Its soothsaying in that it's used and misunderstood by cooks. It's very real in that lots of cultures, particularly old Hebrew cultures, assigned numerical values to letters. A book would be marked page A, page B, for example. This means that it has significance to a lot of people, particularly powerful people. It's like symbology. Its important because that uses to be "writing." Before people knew how to read on a wide scale basis the only way they knew how to visually signify things was with symbols. They became the defacto means of communication, marketing, influence, etc etc. So when people tell you symbology is ridiculous, they don't know jack about history. When people tell you symbols are magical, they don't know jack about history.
Its soothsaying in that it's used and misunderstood by cooks. It's very real in that lots of cultures, particularly old Hebrew cultures, assigned numerical values to letters. A book would be marked page A, page B, for example. This means that it has significance to a lot of people, particularly powerful people. It's like symbology. Its important because that uses to be "writing." Before people knew how to read on a wide scale basis the only way they knew how to visually signify things was with symbols. They became the defacto means of communication, marketing, influence, etc etc. So when people tell you symbology is ridiculous, they don't know jack about history. When people tell you symbols are magical, they don't know jack about history.