Kabbalah Unveiled D 157
second sephirah, was given the God-name Jehovah, with a numerical
value of twenty-six; Binah (Understanding), the third sephirah, was
given the name Elohim, with a numerical value of fifty, and so on.
Key to unlocking what Philips calls "the powerful, beautiful math-
ematics of the Tree of Life" is the Pythagorean triangle, or tetractys, an
equilateral triangle containing ten points arranged in four rows, sym-
bolizing the numbers one, two, three, four as they add up to ten.
Pythagoras, the seventh-century B.C. Greek philosopher and math-
ematician, known as a widely traveled initiate into the secrets of the
most varied mysteries, is considered the world's first theoretical physi-
cist. He taught that mathematics was the key unloclung the mysteries
of the universe and that the number ten is perfect and sacred, the source
and root of eternal nature. Hence his representation of the number ten
in the tetractys, a symbolic glyph at the heart of the number mysticism
Pythagoras taught his students at Crotona in southern Italy. The tetrac-
tys had an esoteric meaning that was revealed in secret only to his priv-
ileged followers dealing with the universal mystical gnosis that lies at
the heart of ancient religion. It also symbolized a tenfold nature for
God. Why this triangle should have been treated with such religious
reverence--students had to swear an oath not to reveal what they
knew of it-remained a mystery to historians of Greek mathematics,
though its relevance is now made clear by Phillips.
Madame Blavatsky, hinting that she knew more than she was
prepared to say, claimed that "the ten points inscribed within the
Pythagorean Triangle are worth all the theogonies and angelologies
ever emanated from the theological brain."
When Phillips realized that the Pythagoreans had discovered that
the religious God-names attributed to the sephiroth of the Tree of
Life-such as Jehovah and Elohim-were not mere inventions of the
pious but express powerful mathematical archetypal principles deter-
mining the laws of nature, he saw that these had been encoded in
both the tetractys and the Tree of Life. One of the remarkable prop-
erties of the tetractys is that through gematria it turns certain poly-
gons, such as the pentagon and the octagon, into geometrical
representations of the God-names.