On The Pythagorean-Kabbalistic YHWH

The Kabbalistic artistic rendering of YHWH is an important key to grasping some of the significance of the name, among many other things that show this. The name is the most important name in Jewish religion and they take it very seriously. One of the mystic keys to the Judaic religion is, as Leonora Leet has shown, in her magnificent study of the Kabbalah and the cosmology involved, using geometry, sound, and number, the generation of the Cosmic Son, through the Kabbalistic geometry and teachings of the Tree of Life and the Sabbath Star, an astonishing geometric figure she discovered .[1] It is understood in the vast Enoch corpus of literature as she elaborates in her text The Universal Kabbalah, that Enoch when he ascended to heaven, and saw the figure the "Son of Man," he was seeing his higher self![2] Enoch was known as "The Lesser YHWH." (he was also equated with the Greek God Hermes, as well as known as the mysterious Metatron, but those are for another post).

Andrei Orlov, an Enoch scholar, has shown that Enoch was known as Metatron and who was known as "the measurer of the divine corporeality who conveys to the visionaries the esoteric lore about the dimensions of the limbs of the cosmic body of the deity. This choice of the revealer is not coincidental since some Merkabah materials suggest that the cosmic body of this exalted angel itself exemplifies the measure or the 'likeness' of the divine body, thus functioning as a representation of the human form of the Deity."[3]

Leet has shown how the vertical Tetragrammaton (YHWH) shows the four cosmic worlds and how humanity is directly woven into the cosmological fabric of reality. The head (the Hebrew letter Yod) stood for the "Father." The arms (the first Hebrew letter Hei) are the chest and arms stood for the "Mother," The torso, (the Hebrew letter Vav) is symbolized by the "Son." While the legs (the second letter Hei) symbolize the "Daughter." The Macrocosm engulfs the Microcosm. But the four worlds also bring geometry into the mystical tradition of the Kabbalah and situates this "mysticism" into a scientific aspect. The number 4 has great significance, not only in religion and mysticism, but in mathematics also. The Kabbalah captures numeral symbolism as good as any ancient religious system in existence. There are 4 cosmological worlds, and mankind possesses 4 kinds of soul, as the ideal family (ideology only here, it's more for symbolism) consists of 4 members, Father, Mother, Son, Daughter.

Mathematically one symbol for four is fascinatingly, the triangle, as the Pythagoreans indicated. After all, in Greek the figure for the number 4 is delta, the triangle! And we have the four elements, earth, air, fire, and water. This numbering of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 =10 led to it being identified with the sacred tetractys, which is the triangular representation of the number 10. Lucian's parody caught it perfectly.

Pythagorean: "How do you count?"

Buyer: "1, 2, 3, 4..."

Pythagorean: "Lol! What you think is four is ten, and a perfect triangle, under our oath!"[4]

Beginning at the point on the top of the triangle it begins with 1 dot. Then below it 1 has become 2 points, and below it has expanded into 3, and finally, the lowest row is 4 dots. The numbers are inherently mathematical and geometrical in their function as well as their essence. This isn't mysticism, it's geometric symbolic truth as seen in our physical world, since, of course, a point and line has no dimensions in our 3-D world.

Now, the geometric production and expansion of the square I take after Robert Lawlor[5] which demonstrates fundamentally that by destroying the original square (the pink one) which we do by bisecting its diagonal thus splitting the square in two, into two triangles, we implicitly build a square that is twice the size of the pink square! I have outlined the next square in a blue line to see it better. We see that the diagonal of the pink square is also the side of the next square (the blue one). And the blue square is exactly twice the size of the original square, which has only 2 triangles in it. The blue one, arising out of the pink one, has 4 equal triangles, thus twice the area of the pink one. This is a powerful meditation as you draw this using your compass and straight edge. When we bisect the blue square across the diagonal we once again see how it ends up as two triangles and the diagonal of it is the side of yet another square rising above its peak (in a two green tone), and once again it is twice the area of the blue square. And this growth goes on forever from here out as we bisect the next square across its diagonal, we end up with another square twice its size arising from the former lesser square.

Why is this important? Well, Pythagoras taught that when we focus on the finite we can discover how it "contains intrinsically a power to express the infinite."[6] This is profoundly demonstrated with the pure science if geometry here, the growth of a square (represents the #4, as well as the earth) by breaking it down, greater growth occurs! How does that work exactly?

The side of a square is called its root. So, beginning with the simplest of squares, one that has all its sides equal 1, the sides of the pink square (our original square) are all the square root of 1. So that means the side of square 2 is the square root of 2. But the diagonal of square 1 is the side of square 2 at the same time, so we know that the diagonal of square 1 is the square root of 2. (I'll put this in a picture for you, as I can't type it very well, I don't have the symbols).

If Pythagoras was correct, that number is the form of things, and the terms 1, 2, 3, 4, are the foundation, then, the ancients taught (Cleinias of Tarentum) "the monad (1) of arithmetic, the dyad (2) of music, the triad (3) of geometry, and the tetrad (4) of astronomy," as Pythagoras was reputed to have said - "Four are the foundations of wisdom - arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy - ordered 1, 2, 3, 4, these things when at rest give rise to arithmetic and geometry, and when moving to harmony and astronomy."[7] Remember too, the number 4 symbolism was vital to the Early Christians, where Irenaeus, one of the early Church Fathers said there were 4 Gospels and only 4 Gospels because there are 4 zones of the world, and lets not forget about the four winds, and there are the four pillars of the world. As the Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman dryly noted, "In other words, four corners of the earth, four winds, four pillars - and necessarily, then, four Gospels."[8] And we can't forget Ovid who described in quite good detail the four ages of ancient man.[9] But back to the geometry significance.

