Post by Omni Zero on Nov 27, 2009 17:34:25 GMT -8
Original Text found here:
www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/sword.htm
I. Introduction.
Magic has exercised the deepest influence upon mankind from remote antiquity unto our own days. It either formed part of the religion of the country, as it was the case in ancient Egypt and Babylon and as it is now in some forms of Buddhism (Tibet), or lived an independent life side by aide with the recognized religion. In some instances it was tolerated, or rendered less obnoxious, by a peculiar subdivision into white or beneficial and black or evil magic, or was downright persecuted. Wherever we go, however, and especially if we turn to the popular beliefs that rule the so-called civilized nations, we shall always and everywhere find a complete system of magical formulas and incantations. The belief in the witch and wizard, and their powerful filters and charms, holds still stronger sway upon human imagination than appears at first sight.
It is remarkable that we do not possess a good work, or exhaustive study, on the history and development of Magic. It is true that we find allusions to it, and sometimes special chapters devoted to the charms and incantations and other superstitious customs prevailing among various nations in books dealing with such nations. But a comprehensive study of Magic is still a pious (or impious) wish. One cannot gainsay that such an undertaking would present extreme difficulties. The material is far too vast, and is scattered over numberless nations and numerous literatures. Besides, much of ancient times has disappeared; in fact, there is a profound gap between antiquity and modern times which is not by any means bridged over by the literature of the Middle Ages. In these times magical art and practice were ruthlessly persecuted by the Church, and the Councils teem with denunciations against the work of the Evil One. Moreover, it was connected in a certain degree with the teachings and practices of the various heretical sects, and the pursuit was anything hut harmless. Thus it comes about that an exhaustive study of the origin and development of Magic is still a wish for the future, and the full influence which it has exercised upon mankind cannot be investigated in such a manner as to have a scientific value until at least a portion of the ancient literature will again have come to light.
The syncretistic character of the Gnostic teachings shows itself also in the adoption of Magic, and in the spiritual interpretation with which they invested the forms and formulas of Magic. The adherents of the various teachings of the Gnostics, and especially those that lived in Egypt and Palestine, adopted all the ideas that were floating about and transferred them into their system of superior Gnosis.
If anything of the teachings of the Gnostics has survived, it is the thaumaturgical portion of it. This has always been popular with the masses, as it afforded them those means which they wanted to defend themselves against the attacks of unseen evil spirits, and to the more speculative minds it afforded a clue to the mystery of the universe. It gave them the means to subdue and to put to their service the unknown forces of nature. This lies at the root of the general acceptance of magic formulas and enchantments, and gives to this practice the popularity which it still retains.
Being the most formidable sects that assumed an anti-Christian character, although some are anterior to Christianity, the Gnostics were the first to be attacked by the Fathers of the Church. Most of the ancient writings of the Fathers are filled with polemics against heretics, of which these are the foremost. The result of this campaign, which lasted for centuries, has been the absolute destruction of all the writings of the Gnostics. Sparse and incoherent fragments only have come down to us, and we are now compelled to study their systems and superstitions, if we may call them so, from the writings of their antagonists, Irenæus and Hippolytus, Tertullian and Epiphanius. A single exception is the work known as "Pistis Sophia," the date of whose composition is variously assigned to the second or fourth century. It certainly seems to belong to a later stage in the development of the Gnosis, as it contains some of the later ideas. It has come down to us in a very bad state of preservation.
Within the last few years the soil of Egypt has rendered some more fragments of this kind of literature, and magic Papyri have now enriched our hitherto very scanty stock of genuine ancient literature. These belong to the second and third century, and, being exclusively of Egyptian origin, throw an unexpected light upon the form which Magic assumed under the influence of the new order of ideas. It is a fact that nothing is so stable and constant than this kind of mystical literature. The very nature of a mystic formula prevents it from ever being radically changed. As there is no other reason for its efficacy than the form in which it is pretended to have been fixed or revealed to the Select by the Divinity itself, any change of that form would immediately destroy its efficacy. Dread preserved the form intact, at least as long as the practitioner stood under the influence of those divinities whose power he invoked for protection, or as long as he believed in the power of those demons whose malignant influence he tried to avert by means of that form of enchantment. This explains the uniformity of a number of such charms in whatever language we find them and almost to whatever time they may belong; as long as they are the outcome of one and the same set of religious ideas, which is the determining factor. But with the change of religion the charms also undergo changes, not in the form but in the names of the divinities invoked, and these bring other changes with them. To take a modern example, the charm against the Evil Eye will contain the name of Christ or of a Saint in a Christian charm, the name of Muhammad in the Muhammedan, and that of an angel or a mysterious name of God in the Jewish formula, though all the rest would be identical. The same process happened also in ancient times, and the Papyri mentioned above assist us in tracing the change which the new order of ideas had introduced in the magical formulas of the Christian era.
