ALW Cipher
According to Allen Greenfield, Carol Smith discovered the ALW Cipher, which she later called "English Qaballa", in 1974. Thelemite James Lees says he discovered it independently on November 26, 1976. Carol Smith published the cipher and the reasoning behind it before anyone else, in The New Equinox / British Journal of Magick. Her presentation was later summarized by Jake Stratton-Kent in The Equinox: British Journal of Thelema. Since then other self-published authors have discussed the system, referring to it as New Aeon English Qabala.
The order & value of the letters in the ALW Cipher are derived from the grid superimposed on one of the pages of manuscript of Liber AL on which this verse appears (sheet 16 of Chapter III). Also appearing on this page are a diagonal line and a circled cross. Thelemites believe the book of the law should ideally only be printed in Crowley's hand-written version, because the books says there are messages in the chance shapes Crowley's handwriting made, or any shapes he adds to the pages. Believers in New Aeon English Qabalah, following the ideas explained by Carol Smith, feel that reading any diagonal across the square one gets the order of the English alphabet to be used in the English Qabala. Whichever diagonal is read the order of the letters is obtained.
As there are ten squares per column, this method is equivalent to taking every eleventh letter of the alphabet as the order and then assigning them sequential values:
| A=1 L=2 W=3 H=4 S=5 D=6 O=7 Z=8 K=9 V=10 G=11 R=12 C=13 N=14 Y=15 J=16 U=17 F=18 Q=19 B=20 M=21 X=22 I=23 T=24 E=25 P=26 |
In the original handwritten text, the string of letters and numbers is divided into two lines, the first ending with "Y" and the second beginning with "X". Stratton-Kent thought that in the manuscript the 'X' at the beginning of line two looked like a multiplication symbol, so he added each line's values together and multiplied them; 17x11=187, the numerical value of the phrase "English alphabet", which he felt confirmed the correctness of the system.
Members of the Hermetic Alchemical Order of the QBLH began to work with the basic cipher. Other Thelemic groups have also adopted it.
Read more about this topic: English Qabalah
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“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)