In the fertile crescent, the rise of Sumerian and Babylonian Cuneiform marked the beginning of a secret number tradition that would eventually reached across the Middle East (in Hebrew and Arabic) into Europe (via Greek and Latin). For the European tradition of Western Magic, Hermeticism, and Freemasonry, the number symbolism found in the Hebrew tradition known as the Qabalah (meaning secret wisdom which is communicated orally rather than in writing) is the most paramount of influences (the other being the lore of Pythagoras, which can be found in the companion volume, THE WESTERN MYSTERIES).
From India, out of the Vedas (one of the oldest prayers to God) came the most sophisticated of all alphanumeric codes that would employ digital numbers, floating decimal points, and even the concept of zero as a place holder, all concealed in the 50 letters of the ancient Sanskrit alphabet.
From China comes the association of the amount of strokes to form a character with its actual number value. And out of this tradition evolved the oldest of written oracles, the I Ching, one of the marvels of ancient wisdom that still has relevancy in the 21st Century.
All these traditions, and so much more, can be found in the pages of the Eastern Mysteries. Esoteric knowledge that can only be found in these printed pages include the Sanskrit and Tibetan number codes, the deciphering of the Sanskrit letters that appear on the 50 petals of the interior flowers of the human body known as the chakras, and the real pattern behind the 64 hexagrams that make up the divinatory sequence known as the I-Ching.
This first volume ends with a 24 page bibliography that is fully annotated as well as an 8 page index. Each chapter has an extensive introduction that walks the reader through the chapter, plus a very detailed prologue that gives not only a historical overview of languages that can be numbered, but also shows the reader how to create a workable numerical dictionary that can capture all the number symbolism contained in the pages of both volumes.