Satanic gematria and the Illuminati cipher

Two phrases, two kinds of thing

A cipher, in gematria, is a table of letter-values. “Satanic gematria” names one. “Illuminati cipher” and “masonic gematria” do not — they name claims made with tables, and the tables turn out to be the ordinary ones.

Keeping that distinction is most of the work. A table can be written down, computed and compared, and this article does that for the Satanic cipher. A claim can be traced to its sources and its method examined, and this article does that for the other two. Neither exercise requires deciding whether anyone is right; it requires only saying what is there.

The “Satanic” cipher

The table called Satanic on Gematrinator and the calculators modelled on it assigns A = 36, B = 37, and so on to Z = 61^{[1] Source: Gematrinator calculator}. A “Reverse Satanic” runs Z = 36 to A = 61. The table appears in the 2010s alongside the four base ciphers popularised by Zachary Hubbard’s decoding community^{[2] Source: Letters & Numbers}; it has no earlier history, no connection to any religious body, and no author who has claimed it beyond the calculator sites themselves. The reason usually given for starting at 36 is that 666 is the 36th triangular number — 1 + 2 + … + 36 = 666^{[3] Source: 666 (number)} — so an alphabet “beginning at 36” gestures at Revelation’s number^{[4] Source: Revelation 13:18}. The full alphabet in this table sums to 1261.

This site does not offer the Satanic table as one of its fourteen ciphers, for the reason set out next: it contains no information that English Ordinal does not.

What the table actually measures

Every letter in the Satanic table is its Ordinal value plus 35. Therefore, for any word, Satanic value = Ordinal value + 35 × (number of letters). The table is not a new way of weighing words; it is Ordinal with a length penalty. The site’s engine checks that identity for every row below at build time.

Two consequences follow. First, two words of equal length that match in Ordinal must match in Satanic, so a “double match” across those ciphers is one match. Second, because the offset is large, Satanic values are spread out and rarely collide by accident — which makes any collision look more impressive than it is, since it is still the same Ordinal coincidence plus an equal letter count. The cipher comparison analyses the same kind of dependency among the site’s own ciphers (Sumerian is Ordinal × 6; Reverse is 27 × letters − Ordinal).

The “Illuminati cipher”

I looked for a table under this name and did not find one. Sites styling themselves “Illuminati gematria calculators” offer the standard ordinal, reduced, reverse and Jewish (Agrippa) tables, sometimes with the Satanic table added; none defines a distinct Illuminati letter-value system, and no two that use the label agree on what it refers to. The phrase, in practice, means “gematria applied to conspiracy topics”.

The historical Illuminati were a Bavarian society founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 and suppressed by 1785^{[5] Source: Illuminati}. They were secretive and did use ciphers — substitution alphabets and code names for members and cities — but these were cryptographic tools for hiding correspondence, not letter-value tables for finding meaning. The conspiracy theories that later borrowed the name are a separate phenomenon, and the pairing “666 Illuminati” has no source in any text: Revelation gives 666 as a person’s name-number in the first century, and the Illuminati were founded seventeen centuries later. For the record, here is what “Illuminati” actually equals in this site’s English ciphers: English Ordinal 120 · Full Reduction 48 · Reverse Ordinal 150 · Reverse Full Reduction 69 · Sumerian 720 · Jewish 438 · Chaldean 29 · Septenary 35. In the Satanic table it is 470. It equals 666 in none of them.

“Masonic gematria”

Freemasonry has no letter-number system; the standard accounts of the fraternity record none^{[6] Source: Freemasonry}. What it does have is a cipher in the other sense: the pigpen cipher, a geometric substitution alphabet used by eighteenth-century Masons to keep records private^{[7] Source: Pigpen cipher}. That is a code for concealing text, not a table for valuing it, and confusing the two senses of “cipher” is how the phrase “masonic cipher” drifted into gematria. The other Masonic numbers in circulation — 33, from the Scottish Rite’s thirty-three degrees, and the motto Ordo ab Chao^{[8] Source: Scottish Rite} — are real features of one Masonic rite, and “masonic gematria” consists of computing words connected to them in a cipher that makes the target easy to reach. The 33 page measures how easy.

How the claims are built

Whatever the label, the decodes that use these tables share a construction, and it is worth describing neutrally, because seeing the construction is the only way to judge the result.

1. A target number is chosen first — 666, 33, 13, 44 — usually from a text or a tradition (Revelation, the Scottish Rite).
2. A phrase is chosen, with freedom over its length, spelling, articles and word order (“Illuminati”, “the Illuminati”, “Illuminati order”).
3. A cipher is chosen from a list of ten or more, including rescaled tables like Satanic and Sumerian that repeat the base ciphers’ matches.
4. Any match among all those combinations is reported; the non-matches are not.

Each step is arithmetically honest, and the sum reported is always correct. The difficulty is that with a free choice of phrase and cipher, a match with some target is close to guaranteed, so its occurrence carries no information. That is a statement about the method, not about the sincerity of the person using it, and it applies to matches that flatter as much as to matches that accuse. The Agrippa table that supplies most of the large “Jewish gematria” values in such decodes is itself a sixteenth-century magical text^{[9] Source: Three Books of Occult Philosophy (De Occulta Philosophia Libri Tres), Book II, chapter XX: “What numbers are attributed to letters; and of divining by the same”} — a fact decoders rarely mention and critics rarely know.

How to evaluate one

The tables in this article are real and the arithmetic is checkable — that is why it is worth knowing what they are. The accuracy page puts numbers on how often unrelated words collide; the decoder shows all fourteen of this site’s ciphers at once with the working displayed, which is the fastest way to see how much any single match is worth.