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skystonedclouds · 4 years

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Changes in Covenant.

For context please visit Cherry Picking.

This is written to show different ways Jesus has changed the covenant in the New testament from the Old testament. For all those who wonder the reason us Christians do not follow Jewish law (like mixed fabrics/pork). Comes down to NEW COVENANT theology.

1. New Vs Old Covenant.

So what fundamentally changed?

I will give some examples of what fundamentally changed in the new covenant with Christians. Keep in mind that when I have spoken to Jewish people they say that not every one of the Old Testament 613 commands are for Christians but for their covenant with God. We have our own covenant which has a lot of overlap but it’s still different.

A) Removing the requirement for the Sabbath Day to favor mercy.

Matthew 12:7 And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless.

Mark 2:27-28 And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is lord even of the Sabbath.”

Luke 14:3-6 And Jesus responded to the lawyers and Pharisees, saying, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath, or not?” But they remained silent. Then he took him and healed him and sent him away. And he said to them, “Which of you, having a son or an ox that has fallen into a well on a Sabbath day, will not immediately pull him out?” And they could not reply to these things.

Matthew 12:10-13 And a man was there with a withered hand. And they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? – so that they might accuse him. He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other.

Is the Sabbath completely gone?

Matthew 11:28-29 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls.

In Hebrews there is talk of a symbolic Sabbath where we rest in God. A rest for our souls. Many people when they are saved talk about feeling like they are finally at peace. The war inside has ceased and they have found rest for their souls in the promises of God. The Sabbath day is technically ~today~ if you hear God`s voice.

Hebrews 4:1-3,7-11. Therefore, while the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us fear lest any of you should seem to have failed to reach it. For good news came to us just as to them, but the message they heard did not benefit them, because they were not united by faith with those who listened. For we who have believed enter that rest, as he has said, “As I swore in my wrath, ‘They shall not enter my rest,’” although his works were finished from the foundation of the world.Again he appoints a certain day, “Today,” saying through David so long afterward, in the words already quoted, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.” For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken of another day later on. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience.

B) Removing the dietary restrictions in favor of symbolic inward purity.

Matthew 15:11-12,15-19 “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Then the disciples came and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this saying?” But Peter said to him, “Explain the parable to us.” And he said,“Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is expelled? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.

First of all it doesn’t seem to be that strict of a law since in the Old Testament there appears to be a few places of exceptions. This is because this is not a moral law. The worst consequence for violating eating something unclean in the Old covenant was to be “unclean until evening”.

Deuteronomy 12:15,22 “However, you may slaughter and eat meat within any of your towns, as much as you desire, according to the blessing of the Lord your God that he has given you. The unclean and the clean may eat of it, as of the gazelle and as of the deer. Just as the gazelle or the deer is eaten, so you may eat of it. The unclean and the clean alike may eat of it.

So if these verses weren’t clear enough there are many verses in the new covenant about all foods becoming clean more explicitly.

Acts 10:13-15 And there came a voice to him: “Rise, Peter; kill and eat.” But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.” And the voice came to him again a second time, “What God has made clean, do not call common.”

Romans 14:6 The one who observes the day, observes it in honor of the Lord. The one who eats, eats in honor of the Lord, since he gives thanks to God, while the one who abstains, abstains in honor of the Lord and gives thanks to God.

Romans 14:20 Do not, for the sake of food, destroy the work of God. Everything is indeed clean, but it is wrong for anyone to make another stumble by what he eats.

1 Corinthians 10:25-26 Eat whatever is sold in the meat market without raising any question on the ground of conscience. For “the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof.”

Mark 7:19 “Since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?”(Thus he declared all foods clean.)

Is the clean law completely gone?

As we have seen the law of cleanliness is about what comes out of our mouths now (our words and actions) rather than what goes in (food). It’s not symbolic cleanliness of what we expel from our mouths.

C) Removing circumcision for symbolic inward heart circumcision.

1 Corinthians 7:19 For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God.

Kind of strange since circumcision was a command right? Well it’s not part of the new commands in the new covenant.

Is circumcision completely removed?

It was just an outward demonstration of the inward change. It has now become symbolic to mean the circumcision of the heart.

Romans 2:28-29 For no one is a Jew who is merely one outwardly, nor is circumcision outward and physical. But a Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter. His praise is not from man but from God.

Galatians 6:14-15 But far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. For neither circumcision counts for anything, nor uncircumcision, but a new creation.

It’s not even a new concept as it was foretold and prophecies in the Old Testament. The symbolic meaning is to love God and cut away any idols in our heart. It hasn’t come out of thin air.

Deuteronomy 30:6 Andthe Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.

What does all of this mean?

So I haven’t mentioned everything that changed. I think you get the point that things are becoming “more symbolic” to inward change rather than outward change. This removes all of the Jewish cultural laws that were not moral laws to favor mercy and inward transformation of the heart.

I know I have been saying that the laws have now become symbolic to the heart. In a way it can be said the other way around and that’s actually how the bible describes it. The bible says Old Testament laws were merely symbolic of the important laws of the new covenant laws. The true purpose of the law was to be a place holder until Christ (as described in my initial post).

Hebrews 10:1-2 For since the law has but a shadow of the good things to come instead of the true form of these realities, it can never, by the same sacrifices that are continually offered every year, make perfect those who draw near. Otherwise, would they not have ceased to be offered, since the worshipers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have any consciousness of sins?

2. Slavery.

I have actually spoke on this one before so if you want the full post you can check it out. I still will reiterate the immediately relevant parts just to have it all in one place.

This is not a call to enslave anyone just that if you are enslaved by an evil person it is better to obey if you are a Christian.

This is only talking about Christians taken by force by someone sinful who have are ready to suffer on this earth for God. It is basically the idea that obeying your master because it will make your time with that master easier. It mentions that even if it doesn’t make things smoother then you will be rewarded and avenged. It is the calling of every believer o suffer in this life for the name of Jesus Christ.

