Mark Reinheimer — Aleph
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One Form, Many Voices:

The Names of God according to Hebrew and Kabbalistic Traditions

There was an ancient admonition against naming God, and the reason for this is one whose importance escapes the notice of theologians and secular theorists alike: the unityBeing exists outside of nounSpace entirely. This one ‘cannot be named but that (the unityBeing) chooses to suggest a temporary transport for mutual contact-convenience’. Even the common term ‘God’ is a deadly-dangerous token, for it ‘magnetically’ attracts to it meanings and bizarre denigrations (artifacts of semantic translation and compression) which openly oppose the actual and accessible realities of (the unityBeing). For this reason and others having to do with tradition, many refer to ‘God’ with the name Ha-Shem, which is to say ‘his name’. In this way they refer to the one from whom all hope of names and naming arises, without presuming that a solid or ‘nonChanging’ name for this being exists.

Each instant, the name of the Holy One is again unique — just as we ourselves are — in perfect likeness with our sources. But the danger of tokenizing the Name or Names of God goes far beyond this — whatever metaphor we make for God radically alters the meaning and connectivity of every other metaphor we possess or assemble — whether or not we ‘believe in God’ at all. This is the key matter that the sages of the ancient religions were holding high to our attention in an attempt to save us from the impossible perils of a single fundamental error which could in fact destroy the planet, and our species.

When we make tokens, we become increasingly like the tokens we make, which are always ‘primitive reductions’ or ‘shavings’ of what they refer to. The idea of a ‘changing name that is alive’ is a better way for us to understand that ‘this sort of being/way/thing’ was to be ever held in precedence to ‘frozen framings’ or ‘idols’. The goal was, is and must remain the constant preservation of direct contact with reality and spirit — not endless copying of frozen memoria.

These things said, various letters and phrases have become vessels for the conservation of ancient transports to understanding. Rather than being ‘names’ as we understand them, they are more like general ‘calls’ — something a mother might intone to call her infant — in reverse. By ‘name’ what is meant is more akin to ‘primordial associative archetype’ — a growing tree of poetic meanings and relations. A few of them may in fact be very ‘close’ compressions of the holy name — but they are still toys compared to what they hope to lead us to through contemplation of their qualities, origins, assemblies and function.

If we wish to understand the name of the unityBeing, we must learn to find our way back to direct connectivity with this One. These names are transports to that connectivity, and the contemplation of them both as riddles as sacred reliquaries of impossible intelligence and harmony is a fruitful pursuit for those who would know the origins of time, life and space.

 

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The Common Names

Our English term is spelled G (7) O (15) and D (4), and is the most commonly used and understood token of reference. We have a few other names for this being, such as ‘The Lord’, or ‘Lord’ (12) (15) (18) (4), and the common english ‘translation’ of YHVH, (the name of 4 letters), is Jehovah. (10) (5) (8) (15) (22) (1) (8).

These add up to 26, 49, 69 or (8, 13 = 4, and 15 = 6) respectively, in an informal mapping of numbers to letters based on ordinal position in the alphabet. The ‘summing’ is the product of an ancient ‘spiritual game’ of alphanumeropoetic decoding and encoding — sometimes called gematria. In the simple method emulated above, one adds the numbers in the sum, thus ‘reducing’ them to their most basic ‘root’.

Let us examine their hebraic sources briefly:

God • El or Elohim.


40 10 5 30 1 = 86 = 14 = 5

The Full Value:

80 20 10 74 111 = 295 = 7

This is the ‘general name’ for the unityBeing in the scriptures, and is the name used in the first statement of the first book of the oneBook. I believe that it refers to unity first, and something akin to ‘a primordial family’ as well. In a personal appeal or private discourse with the unityBeing one might use the form Eloi. Or Allah, in Arabic.

There are common arguments about the fact that the ‘im’ suffix indicates plurality in Hebrew. Such concerns are easily addressed: the elementally transcendent unity of God has precedence in all matters — and secondary to this, the plurality of the nominative token expresses the sovereignty of the penultimate causal sentience. Since ‘there is neither thing nor being not included’ — when God speaks, whatever may be speaks and reflects, resonating in symmetry and magnification. Thus the voice of the One is the voice of every element of source, lineage, cause, context or entity. A very ‘royal’ form of ‘we’.

The unity of God has solid precedence but there is more than our idea of singularity here. The body of the unityBeing is a transentient liquescence of unutterable profundity, ever-more brilliantly and ever-more-uniquely emerging into manifestation in ever-more-perfect forms, ‘dimensions’ and synchronies. How can a non-plural form suffice for such a referent?

