The Qabala of God

(This essay is drawn from the author’s book ANAGOMKIN: Secret of the Hidden God. Available @ Amazon.)

The word Kabbalah comes from the Hebrew root QBL, qibel, meaning simply “to receive.” That etymology matters more than it might first appear. This is not a system someone invented or a philosophy someone reasoned their way into. The tradition as understood by S. L. MacGregor Mathers and the broader Western esoteric inheritance presents it as received knowledge, a body of wisdom passed down from a source beyond ordinary human inquiry. Specifically, the tradition holds that God taught these mysteries directly to chosen angels, who then transmitted them to Adam and Eve. The purpose was not merely intellectual. This sacred knowledge was given as the means by which humanity could recover its original, unfallen condition.

These teachings are what the tradition calls the “pathways of old.” The phrase comes directly from Jeremiah 6:16:

“Thus says the Lord: Stand beside the earliest roads, ask the pathways of old which is the way to good, and walk it; thus you will find rest for your souls.”

In Kabbalistic reading, this is not simply prophetic exhortation. It is a pointer toward something encoded in the structure of reality itself, a route that predates human history and remains accessible if one knows how to ask for it.

The transmission of this knowledge across generations follows a recognizable chain. From Adam to his sons, then to Noah, who according to the tradition initiated his children while they were enclosed in the Ark. Abraham the Patriarch is said to have encoded the teaching in a text called the Sefer Yetzirah. The lineage runs forward to King Solomon. It was only much later, when the disciples of the Kabbalist Rabbi Simeon bar Jochai compiled his writings alongside other treatises, that the wisdom began to exist in written form. Moses de Leon later brought these materials into the open, and the result is the Zohar, the Book of Splendor, which remains the central repository of Kabbalistic teaching.

Gematria

One of the three branches of what is called Literal Kabbalah is Gematria, and it is the method that will occupy most of what follows. The other two branches, Notariqon and Temurah, are set aside here. Gematria operates on a principle that that may feel unfamiliar at first if you approach it from a modern Western frame: every word carries a numerical value, and every number corresponds to words and concepts. The connection between words sharing the same number is not coincidental. It is meaningful, a form of hidden correspondence woven into language itself.

W. W. Westcott, in his Introduction to the Study of Kabbalah, explains the mechanism with remarkable clarity. A name or word with a certain numerical value was understood to bear a relationship with other words reaching the same number, so that those words were considered interpretively linked. His example is precise and invites careful consideration. The Hebrew word for Messiah, MshICh, adds to 358. The phrase IBAShILH, meaning “Shiloh shall come,” also adds to 358. On the basis of this correspondence, the passage in Genesis 49:10 was read as a prophecy of the Messiah. What makes this more than an arbitrary number game is that Nachash, the Serpent of Moses, is also 358, which opens onto the typological connection between Moses lifting the bronze serpent in the wilderness and the later Christian reading of that image as a figure of the crucified Christ. The letter Shin, valued at 300, became an emblem of divinity because it corresponds numerically to Ruach Elohim, the Spirit of the Living God.

A more striking example appears in Genesis 18:2, where Abraham lifts his eyes and sees three men standing before him. The Hebrew phrase “and behold, three men,” Vehenna Shalisha, yields the value 701. The Kabbalist observes that 701 is also the combined gematria of the three archangels’ names in Hebrew: Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael. The three mysterious visitors, in other words, are numerically identified with the three archangels before the narrative offers any other indication of who they are.

The gematria used in the sections that follow works differently from the classical Hebrew method. It applies the Pythagorean system to the English alphabet, using the letter-to-number correspondences that reduce the alphabet to nine values:

1 = A, J, S 2 = B, K, T 3 = C, L, U 4 = D, M, V 5 = E, N, W 6 = F, O, X 7 = G, P, Y 8 = H, Q, Z 9 = I, R

The Pythagorean method also uses the fadic system, which means compound numbers are reduced to a single digit by adding their digits together. The number 25 becomes 7. The number 43 becomes 7. What matters is where the reduction lands.