Many Jewish people think Jesus Christ came to change the status quo and create revels to Rome. Jesus Christ did not come to change the state but to change the individual. We aren’t here to rebel but to submit to our fates as He submitted to the cross. There are other verses about submitting to the government. By the way one can disobey a master or the government if they command you to do something evil. Christians are not here to rebel though we are here to be servants. God considers great people to be those in humble service of others.

Mark 10:42-44 And Jesus called them to him and said to them, “You know that those who are considered rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them. But it shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.

I’m not ignoring it actually. Every day I wonder how I may serve someone kind of like those fast food people who say “how may I serve you today?”. I can’t say I do it perfectly but I try every day to see in which way I may be a servant to all so that I may grow in humility and love. In fact the demands of Christians go far beyond servitude to our earthly masters but to even be sacrificially slaughtered.

Romans 8:36 As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.

Furthermore this is all more explicitly clarified with a few more verses that explicitly literally explain that enslaving someone is against the doctrine of Christianity. It explains there is only laws concerning slaves for sinners who insist on having there own way as a way to minimize the problem. In a believer there is no need for these laws for truth is written on our hearts just like that skeptic probably to some degree feels on their heart.

1 Timothy 1:8-11 Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality,**enslavers**, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted.

It is like a good quote I saw in doctor who “good men don’t need rules” because they are really good changed in their heart not needing any restraint. In the moment of conversion there is a strong renewing of the heart and spirit. Jesus Christ justified us through his blood and saves us more and more from the power of sin.

3. Women.

I am a woman. I don’t feel treated like cattle I feel honored. I see so many passages that are there for the benefit of women. God the Father and God the son are equal but have different roles. They are equally God and equally valuable but they have different positions.

Men and women are equal heirs.

Hurting women hinders prayers.

1 Peter 3:7 In the same way, you husbands must give honor to your wives. Treat your wife with understanding as you live together. She may be weaker than you are, but she is your equal partner in God’s gift of new life.Treat her as you should so your prayers will not be hindered.

The only only restriction is that women can’t be spiritual leaders (pastors). This is a good thing because they are judged more harshly on judgment day. God wants to protect women from the fierce anger and judgment that comes with spiritual leadership.

James 3:1 Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.

Feel free to ask more about it if you have questions.

Inconsistent?

The only thing inconsistent is the way people don’t understand the bible. As I mentioned before I asked Jewish people if God intends those Old Testament commands to be for Christians. They says it`s only for the Jews not for Christians. God made a covenant with one country (Israel). He made another one with the world through Christ. The old covenant has passed away now that the new covenant has come. It’s as I said a car dealer can make two different contracts with two different individuals. Why would I obey the covenant that was given to someone else? It’s like the parent who gives their different children two different curfews. Why would I take the curfew of my other sibling when my parents gave me a different curfew? Say the younger child has a curfew of eight and the older child has a curfew of midnight. The parents did not intend for the younger child to have the later curfew nor the older child to have the earlier curfew. It can even be more severe like if the child thought he had the same chores as the older child such as lawn mowing. Imagine even if your landlord updated your terms of contract of residency. It’s still a new contract even if there’s overlap. This is not a new concept to get your head around.

God has established a whole new covenant through Christ. A covenant that did not come through thin air but was prophecies in the prophets. The old covenant was a mere placeholder or guardian until Christ. It’s really not that hard to understand that a new contract has come between man and God. We make contracts all the time in our lives and they aren’t all the same.

And most of all… Here we are commanded to understand the word of God through the lens our renewed born again hearts.

Matthew 13:15 For this people’s heart has grown dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and understand with their heart and turn, and I would heal them.

So now you know the only way to understand to bible is to understand it with the heart. Give the benefit of the doubt to God.

#pork #sabbath #new testament #old testament #new covenant #covenant #mixed fabric

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talen77703 · 5 years

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By: Insect King

AKA The True Namers, the Baal Chem

In the Beginning was YHVH and He created all life.

The Holy Tetragrammaton has puzzled religious thinkers and mystical speculators about its simplicity, complexity, and its promise for climbing closer in our understanding of Him. Each letter was an engine of creation which pointed in different directions but was the whole. Although it was a sacred duty to meditate upon these things, there where hucksters who also worshiped the power of God but sought to manipulate it. Through rearranging the order of words so the combinations could unlock power, create magick.

These sorcerers were the Baal Shem; the thieves of knowledge and blasphemers with the ability to decode and remake all creation. They were true adepts of their time, recognizable in their attitude and execution of their magick.

As the years waned and cultures grew, interest in sorcery changed, new things were accepted and old ideas lost their flexibility. And so did the Baal Shem, with their ever ready YHVH words of power. Their rules went into the cold storage of old books written by magickally dry occultists. And so they were passed down, flittered about in discussions, and occasionally studied.

But old, powerful ideas do not die easy, they can spontaneously resurrect when the correct grail is found, the hollow idea which can be filled with the liquid of pure imagination and will. And so with one student of ancient occult, it happened, he saw the book and magazine lying side by side, open to the right pages.

On one page was YHVH, the other, AGCT. And then everything just fell into place like a puzzle assembling in reverse motion. Religious philosophy and genetic science were one and the same.

It wasn’t a complete cohesion, some puzzle pieces where in backwards, or the wrong way around. He would have to keep looking at the larger pattern, before finding the small inconsistencies. Of course changing one tiny piece altered the larger pattern, so it is hard work and the gains are few but one day it will be completed, and God’s face will be seen.

AGCT is the Tetragrammaton, the True Genome, the Unpronounceable Name of God. Our individual genomes are our True Names two-billion characters long, and by rewriting our True Names, we can cause a miraculous change, a new creation.

As above, so below is the running irony of the Baal Chem. It is the apotheosis of everything else that makes us human, but not actually us; deep in all the bone, blood, meat, gristle is where God sits, in the tiny arrangements of molecules, the delicate chains of deoxyribonucleic acid that exists innocuously in every living parcel. The most powerful information coherence in the world built of the most of fragile filigree. The most powerful being of the universe is the also one of the weakest.

