Curious Christian

I caught up with an old mate for lunch today who is currently writing a primer article on gematria.

Gematria is a longstanding interest of his as it draws together his twin loves of music and mathematics. Gematria involves converting words and sentences into numbers, usually by assigning numbers to each letter of the Hebrew or Greek alphebet, and when converted to a number, they can be compared to other words and similarities drawn. How he uses this musically is that he incorporates gematrically significant ratios into his musical compositions to effectively tell a story without vocals. Very esoteric I assure you so I wont go into further detail unless asked.

Anyway, his interest dovetails with a present research interest of mine: Kabbalah and visionary pathworkings. As Kabbalistic and Gematric lore are intertwined to a certain extent he has a wealth of books on Kabbalah and related subjects that I was able to pick up. Here’s the list:

“The Holy Kabbalah: A Study of the Secret Tradition in Israel” by A E Waite

“Kabbalah” by Gershom Scholem

“The Essential Kabbalah: The Heart of Jewish Mysticism” by Daniel C Matt

“The Music of the Spheres” by Jamie James

“Dreams: God’s Forgotten Language” by John A Sanford

“The Hindu Scriptures” translated by R C Zaehner (unrelated I know but I took the opportunity to loan this while I was there)

Again I’ll put in my caveat that I am doing this for research purposes and should not be construed as endorsement. That being said I was particularly excited by the A E Waite book and can’t wait to get into it. I hope it will provide further insights into the visionary pathworkings of Jewish and Hermetic esotericists and inform my own explorations into reframing Christian visionary experiences for a post-modern context.