The Rise of the Sorcerers: Chapter Seven - THE HUNDREDTH NAME OF THE LORD
On the skin of a jaguar. - The magic of the name among the and among the Egyptians. - How to tame the bear. -The Secrets of sound. - Gnosis and Revealed Language. - Fulcanelli and the Tongue of the Birds. - Hypotheses about the magical scriptures. - The Amazing Story of the Voynitch Manuscript. - The Padirac River. - The Book of the Great Set.
"A Jew, named Gustav Meyrinck, was circumcised, you know why it was, and it knows the Name in all its aspects."
The Lord has ninety-nine names accessible to the understanding human; Ninety-nine attributes: He is just, merciful, almighty, and so on. But it has a hundredth name that shines in the heavens. He who learns it, rises above the human condition; in it reside infinite thought and power; he is the Master of the Name.
A Long Chain of Masters of the Name "Yisrael Baal Shem," says Yisrael Baal Shem, "binds the centuries to the original revelation, from the time immemorial Melchizedek to the present day.
Eliezer from Worms asserted that the Name is written on a sword, and that, when the Wandering Jew sees it, he must immediately resume his road... In a very remarkable narrative by Jorge Luis Borges, the magician Tzinacan, sacrificial priest of the pyramid of Qaholom, is seen locked up in a deep prison, where he has to die, for having refused to reveal to the Spaniards the hiding place of a treasure. Be Devoured by a jaguar, waiting on the other side of the wall.
Tzinacán He searches for the name, the formula of the absolute writing, of the eternity.
God wrote it on the first day of creation.
'The He wrote in such a way that it would reach the most remote generations and That chance would not touch her. No one knows at what point he wrote it or with what he wrote it. but we know that it remains secret, and that he will read it A chosen one... Maybe magic was written on my face, maybe I even the end of my search. I was in that eagerness when I remembered that the jaguar was one of the attributes of the God."
And so it was that Tzinacan, mute, indifferent to himself and his end,
"Letting me forget the days, lying in the dark," he deciphered in the skin of the fierce "fiery designs of the Universe."
All traditions, primitive, Gnostic, Kabbalistic, say that there is a supreme Name, the key to all things. But also They teach that every thing and every creature has its true name, which contains and expresses its essential nature, its situation and its role in universal harmony. This idea is already found in the ancient civilizations. Rome's real name was kept in and Carthage was destroyed, it was said, when the Romans They learned, by a betrayal, of his hidden name.
To the so-called "primitive" man, there is no difference between the and the word that expresses the thing, there is no difference between the breath, the vital principle, and the Word, formed by the breath between teeth. Language is a substance and a material force that It is not conceived as a mental part, as a process of abstraction. but as an element of the body and of Nature. The same as It happens with matter and spirit, the real and language, the meaning and what it means, which are confused in the unity of the the outer world and the inner world.
To the point that most of the magical systems are founded on a treatment of the word considered as a really active force. There are secret words, too powerful to be handled by the uninitiated; Exist prohibitions on the use of certain words; There are words that are effective instruments of spell or exorcism. On the tongue Akkadian, "to be" and "to name" are synonymous.
In his celebrated book, The Bouquet of gold, Frazer observes that, in many primitive tribes,
"The A name can serve as an intermediary – just like hair, nails or other part of any natural person- to make act the magic about this person."
For the North American Indian, his A name is a part of your body; Whoever mistreats in his name, be attentive against his life.
Julia Joyaux (Language, That Unknown) observes: "The name does not must be pronounced, for the act of the pronunciation-materialization can reveal-materialize the real property of the person wearing it, making it so vulnerable to the gaze of their enemies. The Eskimos adopted a new name when they got old.
The Celts considered the Names as synonyms for "soul" and "breath." Among the Yuins in New South Wales, Australia, and in other towns, always according to Frazer, the father revealed his name to his son at the time of death. initiation, but very few people knew about it.
In Australia, They forget names, and people are called "brother, cousin, nephew...". The Egyptians also had two names: the small, that he was good and employed in public, and the great one, that he He dissembled.
Such beliefs, referring to the proper name, are They are also found among the Kru of West Africa, in the villages on the Slave Coast, among the Wolofs of Senegambia, in the Philippines, in the Burru Islands (East Indies), in the island of Chiloé (off the southern coast of Chile), and so on.
The Egyptian god Ra, being bitten by a snake, laments:
"I am the one who has many names and many forms... My father and My mother told me my name; Stays hidden in my body from my birth, so that no magical power can be acquired by who would put a curse on me."
