When I was originally doing research to develop an esoteric musical framework for the Pegataur Working, my initial line of questioning was primarily concerned with finding a way to map musical theory to hermetic or occult philosophy.  While it wasn't ultimately detailed enough in the low-level way I was looking for, I did stumble across an interesting bit of old world thinking about the Music of the Spheres.

If you're not familiar with the Music of the Spheres, this is a concept closely tied to the Old School pre-heliocentric worldview.  Basically, the heavenly hiearchy, with Earth at the center, of course, was thought of as a divine symphony that actually created a harmonius soundtrack for the universe.  As the Greeks had discovered some time ago, there were mathematical formulae underlying the divisions of tones into scales, and calculations about fret-spacing on the neck of stringed instruments that could be used to develop tonally accurate instruments.  It isn't a far stretch to take Pythagorean mysticism and combine it with a Western religious and scientific worldview and superimpose this earthly knowledge onto the heavens.  This is literally consistent with the old Hermetic axiom "As above, so below."    More...

I've improved the translation services available in the Esoteric Delights Gematria Database.  When you go to the database, you'll notice that I switched the order of the tools in the sliding tabs so that the "TRANSLATE" service is now at the top.  I've been analyzing the usage of the site to make improvements, and a major shortcoming that I found and corrected was that the call to the Babylon Online Dictionary was only really expecting a single word to be translated, but a lot of people are entering phrases into the translation and database searches.  I've corrected this to return results for all words entered, as shown below:

Another thing that I added was that in order to cast a wider net and help you find the closest translation possible, I've incorporated Google's Translation service that is made available through their Google Ajax API for Translation, which is totally awesome.  As demonstrated in the screenshot above, if Google has a translation for you, it will be provided at the bottom below the dictionary results.  This is also nice, because there may be times when the attempt to get a definition from Babylon doesn't return a result for whatever reason, but the Google result will - you can see this in the above example (notice there's no definition retrieved for "brave" in the Babylon section but the Google translation has all 3 words in a suggested translation). More...

Two quick updates about the Esoteric Delights Gematria Database:

1. It's way faster now. 
2. I added new database search functionality. 

The major improvement is in the responsiveness of the database and queries made of it.  For some reason the query response times were insanely slow, taking anywhere from 20-40 seconds (sometimes longer!) to do a simple number lookup.  I thought for some reason this was just how it had to be, but as it turns out, that's not true.  I've taken some steps to make the hosted database more attentive to the web site's needs, so now it's down to executing and returning the query results in a second or two.  Please let me know if you notice extremely long delays in processing your requests.  I've wired some alerts into the app to notify me if it's taking too long to server query results, but if you notice anything wacky, drop me a line.

In addition to being able to get English translations of Hebrew words and transliterating English into Hebrew characters, you can now search the text of the English translations that are stored inside the database directly.  This is a nice thing to have in conjunction with the translation service.  The translations are pretty "straight" in that they are coming from a standard Hebrew-English dictionary.  However, since the database contains words from other sources, some of which are more esoteric in nature, this gives you a second way to find things in the database specifically that may not be turned up in a standard dictionary.  The new database search shows up as the first panel and is labeled as "SEARCH the Gematria Database for Hebrew Words/Phrases by English Translation..."  This search function works more like a search engine and less like a normal database search in that it uses word stemming ("running" would also look for "run" and "ran") and will also look for words in a phrase, not just the word or phrase literally.

I hope you find these features/improvements useful!

I've just added some new functionality to the site: the Sigil Generator.  This is the same functional component that I used to generate the sigils used for the album artwork for the Pegataur album Eternal Flight.  To check it out, just select "Sigil Generator" from the navigation under Esoteric Tools.

The Sigil Generator requires that you input a Hebrew word or phrase.  You can use the Gematria Database page to lookup Hebrew words or transliterate English into Hebrew to use for the Sigil Generator.  I didn't bother with any obvious "export image" functionality, although I might do that later.  For now, if you want your sigil, just right-click (PC) or control-click (MAC, I think?) on the sigil and save from your browser.  If you don't want the colored background/lines, just uncheck the "Use Planetary Color Scales" box.

Enjoy!

I have made my gematria database available to you lovely people to use, here.  You can also get there at any time by clicking on the "Gematria Database" link in the navigation next to "Home."  I will be updating the functionality around the database over the coming months -- please read the overview and disclaimer for more information.

I don't know, but I'm pretty sure that I've built the largest, free online gematria database -- almost 236k translations!

In the early days of Pegataur, we weren't sure if we were going to have vocals or not.  We came up with the idea that, to stay true to the esoteric conceptual basis of the band, we should come up with a way to analyze the music, on a song-by-song basis, using Qabalistic techniques.  The challenge was to come up with a way to translate musical notes into Hebrew letters, and to let our songs tell their stories by spelling Hebrew "words" and "sentences" which could then be studied using gematria to figure out what the songs were telling us.  We could then use these jumbles of words and numbers to help us write lyrics and choose titles for our songs.  This presented a series of puzzles to solve and questions to answer and decisions to make, let me assure you!  More...

Two new web methods are available here. Follow the link for the (wsdl) service descriptions. More...

This is the obligatory "welcome" post for my new website. 

The impetus for the creation of this site is somewhat crazy (well, to some it may seem that way).  To make a long story short, I have a rock band, Pegataur, that is heavily rooted in conceptual mayhem inspired by Western hermetic and occult principles (mostly Qabala, or Kabbalah, if you prefer).  Most of the early symbolism came from dreams from Aaron, and then I got the crazy idea that I should write some software that could analyze the music that we were writing along qabalistic lines.  A year later, I had a pretty solid code base written in C#.NET that allows me to enter in song "data" and churn out qabalistic-derived points of analysis using gematria, notarikon, and temura techniques.  This also necessitated that I create my own gematria database, which was a wild ride in and of itself.  After a year of this I felt like I was going to be sucked into the movie Pi.  It should be noted that I am not Jewish, although one friend who teaches Hebrew school suggested that I may in fact be an honorary Jew at this point.

I've been wanting to get the code out here for people, but I'm a little weary of having to support it.  However, I will be making the database and other functionality available via web services, which I will be hosting off of this site.  When I find the time, I'm going to try to make posts to this site about how I did this stuff and how you can use my stuff for anyone who is interested.  I may also be trying to get help building and cleaning up the gematria database.