Through our consensual landfill of waste religious orthodoxy and mythology we abandoned God, and through our embrace of science and experiment, we have found Him again. We have found him in all of us, the destiny in everything that lives.

And so the school of the Baal Chemistry was born, alchemically uniting old magick and modern science; uniting Baal Shem and Genetics, and making the magick of God’s Chemicals.

STATS

Baal Chemistry is in not in its infancy, but there are few practitioners, mostly in the Middle East, but migrating outwards. The basics are already down but the school is not going to progress unless the students learn Hebrew, or the science of molecular chemistry, or both. It doesn’t have to be to rigorous academic standards but the skills must be bought.

Although firmly rooted in Hebrew mysticism Baal Chemistry isn’t a Jewish school. Anyone with adept potential can learn the school.

Baal Chem relies on the sympathetic law of imitation. The law is quite simple, if anything appears like something else, it will act upon that something else. The Baal Chem use a symbolic version of the Law of Imitation, the Law of Names.

One side of the Baal Chemist’s genetic sorcery is that successful significant effects alter the DNA permanently which might throw off testing.

Blast Style: The Baal Chem can bobby trap scrolls to give blasts but it cause sickness or even cancer. Although the spells are slow they may be fatal over a long period of time.

Random Magick Domain: random magick is antithetical to Baal Chemistry. They might lack true diversity, but the Tetragrammatists can stack magicakal effects on top of each other unlike any other school.

Generate a minor charge: For four hours study the Bible, cabala, The Tetragrammaton, and other tracts of Jewish mysticism, or write an essay condensing your findings.

Generate a significant charge: There are no Significant charges only significant effects generated by actively manipulating the genetic code in yourself or others.

Generate a major charge: Discover a lost tract on the Tetragrammaton and be the first to study it. Discover a break though in genetics research, such as controlling the telomere cancer-cellular mitosis relationship. Work a change over ten years that works.

Taboo: Their work is sacred and may never be abandoned. If the Baal Chemist is ever interrupted from his significant works, they reset and have to be started over again.

The Baal Chem cannot touch any separated tissue or fluids of the target that are derived from injury. Touching blood and other tissues breaks taboo as the law of imitation is subverting by the law of contagion. If the Baal Chem gets splashed with a limited amount of tissue, he can scrub off to avoid taboo.

The temple of the Baal Chemist is generally as close to sterile as any scientific laboratory.

Unlike other adepts, The renamers can incorporate different spells into one, as long as they add up the time taken and roll their Magick: Baal Chemistry skill.

Minor Baal Chemistry Formula Spells

A (one minor charge) The Baal Chemist can diagnose any living body and give a pretty accurate idea of what is going on at that time.

T (one minor charge) The Baal Chemist can correct minor imperfections, purge the body of toxins, exhaustion, and turn back the body’s clock limitedly for about as many months as the sum of the Magick: Ball Chemistry skill. This doesn’t regenerate lost limbs or heal damage, but it removes and smoothes imperfections like scars, wrinkles, and acne, hangovers, reduces infections, cleans the system, and improves the person’s sense of well being. A person with this spell heals 1 wound point has a +10% on all his first stress check afterwards.

The Baal Chemist will use T as a cleansing preparation before performing a procedure.

C (two minor charges) The Genetic Tetragrammatist can improve healing and assist in recovery by rolling his Magick: Baal Chemistry skill as if he was a doctor.

G (three minor charges) This minor blast spell makes the target’s body react as if it were invaded by foreign germs. The target suffers from a debilitating fever. Unless the character gets bed rest for as many days as the sum of the Magick: Baal Chemistry skill, he cannot heal through convalescence. If the character is actively physically stressing his body, he takes one wound point per roll whether successful or not.

Significant Baal Chemistry formula effects

Targeted effects The significant effects do not have to be performed with the target present, but the Baal Chemist must at least have some knowledge of who the person is, to have some idea of the person’s True Name. Basically this: no name -10%, no picture -10%, no basic personality profile -10%, or no truthful history -10%. If the Baal Chemist can touch the victim, the penalty is reduced by 30%. The Baal Chem cannot increase his skill this way.

Rearranging Genomes The spells are basically formulations, long strings of the Tetragrammaton characters AG and CT written on paper scrolls. The paper can be worn as an amulet or scrunched up and swallowed as a pill. Placing the spell on unknowing or unwilling targets is a bit problematic but nothing that can be solving without some quick thinking, sneaky long-fingers or elbow-greasing thugs.

Once the spell is on the person’s body, it takes about an hour to ready or activate. Removing the scroll before then diffuses the magick but the scroll is still active.

For a safety measure the scrolls can actually described to target a specific person, who is listed Tetragrammatically in the formulation.

The Abundance of God’s Blessing (One days work) By spending one day working the Baal Chemist can regenerate one point of Body. This includes the slow re-growth of lost limbs and organs. This spell cannot replace damaged tissue just replace what is missing. Due to the complexity of tissue re-growth it might take many weeks or months before the area is restored.

The Passion of David (One days work) The target may re-roll one failed but non-magickal Soul-based skill and Speed-based skill roll.

A Visitation from the Angel of Betrayal (Two days work) The Baal Chemist can disrupt cellular activity by scribbling over the cell’s ability to control their own division, allowing them to multiply unstoppably into cancerous tissue.

After spell is cast, the opponent rolls his Body stat once per week. If it fails he takes the highest die in damage to his Body. This roll continues once per week until either the cancer kills the target or he successful convalesces, healing his Body back to full while not taking any damage. At which point the cancer has gone into permanent remission. Otherwise, if the cancer is detected within the first month, it can be safely removed.

The Legacy for Esau (Three days work) The next four Mind stat or skill checks are flip-flopped to their worst result. Obsession skills simply do not flip-flop.

The Sword of God (Three days work) The Sword of God is a strange blast spell. It invokes rage in anyone interacting with the target. No everyday things like buying from the market or speaking to people at your office, but when a roll is required. If the roll fails, it triggers their Rage Passion.