But in the end he revealed his Isis, who thereby became all-powerful. They also weigh taboos on words that designate degrees of kinship.
"Among the Kaffirs, women are forbidden to pronounce the name of her husband and her father-in-law, as well as any other words that has a resemblance to them. This brings with it such an alteration in the language of women, which may well be said that they They speak a different language. Frazer recalls, in this regard, that, in ancient times, Ionian women never called their husbands by name, and that, in Rome, no one was to name the father or a daughter while the rites of Ceres were being celebrated.
"The names of the dead are subject to the laws of taboo. Such customs were observed by the Albanians of the Caucasus, and Frazer also sees them in the Aborigines of Australia.
In the language of the Abipones of Paraguay, words are introduced every year, as all those are officially abolished. that resemble the names of the dead, substituting them for new ones. It is understood that such proceedings nullify the possibility of chronicles and stories; Language ceases to be of the past and is transformed by the actual course of the time.
"Taboos also affect the names of kings, sacred personages and of the Godis; but also a lot of people Common names. These are, above all, animal names or plants, considered dangerous, and whose pronunciation would be equivalent to evoke danger itself. Thus, in the Slavic languages, the word meaning "bear" was replaced by a more nondescript one, whose root is "honey" and who gave us, for example, in Russian, the word "med'ved," from "med", honey. The evil bear was replaced by something more euphoric.
"These prohibitions seem to correspond to 'impossibilities' and may be raised or expiated by certain Ceremonies. Many magical practices are founded on the belief that Words have a concrete and active reality, and that it is enough to pronounce them so that they may exert their action. Such is the basis of many prayers or magic formulas with which the "cure" of diseases, rain on the fields, crops abundant, etc."
We, the "civilized," established a dichotomy between spirit and matter, reality and language, and our conception A dualistic generalism leads us to regard language as a Linguistics as a distinct science, linguistics as a distinct science, linguistics as a separate science, linguistics as a distinct science, linguistics as a distinct science, linguistics "linguistic fact" as coming from a purely formal point of view, Abstract. A philologist like Boas takes this isolating vision to the very end. It is to the extent of denying any connection between the language of a tribe and its people. culture.
However, there is not, as Malinovsky believes, a relationship between language and cultural and social context, but that, perhaps, there is a relationship, in "the magic that works," between the Word, breath, sound, position, time, place, the disposition of the assembly in which it is pronounced with rhythmic accompaniment, and the effective action that is undertaken.
We still know very little about the virtues of sound, that Magical and spiritualistic civilizations speak to us. Not yet We have systematically studied the breath and its articulation as "machine" as a means of action, on the psyche, on the Nature. It is possible that linguistics, in the modern sense of This discipline is a science of the cortex, and that there is a pulp science, which maybe, one day, we'll discover or We will rediscover.
The idea that there are "master-words" that would be key to the reality, it is expressed in varying degrees in mentalities. "primitive" and in the metaphysics of the Gnostic current. Every single thing, Each being has its mysterious name inscribed in the repertoire of the absolute knowledge. God gave a name to His creation, in a language that the elect will be called to understand.
"Very few people," he says The Gnostic can possess this knowledge: one in a thousand, two among ten thousand"(Basilido; Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, I, 24, 6).
Simon Magus thus begins his great Revelation (Apophasis):
"This is the writing of the revelation of the Voice and the Name, from the Thought and of the great infinite Power. By this it shall be sealed, hidden, wrapped in the abode where the root of the All has its roots. fundamentals."
There is, then, according to the ancients, a revealed language, in which Names would not be the transmitting symbol of things, but the expression and the reality of the ultimate structure of things. and Our tongues would be nothing more than the vanished memory of this original divine language. Sometimes, a word seems linked still, by a solid bond, to its divine root. Their ambivalence illustrator, or its complex numerical content, seem to evoke his with some encyclopedia of primordial truths.
Like this the word Phos means, in Greek, according to the accentuation, man or man. light. Thus, in the Christian Gnostic sects of the Roman Empire, They used as a sign of recognition some gems that they wore engraved with the magic word Abraxas or Abrasax.
And, as Serge observes, Hutin (The Gnostics),
'by summing the respective numerical values of the Greek letters of this word, since in ancient Greek the The figures were represented by letters, you get 365, which is also the value of Mithras and which corresponds, at the same time, to the number of circles that the sun seems to describe, and to the belief of the Basilidians of that there are 365 heavens or universes."
