Gematria · Notarikon · Temurah
A letter in Kabbalah has three lives. It is a sound, it is a number, and it is a place in a row, and each of these lives yields its own way of reading a word: Gematria counts, Notarikon unfolds, Temurah transposes.
These methods are older than any of the schools that used them: they are already with the authors of Sefer Yetzirah; Cordovero systematises them in Pardes Rimonim; by way of Christian Kabbalah they come to Agrippa, from him to Lévi and into the Golden Dawn. The archive keeps them here not as a curiosity but as a working instrument: the numbers in our tables were obtained by these same means.
The tool reckons by the standard system, mispar hechrechi. Vowel points take no part in the count: gematria counts consonants only. The final forms of the letters (ך ם ן ף ץ) are equated with the ordinary ones; the alternative count, in which they yield 500–900, is shown on a separate line.
Type a word above — or take one ready-made.
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What each method does
Gematria replaces letters with numbers and adds them up. The point of the device is that two words with the same sum are held to be connected. A classical example, which can be verified right here: נחש, “serpent”, gives 358, and משיח, “mashiach”, gives exactly as much. Another: אחד, “one”, and אהבה, “love”, both give 13, and together 26, the number of the Tetragrammaton.
Notarikon reads a word as an abbreviation: every letter is the beginning of another word. The method works in both directions, and it has examples that can be checked rather than merely invented. The name אגלא, AGLA, with which ceremonial magic is filled from the Lesser Key of Solomon to the Golden Dawn, is a notarikon of the phrase אתה גבור לעולם אדני, “Thou art mighty for ever, O Lord”. The names of the masters are built the same way: רמב״ם, Rambam, is Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon.
Temurah puts one letter in the place of another by a rule. The rules are many; the tool above shows three, because each of them is set not by a table one has to remember but by a construction one can check.
- Atbash (אתב״ש) — the alphabet is folded in half end to end: the first letter exchanges with the last, the second with the second from the last. א ↔ ת, ב ↔ ש. Hence the name of the cipher.
- Albam (אלב״ם) — the alphabet is divided into two halves of eleven, and the letters exchange between the halves: א ↔ ל, ב ↔ ם.
- Avgad (אבג״ד) — every letter yields its place to the next, and the row closes into a ring: א → ב, and ת → א.
Why temurah is here and not among the curiosities
Atbash folds the alphabet in half and exchanges what stands at the opposite ends. It is the only one of the three methods that neither adds nor unfolds but turns over, drawing from a word its reverse side by a canonical procedure, not at our own discretion.
For an archive that deals with the reverse side of the Tree, that is a method, not a metaphor. A dark name obtained by Atbash is derived, not invented. The difference between those two things is what the whole of the rest of this site exists for.
Atbash is attested long before the Kabbalists: the book of Jeremiah uses it, where ששך (Jer. 25:26, 51:41) is read as בבל, Babel. Which is to say the cipher is older than the tradition that made it an instrument of interpretation.