There isn’t much control over the situation, but at the wrong time with the right person, the results can be fatal. The person tagged with the Sword of God comes across as hiding crucial personal secrets, arrogant, and irritating. Triggering the anger doesn’t cause a stress check, only the results of it do.

The Sword of God works once.

Blessings on the House (Four days work) With this spell the ability to conceive a child is made better. Not only is the act blessed to be fruitful (the Fertility chance is half of Body), one partner gets a flip-flopping and the other, a re-roll, but the sex of the child can be chosen by the one who rolled highest. This scroll works once per sexual encounter.

The Lions of Daniel (Four days work) While the target is protected by the Lions of Daniel, it triggers or creates the Noble Passion of the animals for the benefit of the target, regardless of how they are feeling or trained to act. The animal certainly won’t attack but it might not let the character pass an area it was set to guard. Animals might even get playful and unintentionally hurt the target.

Wild dogs will not attack her, but they will maul clothing and bags to get to food, rats will climb and nuzzle their way inside her clothing. Once the spell is in effect it lasts twenty-four hours.

Loss of the Innocence of Eden (Five days work) This spell rewrites history recorded onto genetic memory, the target’s twenty billion character True Name. The successful roll can rearrange three failed and hard notches from any three chosen meters. The notches can be placed on any other gauge, Hard or Failed.

Perfecting the Perfect (Five days work) This scroll permanently removes any inherited genetic disease from a person unless the disease has already manifested. The disease’s harmfulness is eradicated and will not pass it along the target’s germline from that point.

Once the genetic malfunction has manifested, there is nothing the Baal Chem can do about it.

The Flesh of Methuselah (Six days work) This spell rejuvenates the target’s body effectively removing the debilitating effects of tissue damage, decrepitude, injury, and internally halving the person’s age. Externally there is little actual change but the spry person may act and thus look younger. Cosmetic surgery and extensive spa treatments may help further at this point.

This spell heals Wound Points equal to the sum of the Magick: Ball Chemistry roll.

Void of the Nameless (Seven days work) The dead are generally beyond the purview of the Baal Chemist. If you do not have a body you have no True Name, their lives are over and thus Nameless. With Void of the Nameless, a possessed person can regain control over his or her body by imprisoning the demon within their mind, and like an oyster, form a psychic pearl around the irritant.

This spell forces the demon to roll possession to escape or be trapped in the victim’s mind as he regains control. It is crushed underneath the awakening mind, trapped. The victim may have dim dreams.

Unless the demon has some magickal means of escaping it is trapped in some disused and sound-proofed basement of the victim’s mind. Over time the entity just decays into oblivion.

The Void of the Nameless is also proof against possession attempts in the first place. The possessing entity just smacks into the target’s body like it was solid.

Once the demon is imprisoned, it is there permanently. The spell gives twenty-four hours protection once activated.

The Lamentations of Solomon (Eight days work) The spell allows the target to increase his Mind and Soul stat at a rate of one experience point per Stat point. The maximum number of purchases is equal to the sum of the Magick: Baal Chemistry roll. This spell only raises the stats, not the skills.

Major Baal Chemistry Effects Change one species into another, read God’s will in someone’s genome, eradicate aging, raise stats to superhuman levels, create the perfect killer immune system, grow a perfect clone body in a few hours, permanently remove all genetic imperfections and disease from a person.

#neat #rpg #unknown armies #adepts #magic #school of magic #system of magic #name of god #hebrew mysticism #genetics #archiving #homebrew #unknown armies homebrew

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foxhenki-blog · 6 years

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The Sea of Death

I’ve been seeing a lot of posts lately on Occult Facebook that revolve around the ‘I have yet to start my practice, I have a lot to learn’ theme. These are almost always juxtapositioned against the ‘If you don’t practice everyday you aren’t a magician’ type of posts.

If there is any true power in the Lovecraftian Magical Aesthetic is that it recognizes the implements of pen and book as part of the magician’s everyday practice. This is slightly different than the ‘I have a lot to learn’ camp as it doesn’t exactly mean sitting down, instagramming a stack of occult books, declaring you need to ‘go through them,’ reading about twelve pages each, repeat process (if this sounds specific, its because I’ve done it). It means going through those books critically and making notes, filling in your own grimoire with experiments and theory. This isn’t just one of the primary methods of engaging with magical material in a Lovecraftian sense, it is also why we even have the classical grimoires to begin with, because there was a tradition of transcription, of study, of armchairing the literal Hell out of magical experiments and writing down what works. The pen and book are core to magical practice. Even illiterate witches and cunning men held on to grimoires as objects of power.

Experience is nothing without theory just as theory is nothing without experience.

This will be the last week that I will be working-out-loud with Sarah Higley’s work on Hildegard of Bingen’s trafficking in word and language as mystical practice. It needs to be returned to the wonderful library that lent it to me tomorrow.

In concluding my notes on the second chapter of her thesis, we pick up on her discussion surrounding the angelic languages. The author states that:

“angelic languages [have] properties that natural languages do not, being better able to communicate directly with the soul… vocables… chosen for their beauty and ease of articulation… were meant to suggest a language of the angels with the emphasis on liquids, open syllables, and front consonants that are the marks… of a language superior to [the] vernacular…”

If the above holds true, than what of this quote from ‘The Dunwich Horror’:

“N’fai, n’gha’ghaa, bugg-shoggog, y’hah; Yog-Sothoth, Yog-Sothoth…“

There seems here to be the opposite of an angelic language, the consonant clusters, the glottal stops… although there are some similarities, like the iterations of the vowel ‘a’ for an ending. At once related and adverse to angelic languages, the language of the Necronomicon has the same elements of a voice with cosmic origins, but one that creates a sonic environment meant to repel or confuse the human recipient.