Every word, in the "tongue of the would be knowledge and magic, that is to say, the revelation of the structure of the thing named and absolute power over this thing, deposit of its ultimate meanings in its correspondence with the universal harmony.
In his famous work The Mystery of the Cathedrals, Fulcanelli proposes an interpretation of the expression "Gothic art", showing that the great buildings The religious books of the Middle Ages are, in fact, books of stone that They teach the science of alchemy and contain,
"The same truth the same scientific background as the pyramids of Egypt, the temples of Greece, Roman catacombs and basilicas Byzantines."
This interpretation presupposes the existence of a Great Original language. We have to look for the explanation, he tells us, in the It is the Kabbalistic origin of the word, rather than its literal root.
Saying In other words, there is an esoteric linguistics that is the true structuralist linguistics.
"Some perceptive authors, impressed by the resemblance which between Gothic and Goetic, they thought there must be a There is a close relationship between Gothic art and Gothic or magical art.
"For us, Gothic art is nothing but a distortion of the word sargetic, whose homophony is perfect, from in accordance with the phonetic law that governs, in all languages and without Keep in mind the spelling, the traditional Kabbalah. The cathedral is A work of art goth or slang. Now, dictionaries They define slang as "a particular language of all individuals who have an interest in communicating their thoughts without being understood by those around them." It is, then, a spoken Kabbalah. The Argotiers, that is, those who use this language, are Hermetic descendants of the Argonauts, who commanded the Argos and spoke the Argothic tongue, as they sailed towards the Lucky shores of Colchis in search of the famous Golden Fleece (...).
"Let us add, finally, that slang is one of the derived forms of the language of birds, mother and doyenne of all others, the language of the philosophers... It is the one whose knowledge Jesus reveals. to his apostles by sending them his spirit, the Holy Spirit. It's her She who teaches the mystery of things and lifts the veil of things. more hidden truths. The ancient Incas called it the "tongue of the Court", because it was widely used by the "diplomats", who were It gave the key to a double science: sacred science and science Profane. In the Middle Ages it was called Gaya Science or Gay (not is related to the current denomination of homosexuality), Saber, Tongue of the Gods, Bottle-Goddess. Tradition states that men spoke it before the construction of the Tower of Babel, the cause of their perversion and, for the majority, of total oblivion of this sacred language."
What are we to make of these repeated statements in all the major traditions, and their echo in the verbal magics of the "primitives"? Our way is not superstitious adherence. But we can ask ourselves, open-mindedly, whether there would be no reasonable basis for a research oriented in this direction.
Everything today leads us to think that languages don't go back. in time, to the Neanderthal babbles. Anthropology Structuralist even evokes the hypothesis of an abrupt onset Language:
"Whatever the time and circumstances of its appearance on the scale of animal life, language only it could have been born in one fell swoop."(Lévi-Strauss)
According to Sapir, the language is "formally complete" from the "beginning," and, from the beginning, That there are men, there is language. For Leroi-Gourhan, the most of a language and graphic symbolism can be traced back to They were found at the end of the Mousterian and became abundant about 35,000 years earlier of our Era. Language would not have had prehistory, but It would have been "given" in some way, and would be, in a way, "eternal."
We also begin to wonder if the Neanderthal, who We had until a few years ago by the ancestor of man, it wouldn't be a product of cross-breeding that coexisted, fifty millennia ago, with an infinitely older homo habilis The Prehistorian Alexander Marshak, in numerous communications submitted by the United States, In 1964, he insisted on some signs, on pebbles, that revealed vestiges of Palaeolithic mathematics. These signs looked like correspond to a 35,000-year-old lunar calendar.
The The creation of such a timetable suggests the existence of Remarkable mathematical knowledge or, in any case, annotation periodicity. If it's remnants of a vanished culture, Before the Neanderthals, are we in the presence of a great primordial language? We can also imagine a time when caverns in which the survivors of a civilization with Neanderthalians, as they coexist, in our era of space rockets, NASA engineers with the Coghis Indians.
In short, we are beginning to decipher, by means of computers, certain languages as ancient and, apparently, as complex as Sanskrit and Egyptian; Such, for example, is the writing on the tablets of the Indus Valley. This decipherment and the study of correlations Among the very ancient scriptures they can bring us great Surprises.
