The Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts as an API & CLI, because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Inspired by Allen Greenfield's bizarre & fascinating book & it's usage in the Hellier TV show. Taking cues from Wren Collier & Chad Milburn's web based versions.

go install github.com/tslight/naeq@latest

Alternatively, download a suitable pre-compiled binary for your architecture and operating system from the Releases page and move it to somewhere in your $PATH.

N.B. The binaries are fairly large because of the embedding of all the files in assets/books/*.json into them.

Running alw-cli with no arguments will prompt for words and use Liber Al Vegis (The Book of the Law) by default, and will display all the results.

If you want to choose another book and limit the number of results use the -b and -n flags respectively. For example:

alw-cli -b liber-i -n 31 hellier

To list the baked in books run alw-cli -l and to give the tool your own book in json format use the -p flag. If you just want to calculate the NAEQ/ALW cipher sum of a given string (without finding matches in a mystical text) use the -s flag.

Usage: alw-cli [options...] <words>:
  -b string
        embedded book (default "liber-al")
  -l    list embedded books
  -n int
        number of matches to show
  -p string
        path to alternative book
  -s    only return naeq sum

This is very much W.I.P. and my first time writing an API from scratch so bare with me...

Usage: alw-api [options...]:
  -p int
        Port to listen on (default 8080)
  -v    print version info

I have instances deployed here and here, if you'd like to try it out:

curl -X GET https://alw.up.railway.app?words=hellier
curl -X GET https://alw.up.railway.app?words=hellier&book=liber-i
curl -X POST https://alw.up.railway.app -d '{"words": "hellier"}'
curl -X POST https://alw.up.railway.app -d '{"book": "liber-x", "words": "hellier"}'

curl -X GET https://naeq.onrender.com?words=hellier
curl -X GET https://naeq.onrender.com?words=hellier&book=liber-i
curl -X POST https://naeq.onrender.com -d '{"words": "hellier"}'
curl -X POST https://naeq.onrender.com -d '{"book": "liber-x", "words": "hellier"}'

The sections below were ripped directly from here, so full credit/attribution to Wren Collier & Alynne Keith.

Hermetic Qabalah is a derivative of a school of Jewish mysticism called Kabbalah that was developed by modern Western esotericists as a way to explore the divine and the nature of the universe. One aspect of Qabalah is Gematria, a mystical interpretation of a holy text using specific mathematical laws. A Gematria is a system used to assign a numeric value for each letter of a word, which is then summed. This sum can be referred to as the “key” of that word, or phrase. Words and phrases that have the same numeric value are thought to have similar properties and can be used to meditate on hidden meanings or relationships contained within those similarities.

The Book of the Law — or Liber AL vel Legis — is the central holy text of Thelema, a spiritual and social philosophy derived from Western esotericism and founded by magician Aleister Crowley. Liber AL vel Legis was dictated to Crowley over the course of three days in 1904 by a discarnate entity called Aiwass.

Since Hebrew Gematria uses the Hebrew script to derive values, it does not neccessarily apply as well to English or Roman scripts and thus efforts have been made over the years to develop an “English Qabalah” that could be utilized with texts in those languages.

In Chapter II verse 55 of Liber AL vel Legis, Crowley writes: “Thou shalt obtain the order & value of the English Alphabet, thou shalt find new symbols to attribute them unto”. When analyzing this information later, Crowley realized that this implied there was a cipher contained within Liber AL that had yet to be discovered or developed. Later on, in Chapter III sheet 16 of the original documents, there is a unique page that contains a grid of numbers, a slash through it, and a circle within a cross.

This page in particular is where the ALW cipher, or New Aeon English Qabalah, is derived. James Lees discovered in 1976 that this key was based on the magical number 11. By taking every eleventh letter of the alphabet as the order, and then assigning them sequential values you are able to arrive at this cipher:

  A=1 L=2 W=3 H=4 S=5 D=6 O=7 Z=8 K=9 V=10 G=11 R=12 C=13 N=14 Y=15 J=16 U=17
  F=18 Q=19 B=20 M=21 X=22 I=23 T=24 E=25 P=26

  A=1 B=20 C=13 D=6 E=25 F=18 G=11 H=4 I=23 J=16 K=9 L=2 M=21 N=14 O=7 P=26 Q=19
  R=12 S=5 T=24 U=17 V=10 W=3 X=22 Y=15 Z=8

Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts, a book published in 1994 and written by occultist and ufologist Allen H. Greenfield seeks to help elucidate the nature of the mysterious Aiwass that dictated Liber AL to Crowley, and the myriad entities encountered by UFO contactees in the 20th and 21st century. His theory was that ultraterrestrials - a term used by researcher and author John Keel used to describe the beings - transmitted information to humans in a secret, enciphered format, in the guise of enlightened messages. These entities often used authors to produce voluminous works, such as Jane Roberts' “Seth” and the “Ephraim” that communicated with poet James Merrill during his writing of The Changing Light at Sandover. In particular, Greenfield conjectures that Liber AL was the ultimate key to this secret cipher utilized by the ultraterrestrials.

Greenfield believed that by utilizing the ALW cipher/NAEQ you could take the names of these entities, or information they provided and compare their cipher value using the values of phrases or words from Liber AL as a key. By analyzing words or phrases in Liber AL that had the same values, one could arrive at further insight, or obtain major revelations about the nature of these entities or their motivations.

Type a word or phrase into the search bar. The ALW cipher value will automatically be calculated and a list of letters, words and phrases (of up to 16 words) from Liber AL of equal value will be shown.

How you interpret this data is up to you. We have found insight stringing together multiple phrases or words with the same value that fit grammatically into something resembling cut-up method poetry, as well as picking out phrases that resonated with the name or phrase we were analyzing. Results are open to interpretation and a bit of psychic intuition plays part. Use your imagination.

Do not read deeply into the order of the results displayed. Individual matches are not neccessarily meant to be interpreted as one string of text; indeed, results will often make little grammatical sense, though occasional happy accidents occur.