A family of ciphers built to give English letters Hebrew-style number values, so that English words can be read as sums. The most famous is the ALW order, derived from every eleventh letter of the alphabet.
Documented
Every eleventh letter
Crowley's 1904 Liber AL vel Legis contains the injunction to obtain the order and value of the English alphabet, and a manuscript page bearing a grid with a diagonal slash and a circled cross. In 1976 James Lees derived the ALW cipher from it: take every eleventh letter as the order, A, L, W, H, S, D, O, Z, K, V, G, R, C, and assign values 1 to 26. The system, published in the British Journal of Magick as English Qaballa, has practitioners and software to this day.
Assessment: The derivation, the 1976 date, and the every-eleventh-letter mechanic are documented by the participants. The cipher is real. Whether the manuscript contained it or furnished it is the live question.
Stories
The voice that dictated a cipher
The story the tradition tells: Liber AL was not written by Crowley but dictated to him over three days in Cairo by a discarnate intelligence called Aiwass, and the injunction about the alphabet was a time-locked puzzle, proof the text knew more than its scribe. The discovery of ALW decades later, by readers not born when the grid was drawn, is offered as the text keeping its own appointment.
Assessment: The dictation account is Crowley's documented testimony, unverifiable by nature. As narrative engineering it is superb: a claim that can only be confirmed by finding a pattern, and humans find patterns professionally.
Interesting claims
The confirmation that multiplies
The claim inside the claim: verse II:76 of Liber AL ends with a string of numbers and letters split across two lines. Researcher Jake Stratton-Kent noted the X starting line two reads as a multiplication sign, summed each line under ALW, and multiplied: 17 times 11 equals 187, the exact ALW value of the phrase English alphabet. Believers file it as the system authenticating itself.
Assessment: The 187 match is real arithmetic and genuinely elegant. It is also a selected operation on a selected string from a text dense with strings. Filed as the tradition's best evidence and its most instructive one: even the proof is a reading.
Sources and further reading
Liber AL vel Legis II:55 and III sheet 16, the grid manuscript
James Lees, the 1976 derivation, The New Equinox / British Journal of Magick
Jake Stratton-Kent, on the II:76 multiplication reading
naeq.io, the cipher as currently practiced
Worth asking
If a cipher is discovered inside a dictated text, is the discovery revelation, pattern-matching, or authorship by other means?