Some words about Me and the path towards this Blog

    Dear Reader,

 

 

    My name is Luís Gonçalves, I'm 39 years young, and I currently live in Portugal, which is my native country. I've been studying Gematria roughly since 1994, when I first had contact with Hebrew Qabalah through a book by Thierry Lenain called "La Science Cabalistique" (The Cabalistic Science). I had also contact with other ciphers, and one of the first I knew was the one that is now mistakenly called "Jewish", in a book by Jorg Sabellicus named "La Magia dei Numeri" (The Magic of Numbers). More on that specific cipher and that very curious book will be left to a future dedicated post.

 

    By that time my Father was running a Hotel and so I had the opportunity to know and talk with some of our clients. One of them, a man from Spain called Bartolomé, once offered me a page from a magazine which contained a table with the evolution of our alphabet - beginning with Phoenician, then Hebrew, Primitive Greek, Classical Greek, Etruscan, the Classical Latin alphabet, and finally the Modern Latin alphabet. This table really caught my attention and ultimately it was a great influence in my study of the alphabets and languages of the world, greatly contributing to my understanding of the origin of some of these Gematria ciphers. Knowing the different shapes of the letters in the various alphabets also meant for me a special interest in Cryptography – or the ability to hide messages within messages.

A table just like this one came to my hands in 1994/1995,

and it completely changed my life since then.

    My work with English Gematria began when I started studying Aleister Crowley's doctrine of Thelema and the mysteries and riddles in his Liber AL vel Legis, "The Book of the Law". This was around 2004. This was a very enriching period for me in terms of Gematria, as I came to know every kind of ciphers based on the English Alphabet, all of them supposed to be the "Key of It All" by their own creators. One of the main ciphers I knew and caught my attention was Jim Lees' English Qaballa (EQ), which really seemed to answer some of the riddles in Liber AL, especially the enduring riddle of AL II:76. That's the cipher that is now being called ALW Kabbalah, as well as "New Aeon English Qabalah" – "NAEQ" for short. A nice review of these "English Ciphers" used to decode Crowley's "Book of the Law" can be found in R. Leo Gillis' short but very informative e-book "Secrets of the Cipher Naughts". That cipher will be further explored in a dedicated post.

 

    Between 2004 and 2008 I dedicated some of my time to studying Secret Societies, including Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, the Knights Templar, and perhaps the most "blasphemous" and controversial of them all, the ill-understood Bavarian Order of the Illuminati. A series of investigations, reading about conspiracy theories and conspiracy practices, even diving into the humorously insane universe of Discordianism and Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus!" Trilogy, and finally coming to study the Illuminati through their own texts (1), eventually lead me to start using the cipher of the Illuminati in "decoding stuff". That's another story that I will leave for one of the following posts in this Blog.

    Well... long story short, last year or so I was searching for Discord servers about Gematria, in order to be able to talk with people that shared the same interests, and I ended up entering in Derek Tikkuri's "Gematrinator" Discord server. In this server I learned that there was this thing of "decoding Reality" by the use of alpha-numerical ciphers that, when used together, showed some interesting patterns and synchronicities that supposedly explained Reality as a sort of "Numerical Matrix" construct. While this was not the way I was used to work with Gematria, I decided to give it a look so that I could learn something about this "method". To be honest with you, my dear Reader, I wasn't (and still am not) convinced that some of those numerical "matches" would survive a serious mathematical and probabilistic analysis, particularly when it comes to the Reduction ciphers. These ciphers have such low values (from 1 to 9 only) that it makes it very easy to find "significant" matches in virtually anything.

    One of the first things I noticed that really annoyed me was seeing people using any cipher indiscriminately and out of their natural context, as well as other ciphers that appeared out of nowhere that were never explained to the ones who used them. I really am not against anyone using any cipher they want. However, my experience with ciphers tells me that if you want to be taken seriously when you work with alpha-numeric ciphers such as these, you've got to know what you are working with. If anyone asks you for more informations about a specific cipher and you can't answer that but you still use it, what chance will there be that your work will be seriously considered and studied? That's precisely what happened in Derek's server: everyone used the available ciphers, but only a handful of them really understood the ciphers they were using. Derek himself was unable to answer some very simple questions about his "Francis Bacon" and "Franc Baconis" ciphers, for example, so you can certainly understand that a natural "friction" happened between me, who insisted that the ciphers should be studied before being used, and Derek Tikkuri. Eventually I was kicked from the server for complaining about being forbidden to use the ciphers I use, the way I use them, even after explaining beyond any doubt the roots and uses of "my bogus ciphers", as Derek called them. While I can't say it was an overwhelmingly enriching or interesting experience in terms of quality and learning, I did learn some things and made some new interesting friends.

 

    So after all of this had happened, here I am with this Blog, believing that a Blog like this is absolutely essential if you want to know more about specific ciphers, their history, and their use. I also believe that a contribution from someone who doesn't use these ciphers the same way as you possibly do, can be an enriching experience for both of us. That's why I'm giving the Readers of my Blog the right to send me messages or even commenting on my posts – because I want to learn from you too, and I don't consider myself a "truth owner", but instead a "truth seeker", just like you. So if my future posts become a good source of study for you, or if you notice some glaring error in any of my posts, I will be thankful if you leave me a word or two. As I said once to a friend of mine: Conflict can be highly enriching for all involved if it is a source of learning, instead of a source of sorrow and resentment.

 

With this in mind, I send you all my best regards.

Luís Gonçalves

 

––––––––––––––––

    (1) I can recommend two very good books that throw a more realistic light over the history and true nature of the Bavarian Order of the Illuminati, their rituals and the inner teachings that were passed on to their members. The first one is Terry Melanson's "Perfectibilists – The 18th Century Bavarian Order of the Illuminati", and the second is the outstanding "The Secret School of Wisdom", edited by Josef Wäges and Reinhard Markner, and translated by the late Jeva Singh-Anand.