History of Ciphers (part 7) - Satanic Gematria

    Dear Reader,

    In this new text I will be talking about Satanic Gematria and other less-known ciphers. Even though I don't usually work with Satanic Gematria, nor have I explored it as deeply as I have explored Alphanumeric Qabbala, for example, I think that this cipher deserves at least a short reference in this blog of mine. After all, have you ever wondered where did this cipher come from, or who created it, or even where it was mentioned for the very first time? Those are the questions I will be answering in this text.

    Unfortunately, like I said above, I never duly explored this cipher (personal choice really), except some minor personal synchronicities, so there won't be much space in this post dedicated to talk about the numerical matches we can find with Satanic Gematria. Instead, I will be referencing the work of the person who was responsible for the discovery of this cipher, and there you will be able to find many curious — and sometimes, not so curious — coincidences with Satanic Gematria.

History of Ciphers

by Luís Gonçalves

Part 7: Satanic Gematria

... and other related ciphers

    Satanic Gematria is one of those few ciphers, like Alphanumeric Qabbala, which were perfectly named. I don't quite remember where I first read about this cipher, even though I remembered that it had something to do with Barack Hussein Obama. I would retain these curious synchronicities about this cipher in my mind for many years to come, and eventually I would have almost forgotten about Satanic Gematria if I hadn't seen it again, some 2 or 3 years ago, in the Gematrinator calculator.

    I must admit that I never really cared about searching for the origins of this cipher, for the reason that I always considered it a very fittingly named system of Gematria and nothing more than that. I mean, I never actually used it. However, as I've been writing about the history of the ciphers that I find more relevant, I would discover that some people also wanted to know where this specific cipher came from, so this post would be the inevitable next step.

    Ironically, it was through a simple and very brief Google search that I managed to find the source material where I had first read about this cipher for the very first time, and it was a book called A Step into the Numeric Enigma of God, written approximately 8 years ago by Alexander Marcussen (owner of the website 777codes.com). The part of that book dealing specifically with Satanic Gematria goes from page 46 to page 56.

    Coincidentally, it was last year, on June 24ᵗʰ, 2022 that I found (actually recollected) this information, and shared it in two or three Discord servers dedicated to Gematria. If you reduce the day, month and year in that date to single digits, you'll have 6-6-6. I hadn't noticed that detail at that time, but it is indeed a curious synchronicity, for some reasons that will soon become apparent.

    This is the chart for Satanic Gematria:

    According to Alexander Marcussen, the name of this cipher and its numerical value basically pay a tribute to the number 666, the "Number of the Beast" in Christian apocalypticism. Its basic premises are the following:

    — The first and last letters of the alphabet are assigned the values 36 (=A) and 61 (=Z). Note that the 36ᵗʰ triangular number is 666, while 61 is the 18ᵗʰ prime number (and 18 equals 6+6+6), so these are quite curious details about this cipher;

    — And secondly, the name "Satanic Gematria" sums 666 in the same cipher (!!!), which greatly reinforces the same symbolism:

    I must admit that I really like the way how this cipher was named. It is indeed a very well crafted cipher, with a very fitting name — but I was never able to see it as more than just that. And that's precisely the reason why I never duly explored this cipher, except on very rare occasions or fitting circumstances. And, to be honest, that's also the reason why I haven't written this text earlier.

* * *

    In A Step Into the Numeric Enigma of God, Alexander Marcussen focused much of his work on the Bible codes, and the discovery of numerical and geometrical patterns in the Holy Bible. It is actually a very interesting reading, and I would recommend it, though not entirely without reservations, to all my Readers. I say "not without reservations" not as a criticism to Alexander Marcussen's work, which I think is fascinating, but simply because I don't work like him, nor do I accept all the 'evidences' that he gives as being... well, evident. But that's simply my personal opinion. I invite my Readers to read this work and study it thoroughly, if it ignites their interest.

    In the section about Satanic Gematria, however, Marcussen seems to have been more focused on an analysis of the name Barack Hussein Obama and the strange numerical alignments that it originates. In fact, Marcussen found that, using Satanic Gematria, the value of that name matches its value in the Standard/"Extended" English cipher, which follows the same pattern of numerical correspondences for the letters as the traditional Hebrew and Greek systems.

    When analyzing this specific number, Marcussen goes to great details to find hidden synchronicities involving this value. Namely, he notes that 793 equals 13×61, with the number 13 being biblically related to ideas of "rebellion" (based on Genesis 14:4) and the number 61 being the 18th prime number — with 18 corresponding to 6+6+6.

    Marcussen also notes that Barack Hussein Obama was born on August 4, the 216ᵗʰ day of the year (216 = 6×6×6), in the year 1961. By a curious coincidence, 1961 was exactly 1891 years after the Siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD, when the Second Temple was destroyed, and 1891 is precisely the 61ˢᵗ triangular number.

