Musical Gematria - Paperback

by William Zeitler (Author)

In modern times we are accustomed to one set of characters for writing words (the alphabet 'A' through 'Z') and another for writing numbers (the digits '0' through '9'). The ancient Greeks and Hebrews, however, used the alphabet for both words and numbers. So their numbers looked like strange words, and their words looked like strange numbers. And every word naturally had a numeric value. The study of these numeric values of words is called 'gematria' ("geh-MAY-tree-uh").The ancients put gematria to use: they apparently used numeric values of the names of Greek gods as dimensions in the Parthenon. And Jewish mystics in the Middle Ages studied the meanings of the numeric values of the Hebrew names of God.This book presents a way of doing 'musical gematria' that takes words or phrases in general and names in particular, and generates graceful and musically useful themes. It uses an elegant method that honors the ancient traditions of gematria while incorporating modern insights.