College of Thelema: Thelemic Education

thank you so much for these references Jim, the examples you have given are wonderful indeed - much appreciated.

greetings,

If anyone uses the Lashtal site, you may have read this querry already, so please forgive me but I'm trying to get advice from multiple sources.

my name is john and I'm a self practitioner here in Hawaii. I have yet to meet anyone who has my interests, so I'm coming to the board as I've nobody to turn to out here. I have found the information invaluable so I thought i'd give it a try.

I have been trying to follow the path of working out a magical motto as offered in advice by Aleister Crowley in Magick without tears. Namely finding a phrase that i seemed driven to and dissecting it through gematria.
I found this latin phrase: Aqua Vitae - which i find to mean water of life
Using my limited knowledge and resources, I used gematria to acheive these results:

Aqua

hebrew "May-yim"
mem-yod-mem(final) = 650 =6+5=11=2 (chokmah)

Latin to hebrew
btw, i used this website for transliteration: www.iosart.com/nlp/heb_enc_dec.html

and came up with aqua = aleph - qof - yod- aleph =112 = 4 (chesed)
i was happy with these two end resulting sephiroth and stretched it more to combine 2 + 4 to get 6 (tipareth)

Vitae

english: life hebrew: chayim
cheth-aleph-ayin-yod-mem which i worked out to 689=23=5 (geburah)

the Latin to Hebrew: vau-yod-teth-aleph-ayin 96=15=6 (tipareth)
extremely happy with these representing 5+6=11 (the great work) = 2 (chokmah)

Adding the end result of my work of water 6 to vitae's 2 = 8 (hod) the sphere of magickal work and mercury.

I would ask anyone who has taught fellow aspirants what to do in order to work on his/her motto. I have no help beside what I read, the wonderful advice given by the late soror Meral in her ITC issues and the internet. Also, if this is correct, could you please give any further correspondences, Maybe the gematria can reference other meanings especially the larger numbers as with my limited knowledge base, i can only reduce them down to a single number for a sephiroth. Reading the ITC's qabalahist corner, and the forums, i see so many combinations and cannot gather the years of searching/research it took to obtain them.

this means a lot to me as I want to earnestly understand the motto and not settle for the name alone, but to bring it out through meditation and an occult base of learning.

I would also ask for only those people's assistance who are really wanting to help. In advance, I would like forgiveness for any errors in my work above as I'm just starting out.

Please forgive this long message, i hope it was not hard on reading it but believe me it was hard to type this while I'm having my 6 and 4 year old daughters running/jumping around me screaming. My wife is at work.

sincerely,
john