"The idea that there was a time when all men "A civilized person spoke the same language," writes Lincoln Barnett. in no way exclusive to Genesis. We also find it in the ancient Egypt and in the old Hindu and Buddhist writings. This This idea was seriously studied by a number of European philosophers of the sixteenth century."
Our immersion in the abyss of time reveals to us a the increasing decline of the age of man and civilizations, and the philosophers of the twenty-first century will perhaps be able to effectively collect this hypothesis and extend it to antediluvian times.
In such a In this case, we should not forget the following question, apparently extravagant:
If there was a primordial language, in what form was it preserved and Transmitted? Then we thought of the clay tablets and the inscriptions on stone or wood. But these crude means, this visible writing, which nevertheless bears witness to societies strikingly refined in the ancient millennia, they were, such as only used by companies subsequent to a civilization. Yes to the idea of high knowledge The idea of secrecy, of communication, is always linked to the We have the right to imagine some of the Writing hidden from the eyes of the public. At present, we own invisible means of recording knowledge, from disk to magnetic tape, from microfilm to crystals. Maybe One day we will discover camouflaged writing, deposited on objects, in stones on the ground or—who knows?—in ourselves, in the subtle depths of our cells... And, in the end, although it is In the case of self-evident writing, we must remember that all books of the ancient world, gathered in the immense libraries of Rhodes, from Carthage, from Alexandria, and elsewhere, were Destroyed; that we own less than 1 percent of the literatures and that the ashes of the genius of the past. To conclude: whether the deciphering of languages progresses ignored, especially through the use of computers, existence of a script that would have conveyed knowledge of Mathematical abstractions would pose insoluble problems. All Our archaeological or linguistic research has been always referring to civilizations less advanced than ours. Yes If the reality were reversed, we would stumble upon terms that we did not we could interpret; We would find ourselves in a situation similar to that of a confused student of the nineteenth century who should have translated, into his Latin exercise, the words transistor or laser.
Another way to access the hypothetical Great Language could be the Analysis of the Magical Scriptures. The English archaeologist S. F. Hood, By studying some tablets found at the prehistoric site of Tartarice, Romania, was able to establish correlations with Crete, the Iraq, Egypt and the Balkans. It seems that, more than six thousand years ago, For years, a unique system of magical signs was
employed.
employed.
The Romanian specialist N. Vlassa, attached to the Museum of Cluj, also collected, among the ashes of what seems to have been an altar, some tablets on which They saw these signs, similar to those discovered at Vinra, near by. from Belgrade; in Tordos, Romania; in Troy, and on the island of Melos, in the Aegean Sea. Hood is of the opinion that this unique system of notations should have to spread from Iraq. But it remains to be interpreted. The deciphering magical scripts, even much more recent, has not been It has not yet begun.
The various esoteric interpretations are few Convincing. Numerous magical alphabets have come down to us, and A. E. Waite published several of them. Actually, the The mystery they contain remains entirely hidden. According to the majority of specialists, have more complex signs than the Chinese ideograms, and they probably have a very rich content in information. One thing catches our attention, and that is that, with They often bear an uncanny resemblance to the diagrams of the printed circuit boards.
We know what circuits are, for example transistors. These are electronic circuits Made with resistant inks... conductive and magnetic. This The idea can be crazy. It will not be a unique case in this book. Some Lines drawn on a parchment can be instruments of telecommunication or power receptacles. In any case, it would be convenient ideas of this multidisciplinary nature in order to continue John Dee's works on magical writing.
The key to magical systems and the Great Language, is to be found, perhaps, in the house of an American antique dealer? This absurd question, typical of a tabloid newspaper, it has, however, a certain interest.
David Kahn, one of America's foremost specialists in cryptography, writes:
"The Voynitch manuscript is, perhaps, a bombshell placed beneath our knowledge, and that the day will burst into to be able to decipher it."
This manuscript is for sale, for $160,000 at Hans P. Kraus's home in New York. Herself It presents itself as an illuminated manuscript of the Middle Ages. It consists of 204 pages. According to the numbering, 28 of them are missing. Its wording it is attributed to Roger Bacon. It is, well, an unknown language, well—and this seems more likely—of a work written in code.
There By the year 1580, the Duke of Northumberland, who had plundered a considerable number of monasteries, sent him to the magician John Dee, the who, after a study of which we know nothing, gave it to the Emperor Rudolf II, alchemist, astronomer and protector of Tycho Brahe and Kepler. Later, in the 17th century, it passed into the hands of Marci, Rector of the University of Prague.