    Thus, both the "good" cipher (English Standard) and the "evil" cipher (Satanic Gematria) would show that Barack Hussein Obama is connected to the "antichrist number" 793 — especially considering that the name "Yehoshua" (Jesus/Joshua), written as יהושוע, sums 397, the reverse of 793, in Hebrew Gematria.

    Even if I don't agree that these or other similar considerations are sufficient proof to claim that Barack Hussein Obama is the "Antichrist", I do consider these findings to be very, very curious, to say the least. Anyway, as at this moment it isn't my purpose to further explore this thesis, I will move on to other less-known — and in my view, equally interesting — ciphers.

* * *

Other experimental ciphers

based on Satanic Gematria

    In this section I will be talking about a less-known cipher that I discovered/devised just 1 week before I found Alexander Marcussen's original materials on Satanic Gematria.

    The idea of this new cipher came to me when I was comparing Alphanumeric Qabbala (tightly associated with Base-36 notation) with Satanic Gematria (starting at A=36). My first thought when comparing them was that Alphanumeric Qabbala goes from 0 to Z=35, while Satanic Gematria continues the same numerical sequence, going from A=36 to Z=61.

    So, what would happen if I joined these two in a single cipher? And then a thought suddenly came to me: "Wait a minute! Isn't there a Case Sensitive cipher? What if I use it as a model to build this new cipher?"

Click to enlarge.

    And so, the cipher that I first called "Satanic Qabbala" (later to be renamed as "Alphanumeric Satanic") was born:

Click to enlarge.

    However, I must tell you my true opinion about this cipher. When I devised/found it, I was merely playing with the ciphers and not exactly looking for any "supreme satanic cipher". In fact, I never took this cipher seriously, and I always saw it as a kind of "joke cipher". Firstly, because I don't like case sensitive ciphers and I definitely don't use them. And secondly, because I simply don't feel compelled to use it — except, perhaps, as a means to play with Gematria and Base-62 notation simultaneously. Anyway, even in that case it is important to note that the order of lower- and uppercase letters is usually reversed in Base-62 notation.

Numerical connections between AQ,

Alphanumeric Satanic, and Satanic Gematria

    In this section we will learn how these 3 ciphers are numerically related.

    If we look closely at Alphanumeric Satanic, we will understand that:

    — the sequence of Arabic numerals (0-9) and lowercase letters (a-z) corresponds to the sequence and values in Alphanumeric Qabbala;

    — the sequence of uppercase letters (A-Z) corresponds to the values of the letters in Satanic Gematria.

    Given this connection between these ciphers, it will thus become clear that if a word or phrase contains only lowercase letters, the value of that word/phrase in Alphanumeric Satanic will match its value in Alphanumeric Qabbala. And if a word or phrase contains only uppercase letters, then its value in Alphanumeric Satanic will match its value in Satanic Gematria.

    Besides this, there's also the following consideration: if a word or phrase contains both lower- and uppercase letters, then the difference between its value in Alphanumeric Satanic and its value in both AQ and Satanic Gematria will always be 26 or one of its multiples.

    Take this example, in order to better understand my explanation:

    While I don't use these systems very frequently (except AQ, which is my favorite system of English Gematria), I will conclude this section by saying that many curious synchronicities can be found when we use these three systems at the same time. However, I would warn my Readers that being carried away by some natural synchronicities (and by this, I mean synchronicities that can be mathematically predictable) as if they were supernaturally relevant, may not always be the best decision to make. In fact, that's one of the greatest dangers in Gematria.

    Use Gematria; but please don't be its slave.

* * *

    As a bonus, in the next part I will briefly talk about "Custom Ordinal" ciphers, or what Alexander Marcussen calls the "English Starter" systems.

"Custom Ordinal" / "English Starter"

Gematria systems

     Just like Alphanumeric Qabbala could be considered to be the same as "Ordinal starting at 10" and Satanic Gematria could be called "Ordinal starting at 36", there are other experimental systems of Gematria that could be included in this category. In fact, there's an infinite amount of Custom Ordinal systems of Gematria, depending only on which number is chosen as the value of "A", and then following the natural sequence of numbers all the way through "Z".

    There are 4 other such ciphers that I will be talking about in this section, as they are the only ones relevant enough that I've seen before in a Gematria calculator.

    The Gematria calculator I'm talking about is not available online; it's rather an executable software that a friend sent me on Discord, and when I saw the amount of ciphers it included, I was... speechless. 👀

Click to enlarge.

