Numbers: Their Occult Power and Mystic Virtues

William Wynn Westcott

The first edition of this little book has been long out of print, and for several years I have been asked to enlarge it, but until the present time sufficient leisure has not been found to collect the additional matter which seemed desirable. This essay on Numbers now appears as Volume IX. of my Series entitled Collectanea Hermetica, of which it seems to form a suitable part, and I am hopeful that it may be as well received by students of mystic philosophy as the previous volumes which treated of Alchemy, in the Hermetic Arcanum, Hermetic Art, Euphrates and Aesch Metzareph the Dream of Scipio and the Golden verses of the Pythagoreans, the Pymander of Hermes and Egyptian Magic. I have added in this edition many notes on the notions of the Rabbis of Israel, both from those who contributed to the Mishnah and Gemara of the Talmuds of Jerusalem and of Babylon, and from the Rabbis who made special study of the Kabalah. Only a few Talmudic treatises have as yet appeared in the English language, and hardly any Kabalistic tracts, except three from the Zohar or Book of Splendour, viz., the Siphra Dtzenioutha, the Idra Rabba and the Idra Suta. A few others are to be read in German and French translations. Many Talmudic and Kabalistic quotations may, however, be found in J. P. Stehelin’s Rabbinical Literature of 1748 in John Allen’s Modern Judaism, 1816, and in works on the Kabalah by Adolph Franck and Christian Ginsburg, while Hershon has published Hebraic lore in his Talmudic Miscellany, and Genesis according to the Talmud. The Midrash ha Zohar of D. H. Joel, Leipzig, 1849, narrates the relation between the Kabalah and Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Greek philosophy and the Zoroastrian doctrines of the Parsees. Perhaps the oldest extant Kabalistic Book is the Sepher Yetzirah, or Book of Formation, an English translation of which has appeared in three editions from the Author’s own pen. The fundamentals of the numerical 3 Kabalistic ideas on creation are laid down in that treatise it has also been printed both in French and German, and there is an American edition. Upon the mathematical aspect of Numbers, readers may consult for further detail the works of Gauss, Disquisitiones Arithmeticae, 1801 Legendre, Theorie des Nombres, 1830 W. G. O. Smith, Reports on the Theory of Numbers, in the Transactions of the British Association, 1859 James Ozanam, Mathematical Recreations, 1710, translated by Hutton in 1814 Snart, The Power of Numbers and Barlow’s Investigations of the Theory of Numbers. For further information on Hindoo philosophy, see The Theosophical Glossary of H. P. Blavatsky, the works of Tukaram Tatya, and modern translations of the Vedas, Puranas and Upanishads, also Rama Prasad’s Nature’s Finer Forces.