Lord • Adonay (or Adonai)


10 50 6 4 1 = 71 = 8

This name’s meaning is Master or Sovereign, but it has an addition which renders it divine and unsurpassable. It is commonly substituted for the mystical name YHVH in spoken language.

Jehovah • YHVH (or YHWH)


5 6 5 10 = 26 = 8

[click image of this name to explore it’s gematria]

This name was revealed to Moses during the time of Exodus and was not to be spoken by mortal tongues, but rather to be kept as a sacred gift within the heart. This probably represents the first common instance of a mystical name which was intended as a transport of direct contact, rather than for use in common human terms or functions. It is not meant to be spoken, for speaking it changes it in a way that silently contemplating it does not. I do not believe ‘Jehovah’ is an accurate translation of this name though I’ve never heard the pronunciation of it, I suspect it may be similar to Havayah.

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The Monogrammaton: H or D

Hey (hei, heh, etc): Fundamentally, the unityBeing is ‘the breath of life’. This is an emanative and pancreative gesture of adoring communion between the Garden across the Veil and our universe of ‘manifestation’. Thus it is that many of our pictures of the Sun show it with ‘a face’ and some of our cartoons show the Sun as a puffy-cheeked entity ‘blowing’ on the clouds and land. These are caricatures which artfully recapitulate ancient spiritual understandings about the relationship between the Sun and the ‘breath of the Holy One’.

It can be said that ‘the breathing of the unityBeing’ is the whole wonder and purpose of all manifestation and existence. This is remembered with a sound akin to that one might make when attempting to fog up a mirror with breath. Silent, yet formative of a change in the ‘reflector’. What happens to the mirror when we fog it thus? Millions of perfectly unique yet perfectly reflectively complete ‘droplets’ emerge between us and the reflector. Each one will completely reflect ‘the one whose breath they were’ and well as aspects of the surrounding context.

We probably don’t realize this, but the english exclamation ‘Hey’ is actually the name for ‘all that was is or shall be’. So when we use this exclamation, it is as if we are appealing to all of timeSpace, even though the language we use it in does not yet conserve this understanding. A word is still a word, and the sound of the word can and often is made as ‘Hey’. Thus too our colloquialisms, such as ‘Hey Hey Hey’ (one of the 72 names of G_od) and even ‘Making Hay’.

My understanding of Dallet is more personal, and may openly contradict other understandings of which I am currently not aware. To my eye, this letter comprises the cross. As ‘4’ we see two related ‘poles’ crossing in the middle. This simultaneously‘infers’ the diamond and the circle. Stand a flat cross on its southern pole and duplicate the horizontal pole, spinning the new pole on the axis so that it remains in the plane of what it duplicates and we have a three-dimensional cross, which infers the dimensional magnifications of its previous shapes: A sphere, and an octahedron. Dallet is ‘the four in one’ which is an elemental character of how polarities emerge and are transcended in manifestation — cognitive, ‘spiritual’, and material.

This is not the end of this mystery but instead the beginning:

1. A cross of two bars, plus the diamond it infers, gives us 2 + 4 = 6 angles plus a unifier (the infered circle) gives us 7.

2. Extended into 3 dimensions, we get 8 + 3 + 1 = 12. Reduced, this is 3.

These two numeric entities are of profound significance. One acts as the remembrance of unification, and the other as the manifest symmetry of this ever-newly-and-more-competely-arriving unification.

The Digrammaton: YH or YY



The Trigrammaton: YHV or IHV

In the view of the Sefer Yetzirah, this name in 6 unique combinations seals the 6 extremities of the world[universe]. In some gnostic traditions this name is held as elementally linked to the gesture of creation. These are the six directions of the 3-dimensional cross.

13. He chose three letters from the simple ones, sealed them, purified them, and set them in His great name YHV, and with them He sealed up the six extremities. Five: He sealed height and turned upwards and sealed it with YHV. Six: He sealed abyss, and turned downwards and sealed it with YVH. Seven: He sealed east, and turned forward and sealed it with HYV. Eight: He sealed west and turned behind, and sealed it with HVY. Nine: He sealed south, and turned to the right and sealed it with VYH. Ten: He sealed north, and turned to the left and sealed it with VHY.

14. These are the ten sefirot beli-mah: Spirit of the Living God, spirit from spirit, water from spirit, fire from water, height, abyss, east, west, north, and south.

The Tetragrammaton: YHVH

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The 7 Names:

El, Shaddai, Elohim, Adonay, Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, YHVH, and Tzeba‘ot.

These are the names most commonly used for ‘God’ and in the Hebrew texts.

El • God

El Shaddai • ‘God Almighty’.

