Jay Dyer
21st Century Wire
In January of 2014, IMF Chief Christine Lagarde gave a speech that was lost on most of her audience and amongst the media.
IMAGE: ‘Flowers of Evil‘ – money goddess and IMF Chief Christine Lagarde ( Photo link media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com)
On January 15th, 2014, IMF head, Christine Lagarde, stated the following:
“Now, I’m going to test your numerology skills by asking you to think about the magic seven, okay? Most of you will know that seven is quite a number in all sorts of themes, religions. And I’m sure that you can compress numbers as well. So if we think about 2014, all right, I’m just giving you 2014, you drop the zero, 14, two times 7. Okay, that’s just by way of example, and we’re going to carry on.”
“So 2014 will be a milestone and hopefully a magic year in many respects. It will mark the hundredth anniversary of the First World War back in 1914. It will note the 70th anniversary, drop the zero, seven– of the Breton Woods conference that actually gave birth to the IMF.”
IMAGE: ‘Cracking the code’ – Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, by Michael Hoffman.
In his classic, Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Hoffman wrote of coincidence, synchronicity and curious connections between 007 and 2001 that also relate to obscure subjects like numerology and gematria. The first 007 was Dr. John Dee, as will be investigated below, but the reason this is of import is the similarity between Christine Lagarde’s seemingly strange comments to her Press Club audience. Hoffman has recently commented on this, and I myself at the time of Lagarde’s comment speculated on the connections between the numbers of sevens that appeared in the downed Malaysian Plane incident(s).
Numerous conspiracy sites and speculators got in on the action, but what no one (other than Hoffman) did was look at the motivations behind such a mindset. The natural approach of those in conspiratorial and alternative media circles would be to leap at the occult.
While I don’t intend to deny such associations, I would like to highlight another element that almost none have considered. Yes, there are believers in dark forces in high places, but there is also another factor that should be kept in mind, as I myself had conversations with individuals about this that appeared a frightened by such calculating mumbo jumbo.
Simon Singh, in his recent The Code Book, explains of the process of cracking ciphers and codes as follows:
“Kerchoff’s Principle: The security of a crypto-system must not depend on keeping secret the crypto-algorithm. The security depends only on keeping secret the key. In addition to keeping the key secret, a secure cipher system must also have a wide range of potential keys.” (The Code Book, Simon Singh, pg. 12)
As researchers and analysts of the world-historical, we attempt to do just this on a much grander scale. Discovering the secrets of nature and super-nature yield fulfilling mental rewards in their own right, but they also free us from the slavery to superstition.
While I have attacked The Enlightenment many times over, and I think I am right in doing so for its excesses, it’s also worth considering the positive aspects of the Enlightenment, which did serve to rid the Roman dominated West of numerous bizarre superstitions and excesses that should not be excused. I doubt many of us in modernity would truly like to return to a world where we expect to almost certainly be damned, spending our days working out a complex system of penitential indulgences to try to settle debts in an absurd punishment-based system. Such is part of my reason for leaving Western Christianity years ago, but this should also not be seen as endorsement of one side of a false western dialectic of Rome versus Enlightenment. On the contrary, the truth lies somewhere in-between extremes that the cunning of history is yet to work out (as we still live under the excesses of the quantification-obsessed Enlightenment). Let us see if we can locate at least one key to cracking the code of our modern overlords and decipher the Lagardian linguistic mysteries, surveying numerology, biblical gematria and cryptography.
First, the subjects of numbers, numerology and ancient perspectives on them, are helpful. For ancient man, numbers were magical, semi-divine entities that somehow related to all things, despite being in no particular time and locale. Obviously, in article format the scope of such an analysis must be limited, so I have chosen influential representative examples.
My friend James Kelley explains in his “Prajapati Purusa and Vedic Altar Construction” essay the means by which the Pythagorean Theorum was actually encoded in Vedic altar designs, much earlier than Pythagoras himself:
“This blurb fails to mention the amazing insights of Dr. Abraham Seidenberg, who found the so-called “Pythagorean theorem” at work in the Indian texts known as the Sulvasūtras, which date from the 8th century B.C., but which crystallize procedures and teachings that reach back into the Neolithic mists. Though historians of mathematics before Seidenberg noted the connection between the famous theorem and Vedic texts, it is our contention that Dr. Seidenberg was the first to offer a coherent presentation of the significance of this influence. The Sulvasūtras contain explicit instructions for how to construct the altars for Vedic worship using only ropes, stakes, and possibly rods. But what has Vedic altar worship to do with “a² + b² = c²”?
In his seminal article “Ritual Origin of Geometry,” Seidenberg demonstrates exactly how the “Pythagorean theorem” was used in creating the falcon-shaped altar used in the Vedic fire ritual, the agnicayana. The altar was built based upon an aerial measure called a “Purusa”! The falcon altar, we are told in the sutra, must be a square with an area of 7 ½ square Purusas (about 56 ¼ square feet). A śulba, or cord, is used to measure out a “Purusa” (about 7 ½ feet, and marked on a section of the cord from an end), and this section is stretched taut between two pegs, one end of the pegged-down cord extending out past a peg, the other end being a meeting point of peg and cord-end. Next, the loose cord is stretched back and wrapped around the apposite peg. This peg-to-peg cord stretch is repeated until the desired length is reached (to achieve the “half Purusa,” the initial Purusa-length has been measured by joining both ends of the section and pulling the loop taut by hand and marking the new end with chalk or ink).
