David Moss Introduction in book accompanying prints: "Among the many Hebrew letter forms which have now largely become defunct, there is a group of strange alphabets which were used exclusively for Kabbalah Maasit-practical Kabbalah, i.e. magic. These bear no apparent relationship to the common Hebrew letters. They were known by various names: angelic alphabets, characters, seals. They appear on ancient Greek magic papyri and on Aramaic incantation bowls; they continued to be used for centuries on amulets and were, until quite recent times, even written on mezuzot. When I chanced upon the first publication of The Midrash on The Alphabet of Metatron, these strange letters were not unfamiliar to me. I recognized in them the characteristic forms of all of these magical alphabets: simple, straight and curved lines always ending with tiny circles. I had seen such letters in Sefer Raziel-probably the most popular book of Jewish magic. But the discovery of this charming midrash based entirely on this esoteric abecedary delighted me. These are letters of power. They shine. They radiate. Their energy is almost palpable. Their graphic forms alone would have warranted my attempting an artistic interpretation. I felt that I had to try to convey the vibrancy in these simple, but very dynamic glyphs. Using white paper, black background and primary colors I worked through the letters, one by one, and developed a style I felt somehow captured the power within them. But it was not only the shapes that interested me. I was equally fascinated by the possible connections between these magical scripts and our original alphabet, the one scholars call the Paleo-Hebrew letters. This alphabet is essentially the original alphabet. It points to the time when this perhaps most important human invention took on its nascent form. It is the alphabet that Moses, David and Isaiah would have used. It is the alphabet found in the few remaining inscriptions and many seals of the first Temple period. To this day the Samaritans have maintained letters very similar to our original Hebrew ones. It is virtually the same as the Phoenecian alphabet which gave birth to the Greek letters which also evolved into this Roman alphabet you are now reading. Upon our return from the Babylonian exile some two and a half millennia ago, we began using the Aramaic alphabet which gradually replaced the Paleo-Hebrew. This is the alphabet we now commonly refer to as the Hebrew alphabet and currently use for all sacred and secular writing. There is speculation that these magical alphabets may somehow be connected to our original Hebrew letters. At first glance there certainly does seem to be a general resemblance in the way the letters are formed. Upon careful examination of each individual letter, however, the connections become much more tenuous. Nevertheless, the mere idea that somehow these magical letters might be a lone remnant of the original Hebrew letters intrigued me. Could our ancient letters have gone underground and been transmuted into the wildly diverse variants of magic letters that somehow survived? Whatever their origin, these bizarre characters do seem to have a remarkable longevity and vitality reaching antiquity through to a twenty-first century artistic portfolio! Had I been asked when I created this series, or even a good bit after, what had been the sources of my fascination with these letters, I would certainly have merely recited the above: the power I sensed in the forms themselves and the fascinating speculation on their possible origins. It was only quite recently, long after I had completed the first sketches of the entire alphabet, and after Bet Alpha had decided to publish this portfolio, that I was sitting in Paul Feinstein's living room and his rather offhanded comment stunned me into recognizing yet another thread. "Don't these letters remind you of STL?" he mused. I had even forgotten the initials we had given nearly thirty years ago to the system of electronic recognition of handwritten characters which I worked on in the early 70's and called Stroke Terminal Logic. Indeed, the diagrams from the unfortunately expired patents bear a striking resemblance to these arcane Hebrew letters. The simple strokes are there, and at the end of each of them, a tiny circle. A dim memory from a previous career. Perhaps it was mere coincidence that these prints were in process when, out of the blue, a patent attorney from the company that makes the Palm Pilot tracked me down through my co-inventor, Jim Liljenwall in Santa Fe. The attorney explained that he needed our help in a lawsuit over patents held by Xerox but which he believed were anticipated by ours and therefore not valid. Even my intensive search of old business records and my rereading the patents themselves didn't make the connection in my mind. But I have no doubt that Paul was absolutely right. There is a very close relationship among our patents, the system of electronic data entry now known as graffiti, and my fascination with the Alphabet of Metatron." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.