Gematria is a form of divination most notably practiced by the ancient Hebrew mystics or Kabbalists. It is a form of numerology, in a sense, as the characters comprising the Hebrew alphabet also served as symbols of their numbering system. In other words, every letter was also a number. Therefore any word automatically generated a number.

For example, in the Hebrew gematria system, the familiar YHVH (the 4-letter name of God) has an alphanumeric value of 26 (Y=10, H=5, V=6). The Greeks used a similar system. The Greeks, in fact, would intentionally manipulate the spellings of certain words so that the alphanumeric value of the word in question would be a number that had some religious, spiritual, or otherwise esoteric significance. For example, the Greek spelling of the name, JESUS, generates a numerical value of 888.

For reasons too complex to elaborate here, this triple number held a high degree of significance for the Greek mystics. It is considered by some that these alphabets are somehow encoded, that their construction and corresponding letter values have been somehow programmed into those particular alphabetic systems. This notion, of course, begs the question: who was the programmer? God? Some advanced extraterrestrial beings? Who? And did this programmer encode any other alphabets? Perhaps the English alphabet? Gematria purists are quick to dismiss that idea. However, they may want to rethink their position on the issue. There are some compelling reasons to suspect there might be more to the English alphabet than previously thought. We'll explore some of those reasons in this article.

Before launching into our exploration of the English alphabet code a brief mention about the mystery of the number 9 is in order because, as we shall see later, the number 9 is embedded (encoded?) within the structure of the English alphabet.

Since ancient times the number 9 has held a significant place in the so-called canon of sacred numbers. "Sacred Numbers" are those numbers that have found their way into all sorts of religious writings and sacred traditions around the world.

For example, the numbers 666, 153, and 144,000 are familiar to many of us as they are mentioned in the Bible.1 There are other numbers from other sources such as the number 432 and it's extended forms of 432,000 and 432,000,000. These are mathematical expressions of cycles of time from the ancient Vedic texts of Hindu tradition.2 One thing all of these numbers have in common is that they are multiples of the number 9:

The ancient Mayans spoke of the Nine Lords of Time. The Greeks told of the 9 Muses, the daughters of Zeus who presided over the arts of music and poetry. Occult traditions speak of the Nine Unknown Men and the celestial Council of Nine. Norse mythology tells of the god, Odin, the ruler of the nine worlds. In the Catholic practice of Novenas, prayer services last nine nights. Mythologist, Joseph Campbell, tells us the number 9 is traditionally associated with the Goddess Mother of the World.3