English Qaballa Calculator — Crowley Cipher (ALW), Explained
English Qaballa (also called the ALW cipher) is a Thelemic letter-value system developed by James Lees in 1976, assigning each of the 26 English letters a number by stepping through the alphabet 11 positions at a time rather than counting A to Z in order. It's distinct from the standard A=1...Z=26 English gematria used elsewhere on this site, and from the older Hebrew Kabbalah its name borrows from.
Calculate a Word or Phrase
Type any word or phrase below to see its English Qaballa (ALW) value, with the full letter-by-letter breakdown shown so you can verify the total yourself.
Results for every cipher will appear here as you type.
Historical Background
Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) was a British occultist who founded the religious philosophy of Thelema. In 1904 he produced The Book of the Law, a text he described as dictated to him rather than authored by him. Verse 2:55 instructs the reader: "Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet; thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto" — understood by Crowley and later Thelemites as pointing to a cipher yet to be discovered, though the verse itself supplies no table.
That table came decades later. In 1976, researcher James Lees proposed the specific letter-ordering now most commonly called English Qaballa or the ALW cipher (other writers have also called it the New Aeon English Qabalah, or NAEQ). It's this 1976 system — not anything published by Crowley himself — that online "English Qaballa calculators," including this one, actually compute.
How the Cipher Works
Instead of counting the alphabet in order, English Qaballa steps through it 11 letters at a time: starting at A, the next letter is 11 positions ahead (L), then 11 more (W), and so on, wrapping around the alphabet. Because 11 shares no common factor with 26, this step size visits all 26 letters exactly once before returning to A — producing the sequence A, L, W, H, S, D, O, Z, K, V, G, R, C, N, Y, J, U, F, Q, B, M, X, I, T, E, P, assigned the values 1 through 26 in that order. Eleven is a significant number within Thelemic numerology, which is why it was chosen as the step size.
A commonly cited worked example: "WORD" sums to 3 + 7 + 12 + 6 = 28 (W=3, O=7, R=12, D=6) — you can verify this yourself in the calculator above.
Sourcing & Accuracy
We previously left this page without a live calculator because English Qaballa's cipher table is something occultist and Thelemic writers have disagreed about over the decades, and we didn't want to publish a table we couldn't verify. Since then we've cross-referenced James Lees' 1976 ALW system against multiple independent sources and checked it against a commonly cited worked example ("WORD" = 28) before publishing the calculator above. We're not aware of a single universally agreed-upon English Qaballa table — if you study this system in depth, treat any calculator's output (including ours) as representing the Lees/ALW convention specifically, not a settled consensus.
Where It Fits in the Bigger Picture
English Qaballa is best understood as one branch of the much broader history of gematria — a 20th-century occultist adaptation sitting alongside, not replacing, the older Hebrew and Greek traditions and the more common modern English gematria ciphers calculated elsewhere on this site. For the full introduction to how gematria works in general, start with What Is Gematria? A Complete Guide.
Frequently asked questions
Did Aleister Crowley invent English Qaballa?
No. Crowley's 1904 text "The Book of the Law" (which he described as received rather than authored) instructs the reader, in verse 2:55, to "obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet" and "find new symbols to attribute them unto" — but it does not itself contain a cipher table. The specific letter-value system now generally called English Qaballa (or the ALW cipher) was developed decades later, in 1976, by James Lees.
What is qaballa?
In this context, "Qaballa" (also spelled Qabalah or Cabala in other traditions) refers to English Qaballa specifically — a 20th-century Thelemic letter-value cipher for the English alphabet, distinct from the older Hebrew Kabbalah it borrows its name from.
Is English Qaballa the same as gematria?
It uses the same underlying mechanic (summing letter values), so it functions as a form of English gematria — but its letter-value table is unique to Thelemic tradition and not compatible with, or comparable to, standard English gematria ciphers like Simple (A=1...Z=26). A word's English Qaballa value and its Simple gematria value are unrelated numbers.