From there we move into the third chapter of Higley’s work, where she begins comparing Hildegard’s Lingua Ignota to the wider ecosystem of invented language through timedepth. I’ll let her set the scene:

“Hildegard lived in a fertile time and she dwelled in an especially fertile area of Germany, near the borders of present-day France, in a part of the Rhine that had enjoyed a rich Celtic influence… the building of the first great Gothic cathedrals, and the developing notion of self, individuality, and spiritual growth… The twelfth century was also undergoing an epistemological metamorphosis whereby the notion of God’s unchanging creation was under scrutiny… a new philosophy emerged toward the end of the century that was willing to entertain the possibility that nature’s structures could indeed undergo natural or even artificial metamorphosis… Hildegard… is a kind of chimaera… she is a vehicle of various charismas or spiritual gifts that put her at odds with her original calling as an anchoress… Her charismas led her out of the cell to found other abbeys, and put her in touch with secular authorities… it may have seemed to Hildegard… that if nature can change or be changed, if base metals can be made into gold, could not [the nuns in her charge] anticipate their glory in heaven and language be made green again…”

According to Higley, our saint lived in a time of transformation, where God’s perfection was in question and with that, the notion that we could improve ourselves flowed closely behind. Saint Hildegard questioned and declared herself the counsel of ecclesiastical authority figures, she is the Saint of Speaking Truth To Power. Hildegard, through her language invention, is performing a spiritual alchemy, or rather, was keeping within the alchemical aesthetics as they were understood in her time. She not only spoke truth to power, she brought mysticism and magic into the light of day:

“distortions of language — especially distortions of Scriptural language — may have been regarded with… alarm, especially as they appeared in spells considered pagan. Hildegard’s greatest strength, then, lay in her lack of secrecy. The Lingua, and all of Hildegard’s writings, exposed rather than hid her ideas.”

To exist magically adjacent to Hildegard of Bingen is to bathe in the light of a saint that reveals your belief and practice of magic to the world. Practicing Out Loud, palam usu magicae, is what the use of the Lingua Ignota symbolizes. She is the Saint of the Magically Outed.

At this point, Higley’s thesis takes a very interesting and enriching turn, as she turns her lens towards actual magic and the use of language in these practices. From the text:

“charms are [often] intriguingly ambiguous in calling upon both pre-Christian magic and Christian religion, but they also offer insights into primitive language creation that exhibit some of the features of glossographia and even glossolalia (the repetition is noticeable). Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were hieratical languages known only to the cognoscenti, and therefore imbued with magic or curative powers for the layman. The unintelligibility of charms was a powerful ingredient of their success as potions, divorcing language from everyday meaning and thus increasing the sufferer’s faith in them.”

What the author is saying here is an admission that the mixing of Latin and Greek and Hebrew with invented names is part of what makes spells potent. This poly-xeno-glossia is a revelation of some of the DNA of how magic is, and likely always has been, performed by humans. Polyglossia is also mixed with, as has been mentioned in previous posts, with encryption. Higley name-drops Trithemius on this point:

“In [the Steganographia] Trithemius purportedly found a way to transmit occult messages through the agency of spirits. The messenger writes an innocuous message on a piece of paper or ‘cover letter,’ over which he presumably ‘thinks’ his message; then he invokes a spirit such as Padiel by uttering the following:

‘Padiel aporsy mesarpon ommeuas peludyn malpreaxo. Condusen, vlearo thersephi bayl merphon, paroys gebuly mailthomyon ilthear tamarson acrimy lon peatha Casmy Chertiel, medony reabdo, lasonti iaciel mal arsi bulomeon abry pathulmon theoma pahtormyn.’

The spirit takes the message to the recipient who utters a similar incantation: instantly he can deduce the true meaning of the sender’s letter.

These [types of] spells are a far cry from what Hildegard was doing with her borrowings from German, Latin, and Greek… Nonetheless, we are back to the chimaera: whereas the invented words in the antiphon bespeak a mystical use of language, the taxonomy seems decidedly nonmystical.”

Hildegard strengthened the mystical properties of the Lingua Ignota through creating a linguistic chimaera. The act of cataloging the invented words increase their power, perhaps, enhance their reification, making them ‘more real.’ The same act is done through using spells with barbarous names and mixed languages in one’s praxis and then transcribing the experiments in a grimoire employing spirit lists (taxonomies) and incantations (antiphons). These are the same ‘chimaeric’ acts as Hildegard employed. Hildegard is the Saint of the Grimoirist.

It is at this point that Higley introduces what I find to be a very useful concept, that of cataphasis:

“Hildegard’s visionary knowledge is of explaining and writing. She heard a voice tell her to rise above her timidity and ignorance, and ‘speak and write what she saw and heard’ in her visions: ‘Explain them such that the hearer, hearing the words of his instructor, manifests them in those words, following that very will, revelation, and instruction.’… Her descriptions are followed by her interpretations. This is not a woman who has little faith in the clarifying qualities of language, sound, and vision. Her penchant runs toward explication and cataphaticism [(cata) ‘language’ (phasis): ‘in mystical discourse’], and so does her Lingua with its translations…”

Often it is said that the language of the grimoires, the experiments, the rigor of practice, is conveyed via a spirit that is summoned. Until reading ‘Hildegard of Bingen’s Unknown Language,’ I had made the assumption that this was a type of automatic writing or a physically manifested spirit dictating to the magician (or her scryer) the new knowledge. My conceptualization has changed. I believe now that it is just as likely that daemonic revelatory knowledge can be derived at through working with the text, think Burroughs and his Cut-Ups, think Gysin, these cat’s were on the same line as, if we are to believe Hagley’s arguments, the authors of the gnostic gospels:

“The Acts of Philip… is believed to have been generated circa AD 500, and it has many recensions in Greek, Latin, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syriac, and Arabic… Throughout its versions, we find a number of passages exhibiting a psuedo-Hebrew, which the authors write and translate in several places:

Philip conjures Jesus in a mysterious language — ‘Zavarthan, savathavat, vramanoukh, come quickly!’…

Philip’s sister Miriamne speaks to the wife of the Proconsul who is healed by her faith: ‘Alikaman, ikasame, marmari, iachaman, mastranan, achaman,’ which is translated as ‘O daughter of the father, my lady, who wast given as a pledge to the serpent; Christ has come to thee…’ [In the] Syraic version of [a speech from Miriamne]… ‘When she came to the door of the house, Marianne began to speak to her in the Syriac language: Elikomai kasma hitaa mariakha khamastrai kalimakhaa…’ Further on, Philip curses his tormentors… ‘Abalo, arimouni, douthael, tharseleen, nachaoth, aeidounaph, teleteloein, which is (after many invocations descriptive of God), let the deep open and swallow these men.”

