A Different "Look" at the Tetragrammaton

Hi everybody, this is my first attempt at a thread on ATS, even though I've been reading for quite a few years now.

What I'm presenting may be unique, and so far I've been unable to find any similar discussion on the matter, so any help in that regard would be greatly appreciated (and also, please let me know if I'm violating any rules on this post).

I've been a non-practicing Catholic for a while, which means, well, not much, but in the past few years I've spent a lot of time reading about various religions. After reading about the Tetragrammaton about a year ago, I noticed something that really jumped out at me.

So first, here's the wikipedia article on the Tetragrammaton:
Tetragrammaton

Good for some quick background info on the Tetragrammaton, but the thing that really caught my attention was the image on the Wikipedia page (right side of the article):




The image, per the Wikipedia page, is the Tetragrammaton in Paleo-Hebrew, Aramaic, and modern Hebrew (in that order).

Basically, when I first saw the Tetragrammaton in modern Hebrew, I thought that the Tetragrammaton looked like a pair of eyes. The first letter He is an eye, the letter Waw (Vav) looks like the nose, the second letter He the other eye, and finally the letter Yodh or Yud looks like a raised eyebrow.

Now, it doesn't seem like a huge stretch to me to see that the Paleo-Hebrew and Aramaic versions LOOK like the word "EYEZ", or more appropriately, EYES. Funky, huh? But I found few other things that may be of interest.

Now, Paleo-Hebrew is roughly correlative with the Phoenician alphabet. A quick glance at the Wikipedia page for the Phoenician alphabet (found here, look at the table about halfway down), give the letter meaning for the letter He to be "WINDOW".

Considering that I thought the two He letters looked like eyes, it certainly was evocative of the phrase, "The eyes are the windows of the soul". Perhaps a possible origin for the phrase? Yeah, I know it's a stretch, but I still found it pretty cool.

For you Masonic conspiracy people, many of you have probably seen this picture below:



It's the Tetragrammaton inside a triangle, and when taken in the context of what I've posited above, it certainly seems like it could represent the All-Seeing Eye, or perhaps EYES.

Lastly, a little numerology. Take a look at the Wikipedia page for the Greek Alphabet, and look at the first table under the heading "Main Letters". If you look at the Greek letters and their Phoenician counterparts, you can get the numerical values for the Phoenician letters. So, the letters in the Tetragrammaton are He, Waw, He, and Yodh, and their values are 5, 400, 5, and 10, and when added together you get the number 420!

Now, that's an interesting number in itself, not for the normal subculture use of the word, but that sometimes the number is used to reference the collective unconscious (subconscious), which some may say is how we get inspiration or even connect with God. All I have to say is WHOA, I feel SO self-actualized right now.

So, let me know what you guys think. Sorry for the profusion of Wikipedia links, but hey, I have to work with what I've got. And also, please help me to edit this post or correct any massive mistakes; I'm still a newbie.

Thanks, and have a good one!

[edit on 3-10-2008 by ThoughtMachine]

[edit on 3-10-2008 by ThoughtMachine]

Man I love this kind of thing, I was a little amazed when you pointed out the it looked like the word eyes written in the two top scripts.

But I think this nothing more than a stretch. I mean the English word eyes [eyez] seems to be a coincidence, I mean what link does English have to those scripts?

Here's another observation, the characters 'he' mean window right, well to me they look like windows too, rather than eyes. It's like in japanese, the Kanji and Katakana look like what they mean.

another stretch might be , I (eye) am that I (eye) am.

Interesting!

You should take a look at the video with Nassin Haramein if you didn't see it already. I loved his presentation. He goes through physics concentrating on the tetrahedron and arrives in culture with the tetragrammaton (God is a thing, a machine)
Part 1

Google Video Link

reply to post by Good Wolf


Thanks for the post Good Wolf, and I would agree that the "inferences" I've made are tenuous at best, but there's never any harm in a little speculation.

I can't think of any way that English could be connected to the scripts, but I've far from being a linguistic expert. But still, as far as coincidences go, this one suits my purpose well.