The square is created next, in a manner that we would find odd, by stretching a second cord from the midpoint of the initial 7 ½ Purusa cord, the end result being a “T” shape. Then the altar boundary parallel to the initial side is stretched, making an “H,” the final step being a simple stretching of two boundaries parallel to the central connecting cord. It is not important to trace the subsequent “unnecessary” (from our “practical” perspective) steps in creating a square that is 7 ½ Purusa by 7 ½ Purusa (we moderns would simply stretch the loose cord, once measured, to make a 7 ½ Purusa “L,” then repeat the process twice more to get a square). Instead, our attention must be focused upon what the Vedic priests did next: They believed that it was necessary to increase the area of the altar by 1 Purusa, without changing the altar’s shape!”
In this fascinating and illustrative section we have an important insight that is lost on many: the primal and archetypal rites of ancient man, in what might be considered a serious contender for the origin of the “perennial tradition” (India), we see that the rites of the gods here encode mathematical forumlae. Specifically in this case, the message is a geometrical formula, and in fact the most famous one. While one is left to speculate on his own as to the divine status of such “gods,” what can be divined from this section is the fact that the ritual encodes a mathematical form and functions as a veil for a more axiomatic principle. This seems to suggest a conscious desire to cloak abstract principles from the profane by the priestclass, keeping the secrets from the populace through religious fear.
Continuing with this survey of ancient thought, Egyptologist Wim van den Dungen analyzes the Pythagorean and Western conceptions of basic number principles and numerology. Dungen’s linked chart also demonstrates the similarity in the various religious traditions through the numerological principles. We see again the theme of hiding numerological doctrines under the divine:
“The first standard is immanent. Using the first ten cardinal numbers of N, the set of all natural numbers, the decadic setN’ {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10} is isolated (cf. Pythagorism based on Ancient Egyptian thought and later replicated by the Qabalah). By means of N’, all subsequent natural numbers can be derived. Each cardinal number of N’ is then coupled with a symbol one-to-one. These combinations give form to the famous neo-Platonic formula : exitus a Deo, reditus in Deum (outgoing from and return to God). This “numerology” is backed by a process in which the “exit” is an involution (a materialization of spirit) and the “return” an evolution (a spiritualization of matter). Immanence and the realms of process (becoming) prevail.
The second standard is transcendent. Transcendence is approached with negatives (radical apophatism). Three kinds emerge : unknowing itself, virtuality (the possible, or {Ø}) and nothingness (the void, or “0”). The first is a nothingness with potential, the second the non-existent (cf. Nature abhors a void). The set of all relevant criteria of measurable differences is given 10 ordinal positions defining 10 dimensions. The logic of creation (transcendence into immanence and vice versa) links with this.” (Van Den Dungen, “Tabularm Esotericum”)
In another influential example, the first century collection of documents known as the Corpus Hermeticum relates these numbers to the original creation act, echoing the same Indian, Hellenic and Egyptian principles:
“I saw in the darkness of the deep, chaotic water without form permeated with a subtle intelligent breath of divine power, Atum’s Word fell on fertile waters making them pregnant with all forms. Ordered by the harmony of the Word, the four elements came into being, combining to create the brood of living creatures the fiery element was articulated [aether] as the constellations of the stars, and the gods of the seven heavenly bodies, revolving forever in celestial circles. The Word leapt up from the elements of Nature and reunited with the mind of the Maker, leaving mere matter devoid of intelligence….
In the beginning there is unity. Unity separates into two fundamental forces, which like negative and positive poles of a battery, generate everything. Hermes describes them as Life and Light, which become Mind and Soul. We experience them as thoughts and feelings.” (The Hermetica, By; Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, pgs. 13, 14, 35)
This tradition would continue in the Jewish and biblical tradition, as van den Dungen expounded, with Kabbalah and gematria. In Kabbalah, the first ten numbers, like in Pythagoreanism, correspond to the divine energies or attributes that shine forth from the One (or God). With this belief, ancient Jewish belief considered the very letters of the Torah to be divinely inspired and their particular forms and lexical constructs could encode secret meanings. Jewish scholar and Kabbalah expert Gershom Scholem defines gematria as follows:
“Gematria (from Gr. geometria), is one of the aggadic hermeneutical rules for interpreting the Torah (in the Baraita of 32 Rules, No. 29). It consists of explaining a word of group of words according to the numerical value of the letters, or of substituting other letters of the alphabet for them in accordance with a set system. Whereas a word is normally employed in this sense of manipulating according to a numerical value, it is sometimes found with the meaning of “calculations” (Avot 3:18)….The use of letters to signify numbers was known to the Babylonians and the Greeks. The first use of gematria occurs in an inscription of Sargon II (727-707 B.C.E.) which states that the king built the wall of Khorsabad 16,283 cubits long to correspond with the numerical value of his name. The use of gematria was widespread in the literature of the magi and among interpreters of dreams in the Hellenistic world.” (Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, pg. 337)
What is relevant to our analysis of Lagarde’s comments is that we begin to see that the learned and priest classes would naturally see the pragmatic usage of gemtaria and numerology for conveying messages in a covert fashion.
Espionage and statecraft have always gone hand in hand, and the desire of rulers to send encrypted messages is an ancient art. Thus, religious traditions and languages (such as Hebrew and Greek) where letters also functioned as numbers would naturally serve as a medium for secret communications.
Read the rest at Jay’s Analysis…
21WIRE contributor and author Jay Dyer is a commentator on media, art, philosophy and culture. This article and many others, along with Jay’s podcast archive can be found on his blog Jay’s Analysis.
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