Is this not what Lovecraft is doing with his quotes from the Necronomicon as well? Sometimes we only receive the English translations from the text but at other times we are offered the unknown language of the Necronomicon followed by a translation as we see above in the Acts of Philip. Lovecraft gave his Necronomicon the same shape as the gnostic gospels, fragmented and cataphatic. We find further vector’s into the main subject of our research when Higley once again begins to pull on the work of Johaness Trithemius:

“In the later Middle Ages Hildegard became associated with prophecy and divination, and so it is no wonder that [Johanness] Trithemius, with his interest in magic characters and conjuration, took an interest in her… [In the] Steganographia] Trithemius gives the names of chief spirits and their symbols boldly copied out, but contains within itself a cipher — the original purpose of a steganography (‘covered writing’). The passage summoning the spirit Padiel, then, is an elaborate encryption. Instead of naming a spirit to convey a message magically, the initial word gives a clue to its interpreter, who then highlights every other letter of every other word — one finds the Latin phrase *primus apex* (‘the first point’) in the sentence headed by ‘Padiel’… This book, so feared as a grimoire, was finally printed posthumously in 1606 and throughout the seventeenth century, but was banned by the Catholic Church in 1609…”

This type of encryption is spoken of in Lovecraft’s tales. Often the protagonist has to decrypt fragments of writing in order to come to their true meaning. While this is painted by Lovecraft (or at least seen as such through a modern lens) as a materialist engagement with esoterica, it is in fact a description of one of the oldest magical acts. Encryption and decryption were pioneered by magicians.

What are the implications of this in the twenty-first century? Here’s a question, what happens when we set an AI to the task of what is essentially a magical act as old as writing itself?

Along with the Lingua Ignota, Hildegard also invented her own orthography to go along with it. In Higley’s words:

“[Hildegard’s] letters [the ignotae litterae] are most likely her own invention… certain shapes are popular in simple invented alphabets… What makes her alphabet so ahead of her time, though, is that it is not until centuries later that we find a proliferation of esoteric alphabets published with their Roman equivalences… The curious resemblance of Hildegard’s first three letters to those of ‘Theban Writing’ attributed by Agrippas to Honorius of Thebes and showing some influence by Aramaic script, is striking, especially since in this alphabet Roman characters — ‘a,’ ‘b,’ ‘c’ — like that in Hildegard’s, are written from left to right with their Theban characters, quite unlike the other alphabets Agrippa records that are written right to left with the name of the Hebrew letter: aleph, bet, gimel.”

The way this researcher views it, Hildegard is also the Saint of the Esoteric Alphabet, as hers is the earliest (and possibly first) extant example. In this way she is the divine mother of Austin Spare’s Alphabet of Desire, of Chaos Magic sigils, of Burroughs, of what came after.

Here Higley transitions directly into a discussion of what came after, namely language inventions that arose between the Fifteenth and Nineteenth centuries. One of the best and most influential examples, and one dear to my own literary heart, is that of the satirist Thomas More:

“[Thomas More’s Utopia], published in the original Latin in 1516… [contains] perhaps the first secular and fictional glossopoeia — that is, an invented language (or a portion of a language) [Utopian] with a coherent structure accompanying an imaginary culture that has served as a model for subsequent ‘voyage’ and ‘science fiction’ fantasies and their imaginary languages… besides Hildegard’s Lingua it is one of the earliest glossopoeic productions; it shows More’s… delight in invention… it is one of the first attempts at a grammatical structure such that its parts could be translated into coherent sentences…”

and as I have pointed out before but Higley does in a much more coherent way, is the nature of the work Utopia (and by extension the very wrong way the non-word ‘dystopia’ is used):

“Often misunderstood today as ‘good place,’ the original… meaning of utopia is ‘no place,’ which has furnished early scholars of language invention with the popular term uglossia, ‘no language,’ a language that either cannot be a language by virtue of its isolation and artificiality, a language that has a utopian philosophy in mind, a language that has no place within an outsider’s comprehension of it, or a language that can claim no place even within the speaker’s sense of speaking. Significantly, Hildegard’s own term for her language is ignota [unknown].”

From Utopia we move into the Land of Enoch. Again from the text:

“John Dee… fascinated by secret scripts and languages… collected in his vast library the works of Trithemius, Cornelius Agrippa, and the Voarchadumia contra alchimian of Joannes Antonius Pantheus, which claimed to have discovered the language of Enoch. With the help of his scryer, Dee produced perhaps the most famous invented language of his era, apart from the mysterious Voynich Manuscript… Having consulted Kabbalistic texts, he believed that the angels could… reveal the sacred letters that provided the material elements of Nature… Stephen Skinner, author of the preface to the revised edition of… Laycock’s The Complete Enochian Dictionary, warns us that

‘the Enochian system is… one of the more complex bridges ever built between this world and the world of daemons, spirits, and angels, a piece of spiritual engineering created by one of the most brilliant minds of his age. As such it deserves to be traversed with care…’

[Dee’s] reputation was tarnished in a way that Hildegard’s was not; at her death the Inquisition examined her works, including her Unknown Language and Letters, and found in them proof of her orthodoxy and godliness… Hildegard wrote during a time of intellectual challenge and change, and within the supportive structure of the Church… Dee wrote during a time of tremendous religious turmoil… I prefer to see [language] inventions as extraordinary acts of imagination wherein a revealed world that offers alterity to this one has a foreign language. It is part of the mythopoeic process, so popular in human creation and divination.”

