Using Sacred Numbers to Make Money

Secret Kabbalist Practices for Conquering Chance

An unusual pentagonal diagram with numbers and letters is found in some old texts. The oldest extant version is in a French book published in 1754, but the image and explanation that accompanies it is much older. Credited to someone named Albumaz de Carpentieri, it is one of many secret “systems” that could supposedly assist people to obtain fortune. In particular, this is one of many secret Kabbalist ways of increasing one’s odds in lottery extractions.  

A numerical system with numbers on a pentagram (courtesy author). 

Mysterious Tome 

I first came across this diagram and the explanation of how to use it in a yellowed, Italian-language book published in the 1800s.  It contains chapters on the Good and Bad Days of the Moon, the Golden Key, Sibyl’s Kabbalah, the Zoroastrian Kabbalah, and more than 10,000 vocabulary terms from dream topics, proverbs, and more, along with their numerical relationships. The text only reveals that it was by an “anonymous Kabbalist.”  It also reveals that he was not the author; the unique methods (for conquering chance) within came from different Kabbalists and astrologers from earlier than the 1500s through the 1700s.  

Another compilation of such systems (in Italian) is entitled A New Look at Lottery Games, published by Giustino Rumeo in 1866, and a second (also written in Italian) was published ten years later under the title Public Lottery Extraction Numbers.  The only English-language translation of the text is entitled Making Millions: A 500-Year-Old Kabbalist’s Guide to Conquering Chance.   

The Kabbalah and a Divine Connection 

The Kabbalah is rooted in esoteric Judaism, and many of its teachings, found in the Zohar, the Sefer Yetsirah, and other texts, demonstrate the interconnectedness of all lives and events; they indicate that a knowledge of this interrelationship can help people to make causal inferences – to get a feel for what the future will bring. 

The Sefer Yetsirah (Book of Creation) in particular revolves around cosmology and its numerical connections.  Other texts likewise indicate that numbers define the cosmological structure, so an understanding of numbers can lead to an understanding of Ein Sof (the Endless) and the interworking relationship between Shekinah and the Holy One. In other words, a divine connection can be understood through numbers.  

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life with the names of the Sephiroth and paths in Hebrew. (Public Domain) 

In the 1600s, Moses Cordovero wrote (in Shi’ur Qomah) that divinity pervades everything and the number ten is the key to unlocking this mystical understanding. 

“The ten sefirot are the secret of existence, the array of wisdom, by which the worlds above and below were created. Corresponding to this secret are the ten utterances by which the world was created, and the ten commandments, which epitomize the holy Torah” (Smith, 1995, p. 69). 

An understanding of other important numbers can supposedly illustrate divine attributes as well as a more thorough understanding of the nature of reality.  Before returning to the unusual pentagonal figure and explaining its use in lottery extractions, let us explore this a bit further.