kallis@pen.DEC (05/21/85)
>Subject: The True Name of God >Posted: Fri May 17 13:31:18 1985 >From: Laurence R Brothers <LAURENCE@SU-CSLI.ARPA> >Actually, if you want to avoid offending orthodox jews, you won't refer >to "Y*w*h" either. Try '' (yod yod), pronounced "Adonoi". >-Laurence During the Medieval period, when sorcery was much in vogue, there were many attempts to invoke *a* name of God without necessarily invoking *the* Name. One approach was assuming "Ya[h]weh," as the Name, the ceremonial magician would take the (more or less) consonantal aspects, YHWH and refer to them as the "Tetragrammaton," i.e., the four-character representation (this was sometimes written enclosed in parentheses). Other names were used in a great deal of (rather dubious) ceremonial work (e.g., Shaddai, El, and Agla). Tradition states that the True Name of God was never spoken nor written down, but yet was known to the initiates of the Greater Mysteries of the Lord. How this was done was cleverly deduced by Robert Graves in his _The White Goddess_, but whether this was a real derivation or just a clever construct on Graves' part is unclear (perhaps even to Graves). -Steve Kallis, Jr. p.s.: There are some echoes of this idea of the Ancient Egyptian Words of Power, probably handed down through the Gnostics. SK