Invented languages are an expression of our imaginal self, of interiority. Viewed through this lens, Lovecraft’s fiction, more than most, is a deeply animist expression, an animist hypersigil that has spread interiority throughout the world, expanding the imaginal selves of all it touches. I love the phrasing of the Skinner quote that Higley offers, a complex bridge, an engineered solution. Magic isn’t a gut feel, or at least, it isn’t just a gut feel. It is the application of long hours of research and planning. Or at least, the best most sustainable magic has those qualities. Before shifting into our examination of Lovecraft, I’ll leave you with one parting quote from Higley:

“For the medievals, language invention was largely divine, demonic, or comic, and many of their examples were copied manually from lost exemplars. For the Renaissance magi, secrecy, magic, and code were the games that were played, accompanied by the new books made available by printing. The bizarre instruments Dee used — the charts, the scrying stone, the backward writing — heavily influenced not only his conception of what he was doing, but its reception by others…”

Secrecy, magic, and code — these are the pillars of Lovecraftian Magic.

Our tale this week is ‘The Nameless City.’

The premise of which is a nameless narrator who strikes out on his own into the desert in order to find a city of rumor and myth that exists in the sands of Arabia. We pick up the tale as the searcher finally stumbles upon his goal, a place that no other living human had ever seen, the others held at bay by the power of rumor and fear:

“When I drew nigh the Nameless City I knew it was accursed. I was traveling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands… Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge…”

This marks Lovecraft’s mythos as a predecessor (but not precluded from) those that arose after the flood, the flood that every culture and religion, both living and dead has mythic memory of. Upon laying eyes on the city, our searcher, a scholar, cites a phrase quite famous in our modern day Lovecraftian reality:

“It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet:

‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.’”

I’ve mentioned before how much this research journey has unveiled for me about the nature of Lovecraft and his work. This bit of prose is a revelation to me because I have always assumed (and although I can’t quote them here, know others have put this thought in my head) that the couplet of Abdul Alhazred is about Cthulhu and his submerged city of R’lyeh, but here it is, in black and white, that the couplet was in fact inspired by a dream of a city lost in the desert, and not in the sea. A city that existed in a place that remained dry during the flood that took Laurasia, that consumed Atlantis and the rest of the known world in its waves.

Our author then picks up the vein of inquiry we have been engaged in for the past three weeks:

“I heard a moaning and saw a storm of sand stirring among the antique stones… Then suddenly above the desert’s far rim came the blazing edge of the sun, seen through the tiny sandstorm which was passing away, and in my fevered state I fancied that from some remote depth there came a crash of musical metal to hail the fiery disc as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.”

It should be clear now how the mention of music and magic here is timely in my own practice, as my study of the Greek Magical Papyri via the Rune Soup Premium Member course has just taken us through that turn, the place of music and song and moaning and sighs when speaking the barbarous names. Memnon is known as the ‘Son of Dawn,’ and as such could be a metaphor for magical timing, the first hour of the day being the most potent time to invoke celestial spirits. Our narrator continues wrapt in wonder at the Nameless City’s origin in timedepth:

“I saw that the city had been might indeed, and wondered at the sources of its greatness. To myself I pictured all the splendors of an age so distant that Chaldea could not recall it, and though of Sarnath the Doomed, that stood in the land of Mnar when mankind was young, and of Ib, that was carven of grey stone before mankind existed.”

Which trigger another learning moment for me, for I had assumed that Sarnath (and I state as much) was not a city of Earth but of the Dreamlands.

Throughout The Nameless City, Lovecraft places wonder and fear in opposition of each other, as if they were poles on a sliding scale:

“I was more afraid than I could explain, but not enough to dull my thirst for wonder… I crossed into the dark chamber from which it had come. This temple… was larger than either of those I had visited before… On the walls and roof I beheld for the first time some traces of the pictorial art of the ancient race… and on two of the altars I saw… a maze of… curvilinear carvings. As I held my torch aloft it seemed to me that the shape of the roof was too regular to be natural, and I wondered what the prehistoric cutters of stone had first worked upon. Their engineering skill must have been vast.”

This popular thought experiment, attempting to fit a modern (read: flawed) perception of the engineering and scientific skills of the ancient, brings to ‘Nameless City’ a distinct ‘ancient aliens’ feel to it. It also brings to mind a question when wrestling with Lovecraft’s fiction in a non-esoteric (but nonetheless relevant) frame - when Lovecraft speaks of Ancient Aliens, does that place his fiction in the genre of Science Fiction or Fantasy?

The element of Air and indeed, of Aerial Spirits, is strong in the tale of The Nameless City. Our explorer, sliding back and forth between fear and wonder, finds himself at another one of Lovecraft’s barriers, another door, except this one, long abandoned by the world of humans, has been left open.

“Then a brighter flare of the… flame shewed me… the opening to those remoter abysses whence the sudden wind had blown… it was a small and plainly *artificial* door chiseled in the solid rock. I thrust my torch within, beholding… a rough flight of… steeply descending steps [which] I shall always see… in my dreams… I hesitated only a moment before advancing… to climb… down the steep passage… I lost track of the hours… In the darkness there flashed before my mind fragments of my cherished treasury of daemonic lore; sentences from Alhazred the mad Arab, paragraphs from the apocryphal nightmares of Damascius, and infamous lines from the delirious Image du Monde of Gauthier de Metz. I repeated queer extracts, and muttered of Afrasiab and the daemons that floated with him down the Oxus; later chanting over and over again a phrase from one of Lord Dunsany’s tales-

‘the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.’

Once when the descent grew amazingly steep I recited something in sing-song from Thomas Moore until I feared to recite more:

‘A reservoir of darkness, black As witches’ cauldrons are, when fill’d With moon-drugs in th’ eclipse distill’d. Leaning to look if foot might pass Down thro’ that chasm, I saw, beneath, As far as vision could explore, The jetty sides as smooth as glass, Looking as if just varnish’d o’er With that dark pitch the Sea of Death Throws out upon its slimy shore.”

