The Name Lattice
Every name spells a chain of gates — each pair of its letters is a door. The question worth asking is whether your chart already stands on any of them.
A name is a sequence of letters, and in this system every pair of letters is one of the 231 gates. So a name does not just have a number — it walks a specific path through the gate lattice, one door per consecutive pair. Separately, a birth chart sits on its own letters, through the decan of the Sun and the decan of the Moon. This page computes both and crosses them. Where they overlap is the interesting part, and neither the name tool nor the chart tool could find it alone.
What it computes
- 01Each character of the name is mapped to one of the twenty-two letters BY POSITION — A to the first letter Aleph, B to the second, C to the third — and its value is that letter's gematria. Five Latin letters (C, F, S, T, X) would land elsewhere under the site's other, by-sound convention; the drawer at the foot of the page names both.
- 02Consecutive pairs become gates. A five-letter name walks four gates in order; a doubled letter is skipped, because a letter paired with itself is not one of the 231.
- 03The name's total value is checked against every gate's own value — a gate's worth is simply its two letters added — so a name can land exactly on a gate numerically as well as sequentially.
- 04Your chart's letters come from the decan the Sun occupied and the decan the Moon occupied at your birth. Every gate containing either letter is a gate your chart stands on.
- 05The reading is the intersection: gates your name spells that your chart also holds.
How to read it
Overlap means name and chart agree — the same door named twice, once by what you were called and once by when you arrived. No overlap is not a failure; it usually reads as a name that reaches for territory the chart does not already own.
What it does not claim
One honest assumption sits under all of this: mapping Latin letters to Hebrew ones is a CONVENTION, not a canonical correspondence, and the author's own audit flagged the English 26-letter signature dataset as unreliable. Everything computed here is derived from the Hebrew letter table, but the first step — turning your written name into Hebrew letters — is a choice this system makes, not a fact it discovered. Read accordingly.
Where does the idea that a name has power come from?
The engine on this page rests on a very old premise: that a name is not a label stuck on from outside but part of a person's makeup. The Hebrew Bible treats turning points as naming events — Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, Jacob becomes Israel — a changed life marked by a changed name. The Talmud goes further and lists changing one's name among the acts that can tear up a harsh decree of heaven, and a folk custom built on that idea is still practiced today: a dangerously ill person is given an added name such as Chaim (“life”) or Raphael (“God heals”), on the reasoning that the decree was issued against the old name. That is folklore, not physics — but it is genuinely ancient folklore, and it is the soil this whole tool grows in.
The numbers come along for free. For most of its history Hebrew had no separate digits: every letter doubled as a numeral, so every written word was automatically also a sum. Greek worked the same way, and the Greeks made a practice of comparing words by their totals — they called it isopsephy; the rabbis called their version and used it as a tool of interpretation. The habit survives in plain sight: the Hebrew word for life, chai, adds to eighteen, which is why gifts at Jewish celebrations still come in multiples of 18. When this page prints your name's value, that is the same arithmetic — not a modern invention, just the way the alphabet worked.
The gates are older than they look, too. , the short early text this system leans on hardest, pictures the twenty-two letters fixed on a turning wheel with — every possible pairing of two different letters, which is exactly what twenty-two things taken two at a time yields — and treats those pairs as the roots from which words, and through words everything else, are formed. The golem legends run on the same premise: permuting letters as an act of creation. So the arithmetic here — pairs of letters as doors, 231 of them and no more — is inherited faithfully from the tradition.
What the tradition does not say is how to read a personal name. Sefer Yetzirah never instructs anyone to walk a name's consecutive letter-pairs through the gates, and crossing that walk against the letters of a birth chart is this system's own construction — though it has a well-known modern cousin: compares an taken from your name against a taken from your birth date, the same instinct in a different alphabet. Read the layers accordingly: the pairing arithmetic is ancient; the name-walk and the chart-crossing are this site's interpretation, and they are offered as interpretation.
The assumption under this page
Turning a name written in Latin letters into Hebrew ones is a convention this system chose, not a correspondence anyone discovered — and the author's own audit flagged the English 26-letter signature data as unreliable. That first step is a , and every transliteration is a set of choices. Everything after it is exact arithmetic on the Hebrew letter table. Read the result as a structured way of looking at a name, not a fact about the person carrying it.
Which convention, exactly. There are two on this site and this page runs the one that matches by position: A is the first letter of both alphabets so A becomes Aleph, B becomes Bet, C becomes the third letter Gimel, and so on down the line. The other one, used by the free reading, matches by sound: C is heard as a K so it becomes Kaf. Both are defensible and neither is the canon — the author has not ruled between them.
The good news is how little turns on it. Twenty-one of the twenty-six Latin letters land on the same Hebrew letter either way. Exactly five diverge: C (Gimel here, Kaf by sound), F (Vav / Peh), S (Shin / Samekh), T (Tav / Tet) and X (Shin / Samekh). If your name contains none of those five, both instruments give you the same letters, the same total and the same gates. If it contains one, expect the two pages to differ — and that is the convention showing, not an error in either.
Counted from the two tables themselves rather than asserted: lib/gate-engine.ts holds the by-position map and lib/hebrew-translit.ts holds the by-sound map.
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