17 A Brave New World eight hundred years before the first written accounts of the Hindu Yugas. Pythagoras is single-handedly responsible for the invention of isopsephy (the divinatory art of aligning concepts by numerological value – called gematria in Hebrew, a corruption of the Greek word ‘geomatria’ meaning geometry), of attributing symbols to letters of the alphabet, the use of the pentagram, the practice of monasticism, philosophy (he was the first person to describe himself as a ‘lover of wisdom’) and the idea that both reality and the divine are best approached and understood through number: everything can be measured and predicted in cycles and rhythmic patterns, including time. The Ten Sephiroth or emanations of the Hebrews are in fact the Pythagorean Tetractys or Decad (see Figure 1.), the first mathematical model of emanations.
Alan Chapman
www.thebaptistshead.co.uk