About

It is strange that we have an alphabet at all

Start with the thing everyone walks past. Human beings have an alphabet. Somewhere back there the continuous sound of a voice got quantised into a few dozen marks, and out of those marks came words, sentences, paragraphs, books, whole genres. We built culture on that quantisation, we shape expression with it, and we tell each other who we are with it. A handful of shapes, carrying all of that.

Hebrew letters mean something before you spell a word

Hebrew is one of the oldest alphabets still in daily use, and one of the few its own readers hold as sacred. Every letter carries a meaning of its own: a house, a hand, an ox, a hook. Writing in it arranges icons, and the meanings interfere with one another. The letter is already saying something before you have spelled anything with it.

That alphabet also came down carrying its texts. Kabbalistic teaching and biblical teaching arrived inside the same letters, and those teachings have been steering events on the surface of this planet for a very long time. The letters carry the teaching and they are part of it.

Why I built this

Shem72 started as an app for one user. I work with certain angel names often, and I wanted somewhere to set them up, keep them in an order that made sense, and run them consecutively without rebuilding the sequence by hand every morning. Nothing did that, so I wrote it.

Then the obvious thought arrived. Anyone curious about the letters, and especially anyone magically inclined who wants to use them for more than meets the eye, would want the same instrument. So I finished it properly and put it in the stores.

The 72 Names

The Shem HaMephorash matters out of all proportion to its size. Seventy-two triads, drawn from three verses of Exodus. Working with them connects you to the larger spirit, and to the foundations of Western culture, which were laid with these letters whether or not anybody remembers it.

From my own experience, and by some mechanism I cannot explain, the 72 angels have self-replicating meanings. Hold the meaning and the shape of one together and the concept stays alive in the mind long after you stop looking at it. It reinforces itself. It turns up in the day. The letters behave like self-replicators of some kind, and the intention you put behind them arrives far more often than chance explains.

So they are used for advanced ritual work, and for serious protection. They are also a Kabbalistic instrument for working with blessing, which is the rarer thing: most magic asks to be paid, relentlessly. This does not.

Scanning

Scanning reached me through Rabbi Abe, a soul coach who got me working with the 72-letter Name and showed me what scanning is. In the Golden Dawn you vibrate a name. You sound it, you feel it in the chest, you push it outward. Scanning moves the eyes across the letters instead, right to left, without pronouncing a thing.

It sits closer to what the old texts describe. It also lands somewhere different. A vibrated name tends to show up as a perturbation beside you. A scanned Name works through you. That difference is most of the reason this app is shaped the way it is.

Who is writing this

A bachelor's and a master's degree in computer science. Seven years as a data scientist and data architect, in companies from the very small to the very large. These days I build apps of every kind for a long list of clients. In 2025 I took a degree in physics, and I am now working through a master's in physics at Ghent University.

Why a physicist builds an angel app

This is not science, and I have never dressed it up as science. What I take from science is its posture. The purpose of science is not to be right. The purpose of science is to be less wrong.

Religion and systems of meaning visibly change human lives, and mostly for the better. That much is hard to argue with. What is ridiculous is that the dynamics behind it sit almost entirely unprocessed and misunderstood at a foundational level, and that the ancient texts are still not read with the scrutiny they can easily take.

Part of the reason is what reading them properly asks of a reader. You have to be open to the elemental, conceptual spaces where thought forms talk to each other. Something close to a shamanic brain: able to conjure one object, then a second, then a third, and let all three interact inside a single Name. That is an unusual instrument to bring to a text, and almost nobody is trained for it.

What Shem72 is for

I want this to be the place where Kabbalists, practical Kabbalists and practitioners of the Western magical traditions work with the 72 Names in a new way. Some would call it a kosher way, appropriate to what the old patriarchs had in mind. Mostly I hope it is where you build the daily habit: learn what the letters mean, learn what the 72 mean, and let the whole thing get its hooks into you.

One purchase

Buy the app once and it is yours. That purchase carries a year of updates, and if you buy inside the first year the updates stay free for life.

Elsewhere

adamblvck.com for the writing, and adam@blvckstudios.com if you want to say something to me directly. App questions are better sent to shem72@apps.blvckstudios.com, where I keep them all in one place.