Hypertext Hebrew Alphabet

Introduction to The Cipher of Genesis by Carlo Suares, Weiser, 1992

    NOT VERY long ago artificial institutions and moral values were the terms for our civilization. Such definitions have gradually revealed their inadequacy in every sphere in the rapidly changing circumstances of our world, and an articulate call for the rediscovery of the sacred fount which is believed to exist in our Scriptures is heard everywhere.

Our many-sided sciences make almost daily discoveries -- or inventions-of collaterals which by mere impact of observation acquire the status of distinct branches, thereby splitting further our already scattered body of knowledge. In spite of the increasing hold of mathematics on departments as far apart as optics, philology, biology or ethics, it cannot and will never discover a basic postulate befitting the simultaneous existence of a universe and of man.

Some religiously-minded people are aware of this lack of a unitary way of thought capable of including the knowledge of man and the knowledge of things. Although far too late, they are only just in time to measure, not without some perplexity, the unthought-of distance which separates them from the world as it is.

Like bewildered passengers in a ship astray on uncharted seas, whose call to Saviours is of no avail, we are told to believe in a brotherly huddle, to feed the hungry and clothe the naked as a means of atonement. Does not the sacred thus humanized fall under Jesus' curse: Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence to me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men (Matt. xvi, 2~)?

This emphasizing of "the things that be of man" stressed by so many churches today -- -in an attempt to recapture their grip on human affairs -- blended with a clinging to obsolete myths does not lead to the sacred fount of revelation and knowledge, but rather to an alienation from it. In order to obviate this estrangement, high authorities have asked learned personalities, priests, monks, ministers, rabbis, to co-operate in retranslating the Bible into different languages. In this connection the most ancient of ancient traditions (the Qabala) cannot but issue a severe warning to those scholars: their monumental task will not lead them any nearer the Source, not only because the Bible is untranslatable but, strange as it may seem, because it is already hopelessly mistranslated in Hebrew.

The twenty-two graphs which are used as letters in the Hebrew alphabet are twenty-two proper names originally used to designate different states or structures of the one cosmic energy, which is essence and semblance, of all that is. Even though they correspond to numbers, symbols and ideas, those twenty two vastly exceed all the most exhaustive sets of classes: they cannot be distributed among things because they factually are that which they designate.

One has to probe very deeply into this semasiology to realize that this last statement does not exceed the limits of truth and need not be a cause of astonishment. We are approaching here a language which is not a by-product of sensorial references, but a would-be transmission from the unknown. Hence the difficulty of explaining it, because of the inability of the human mind to grasp that which is not contained in a frame of recognition.

This present essay is, however, an attempt to overcome that difficulty by suggesting a number of approaches, which, it is hoped, will gradually uncover that which is purported to be rediscovered: the secret and sacred fount lying in the hidden depths of the Bible.

A direct approach would be to introduce immediately the code with which to decipher the Bible, and to begin with the first schemata of the Genesis: Bereschyt Barah Elohim . . . etc., but it is doubtful whether the readers would willingly follow such a plan, without first having found a good reason for so doing. The statement that the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet are but the initials of names, the meanings of which have been lost throughout the ages, gives rise to such legitimate questions as to how, whence, and why.

The why is simply the fact that the Book of Genesis was originally a cabalistic script. The whence is lost in immemorial time, through centuries of history, proto-history, pseudo-history, myths and legends. The how is a secretly transmitted tradition the thread of which was never lost and which for many reasons has remained hidden.

But things have come to such a point, in our present juncture of historical and psychological events, when it is necessary that it should be revealed, by bestowing its basic key: the code of those names which have been desecrated to the point of being made use of in an alphabet constituted by only their initials. (Whereas our A, B, C, and so on, are mere representations of vocal sounds, the names Aleph, Bayt, Ghimel, etc. are projections of biologically structured energies in different stages of organization.)


The decoding of Genesis and of any other cabalistic text is therefore not a mere matter of transposing from A-B-C to Aleph-Bayt-Ghimel, but a process of penetrating an unknown world by means of a manner of thinking which has to be experienced by the very use of the language which must be learned in order to understand it. However paradoxical and perhaps difficult this may appear, it stands to reason that were the Revelation a matter of ordinary words, it would be an obvious fact prone to superficial observation.

The words we use in our languages are conventional. They do not emanate from the objects which they designate. The word house is understood just as well as maison in French or casa in Italian: none of those words has any ontological link with the essence of the object thus specified, and their use merely helps us to recognize such objects, by means of linguistic agreements.

We come to realize that the problem of conveying the unknown could only be solved if it were possible to project the common essence of everything which is in the universe as a whole (including, of course, Man, because the essence is One). That essence in Man is according to cabalistic postulates a movement both inner and outer, which builds structures and destroys them unceasingly. Our psychological inner structures built with and upon words which never convey the things, but are our ideas of what we recognize their appearances to be, must therefore be atomized, so to speak, in order for us to partake in and commune with the cosmic unfathomable mystery of the one movement, which is life.

There will never be any explanation of why anything exists at all. The dogmas of the beginning of a Creation and a God who creates will never be anything but futile attempts to explain away the mystery which is the totality of time and space and life and, in a word: of being. On that assertion is founded the Qabala.

The Qabala -- which among thousands of scripts, includes Genesis and scattered fragments of other biblical sources-stands unremittingly against every projection of thought concerning the essence of life, because projections are but images, symbols and vagrant words. Qabala existed even before Abraham and therefore does not belong to any specific tradition. It is not -- as so repeatedly stated by so-called experts -- a mysticism or any mysterious system of occultism. It is a way of thinking based on unitive postulates and analogical developments, of which our modern thought can well take advantage. For many centuries it has been the nutritive roots of our civilizations, hidden in the gnostic teachings and in many schools of thought. Whether deliberately ignored or criticized with blatant prejudice, whether feared or laughed at, this vital knowledge and its subdivisions of structures has always been misunderstood. The reason for such constant ostracism will appear only too clearly when this essay is subjected to the criticism of Tradition founded on eccliesiasticism. In spite, however, or because of the assertion that the Bible has been, for centuries, and still is being read in a sense contrary to its intent, we trust religious as well as scientific circles to respond to it with interest.

[ Emphasis added ]



The Cipher of Genesis / Tree 2 / and duversity.org
The Cipher of Genesis: Review by J.C. Cooper
The Cipher of Genesis: Review in Maitreya 1 1970
Carlo Suares Cipher of Genesis (Scribd PDF)
The Cipher of Genesis (psyche.com PDF)