    Well, I must say that I was speechless, but not because I liked it a lot. In fact, with all due respect for the creator of this software (which I don't know who it is), this software is filled with what I call "junk ciphers", i.e., many of the ciphers it contains simply don't make any sense to even be considered as valid. And that's possibly due to the fact that the author of this software didn't have enough knowledge on the history of ciphers in order to understand why some ciphers are the way they are (like the "ALW" cipher or "Chaldean" Numerology, for example), so the author took the liberty to create "reverse" and "reduced" versions of many ciphers that simply don't make sense to have those counterparts. I won't even talk about some ciphers like "The 911 Cipher" or "Vortex Unreduced", which I think are ridiculous.

    Again, please be aware that I'm talking about the ciphers contained in this software and not about its author. The author's work was impeccable: however, I'm afraid that their knowledge on the history of Gematria is unfortunately very limited, so they simply did what they thought was correct — and I respect that. However, I do not support the idea that "anything goes", since that's not how Gematria should work, in principle.

    Anyway... amongst this deranged chaos of experimental Gematria ciphers, there were exactly four ciphers that caught my attention, and those ciphers are called (in this software) "Master", "Master Builder", "Masonic" and "Foundation". They look like this:

    A quick gaze at these ciphers will lead us to conclude that these are precisely "Custom Ordinal" ciphers: which means that the "Master" cipher is nothing more than Ordinal starting at 11, the "Master Builder" cipher is the same as Ordinal starting at 22, "Masonic" is equal to Ordinal starting at 33, and "Foundation" is precisely the same as Ordinal starting at 44.

    Why these names, though? And why starting the numerical sequence at 11, 22, 33 and 44?

    In fact, I have a strong suspicion that these ciphers were inspired directly on Satanic Gematria, which starts at A=36 (remember that the 36ᵗʰ triangular number is 666, and "Satanic Gematria" adds to 666 in the same cipher), while adding to the equation some considerations that are specific to Numerology. And it's precisely through Numerology that we can understand why the numbers 11, 22, 33 and 44 were chosen: and why the ciphers were named the way they were.

    In Numerology (see this example), the number 11 is called a "Master number", similarly to its multiples (22, 33, 44, 55). And each "Master number" has its own characteristics and 'temperament', as it were. So for example, number 22 is associated with the symbolic imagery of the "Master Builder", and number 33 is traditionally tied to Masonry (supposedly due to the fact that the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Masonry has 33 degrees), while the description of the Master number 44 includes references to "building a strong foundation to achieve success".

    So this is the actual origin of these ciphers. By starting the numerical sequence with specific "Master numbers", the ciphers were named according to the numerological, occult or symbolical meanings of those same numbers.

    In any case, these ciphers are not as intelligently named as Satanic Gematria since their names don't translate to any relevant values when analyzed through their own systems.

    At this point I should argue that, for example, the "Masonic" cipher was never used in Freemasonry and its relevance in a Masonic context is disputable at best, or absolutely irrelevant at worst. So, even though I enjoy the imaginative process involved in the creation of these ciphers, I'm not entirely convinced that they would be "useful" somehow... except if we want to explore some mathematical laws behind what we call "numerical matches" in Gematria.

    And that's precisely what I'm talking about now.

How "numerical matches" work

regarding Custom Ordinal ciphers

    In this final part I will compare the most basic English cipher ("English Ordinal": A=1, B=2, etc) with several Custom Ordinal ciphers, in order to show my Readers how numerical matches work when we're dealing with this type of ciphers.

    In my previous text How I use Gematria, in the section called "What is a numerical match?", I gave a practical example of how we can weave a story based on numerical equivalences between words:

Click to enlarge.

    This is indeed a remarkable set of matches between words, all weaved into the life story of Jesus Christ, and one that has been repeated over and over by many people who see in Gematria a method to "decode Reality". And while this is indeed a very interesting exercise that will always give many fruits — irrespective of which cipher you're using — the question is different when we start talking about cross-cipher matches. In fact, even though these correspondences shown above can only be obtained using the simplest cipher for the English alphabet (A=1, B=2, etc), the same matches won't work with other different ciphers; or, in fact, using other ciphers we will see other matches that are equally relevant but aren't included in this specific set of matches. So considering this, wouldn't it be tempting to see if all these matches also worked in Custom Ordinal ciphers? That's the thing I will be explaining in this section: how cross-cipher matches work.

    The basic premise is this:

    If two words or phrases match in English Ordinal and they have the same number of letters, they will also match in any Custom Ordinal cipher.

    If we look closely, this will make perfect sense. In fact, in any Custom Ordinal cipher, the value of a letter of the alphabet always corresponds to its value in English Ordinal added to a natural number (equal to 1 or larger). We will call this value the Custom Constant. For example, the so-called "Master" cipher is the same as English Ordinal + 10, while Satanic Gematria corresponds to English Ordinal + 35. So in order to have two words matching in both English Ordinal and a Custom Ordinal cipher, it will be imperative that both words share exactly the same number of letters, since the Custom Constant is accumulated across the same number of letters.

