Meaning
The Septenary cipher draws a wave over the alphabet. Values climb from 1 at A to 7 at G, fall back to 1 at M, climb again from N to 7 at T, and fall to 1 at Z. The name is the Latin for "of sevens". It keeps totals small, like the reduction ciphers, but its letters are paired in an odd way: A and M, N and Z all count 1, while G and T are the only 7s.
The cipher appears in Gematrinator's list in the 2010s. Who devised it is not established; one practitioner's blog credits a video maker of that decade, and we found nothing earlier. Seven is a number with a long symbolic history, from the days of creation to the seven planets of ancient astronomy, but nothing in that history lays sevens across the English alphabet; the cipher borrows the number's prestige and nothing else.
How it is counted
GEMATRIA: G 7 + E 5 + M 1 + A 1 + T 7 + R 5 + I 5 + A 1 = 32; reduced to 5. ALPHABET: A 1 + L 2 + P 3 + H 6 + A 1 + B 2 + E 5 + T 7 = 27; reduced to 9.
With every letter between 1 and 7, a word of eight letters lands somewhere between 8 and 56, and most land in the middle. Matches between words are therefore everywhere under this cipher, and they mean correspondingly little.
What this page leaves out
Gematrinator also has reverse and variant forms of several such ciphers. We compute the Septenary only as it stands and give no reading of its totals.
A symmetry in the table
The second half of the alphabet repeats the first exactly: N has A's value, O has B's, and so on to Z, which has M's. A letter and the letter thirteen places on always count the same, so any word and its letter-for-letter shift by thirteen give the same total; GEMATRIA and its shift TRZNGEVN both make 32. Equal totals that come from the table's own symmetry say nothing about the words.
Correspondences
Each item with how it stands: “sourced” is in the work cited, “our construction” is EsoTerrier’s own, and “disputed” means the sources disagree.
- Name on the popular sites
- "Septenary" (Gematrinator) sourced
- Shape
- A wave over the alphabet: up to 7, down to 1, twice our construction
- Tradition
- None found; the symbolism of seven is old, the cipher is not sourced
How the schools read it
- Gematrinator
- Lists it among its ciphers.
- EsoTerrier
- Behind "more ciphers", labelled as a modern cipher.
Claims about it
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The Septenary cipher carries the sacred sevens of ancient tradition.
falseWhat the record shows: Sevens are old in many traditions; this way of laying them over the English alphabet is a website cipher of the 2010s, and who devised it is not established.
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Two words or names with the same value under this cipher are connected.
falseWhat the record shows: Equal values are what any table of this kind produces in quantity; the tradition reads them together as a way of interpreting a text.
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Totals under this cipher show that news events are planned by their numbers.
falseWhat the record shows: A search with dozens of ciphers and millions of phrases always finds a match; fact-checkers have shown it. Nothing on this site reads events, dates or news by number.