I guess if you're having a hard time seeing the eyes in the Tetragrammaton, which I'm not saying you are, the way I originally saw it is similar to the expression of Fagin on the cover of my copy of Oliver Twist (which I was reading at the time):

i383.photobucket.com...

If you look at the Tetragrammaton, the "eyes" are facing down to the left (the smaller, detached part of the letter He are the irises), and the Yodh looks like a questioning, raised eyebrow.

I could also see it being a window. And though I know nothing about Japanese or Chinese characters, sometimes I've looked at them and they almost seem to tell a story pictorially. What they actually say, though, is probably very different from what I envision.


[edit on 3-10-2008 by ThoughtMachine]

reply to post by ThoughtMachine


No, I understood what you were imagining accurately, down and left. I think they are windows because they are square and the 2 missing corners suggests that the square thing is transparent or translucent.

A japanese Kanji example is the character they use for the term 'to eat' (tabi), which is a simplified drawing of a man eating sushi.

Almost all languages are pictorial, in fact one of the reasons that the romanic alphabet became so wide spread and so sucesful was because it was not pictorial, but rather phonetic. It was far superior because it could be broken down to around 27 characters, whereas the majority of the worlds languages remained pictorial and hence, massive.

The earliest written languages all developed in this way, the drawing represented something, whether it be an object or a concept, (like a foot for 'foot' and feet for 'running') and then they became written words.

THAT is why they are windows my friend.


It's also why the fact that it looks like the english word 'eyes' is an astonishing coincidence- english doesn't work on the same mechanic.




I'm a bit of a linguist, myself.

[edit on 10/3/2008 by Good Wolf]

reply to post by Pjotr


Thanks pjotr...I'll certainly try and check out the video when I get the chance. From what I've read about the guy he's a bit like Deepak Chopra; I'm all about relating spirituality and science. Here's a tidbit you might find interesting too...might be a little off-topic, but if you're talking about God and the universe, I guess a lot is fair play.

If you haven't seen it, there's a recent story about how French and American cosmologists, by analyzing the cosmic microwave background, have determined that the universe is a dodecahedron based on the number Phi: Link

Now, compare that to the Dali's The Sacrament of the Last Supper:



Yup, the centerpiece of Dali's painting is a dodecahedron based on the number Phi. Pretty nifty.

reply to post by Good Wolf

I'm a bit of a linguist, myself.

Yeah, it certainly sounds like it to me.

Actually, when I was a child, I was addicted to reading the World Book Encyclopedia, and I always loved how they showed the progression of each letter from ancient to present times. Now if I had just gone into something like linguistics instead of chemistry...

reply to post by ThoughtMachine


I'm contemplating going into linguistics and anthropology/paleoanthropology next year at uni Screw chem!

reply to post by Good Wolf

I'm contemplating going into linguistics and anthropology/paleoanthropology next year at uni

Screw chem!

Well, I wouldn't exactly say screw chem...after all, I'm a professional tutor, and chemistry is pretty fundamental to, well, everything, including my job.

But seriously, the way I look at it, to borrow a phrase, is that chemistry is chicken crap. Physics would then be bull crap, and as for the elephant crap; that would represent, as far as we presently know, the undefined, and be open to interpretation. Maybe the metaphysical? Things like the concept of God, the bounds of the universe, the melding of the realm of the spiritual with the physical. Even with something like the LHC, we'll never be able to say definitively what the lower and upper bounds of the physical universe are.

That being said...there's one thing I never understood about the Tetragrammaton, or YHWH. If God is omnipresent and omnipotent, wouldn't he know, even ahead of time, that you were going to blaspheme him? I mean, geez, isn't God being a little touchy? At the risk of being smited, I find it a bit ridiculous. I don't see God being like Voldemort, ready to sweep in and wreak holy havoc if you simply say his name, or, heaven forbid, curse his name. At least heathen blasphemers like me give uber-religious folks fodder for their distrust and enmity. Who would think that God, our all-loving Creator, would be one of the primary reasons for hatred in modern times? The Earth...whadda planet!

