One of the finest examples of the application of the ancient number Philosophy, is to be found in the very first verse of the first chapter of Genesis, which reads as follows : “In the beginning
God created the heavens and the earth,” etc.
The Holy Bible, aside from the beautiful quality of the Elizabethan or rather Jacobean English of its translators, which rings so sweetly to the Anglo-Saxon ear, is not an English document.
It is the best rendition that the best men of several periods have been able to give us, according to their best contemporary lights, of a Hebrew “Old Testament” and a Greek “New Testament.”
As original documents, in their respective original tongues, there is no secret among scholars that the first reflects a great volume of Chaldean mysticism and that the second bears the impress of the schools of Alexandria. The Old Testament is the Holy Book of the Hebrews, and their scholarship has been concerned with it for some thousands of years, bearing fruit in that colossal commentary called the Talmud and the deeply mystical Kabbalah, not to speak of the profound and almost inspired writings of Philo Judaus.
The philosophical system known as that of the “Chaldean Numbers” is sufficiently in evidence in the works quoted to disprove any suspicion that they are an invention for the purpose of proving something connected with modern Masonry.
They are the basis of the so-called Pythagorean system, which sought to erect a complete theory of cosmogony on a mathematical basis, and we are now justified in believing that Pythagoras did no more than pass into Greece that which he learned from the hierophants of Chaldea and Central India. Many Hebrews and Greeks employ the letters of their respective alphabets as numbers, to this very day.
Almost all the ancient names of Deity, when their letters are resolved into numbers, are found to consist of what are sometimes called “cosmic” numbers, in that they set forth some great and majestic planetary or terrestrial cycle which attests the stupendous scope of divine power and wisdom. The “Ineffable” Name is the most remarkable of these cabalistic words, because it can be shown in various ways to be the pivotal formula upon which turned the seven primitive sciences of the Chaldeans. In the original texts there are over a dozen different names of Deity, which is uniformly translated “God,” even though individually they possess shades of meaning conveying notions of special divine attributes .
The two accounts of Creation embodied in the book of Genesis are called the “Elohistic” and “Jehovistic,” respectively, because of the employment of the distinct titles “ALHUM” and “JHVH.”
The former, the letters of which are valued as 1-30-5-10-40, are quoted by Mme. Blavatsky as giving the Pi proportion when written in a circle. Arranged as an acrostic, however, in the 25 squares of Pythagoras’ “square on the hypotenuse,” and employing only the digits in the final expression (see illustration), the result is much better.
“Bezaleel, the builder of the Tabernacle in the Wilderness,” says the Talmud, “knew the transposition of letters by which God created the World.”
ALHIM, reversed into “MIHLA,” is a Hebrew word expressing “circumcision.” The addition of the digits of 3.1415 is 14, which was the value of the diameter of a circle in a wide range of oriental philosophies, because 3 1-7 times 14 is 44, or 11 x 11, the perimeter of which closely corresponds with that of a circle, 14 of the .same parts in diameter . This problem is one of the most noted Egyptian hieroglyphs, and is profusely sculptured on the facade of the great Temple of Hathor at Denderah.
The 3.1415 formula of the Pi proportion is popularly attributed to the noted Greek mathematician and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse.
It is not final, however, and the greatest and most painstaking of German mathematicians have continued the Archimedean process until they have run the figure into several score of decimal places without attaining finality. This is precisely what the ancient mind probably meant to express, with exquisite reverence-a creative factor inseparable from all orderly arrangement of matter, which could not be proved finite.
The verse that embodies “ALHIM” is:
In the beginning God (Elohim) created the Heaven and Earth, and the Earth was without form and void, etc.
It is completely in accord with the ancient philosophy, which, in apostrophizing the Deity as the “Pi proportion,” meant what later, in Isaiah, is called “The living Elohim,”-The Pi proportion, endowed with omnipotent self-exertion in the ordering of inchoate matter; in other words, a LOGOS active in Cosmos. The Pi proportion is something that is never absent, in one form or other, from every one of the world’s primitive religions, and certainly enters deeply and radically into the philosophies that have given rise to what we in these days call “Masonry.”
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