The reason this geometric/arithmetic demonstration is so important is because "the square and its diagonal express the creation of Two from Unity (the initial square) and a consequent proliferation of number through a geometric sequence." In other words, we have here is growth, eternal growth with not only larger physically sized figures, but their number gets larger and larger and there is no end. What begin in simplicity doesn't ever end but increases eternally.

What we have here is an archetype knowledge, and archetypal truth, a real and accurate truth discovered by just doing a little bit of drawing, a truth that never changes! This is, on serious thought while drawing the figures, an amazing thing to experience! There is "a fixed proportional increases within a geometrically increasing generative pattern,"[10] both in number and size based on the destruction of the former figure we drew in order to get the increase!

This is not mysticism or Voo Doo New Age Guru type of thinking, it is literally geometric and figurate creation and discovery through participation of art, math, science and harmony. It is the discovery of the relationship between proportion and progression... everything in creation is formed from a fixed, immutable component (proportion) as well as a volatile, mutable component (progression).

What does this actually mean for us though? O.K., mathematically we discover things get destroyed and out of that "death" (the original square was cut in two and ended up as triangles, not a square) and out of that other squares arise unendingly. So what? Don't you see the analogy here?

Everything that is manifest (what we see) either in the physical world or in our mental world of images and our conceptions "belongs to the ever flowing progressions of constant change: it is only in the non-manifest realms of Principles which is immutable. Our science errs in attempting to attach fixed, absolute laws and definitions to the changing world of appearances." There is a metaphysical, non-physical reality of proportions and laws of Principles we cannot see or hear or smell, but is very real and is revealed as we perform mathematical meditation and draw sacred geometric figures involving the principles and products of numbers, ratios and proportions.[11] It is these ratios, proportions, and eternal immutable principles which the ancients called "the gods."

Let that sink in. All the gods are real, and they exist right now today. They are invisible and inaccessible except through meditation and geometry following the ideas of Plato, Pythagoras, and other ancient Greeks.[12] Zeus, Hermes, Apollo, Perseus, Poseidon, Orpheus, Hercules, are real and they exist today, and they will always exist throughout eternity...

Yahweh too is known to also possess all those same rations, proportions and eternal immutable laws of mathematics and harmony in music and value of number relationships to letters and words in the Hebrew alphabet called gematria. This is what the Kabbalah brings out the best. There is a systematic, logic progression and actual system of gematria in both the Old Testament and the New Testament, used by Early Christians, Gnostics, and Jews, not an arbitrary nilly willy subjective make what fits as it suits you going on.[13] This was begun to be elaborated by Thomas Simcox Lea and Frederick Bligh Bond,[14] and continued by numerous serious scholars such as David Fideler (Early Christian, gematria scholar), Leonora Leet (Phenominal Kabbalah scholar), Kieren Barry, (Greek Qabalah scholar)and Mark Pawson, John Michell, Rabbi Michael L Munk, (A scholar of Hebrew and the letters spiritual significance) David Allen Hulse, (scholar of the Cube of Space) Kevin Townley, (incredibly indepth scholar of the Cube of Space, a mysterious structure hinted at in the Jewish mystical texts of the Zohar, Bahir, and Sefer Yetzirah) Paul Foster Case, (Tarot card and Rosicruscian scholar), Robert Wang (Qabalistic Tarot scholar), Simo Parpola, (Near East and Bible scholar) Charles Ponce (Kabbalah), Rabbi Joel C. Dobin (Hebrew Astrology and ancient mysticism scholar) and Michael S. Schneider (Geometry scholar), to name just a few. It is a fascinating thing to investigate.

Endnotes

1. Leonora Leet, The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah, Inner Traditions, 1999: 22-23.

2. Leonora Leet, The Universal Kabbalah, Inner Traditions, 2004: 194-196.

3. Andrei Orlov, The Enoch-Metatron Tradition, Mohr-Siebeck, 2005: 165-166.

4. Kieren Barry, The Greek Qabalah: Alphabetic Mysticism and Numerology in the Ancient World, Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1999: 70. Cf. Johann Reuchlin, On The Art of the Kabbalah (De Arte Cabalistica), Translated by Martin and Sarah Goodman, University of Nebraska Press, 1983: 195 - "For as you have already heard, one and two, together with the divine essence, make that quaternitude, the tetractys, the Idea of all things, which is to be brought to its highest perfection in the decad."

5. Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, Thames & Hudson, 1982: 25-26.

6. Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, Thames & Hudson, 1982: 25.

7. Iamblichus, The Theology of Arithmetic, On the Mystical, Mathematical and Cosmological Symbolism of the First Ten Numbers, Translated by Robin A. Waterford, Phanes Press, 1988: 56. Cf. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Door in the Sky, Princeton University Press, 1997: "...myths describe the various and sometimes dramatic breakthrough of the sacred (or the 'supernatural') into the World and makes it what it is today." (p. xi)

8. Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, HarperSanFrancisco, 2005: 35.

9. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Rolfe Humphries, translator, Indiana University Press, 12th printing, 1968: 5-7, the ages being, The Golden, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, each successive age humankind dwindling further down the scale.

10. Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, p. 27.

11. Robert Lawlor, Sacred Geometry, p. 27.

12. David Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God, Ancient Cosmology and Early Christian Symbolism,Quest Books, 1993: chapter 4 especially.

13. John Michell, The City of New Jerusalem in Revelation, and several other of his books are extensive materials showing this, such as The New View Over Atlantis, Twelve Tribe Nations, Sacred Number and the Golden Age, The Dimensions of Paradise, and How the World Was Made.

14. Lea and Bond, Gematria, and their other magnum opus, Materials for the Study of the Apostolic Gnosis, Marshall Jones Co., 1920.