If we trace the first impulse of these changes to the Gnostics, we must at once associate it with the sects of Essenes and Theraupeuts that swarmed in Egypt and Palestine, and with the most important sect of Gnostics which produced the greatest impression, i.e. that represented by Valentin. His is the one against whom most of the polemics of the Fathers of the Church were directed. He is the author of the most profound and luxuriant, as well as the most influential and the best known, of the Gnostic systems. He was probably of Egyptian-Jewish descent ; and he derived his material from his own fertile imagination, from Oriental and Greek speculations, and from Christian ideas. [1] In his system entered also the mystical combinations of letters and signs known under the name of cabalistic formulas, and he moreover favored the permutations and combinations of letters to express divine names and attributes. To him we owe the theory of Æons and the Syzygies, or divine creative pairs, of which the two first form together the sacred "Tetraktys." I believe this to be the Gnostic counterpart of the sacred "Tetragrammaton," and not, as has hitherto been assumed by others, the Tetraktys of the Pythagoreans. For one can see in his system, and more so in the mystical part of it, the direct influence of the Jewish mystical speculations of the time. Valentin lived, moreover, in Palestine, and nothing would suit him better than to manipulate that mystical, Ineffable Name of God, round which a whole system had been evolved in the service of the Temple. Angelology and mysterious names of God and His angels are, moreover, intimately connected with the above-mentioned sects.
The mysterious Ineffable Name of the divinity which is invoked seems to be the center of moat of the ancient and even modern Magic. By knowing that Name, which is assumed to be the name by means of which the world was created, the man or exorciser in Egypt pretended to constrain the god to obey his wishes and to give effect to his invocation if called by his true name; whilst in Chaldea the mysterious Name was considered a real and divine being, who had a personal existence, and therefore exclusive power over the other gods of a less elevated rank, over nature, and the world of spirits. In Egyptian magic, even if the exercisers did not understand the language from which the Name was borrowed, they considered it necessary to retain it in its primitive form, as another word would not have the same virtue. The author of the treatise on the Egyptian mysteries attributed to Jamblichus maintains that the barbarous names taken from the dialects of Egypt. and Assyria have a mysterious and ineffable virtue on account of the great antiquity of these languages. The use of such unintelligible words can be traced in Egypt to a very great antiquity. [2]
It is necessary to point out these things in order to understand the character of the new formulas which take now the place of the old. To the old and in time utterly unintelligible names, new names were either added or substituted, and the common source of many of these names is Jewish, mystical speculation. The Ineffable Name of God and the fear of pronouncing it can be traced to a comparatively remote antiquity. We find in those ancient writings that have retained the traditions of the centuries before the common era, the idea of a form of the Ineffable Name composed of 22, 42, or 72 parts, or words, or letters, of which that consisting of 72 was the most sacred. It is still doubtful what those 22, 42, and 72 were -- either different words expressing the various attributes of God, or letters in a mystical combination; but whatever these may have been they took the place of the Ineffable mystical name and were credited with the selfsame astounding powers. By means of these every miracle could be done and everything could be achieved. All the powers of nature, nil the spirits and demons could be subdued, and in fact there was no barrier to human aspiration. The heavens were moreover peopled at a very early age with numberless angels arranged in a hierarchical order and each endowed with a special Name, the knowledge of which was no less desirable for working miracles. I need only allude to Dionysius Areopagita to have mentioned a complete treatise of such a divine economy recognized by the Church, but we can go much higher up and find these divisions and subdivisions of the celestial hosts recorded in books that belong to the second era before Christ. In the Book of Enoch (ch. vi) we have a long list of such names of angels, and in a book, the date of which has been differently put, the names of angels are still more numerous, to which there are added also various names of God. The book in question pretends to be a vision of the high Priest Ismael, and is a description of the heavenly halls. Modern scholars who knew nothing of the Gnostic and other heretic literature put it as late as the ninth century, simply and solely because they could not find early traces of it in the old literature, and because it seemed to appear first in those times. A comparison of it with the Ascensio Iesaiae, and still more with a chapter in the "Pistis Sophia," easily convinces us, however, of the fact that absolutely similar treatises were known as early as the first centuries after Christ, if they were not, in fact, later remakings of still more ancient texts. The Greek Papyri already alluded to have also this peculiarity in common with these texts, that they abound in similar lists of names of angels and demons borrowed from Egyptian, Christian, and Jewish sources. Among these we find also numerous forms of the Name of God consisting also of a number of letters, 7, 27, and others, [3] and also most curious combinations of letters.