So what you're saying is that the all the universe is a petting zoo.

I said screw chem because I suck at it. In year 12 @ school in chem I didn't achieve a single credit!
Biology and physics on the other hand I rocked at.
In bio I would listen and lean but could never be bothered to do any homework or test but for major tests and exams I cleaned up.


Two things. Where does this '420' come from and where did all that blasphemy talk come from?

Originally posted by Good Wolf
So what you're saying is that the all the universe is a petting zoo.

I said screw chem because I suck at it. In year 12 @ school in chem I didn't achieve a single credit!
Biology and physics on the other hand I rocked at.
In bio I would listen and lean but could never be bothered to do any homework or test but for major tests and exams I cleaned up.

Two things. Where does this '420' come from and where did all that blasphemy talk come from?

Great first line...I guess as long as "heavy petting" is allowed, I'm all for it.

I'm not saying chemistry isn't difficult, but I just think there's a dearth of quality chemistry teachers around. It has a lexicon all its own, and teachers sometimes forget that what may seem trivial after years of familiarity can be devastatingly complex to the uninitiated.

420 may be a more American phenomena, but it's more or less the not-so-secret number used to represent smoking cannabis. Some people claim that smoking cannabis makes it easier to "bridge" to the collective subconscious (as described by Carl Jung), or receive divine inspiration. Thus, 420 is equated with the subconscious. Many American artists used cannabis to that end, and its use was especially prevalent during the early years of jazz.

And the blasphemy rant I had is referring to WHY the tetragrammaton was used. People were so afraid of using God's name in vain that they wrote YHWH instead of saying Yahweh. Actually, it's probably more out of respect than fear, but you get my drift. Blasphemy is still a crime in many countries, and is especially serious in places like Pakistan, where blaspheming the Qur'an or any of the prophets is punishable by life imprisonment or death.
Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code was deemed to be blasphemous in Pakistan because of its depiction of Jesus, one of Islam's prophets. SO, I guess sometimes words ARE worse than sticks and stones.

I guess I just went on about the blaspheming thing because, while I find religion and formation of religions really interesting, at the same time the practice of religion borders on absurdity. I should know, I'm Catholic.

reply to post by ThoughtMachine


The gematria value of the tetragrammaton is 26.

Originally posted by torahwarrior
reply to post by ThoughtMachine

 

The gematria value of the tetragrammaton is 26.

Yeah...that's the gematria value alright...I was basing it on Phoenician numerology, not Hebrew. "Gematria" basically means "play upon letters", and I was just playing around with them when I noticed the Phoenician value was 420.

The Phoenician value might be as "legitimate" as the gematria value:

According to contemporary scholars[2], the modern script used for writing Hebrew (usually called the Jewish script by scholars, and also traditionally known as the square script, block script, or Assyrian script — not to be confused with the Eastern variant of the Syriac alphabet) evolved during the 3rd century BCE from the Aramaic script, which had been used by Jews for writing Hebrew since the 6th century BCE, retaining the old script only for the Name of God. en.wikipedia.org... Prior to that, Hebrew was written using the old Hebrew script, which evolved during the 10th century BCE from the Phoenician script...

from en.wikipedia.org... (Bold added for emphasis)

So early Hebrew was derived from the Phoenician alphabet even before the Aramaic alphabet came into play.

Furthermore,

The Aramaic and Hebrew alphabets, as Greek, were derived from the Phoenician alphabet. Phoenicia (now Lebanon) was a peaceful sea-faring nation expert in navigation and trade that developed their alphabet around 1400 BC in an effort to communicate with their diverse trading partners that encircled the Mediterranean Sea. The Phoenician alphabet was widely received, as it was only 22 letters based on sound, as opposed to the myriad of symbols in cuneiform and hieroglyphics prevalent at the time. The ancient Hebrew alphabet - ketav Ivri - was nearly identical to the Phoenician alphabet...Biblical Hebrew contains 22 letters, as noted in Psalm 119, all of which are consonants. The alphabet and language remained pure until the Babylonian exile in 587 BC, when spoken Hebrew came under the influence of other languages, particularly Aramaic.

from www.biblescripture.net...

