In his work Gan Na'ul, The Enclosed Garden, Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia evokes the art of Tseruf, a mystical approach to the permutation of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Transcending the three methods of gematria, notarikon, and temurah advocated by the medieval Kabbalists, Abulafia sets forth a system of meditation whose object would no longer be the Torah alone, but writing as a whole.

A few years after his death, at the end of the thirteenth century, the disciples of Tseruf encountered Aristoxenus of Tarentum, an influential member of the Pythagorean brotherhood of Apamea in Syria. Hermetic knowledge was then exchanged between a master of Numbers — whose subtle arrangements allow the initiate to comprehend the perfect harmony of the world — and the adepts of a long tradition of combinatorial study of the sacred Hebrew texts, in which every letter possesses a numerical value.

They would doubtless gather in the coolness of a study with a floor paved in geometric patterns, for long and passionate discussions. In the evening, when Al-Zahra, who guides the shepherds through the desert, rose above the horizon, they could hardly fail to meet again on a terrace, there to observe and measure the course of the stars with instruments of copper.

From this fleeting assembly emerged the archetype of a combinatorial architecture. Every building, but also every room, courtyard, passage, and staircase, would follow the strict order of true proportions, unfolding through learned mathematical iterations. The devices of perspective with which the ancients prided themselves on deceiving the eye would be banished, as would ornaments that distract the senses, for it is written that only rigor and asceticism allow one to hear the music of the soul.


Translated by AI.