Adonay • Holy Lord, Celestial Sovereign, Panpenultimate ‘Father’

Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh • ‘I AM (all) I AM (BE-COMING)’
This name is first used in Exodus III: 14 when Moses asks God what name he shall tell Israel to ‘name’ Alohim to them, YHVH tells him He is the ‘God of their Fathers’. The emphasis is on the ‘ever-arriving spirit of perfection’ which moves all things in billions of ways at once, emerging from void like liquid flowers. The ‘fast and multiple emergence dimensions’ is an elemental part of the meaning of this name. ‘I arrive, exponentially more each instant, into local presence and accessibility’ or ‘All that becomes, becomes from my ‘breathing’ into us’. We see that God demands a name that moves and sings and is not frozen in what it points toward! This name -must- not be a noun!

YHVH: In Exodus VI: 3 God gives this ‘new name’ to Moses, telling him it has not been known before. This name is normally ‘read aloud’ as Adonay.

Tzeba‘ot: This word is the plural form of ‘host’ or ‘vast family’. An army or host of angels might be referred to this way, and this translates to our English phrase ‘Lord of Hosts’. The problem is that there are many meanings lost in our understanding and translations. [insert scalarity example here]

The 8-Letter Name:

This name is formed by mixing YHVH with Adonay

The Name of 12 letters:

YHVH YHVH YHVH

Other 12-letter names exist, but since I was unable to locate any dependable source for them, I will leave it to the reader to seek them out.

33

The 9 holy names

Ehyeh, Yah, YHVH, Adonay, El, Elo’ah, Elohim, Shadai, Tzevaot

 

42

1. Sunday : Saturn

2. Monday : Jupiter:

3. Tuesday: Mars:

4. Wednesday: Sun

5. Thursday: Mercury

6. Friday: Venus

7. Saturday: Moon

This holy name is formed from a notarikon of the Ana Be’Ko’Ach prayer. Each ‘word’ is theopoetically linked to a day of the week, and a body in the solar system, according to traditions emerging in part from the Sefir Yetzirah. This ‘name’ is based in a termuric permutation of the first 42 letters of Genesis.

Another 42-Letter name

 

Chockmah Hhaqaq Yah YHVH Tzabaot Elohi Israel Elohim Hha’im Wemelekh Oulam El Shaddai

30

ShVDQV M(s)VRM DAi N(s)KVSh AShNV MR N(s)VNChV M(s)VChR


Rahhoum Vehenoun Ram Venesha Schokan ’Ad Maroum Wequodosh

‘Merciful clement magnified, ever-highest (who) lives (with/as/in) eternity (of) elevation and Holy (is).’

 

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The ‘72 Names of God’

[click this text to enlarge in a new and extremely wide window]

The unmarked text of Exodus XIV: 19, 20 & 2. Note that vowel marking did not exist prior to 700 C.E./A.D. (± 200).[2]

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Exodus XIV

19: And the angel of God, who went before the camp of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of cloud removed from before them, and stood behind them;

20: and it came between the camp of Egypt and the camp of Israel; and there was the cloud, and darkness here, yet gave it light by the night there; and the one came not near the other all the night.

21: And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all the night, and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided.

The ‘72 names of God’ as revealed in Exodus 14: 19,20,21

[click the image to enlarge in a new window. click here for a printable .pdf file]

“When I came to the night in which this power was conferred on me, and midnight — when this power especially expands and gains strength whereas the body weakens had passed, I set out to take up the Great Name of God, consisting of seventy-two names, permuting and combining it. But when I had done this for a little while, behold, the letters took on in my eyes the shape of great mountains, strong trembling seized me and I could summon no strength, my hair stood on end, and it was as if I were not in this world. At once I fell down, for I no longer felt the least strength in any of my limbs. And behold, something resembling speech emerged from my heart and came to my lips and forced them to move. I thought—perhaps this is, God forbid, a spirit of madness that has entered into me? But behold, I saw it uttering wisdom. I said: ‘This is indeed the spirit of wisdom.’”

Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia, Sicilian, Born 1240

Abulafia, Abraham

 

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References:

psyche.com Source of the 30 letter name spelling

Reference Source for checking of most other names: 10 Names of God

Kabbalah Center was the online source for verifying the 42 letter name by comparing it with its source in Hebrew.

The 72-name chart was crafted by applying the ancient formula to the text of Exodus as it is written in the Soncino Pentateuch. The chart preserves Sofit-endings as in Exodus. Nothing is added, nothing missing. Errors, if they exist, are my own.

All quotes from scripture are from the Soncino Pentateuch, 2nd Edition.
Errors in transcription may exist, and are my own.