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100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide. The Alphabetic
Labyrinth: The letters of the alphabet have been the object of
speculation since their invention almost 4000 years ago. The
symbols represent sounds, yet they exist in their own right,
often invested with quasi-magical power. This book examines the
many imaginative, often idiosyncratic ways in which the letters
of the alphabet have been assigned value in political,
spiritual, or religious belief systems over two millennia. The
birth of writing was linked to religion and cosmology and was
endowed with semi-divine status. Plato saw letter-forms as
reflecting ideas, while the Pythagoreans assimilated them to
number-theory. The Greeks employed letters for occult and
divinatory purposes, while the Romans used them in more
practical ways, such as the invention of shor