English Qaballa & Aleister Crowley's Cipher, Explained

The Thelemic English Qaballa (TEQ) is an alternative English letter-value cipher system developed within occultist circles influenced by Aleister Crowley's 1904 text "The Book of the Law," distinct from the standard A=1...Z=26 English gematria used elsewhere on this site. It is one of the more specialized and debated corners of English-language gematria.

The 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, which contains a passage referencing a future cipher to be discovered ("the key of it is in the beast"). Decades later, other researchers within Thelemic and occult communities proposed specific letter-value systems intended to fulfill that reference — these later proposals are what's generally meant by "English Qaballa" or "Crowley's cipher" today.

How it differs from standard gematria

Where Hebrew gematria and Greek isopsephy inherit their letter values directly from alphabets that have functioned as number systems for millennia, and standard English gematria simply counts A=1 through Z=26, English Qaballa uses a specific, non-obvious letter ordering unique to its own tradition — making it incompatible with, and not directly comparable to, the standard ciphers calculated elsewhere on this site.

A note on accuracy

Because English Qaballa's specific cipher table is a matter of internal debate within occultist and Thelemic communities (with more than one competing version in circulation), we have not yet added a live calculator for it — we would rather leave it out than publish a table we can't fully verify. If you study this system directly, treat any online "English Qaballa calculator" (including a future version of this one) with the same scrutiny you'd apply to any specialized, community-debated cipher.

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 ciphers available in our English calculator.