The Number of the Divine

The convergence that emerges across traditions, once the gematria is applied, is remarkable enough that I want to present it without rushing past it.

In Egypt, the Hidden Eternal God of Light is known as Amen Ra. The name yields 1+4+5+5+9+1, which reduces to 25, then to 7. The royal name rendered as Pharaoh was, according to Albert Pike in Morals and Dogma, PHRA, meaning Pai-ra, the Sun. PHRA reduces to 25, then to 7. The fire god of Hindu tradition, Brahma, also arrives at 7 by the same path.

The Hebrew God who answers with fire in 1 Kings 18 and who spoke to Moses through the burning bush: YAHWEH, 7+1+8+5+5+8, reduces to 34, then to 7. In Mazdean religion, the God of Light is Ormuzd, also 34, also 7. Mithras arrives at the same number. Allah, the God of Islam, reduces to 16, then to 7. The Egyptian sun god Ra, approached through the Greek name Heli, also reaches 16 and then 7. The Gnostic Greeks worshipped this same figure as IAO, 9+1+6, which is 16, which is 7. The Zohar’s name for the supreme ruler of the cosmos, Adon, reaches 7 by the same path.

The pattern holds across traditions that have no historical contact with one another, or contact so distant and indirect that common borrowing cannot explain the numerical alignment. Siddhartha Gautama Buddha reduces to 88, then 16, then 7. The name Rama Caitanya Mahaprabhu reaches 88 by a different path and arrives at the same destination. Jesus Christ, 1+5+1+3+1 and 3+8+9+9+1+2, totals 43, which reduces to 7.

I should say simply that I do not know whether this convergence is best understood as a discovery about language and number or as a construction that the method makes inevitable. The Pythagorean fadic system, applied with sufficient flexibility in spelling, can generate 7 as a destination for a great many names. The question of whether the convergence reveals something real about the underlying unity of divine names, or whether it demonstrates the malleability of numerological systems, is one the evidence does not settle. What I can say is that the tradition takes the convergence seriously as disclosure rather than coincidence, and that taking it seriously, even provisionally, opens perspectives that dismissing it too quickly forecloses.

The Recurrent Figure

The tradition does not stop at numerical equivalence. It proposes something more specific: that across different cultures and centuries, the same divine figure appears under different names, and that the gematric convergence is a trace of this underlying identity.

The most provocative instance involves the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep, who in approximately 1375 BCE undertook a campaign to cleanse Egyptian temples of idolatrous practice, beheading priests and erasing the names of other gods from temple walls. The name Amenhotep reduces to 4+3, then to 7, the same value as Jesus Christ. The tradition reads in this a historical parallel: the same righteous energy that drove Jesus to overturn the tables of the money changers in the Temple was present in Amenhotep’s earlier purification of sacred space. Whether one accepts the theological interpretation or not, the structural parallel is genuinely striking.

In Peru, the creator deity Virakocha, to whom the Inca attributed the origins of civilization, also reaches 7. Thor Heyerdahl noted in Kon-Tiki that the older name for Virakocha was Kon-Tiki or Illa-Tiki, meaning Sun-Tiki or Fire-Tiki, which places him within the same cluster of solar and fire symbolism that runs through the other divine names gathered here. In India, the name Parabrahma, the One and Supreme Spirit, reduces through the same method to 7.

What the tradition is tracing is not simply a formal curiosity about how numbers behave. It is an argument, made through the medium of language and number, that the divine presence recognized across cultures as the God of Light, the Fire God, the Sun, the Supreme Spirit, the Master of the Universe, is a single reality appearing under the names each tradition has given it. The Qabala of God, in this reading, is the hidden grammar that underlies the apparent multiplicity of divine names, a grammar that only becomes visible when you know how to read the numbers.

The path of old that Jeremiah names at the crossroads is, among other things, this: the recognition that what every tradition has been reaching toward, through its own language and imagery and practice, is not many different things but one thing, approached from many different angles, across the full span of human religious history.