On ciphers, probabilities, and the search for "meaningful matches"

    Dear Reader,

    In this new text I will invite my Readers to discuss about ciphers, probabilities, the search for "meaningful matches", and their meaning in our work with Gematria. Even though this subject was already addressed (very lightly) in my previous text "How I work with Gematria", in my opinion this matter should be further discussed, not only because it is a fundamental aspect of Gematria, but also because people still tend to get confused about what a numerical match "means" — if it means anything at all.

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    It is my firm belief that, whether it be UFOnauts, Thelemic texts or sacred scriptures, all ciphers will always deliver certain "meaningful" matches when we want to "decode" those things.

    One of the clearest examples of this can be found in Allen H. Greenfield's "Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts", in which he proposes that EQ / ALW / NAEQ is the "secret cipher" of the UFOnauts — for the simple fact that he was able to find "meaningful matches" when applying it to the cases he was researching.

    But then a question arises:

    What if we used a completely different cipher — would we still be able to find "meaningful matches"?

    And the answer to this is an absolute YES.

    Whether it be Simple/Ordinal, or John Farthing's Toavotea Key, or R. Leo Gillis' Trigrammaton Qabalah, or even Frater RIKB's Mars Kamea Gematria — or any other cipher you could think of — we will always find "meaningful" matches when we use this kind of ciphers to decode anything we want.

    I did it before with the cipher of the Bavarian Illuminati, applying it to the names and specific phrases in Greenfield's book. I did it with Simple/Ordinal English. And I did it with Alphanumeric Qabbala, Edgar Joel Love's Cipher X, and even my own experimental cipher called "Elevenfold Qabalah" — only to find that all of them, in a way or another, delivered some outstanding results when applied to this specific subject.

    So what would make a cipher "relevant"?

    Would it be the matches we can get when we apply it in a certain context?

    Or is it the context we're working on that dictates which ciphers make sense to be used?

    Also — how can we be sure that something was previously encoded with Gematria? Is it the "meaningful matches" we can get that "confirm" that? Or do we have to be extremely cautious in these things, for the simple fact that a "match" doesn't mean anything per se, except the meaning that we willingfully give to it?

    Just some food for thought...

    NOTE:

    I originally published this short text on Reddit, and I must say that I was very satisfied with most replies — namely that of u/diviludicrum, which I will reproduce here in its entirety, due to its relevance in this discussion:

    "I don’t know anything about the specific text you’re referencing or what material it was purporting to decode, but I can speak to the question from the standpoint of general principles regarding coded texts.

    Simply put, you’re right, the mere existence of “meaningful matches” is insufficient grounds to conclude that the text was coded with a particular cipher, since it’s self-evident that meaningful matches could be found with many other conceivable ciphers too.

    So the primary concern should not be with the number or frequency of seemingly meaningful matches, but rather the opposite - ie how often does the decoded text lack meaning, and what is the proportion of those instances versus those that are meaningful?

    Because if a text can be consistently and perfectly decoded with a particular cipher, producing a 100% meaningful and coherent decoded text, that is highly unlikely to occur by chance. Whereas if the decoded text is only meaningful 1% of the time, with no consistent pattern that signals that 1% as somehow “special” within the context of the text as a whole, that would seem extremely weak evidence of a deliberate coding process."

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