For someone who doesn’t much care for numerological and onomantic techniques, I sure have caught some kind of bug on this. Then again, I suppose it’s helpful to brush up on these methods of exegesis and esoteric analysis of individual words. I have it on my to-do list to analyze the Ephesian Grammata and other barbarous words within a mathetic framework, and besides pure meditation and contemplation, it helps to have some other guiding principles that can tease out deeper meaning. Seeing how many of our forebears in philosophy, the occult, and religion used many of these techniques and in many different variations for their worldviews, I suppose there’s something to it. Still, I can’t help but feel like I’m grasping at something hilariously dumb here, but I could use any tool I can get.
The last two posts have discussed a few methods of Greek numerological divination based on names, isopsephy, pythmenes, and modular division (taking the remainder after division). With these methods, we know how to determine who will win in a fight, how a conflict may be resolved, and whether one will recover from illness and, if so, how soon. These methods can be expanded in any number of ways, but I want to take this in a slightly different direction. For me, although the isopsephy of the letters are important, the stoicheia is even more so (at least at my early stage of study). It’d be awesome to find a way to tie isopsephy and stoicheia together, and I think I’ve found such a way. Similar methods exist in the extant literature of Greek numerology from the early first few centuries AD, but I’m combining this with the rest of grammatomancy and a few of my other tricks to expand the system a bit further.
The process is similar to the other onomantic methods we’ve seen before, except instead of using 9 or 30 as our divisor, we use 24, since there are 24 letters in the Greek alphabet:
- Find the isopsephic value of a word.
- Divide each by 24 and take the remainder.
- If the remainder is 0, then we use 24.
- The letter corresponding in the Greek alphabet with the value is our letter.
Thus, consider my name, polyphanes (πολυφανης) has an isopsephic value of 1339. 1339 % 24 = 19, and the nineteenth letter of the Greek alphabet is Tau (Τ), associated with Pisces, lending my own name Piscean traits. If we also include the Greek alphabet oracle into this, we know that Tau is associated with the oracle “You will have a parting from the companions now around you”; this can be an overall message to my life, something I should heed in all matters that can direct me as a fundamental bit of advice. These two factors combined suggest that I’ll have a bit of a problem holding onto friends for a long period of time, possibly due to constant wandering, possibly due to constant mystery and mysticality surrounding me.
However, we can expand this as well by recalling that there are three groups of stoicheic forces represented by the Greek alphabet: five elements, seven planets, and twelve zodiac signs. Although taking the remainder by dividing by 24 yields an overall view, an all-encompassing force to which a word or name belongs, we can take the remainder by dividing by 5, 7, and 12 to obtain a specific view for what element, planet, and zodiac sign specifically relates to that word under the overall context of the stoicheion obtained by dividing by 24. Thus, again, using my own name of polyphanes with its isopsephic value of 1339:
- Element: 1339 % 5 = 4. The fourth element is Fire (Χ).
- Planet: 1339 % 7 = 2. The second planet is Mercury (Ε).
- Zodiac: 1339 % 12 = 7. The seventh zodiac sign is Libra (Μ).
Oddly enough, these are all some of the most important things I value in my work. What about my actual given name, which is in Greek Σαμουηλ? The isopsephic value of this word is 749, which yields:
- Stoicheic: 749 % 24 = 5. The fifth letter is Epsilon (Ε), whose stoicheia is the planet Mercury and whose oracle is “You desire to see the offspring of righteous marriages”. Mercury certainly is a dominating force in my life (could you guess?), and one of the recurring messages I keep getting is to stop peering around and start acting on what I can and should be acting upon.
- Element: 749 % 5 = 4. The fourth element is Fire (X). Although I’m more earthy than fiery in my birth chart, I still tend to run hot and dry.
- Planet: 749 % 7 = 7. The seventh planet is Saturn (Ω). A planet that’s oddly and powerfully dignified in my birth chart, and with which I have a fascination and reliance upon after Mercury.
- Zodiac: 749 % 12 = 5. The fifth zodiac sign is Leo (Κ). I have nothing in this sign in my birth chart, and it’s not particularly important, but then, this is all just me throwing things off the top of my head. Leo is a sign of rulership and renown, and I do tend to end up with that despite my best attempts to avoid it.
Thus, by taking the remainder of a given isopsephic value by dividing by some sacred number, we end up with an association of a given word to an overall stoicheic force as well as specific forces that constitute its parts. We can analyze a word through these stoicheic connections, determining overall esoteric or expressive meanings to each.
However, we can also use these stoicheic associations to make sacred words that “encode” the forces of a given word. Combinatorically, it’s no different than just taking the isopsehic value itself; any word that has the same isopsephic value will have the same stoicheic associations. So, let’s say we have our four letters based on a given isopsephic value of a word: stoicheic, elemental, planetary, and zodiacal. The stoicheic force is both the end and beginning of the word, since it encapsulates and contains that entire word; we have this letter at the start and end of the word. The other letters fill in the space between the “bookend” stoicheic letters. Thus, for πολυφανης, we know that our four letters are Τ, Χ, Ε, and Μ. If we use our rules for pronouncing generated Greek words from before, we might end up with the word Taukhemyt (Ταυχεμυτ, based on ΤΧΕΜΤ) to represent my name as a mantra or obscuration/occultation that focuses the entire forces of the word together, or that might act as a type of spiritual alias for the name based on its stoicheic forces much as the name of the natal genius functions for one in astrology. For my given name Σαμουηλ, the corresponding letters are Ε, Χ, Ω, and Κ, and the corresponding word might be Ekhōke (Εχωκε).
This sort of linking between the isopsephy of a word and a given letter of the Greek alphabet, along with its corresponding stoicheia, isn’t too far a stretch of isopsephic and numerological techniques. Similar techniques have been used in methods of onomancy that derive an astrological birth chart from someone’s name by modular divination by 7 and 12 combined with other numbers, and there are echoes of this in some geomantic techniques I’ve used and seen other use as well. The written works of Joel Kalvesmaki in the modern day are an incredibly useful resource on how Greek numerology was applied, as well as number symbolism was used and interpreted in the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire period, and I plan on experimenting with some of these techniques in the future besides straightforward isopsephic comparison. Who knows? Maybe my own views on what I’ve perceived as nonsense will change. It’s happened before with orgone tech, after all.
