Foucault's pendulum - Umberto Eco [15]
“Listen,” Belbo said to him then. “You haven’t discouraged me, you know. On the contrary. I have Abulafia—that’s what I’m calling him—at my command, the way our friends used to have the golem. Only, my Abulafia will be more cautious and respectful. More modest. The problem is to find all the permutations of the name of God, isn’t it? Well, this manual has a neat little program in Basic for listing all possible sequences of four letters. It seems tailor-made for YHVH. Should I give it a whirl?” And he showed Diotallevi the program; Diotallevi had to agree it looked cabalistic:
10 REM anagrams
20 INPUT L$(1), L$(2), L$(3), L$(4)
30 PRINT
40 FOR I1 = 1 TO 4
50 FOR I2 = 1 TO 4
60 IF I2 = I1 THEN 130
70 FOR I3 = 1 TO 4
80 IF I3 = I1 THEN 120
90 IF I3 = I1 THEN 120
100 LET I4 = 10-(I1+I2+I3)
110 LPRINT L$(I1);L$(I2);L$(I3);L$(I4)
120 NEXT I3
130 NEXT I2
140 NEXT I1
150 END
“Try it yourself. When it asks for input, type in Y, H, V, H, and press the ENTER key. But you may be disappointed. There are only twenty-four possible permutations.”
“Holy Seraphim! What can you do with twenty-four names of God? You think our wise men hadn’t made that calculation? Read the Sefer Yesirah, Chapter Four, Section Sixteen. And they didn’t have computers. ‘Two Stones make two Houses. Three Stones make six Houses. Four Stones make twenty-four Houses. Five Stones make one hundred and twenty Houses. Six Stones make seven hundred and twenty Houses. Seven Stones make five thousand and forty Houses. Beyond this point, think of what the mouth cannot say and the ear cannot hear. ‘ You know what this is called today? Factor analysis. And you know why the Tradition warns that beyond this point a man should quit? Because if there were eight letters in the name of God, there would be forty thousand three hundred and twenty permutations, and if ten, there would be three million six hundred twenty-eight thousand eight hundred, and the permutations of your own wretched little name, first name and last, would come to almost forty million. Thank God you don’t have a middle initial, like so many Americans, because then there would be more than four hundred million. And if the names of God contained twenty-seven letters — in the Hebrew alphabet there are no vowels, but twenty -two consonants plus five variants— then the number of His possible names would have twenty-nine digits. Except that you have to allow for repetitions, because the name of God could be aleph repeated twenty-seven times, in which case factor analysis is of no use: with repetitions you’d have to take twenty-seven to the twenty-seventh power, which is, I believe, something like four hundred forty-four billion billion billion billion. Four times ten with thirty-nine zeros after it.”
“You’re cheating, trying to scare me. I’ve read your Sefer Yesirah, too. There are twenty-two fundamental letters, and with them—with them alone—God formed all creation.”
“Let’s not split hairs. Five, at this order of magnitude, won’t help. If you say twenty-two to the twenty-second power instead of twenty-seven to the twenty-seventh, you still come up with something like three hundred and forty billion billion billion. On the human scale, it doesn’t make much difference. If I counted one, two, three, and so on, one number every second, it would take me almost thirty-two years to get to one lousy little billion. And it’s more complicated than that, because cabala can’t be reduced to the Sefer Yesirah alone. Besides which, there’s a good reason why any real permutation of the Torah must include all twenty-seven letters. It’s true