The Jewish idea of a mystical Name of God rests thus upon the interpretation of the Tetragrammaton, or the word JHVH, that stands for God in the Hebrew text, which from very ancient times the priests first and then the whole people refrained from pronouncing in the way it was written. A substitute was found for it, so as to avoid a possible profanation of the sacred Name. But it is an object of millenary speculation what that substitute really was. As already remarked, it is represented by a changing number of elements, letters or words. The original miraculous, powerful Name, however, was the Tetragrammaton known as the "Shem ha-meforash." This word has presented great difficulties to the following generations. It can be translated either as meaning explicit, the "explicit" Name of God, whilst the others are merely substitutes, or separate, the name which is used exclusively for the designation of the Divinity. These two are the best known and most widely accepted interpretations of the "Shem ha-meforash." In the light, however, of our study it will appear that another translation will henceforth be found to be the only true one, at any rate for ancient times. Later on the true meaning of this expression was lost, and one or the other of the first-mentioned philological translations was adopted. So we find in the Testament of Solomon, e.g., "the angel called Aphoph, which is interpreted as Rafael." [This expression proves that it is based upon a Hebrew original, and that the word "perush" was taken to mean " interpretation."] Considering that this name was believed to be the only True Name of God, the all-powerful name which was never pronounced, "Shem ha-meforash" can only mean the Ineffable, as we find it also in the "Pistis Sophia," and all throughout the ancient tradition. It is an euphemism; instead of saying: it is the "Ineffable" unutterable name, they used the word which meant: it is the "explicit" name, just as they said for a "blind" man -- he is "full of light"; other examples can be easily adduced. In this way an ancient mystery and a stumbling-block for the translator of such texts disappears
www.esotericarchives.com/solomon/sword.htm
I. Introduction.
Magic has exercised the deepest influence upon mankind from remote antiquity unto our own days. It either formed part of the religion of the country, as it was the case in ancient Egypt and Babylon and as it is now in some forms of Buddhism (Tibet), or lived an independent life side by aide with the recognized religion. In some instances it was tolerated, or rendered less obnoxious, by a peculiar subdivision into white or beneficial and black or evil magic, or was downright persecuted. Wherever we go, however, and especially if we turn to the popular beliefs that rule the so-called civilized nations, we shall always and everywhere find a complete system of magical formulas and incantations. The belief in the witch and wizard, and their powerful filters and charms, holds still stronger sway upon human imagination than appears at first sight.
It is remarkable that we do not possess a good work, or exhaustive study, on the history and development of Magic. It is true that we find allusions to it, and sometimes special chapters devoted to the charms and incantations and other superstitious customs prevailing among various nations in books dealing with such nations. But a comprehensive study of Magic is still a pious (or impious) wish. One cannot gainsay that such an undertaking would present extreme difficulties. The material is far too vast, and is scattered over numberless nations and numerous literatures. Besides, much of ancient times has disappeared; in fact, there is a profound gap between antiquity and modern times which is not by any means bridged over by the literature of the Middle Ages. In these times magical art and practice were ruthlessly persecuted by the Church, and the Councils teem with denunciations against the work of the Evil One. Moreover, it was connected in a certain degree with the teachings and practices of the various heretical sects, and the pursuit was anything hut harmless. Thus it comes about that an exhaustive study of the origin and development of Magic is still a wish for the future, and the full influence which it has exercised upon mankind cannot be investigated in such a manner as to have a scientific value until at least a portion of the ancient literature will again have come to light.
The syncretistic character of the Gnostic teachings shows itself also in the adoption of Magic, and in the spiritual interpretation with which they invested the forms and formulas of Magic. The adherents of the various teachings of the Gnostics, and especially those that lived in Egypt and Palestine, adopted all the ideas that were floating about and transferred them into their system of superior Gnosis.