    We could also think about the following:

    The value of a phrase in any Custom Ordinal cipher will always correspond to its value in English Ordinal, added to the Custom Constant multiplied by the number of letters in the phrase.

    Using the table above as an example, the value of the word "Cross" (5 letters) in English Ordinal is 74. Knowing that the Custom Constant of Satanic Gematria is 35, it is thus expected that the value of "Cross" in Satanic Gematria will be 74 + 35×5 = 249.

    And the following will also be true, obviously:

    If two words or phrases match in English Ordinal but they don't have the same number of letters, the difference between their values in English Ordinal and any Custom Ordinal cipher will always correspond to the cipher's Custom Constant multiplied by the difference of letters between both phrases.

    Here's a practical example:

    In English Ordinal, the words "Jesus" (5 letters) and "Messiah" (7 letters) share the same value (74). In Satanic Gematria, the value of the word "Jesus" will be 249, while the value of "Messiah" will be 319. The difference between 249 and 319 will then be 70, which corresponds to the Custom Constant of Satanic Gematria (35) multiplied by 2 (the difference between the number of letters of the two words).

    Here's a table that shows, in practice, how these rules work:

Click to enlarge.

* * *

    Hopefully, this short section will have helped some of my Readers understanding why some numerical matches are not "extraordinary" (i.e. fruit of some random or mysterious condition) but instead quite the opposite: they're actually based on very strict mathematical laws, and can thus be easily predicted. Or in other words, it is the words themselves that matter when we talk about numerical matches in Gematria, and not what they mean. So it's actually us who give meaning to the numerical connection between words, phrases or names, and build narratives based on numerical correspondences. This can be quite a fun hobby, but it can also be dangerously misleading sometimes. There's a fine line bet   

Some final words on Satanic Gematria

(and Custom Ordinal ciphers)

    My main intention in writing this text, as all texts in this blog that verse about the History of Ciphers, was above all to let my Readers know where the ciphers came from, the names of their discoverers, what's the logic behind the ciphers (if there is any, of course), and also if there is any specific context where the ciphers fit well.

     Regarding Satanic Gematria, the main subject of this specific text, what I find most interesting is that it was devised so that it encodes the number 666 in at least three different ways:

    — the first letter of the alphabet, "A", corresponds to 36, and 666 is the 36ᵗʰ triangular number;

    — the last letter of the alphabet, "Z", corresponds to 61, the 18ᵗʰ prime number (and 18 = 6+6+6);

    — and finally, the value of the cipher's name in the same cipher is, quite surprisingly, 666.

    This is basically what I find most interesting in Satanic Gematria. Beyond that, I really can't say that I "like a lot" this cipher because, honestly, I don't. I only use it very rarely, because besides these intriguing patterns, there's nothing drawing me to use it. This, of course, is just my personal opinion, but I think that the best advice that I could give to my Readers at this moment is this: if you like it, use it. If you don't like it, don't use it. 😜

* * *

    Then, we talked about my own experimental case sensitive cipher, which I first called Satanic Qabbala and was later rebaptized as Alphanumeric Satanic. This cipher is merely a combination of Alphanumeric Qabbala and Satanic Gematria (hence the name!) and when I devised it, I did it simply because it was a fun idea. So originally, I made this cipher as a "joke cipher", even though some people liked it and use it sometimes. Personally, I don't use it — and I don't like case sensitive ciphers either, so the best thing I can tell my Readers about this cipher is this: use it at your own risk. 😅

* * *

    Now, regarding Custom Ordinal ciphers, or "English Starter" systems as Alexander Marcussen calls them, I thought this was a nice opportunity not only to talk about those ciphers, but also to talk about the mathematical patterns behind numerical matches involving these ciphers and English Ordinal. And this is a very important aspect of Gematria — particularly English Gematria — because sometimes people tend to be overwhelmed when they see a "match" across many different ciphers, while that match may in fact be mathematically justifiable through a simple demonstration, just like I've done in this text.

    Regarding the "validity" of Custom Ordinal ciphers, I believe that's a question of personal choice, so it is up to my Readers to find out if they see much sense in these ciphers and if they should use them or not. On a personal level, I'm not very fond of Custom Ordinal ciphers — except Alphanumeric Qabbala, which is not the same as "Ordinal starting at 10" (even though the values they give to the letters are exactly the same), and it is in fact a whole different thing altogether.

* * *

    Hoping that this text has been an enriching piece of information to my Readers, I bid my Readers farewell... well, at least until I think about a new cipher to write about. I don't have any idea at this moment, but as Gematria is a neverending universe, maybe something will occur to me in the mean time. Maybe in a somewhat different format, haha. 😉

    Luís Gonçalves