So which value is the more legitimate? I think that could be honestly debated. But if the gematria value for the Tetragrammaton, one of the names given for God, is 26, maybe somebody out there with more experience could tell me if that value means anything. 420 is a little more interesting than 26, IMHO.

[edit on 5-10-2008 by ThoughtMachine]

reply to post by ThoughtMachine


well, this is kinda neat:

The Father's Name(yod-hay-waw-hay)= 26
The Son's Name (yod-hay-waw-shin-ayin)= 391

391-26= 365

-that's definately a special number. : )

the picture you are looking at is not i repeat not the tetragrammaton!!!

reply to post by ThoughtMachine


i know this is a long watch but this blew my mind it says its 8 hours long but its not its 4hours 21 mins
i really think people should watch this i did yesterday

www.abovetopsecret.com...

this is part two of the one above (hassim harameir)

reply to post by ThoughtMachine

So which value is the more legitimate? I think that could be honestly debated. But if the gematria value for the Tetragrammaton, one of the names given for God, is 26, maybe somebody out there with more experience could tell me if that value means anything. 420 is a little more interesting than 26, IMHO. [edit on 5-10-2008 by ThoughtMachine]

H ThoughtMachine///
Im not so good with numbers, but 2 plus 6 gives you an 8
8 stands for eternity....And God is 'ETERNAL'!
Just my thought!

ICXC NIKA

If any of you want to understand the meanings of the Divine Names, you should study the seminal breakthrough research of Dr Stephen Phillips presented in his website at
smphillips.8m.com...
You will learn that they are mathematical prescriptions of all levels of reality, including space-time. For example, it is NOT coincidence that the number value 26 of YAHWEH is the number of dimensions of space-time predicted by quantum mechanics for spinless, 1-dimensional objects called "strings". All the Godnames are different levels of abstraction of the mathematical archetypes governing the divine paradigm as expressed in space through the sacred geometries of the world's religions. One amazing breakthrough has been Dr Phillips' proof that these geometries are isomorphic, as well as representations of a universal, mathematical pattern containing information about the structure of superstrings and their forces, as well as the seven types of musical scales. The Godnames mathematically describe aspects of this pattern. See his:
smphillips.8m.com...
and
smphillips.8m.com...
The number 420 = 10x42, where 42 is the 21st even integer and 21 is the number value of EHYEH, the Godname of Kether, the Sephirah preceding Chokmah in the Tree of Life (Otz Chiim), the Godname of which is YAHWEH. Phillips has proved that the Catalan solid known to mathematicians as the disdyakis triacontahedron is the outer form of the polyhedral version of the Tree of Life. It has 62 vertices, 180 edges & 120 faces containing the proportion of the Golden Ratio. He has shown that the template of sacred geometries is the Pythagorean tetractys - a triangular array of 10 points. Constructed from tetractyses, the disdyakis triacontahedron has 420 points lining its edges that surround any axis passing through two opposite vertices. In other words, the number 420 quantifies the shape of the polyhedron that encodes mathematical information concerning the basic nature of matter. There is a profound connection between Godnames such as the Tetragrammaton and REAL sacred geometries (as opposed to their pale imitations often found on the internet). The problem is that many researchers, e.g., Stan Tenan, never manage to get beyond understanding Kabbalistic names as metaphors and so their work of mathematically decoding Kabbalah is never completely convincing. When one realizes, as Phillips has done, that these names embody certain numbers that characterize well-known sacred geometries, then the Kabbalistic system of transcendental knowledge becomes revealed for the first time in its entirety: spiritual, psychological AND intellectual/scientific.

The four letters are simply the description of what he does, as is any Hebrew name. Using the SDH system,
The first two glyphs, the Yod and He mean...to materialize. the next letter Vav means...being, and the last letter again being another He, means "to define" that. So the name would read...define, being to materialize. That would be to create.

Not that complex