If anything of the teachings of the Gnostics has survived, it is the thaumaturgical portion of it. This has always been popular with the masses, as it afforded them those means which they wanted to defend themselves against the attacks of unseen evil spirits, and to the more speculative minds it afforded a clue to the mystery of the universe. It gave them the means to subdue and to put to their service the unknown forces of nature. This lies at the root of the general acceptance of magic formulas and enchantments, and gives to this practice the popularity which it still retains.
Being the most formidable sects that assumed an anti-Christian character, although some are anterior to Christianity, the Gnostics were the first to be attacked by the Fathers of the Church. Most of the ancient writings of the Fathers are filled with polemics against heretics, of which these are the foremost. The result of this campaign, which lasted for centuries, has been the absolute destruction of all the writings of the Gnostics. Sparse and incoherent fragments only have come down to us, and we are now compelled to study their systems and superstitions, if we may call them so, from the writings of their antagonists, Irenæus and Hippolytus, Tertullian and Epiphanius. A single exception is the work known as "Pistis Sophia," the date of whose composition is variously assigned to the second or fourth century. It certainly seems to belong to a later stage in the development of the Gnosis, as it contains some of the later ideas. It has come down to us in a very bad state of preservation.
Within the last few years the soil of Egypt has rendered some more fragments of this kind of literature, and magic Papyri have now enriched our hitherto very scanty stock of genuine ancient literature. These belong to the second and third century, and, being exclusively of Egyptian origin, throw an unexpected light upon the form which Magic assumed under the influence of the new order of ideas. It is a fact that nothing is so stable and constant than this kind of mystical literature. The very nature of a mystic formula prevents it from ever being radically changed. As there is no other reason for its efficacy than the form in which it is pretended to have been fixed or revealed to the Select by the Divinity itself, any change of that form would immediately destroy its efficacy. Dread preserved the form intact, at least as long as the practitioner stood under the influence of those divinities whose power he invoked for protection, or as long as he believed in the power of those demons whose malignant influence he tried to avert by means of that form of enchantment. This explains the uniformity of a number of such charms in whatever language we find them and almost to whatever time they may belong; as long as they are the outcome of one and the same set of religious ideas, which is the determining factor. But with the change of religion the charms also undergo changes, not in the form but in the names of the divinities invoked, and these bring other changes with them. To take a modern example, the charm against the Evil Eye will contain the name of Christ or of a Saint in a Christian charm, the name of Muhammad in the Muhammedan, and that of an angel or a mysterious name of God in the Jewish formula, though all the rest would be identical. The same process happened also in ancient times, and the Papyri mentioned above assist us in tracing the change which the new order of ideas had introduced in the magical formulas of the Christian era.
If we trace the first impulse of these changes to the Gnostics, we must at once associate it with the sects of Essenes and Theraupeuts that swarmed in Egypt and Palestine, and with the most important sect of Gnostics which produced the greatest impression, i.e. that represented by Valentin. His is the one against whom most of the polemics of the Fathers of the Church were directed. He is the author of the most profound and luxuriant, as well as the most influential and the best known, of the Gnostic systems. He was probably of Egyptian-Jewish descent ; and he derived his material from his own fertile imagination, from Oriental and Greek speculations, and from Christian ideas. [1] In his system entered also the mystical combinations of letters and signs known under the name of cabalistic formulas, and he moreover favored the permutations and combinations of letters to express divine names and attributes. To him we owe the theory of Æons and the Syzygies, or divine creative pairs, of which the two first form together the sacred "Tetraktys." I believe this to be the Gnostic counterpart of the sacred "Tetragrammaton," and not, as has hitherto been assumed by others, the Tetraktys of the Pythagoreans. For one can see in his system, and more so in the mystical part of it, the direct influence of the Jewish mystical speculations of the time. Valentin lived, moreover, in Palestine, and nothing would suit him better than to manipulate that mystical, Ineffable Name of God, round which a whole system had been evolved in the service of the Temple. Angelology and mysterious names of God and His angels are, moreover, intimately connected with the above-mentioned sects.
