The Kabbalah Ciphers Explained: ALW, KFW and LCH

Most English gematria calculators carry three ciphers filed under Kabbalah: ALW, KFW and LCH. They look arbitrary — the letters run in an order nobody recognises, and one of them starts counting at zero. Each has a specific origin, and none of them is Hebrew Kabbalah.

The instruction that started it

In 1904 Aleister Crowley wrote Liber AL vel Legis (The Book of the Law). Verse II:55 contains a directive he took as a task: obtain the order and value of the English alphabet, and find new symbols to attribute to them.

In 1907 he wrote Liber Trigrammaton, twenty-seven three-line figures built from a solid line, a broken line and a point. Attributing the twenty-six Latin letters to those trigrams was, in his view, how the instruction got fulfilled. Everything below descends from that assignment.

ALW: the English Qaballa

The system was worked out in 1976 by James Lees, who arrived at an ordering of the alphabet that begins A, L, W — hence the nickname. It runs:

Lees called it English Qaballa. The label ALW cipher was applied later by Allen H. Greenfield, and New Aeon English Qabalah (NAEQ) by Gerald del Campo — three names, one table. Calculators generally use the shortest.

Structurally it is an ordinal cipher: values 1 to 26, one per letter, exactly like English Ordinal but in a different sequence. Word lengths behave the same way; only the totals move.

The letter table is on the ALW Kabbalah page.

LCH: the Trigrammaton Qabalah

This one is misnamed almost everywhere, this calculator included. Its real name is the Trigrammaton Qabalah (TQ), worked out by R. Leo Gillis directly from Crowley's Liber Trigrammaton. "LCH" is just its first three letters, borrowed as a label by calculator authors.

Its distinguishing feature is that it starts at zero:

The zero is not a rounding artefact. It follows from the trigram structure, where one figure represents the Tao and carries no value. The practical consequence is that in TQ the letter I is free: list and lst have the same value, and adding an I to a word changes nothing.

That single property makes TQ behave unlike every other cipher in the set, and it is worth knowing before reading anything into a TQ match. The table is on the LCH Kabbalah page.

KFW

The third, KFW, is the least documented of the three — a variant ordering circulated among cipher collectors, also filed under names like Cipher X or English Qabalah 2. It runs K = 1, F = 2, W = 3 and continues through all twenty-six letters.

Like ALW it is ordinal in structure: 1 to 26, reshuffled. See the KFW Kabbalah page for the full table.

What to make of them

Three things are worth keeping straight:

They are not Hebrew. These are twentieth-century constructions applied to the Latin alphabet by people working in a Thelemic and Hermetic context. Hebrew gematria has its own letter values, sketched in the Jewish gematria post. Nothing here reaches back into a Hebrew text.

ALW and KFW are reorderings of the same idea. Both are 1-to-26 ordinal ciphers. A word's value in either lands in the same broad range as its English Ordinal value, so a match in one of them is roughly as likely as a match in the other. They are not independent evidence of anything.

LCH is the genuinely different one. Zero-based, with a free letter. If you are looking for a cipher whose behaviour is not a restatement of Ordinal, this is the one in the group.

All three sit alongside the other thirty-three on the ciphers page, each with its full letter table printed, so you can see exactly what any quoted value was built from.

Sources

• English Qaballa — Wikipedia, on James Lees and the 1976 system
• English Qabalah — Wikipedia, on the family of systems and their names
• Liber Trigrammaton — Wikipedia, on the 1907 text the attributions come from