A letter dated August 19 of 1666 accompanies his dispatch to Athanasius Kirscher, whose efforts They were in vain. After his failure, Kirscher deposited the manuscript in the possession of the Jesuit Order. In 1912, the antiquarian Wilfred Voynitch bought it from the Jesuit University of Mondragone Frascati (Italy) and distributed copies all over the world.
Herself He thought he discovered, in the illuminations, spiral nebulae, plants and the sky around Aldebaran and the Hyads. In 1921, William Newbold, dean of the University of Pennsylvania, adviser to the American spy center on cryptography, He thought he had deciphered a part of the manuscript, some of the first pages. But the key changed later. According to Newbold, Bacon must have had knowledge superior to ours; But his Translation is currently discussed. Newbold died in 1926; Voynitch, in 1930; his wife, in 1960, and the heirs ceded the indecipherable manuscript to Kraus, who is waiting for the offer of some foundation.
All hypotheses are allowed. The pessimist will remember the famous Rhind papyrus, written 1,800 years B.C., which announces "The complete knowledge of all things, the explanation of everything what exists, the revelation of all secrets," and that there is no It contains more than the theory of fractions and its application to the pay of the workers on a construction site. The optimist will think that Roger Bacon was not a man capable of putting insignificant things into code. The Voynitch manuscript may contain nothing more than formulas Or it may be the key that, as David Kahn imagines, comes to the fore. to one day upset the whole history of knowledge.
On the other hand, this upheaval is already underway, especially in the the study of ancient mathematics. Not even a man like Van der Waerden, one of the highest authorities in this field, rejects the hypothesis of an ancient science that would have given rise to Babylonian, Egyptian, and Chinese knowledge.
'It is impossible to prove the foundation of such hypotheses, which, by reason of the the rest are extraneous to our work," he says.
But it adds to continuation:
"The history of Greek mathematics is dying out suddenly, like a candle being blown out. How many other registrations sciences died just as suddenly, and why?"
It is clear that the discovery of superior mathematics would prove the existence of extinct high civilizations, at the same time, as a result of the "like a candle being blown out," and would throw a living light on the Great Language. However, high mathematics demands a particular mental structure. Numbers and calculations don't appear on their own. Their relationship to the real world is impossible to grasp.
If there is any trace of them in the documents that It could only be discovered by mathematicians whose violin Archaeology, or by multidisciplinary teams, which have not yet been systematically constituted. Of course We are optimists. Our greatest satisfaction would be witnessing the explosion of bombs like the one Kahn dreams of. And, however, prejudge nothing, we are alert everywhere: before the portico of Notre-Dame; among the megaliths; in the ruins of Babylon, and even at Kraus's house in New York...
One last clue could lead to the Big Language: the unconscious of the human species. In the strange languages they invent Sometimes the children, in the unknown languages they make appear, In certain cases, deep hypnosis, can the echo of that "tongue of birds, mother and doyenne of all others," Ascending from the depths of time?
Thirty years ago, I visited the chasm of Padirac. The ferryman who gave us As he was driving over the black waters, he uttered this wonderful sentence:
"This river is so unknown that you don't even know its name..."
In this he expressed, naively, two profound certainties that were stir in our souls: namely, that things exist only for the sake of when they have been named, and that they exist, since the eternity, a name that corresponds to each thing, contains it and expresses entirely.
"Man," writes Chesterton, "knows that the soul has more nuances miraculous, more innumerable, even more unspeakable than the colors of A forest in autumn. How can we believe that all these realities, in their tones and semitones, in their fusions and subtle correlations, can be expressed accurately by an arbitrary system of grunts and Groans? Can an Exchange and Stock Exchange Agent Emit With His Lips all the sounds that explain the mysteries of memory and anxieties of desire? No, no, man thinks: every tongue is Insufficient: perhaps all languages are nothing but degenerations of the sacred moment when Adam "named things."
Is this idea longing, or proof of an eternal insufficiency? Have we invented the myth of a Great Language to mitigate our anguish of the inexpressible? However, the tradition refers to He insists, and the Gnostic sects, for example, affirm possess the truth of books whose origin is allogenous, alien, and superior to this world.
The Exposition of the Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit begins with these solemn phrases:
"Here is the book written by the great Seth (one of the sons of Adam). He deposited it in high mountains... This book was written by great Set, with writings a hundred and thirty years old. He deposited it in the mountain called Charax, in order that it may manifest itself in the last days. times and in the last moments."