The mysterious Ineffable Name of the divinity which is invoked seems to be the center of moat of the ancient and even modern Magic. By knowing that Name, which is assumed to be the name by means of which the world was created, the man or exorciser in Egypt pretended to constrain the god to obey his wishes and to give effect to his invocation if called by his true name; whilst in Chaldea the mysterious Name was considered a real and divine being, who had a personal existence, and therefore exclusive power over the other gods of a less elevated rank, over nature, and the world of spirits. In Egyptian magic, even if the exercisers did not understand the language from which the Name was borrowed, they considered it necessary to retain it in its primitive form, as another word would not have the same virtue. The author of the treatise on the Egyptian mysteries attributed to Jamblichus maintains that the barbarous names taken from the dialects of Egypt. and Assyria have a mysterious and ineffable virtue on account of the great antiquity of these languages. The use of such unintelligible words can be traced in Egypt to a very great antiquity. [2]
It is necessary to point out these things in order to understand the character of the new formulas which take now the place of the old. To the old and in time utterly unintelligible names, new names were either added or substituted, and the common source of many of these names is Jewish, mystical speculation. The Ineffable Name of God and the fear of pronouncing it can be traced to a comparatively remote antiquity. We find in those ancient writings that have retained the traditions of the centuries before the common era, the idea of a form of the Ineffable Name composed of 22, 42, or 72 parts, or words, or letters, of which that consisting of 72 was the most sacred. It is still doubtful what those 22, 42, and 72 were -- either different words expressing the various attributes of God, or letters in a mystical combination; but whatever these may have been they took the place of the Ineffable mystical name and were credited with the selfsame astounding powers. By means of these every miracle could be done and everything could be achieved. All the powers of nature, nil the spirits and demons could be subdued, and in fact there was no barrier to human aspiration. The heavens were moreover peopled at a very early age with numberless angels arranged in a hierarchical order and each endowed with a special Name, the knowledge of which was no less desirable for working miracles. I need only allude to Dionysius Areopagita to have mentioned a complete treatise of such a divine economy recognized by the Church, but we can go much higher up and find these divisions and subdivisions of the celestial hosts recorded in books that belong to the second era before Christ. In the Book of Enoch (ch. vi) we have a long list of such names of angels, and in a book, the date of which has been differently put, the names of angels are still more numerous, to which there are added also various names of God. The book in question pretends to be a vision of the high Priest Ismael, and is a description of the heavenly halls. Modern scholars who knew nothing of the Gnostic and other heretic literature put it as late as the ninth century, simply and solely because they could not find early traces of it in the old literature, and because it seemed to appear first in those times. A comparison of it with the Ascensio Iesaiae, and still more with a chapter in the "Pistis Sophia," easily convinces us, however, of the fact that absolutely similar treatises were known as early as the first centuries after Christ, if they were not, in fact, later remakings of still more ancient texts. The Greek Papyri already alluded to have also this peculiarity in common with these texts, that they abound in similar lists of names of angels and demons borrowed from Egyptian, Christian, and Jewish sources. Among these we find also numerous forms of the Name of God consisting also of a number of letters, 7, 27, and others, [3] and also most curious combinations of letters.
The Jewish idea of a mystical Name of God rests thus upon the interpretation of the Tetragrammaton, or the word JHVH, that stands for God in the Hebrew text, which from very ancient times the priests first and then the whole people refrained from pronouncing in the way it was written. A substitute was found for it, so as to avoid a possible profanation of the sacred Name. But it is an object of millenary speculation what that substitute really was. As already remarked, it is represented by a changing number of elements, letters or words. The original miraculous, powerful Name, however, was the Tetragrammaton known as the "Shem ha-meforash." This word has presented great difficulties to the following generations. It can be translated either as meaning explicit, the "explicit" Name of God, whilst the others are merely substitutes, or separate, the name which is used exclusively for the designation of the Divinity. These two are the best known and most widely accepted interpretations of the "Shem ha-meforash." In the light, however, of our study it will appear that another translation will henceforth be found to be the only true one, at any rate for ancient times. Later on the true meaning of this expression was lost, and one or the other of the first-mentioned philological translations was adopted. So we find in the Testament of Solomon, e.g., "the angel called Aphoph, which is interpreted as Rafael." [This expression proves that it is based upon a Hebrew original, and that the word "perush" was taken to mean " interpretation."] Considering that this name was believed to be the only True Name of God, the all-powerful name which was never pronounced, "Shem ha-meforash" can only mean the Ineffable, as we find it also in the "Pistis Sophia," and all throughout the ancient tradition. It is an euphemism; instead of saying: it is the "Ineffable" unutterable name, they used the word which meant: it is the "explicit" name, just as they said for a "blind" man -- he is "full of light"; other examples can be easily adduced. In this way an ancient mystery and a stumbling-block for the translator of such texts disappears
