Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation)
About this book
Sefer Yetzirah ("Book of Formation") is the earliest surviving Hebrew cosmological treatise, composed anonymously between roughly the 2nd and 9th centuries CE. In fewer than two thousand words it describes the creation of the universe through 22 Hebrew letters — 3 mother letters (air, water, fire), 7 double letters, and 12 simple letters — which it maps onto the 7 planets and the 12 zodiac signs, and arranges into the 231 two-letter gates. It is the foundational text of Jewish letter-mysticism and the direct ancestor of the later Kabbalah. The folder holds the Hebrew base text (Sefaria), the Nachmanides/Ramban commentary (Warsaw 1884), and the Westcott 1893 English translation (with the "Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom" supplement).
Relevance to this project
The frame text of this whole project: 3 mothers / 7 doubles / 12 simples; the letter↔luminary mapping; the 231 gates = C(22,2); AB+BA = ABBA. The 22 letters, the 7 planets and the 12 zodiac signs are the apparatus the Reader computes.