Foucault's Pendulum Study Guide: Hokhmah

Hokhmah: The sephirot of wisdom, the first manifestation of intellect in creation.

Abulafia: a Medieval philosopher whose ideas became the basis for prophetic Kabbalah. His writings talked a lot about meditation techniques to achieve this state of uniting with God, and also of manipulating the letters of the Torah. When he was alive, he promoted himself as a messiah of sorts, his ideas were banned in some places but posthumously adapted into Sufism.

Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade: the Maltese Falcon, supposedly a figurine covered with jewels, is a MacGuffin, never shows up in the course of the book, but motivates everyone's actions anyway.

Notarikon, temurah, gematria: the three techniques used by the Kabbalists to rearrange the words in the Torah to arrive at another meaning or find the name of God or something. Notarikon is taking the first and/or last letters of a word and using them to form other words, temurah is exchanging some letters in a word with other letters (like shifting all letters 12 down the alphabet), gematria is assigning a numerial value to words or letters. The Hebrews never developed their own way of writing down numbers, so it was all done with letters.

Tetragrammaton: the four-letter name of God (YHWH). The vowels are omitted in the Hebrew alphabet. Observant Jews write but do not speak this name aloud because it is too sacred to be used everyday.

St. Thomas and the five paths: St. Thomas Aquinas, a Dominican priest who wrote the Summa Theologia in which he examines the justifications for the existence of God. He said there were five ways: God is simple, God is perfect, God is infinite, etc. He is part of a tradition of scholasticism which was originally an attempt to temper classical philosophy with medieval theology, using reason.

Ennoia: talking around something without really explaining anything but still hinting at what is meant.

Exu: the god of chaos and trickery in the Yoruba mythology.