are forced to submit to the 
digital essence to disperse their ideas in books, zines, and newspapers 
(at least for now!).  In short, the digital essence is everywhere.
        Despite the terrifying aspects of the digital essence (increasing 
with the passage of time),  there may be some thing useful here for the 
project at hand.  If most printed and electronic texts are created using 
computers, then the words are infused with the digital essence.  These 
texts maintain connections within themselves and with other texts through the 
infusion of the essence.  A gematria grounded in the means by which these 
texts are created would have access to the esoteric connections between 
words.  Therefore, a useful way to interpret digitally created texts 
would be through a digital gematria.    
        Interestingly enough, digital gematrias already exist, but they 
are not usually used for hermeneutic purposes!  In the digital realm,  all 
characters (letters, numbers, and punctuation)  are represented by a 
number.  The computer  understands characters not as a character, but as 
a number (code).  Several standards exist which allow information to be 
exchanged among several computers.  The most common of these standards is 
the ASCII character set which is supported by almost all computers.  This set
contains 127 characters of which code numbers 32 to 126 are visible and 
the rest are actions or not visible (tab, new line, etc.).  All characters 
have a corresponding number.  This includes spaces, punctuation, numbers,  and 
upper and lower case letters for a total of 94 characters. Considering 
that is 3.5 times as large as the earlier mentioned gematria, the 
possibilities for hermeneutical exegesis are overwhelming!  Interpretations 
are context specific not only in meaning, but in visible manifestation as 
well.  This means that God (71+111+100=282) and god (103+111+100=314) have 
different values.  Spaces have value as well, allowing for sentence by 
sentence  analysis or even document by document comparison.  With the speed and 
ease of programming, entire books can be analyzed in a variety of ways.  
Each word could be calculated and indexed based on value.  This could be 
done for sentences, paragraphs, pages, or whatever coordination of characters 
you want to penetrate.   All texts that have the digital essence can be 
analyzed in this way.  Obviously, those still in electronic form would lend 
themselves to the previously mentioned gematric endeavors which would be 
rather time consuming for a human, but trivial for a computer.  The 
possibilities are only restricted by the patience and skill of the 
programmer writing gematric tools.
        Before theory consumes this writing, I would like to discuss my 
initial experiences with digital gematria.  Using the PERL language, 
I wrote a program to calculate the values and index the contents of a 
list of 25,000 words.  This may seem like a lot, but for the computer its not 
that much trouble.  Here are a few of the findings:
 
        444:  word holy pure four
        764:  ecstasy numbers
        772:  rituals writing 
 
What this may suggest depends on the context of the words (or it may 
not!).  Therefore, the meaning of the correspondences may not be immediately 
apparent, but they are connected.
        Continuing my experimentation, I decided to write a program to 
analyze the punctuated fragments of Aleister Crowley's Book of the Law.  
The Liber AL vel Legis  (as its also known)  incorporates a fair amount 
of Kabbalistic gematria in its structure and composition.  For those 
interested in the Kabbalistic correspondences,  Crowley's The Law is for All
is his personal commentary on the book.  Honestly, I really know very 
little about it and would not attempt to discuss it.  I chose this book, 
because it is one of the more interesting digital books freely available 
(I also did the Book of Revelations!).  However, what I will do is 
present some of the digital correspondences that arose.  Instead of commentary, 
I will leave these for the reader to enjoy untainted.
 
        2397:
        Drink to me, for I love you!
        there is a word not known.
 
        3276:
        Every man and every woman is a star.
        Death is forbidden, o man, unto thee.
 
        3723:
        he that is filthy shall be filthy still.
        There is now law beyond Do what thou wilt.
 
        5108:
        For I am divided for loves sake, for the chance of union.
        A feast for the first night of the Prophet and his Bride!
 
        7493:
        on the low men trample in the fierce lust of your pride, in the 
	day of your wrath.
        Let there be no difference made among you between any one thing & 
        any other thing; 

b.thales
pob 852
athens, ga 30603
usa