Lovecraft uses this trope, the litany of literature, often, and most every time is introduces me to something new and strange. Such as the William Caxton translation of The Mirror of the World (which can be found digitally reproduced here by the World Digital Library). Where was Lovecraft exposed to Caxton? The closest extant copy I could find today is in the University of Cambridge. It was likely mentioned in his astronomy journals, as that is one of the foci of this epic ‘encyclopedic poem.’

Further, I’d like to point out the codification of this scene in modern horror. I have just recently picked up the graphic novel version of The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman from the library this week and as I read through it, found something very familiar in these panels:

Our searcher, upon finding the floor of his descent, is confronted by a silent but terrible codification:

“Time had quite ceased to exist when my feet felt again a level floor… there came a gradual glow ahead, and all at once I knew that I saw the dim outlines of [a] corridor and [wooden] cases… This hall was no relic… like the temples in the city above, but a monument of the most magnificent… art… The cases were of a… golden wood, with fronts of… glass, and contained the mummified forms of creatures… of the reptile kind, with body lines suggesting the crocodile, sometimes the seal… in size they approximated a small man, and their fore legs bore… flexible feet… like human hands and fingers. But strangest all were their heads… I thought of comparisons as varied as the cat, the bulldog, the mythic Satyr… the horns and the noselessness an alligator-like jaw placed the things outside of all established categories… The creatures, I said to myself, were to the men of the nameless city what the she-wold was to Rome, or some totem-beast is to a tribe of Indians.”

The anthropormanteaus in this scene remind me immediately of the decans or other manifestations of spirit-forms in the grimoires and the Greek Magical Papyri. Lovecraft’s deep education and anchoring in pagan Rome shows again in this sentence. It also shows a more than passing familiarity with American Indian tribes too. Note that he is relating the spiritual and cultural practices, particularly the cosmogony, of Indian Tribes with that of his beloved Rome. The context of this sentence is saying that the mythic pagan origins of Rome, of Indian tribes that trace their origins to spirit and heroes in animal form, and his own conceptualization of ancient aliens are all on the same level. Ancient aliens and the she-wolf mother of Romulus and Remus are as animist in Lovecraftian Magic as the loon and bear are to the Ojibwe. He continues, connecting these thoughts to Laurasia:

“Holding this view, I thought I could trace roughly a wonderful epic of the namelss city; the tale of a might sea-coast metropolis that ruled the world before Africa rose out of the waves, and of its struggles as the sea shrank away and the desert crept into the fertile valley that held it… The civilization, which included a written alphabet, had seemingly risen to a higher order than those immeasurably later civilizations of Egypt and Chaldaea, yet there were curious omissions… no pictures to represent deaths of funeral customs… It was as though an ideal of earthly immortality had been fostered as a cheering illusion.”

Even in this slightest mention, we have a glimmer of Lovecraft’s glossopoeia, marking him (Like Austin Spare and Burroughs) as the esoteric and mystical kin of Saint Hildegard. Think on it, without Saint Hildegard’s work on her Lingua Ignota, there would be no Dee, there would be no Agrippa, there would be no Lovecraft. From her pen a fount of magic flooded the world.

And then our archetype is finally confronted by those crepuscular arial spirit forms mentioned in the beginning of the tale, having stumbled upon their final resting place:

“[I] was aware of a great gate through which came all of the illuminating phosphoresence… what lay beyond… was only an illimitable void of uniform radiance… an infinity of subterranean effulgence… in another moment… I received a still greater shock in the form of a… deep, low moaning… Its volume rapidly grew… and at the same time I became conscious of an increasing draught of cold air… I instantly recalled the sudden gusts which had risen around the mouth of the abyss each sunset and sunrise… I looked at my watch and saw that sunrise was near… More and more madly poured the… moaning night-wind into that gulf of inner earth… I… screamed frantically near the last — I was almost mad… Finally reason must have wholly snapped, for I fell to babbling over and over that unexplainable couplet of the mad Arab Alhazred, who dreamed of the nameless city:

‘That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die…’

And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-peopled blackness of earth’s bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.”

Lovecraft’s work is potent when considered as just fiction. It is even more powerful, however, when considered as a magical aesthetic. The reason for this is due to the depth of his mythopoesis and glossopoesis. We see in The Nameless City a kernel of the cosmogony that builds on itself throughout his ouevre, and we also are given rare secrets to the writing and nature of the Necronomicon itself — inspired by this nameless city that exists before man’s rise (and into his dominance), before the Deluge, but after his Age of Chaos. In the endless Sea of Death that is the desert of the mind, Lovecraft is endlessly greening language and thought, his perennial magic breathing life into the lifeless, haunting the words of storytellers and magicians for a century now and continuing to evolve into the future.

Our tarot card match for The Nameless City is that most potent of Trumps, Justice.

The card offered itself up to me in the Reversed form, displaying the keyword, Le Legiste, or the ‘Jurist.’ Jurist is an older word than Justice. Stemming from the Old Latin ‘ious,’ which is literally translated into the phrase ‘sacred formula’ and is unique to Latin, having its origins in the many religious cults of the time. It stems from the PIE root *yewes- and expands from that point into the Latin ‘iurare,’ or ‘to pronounce a ritual formula, and the Avestan (known better as Zend [the language of the Zoroastrian scriptures]) term ‘yaoz-da,’ or ‘to make ritually pure.’ When we look below the surface of language, as Saint Hildegard and Lovecraft would have us do, we find that the Justice archetype is not as closely associated with our modern conceptions of the separation of Church and State as we thought. It is a wholly religious word, moreover, it is a word associated with religious order. Compare this to the word ‘Decan,’ recalling the anthroportmanteau’s from the tale. Decan is a variation of ‘dean,’ an ecclesiastical title stemming form the Late Latin ‘decanus,’ or the head of a group of ten monks in a monastery. This religious title maps well against *yewes- and its expansions into ritual formulas and purity. The Proto-Indo-European root of decan is *dekm-, meaning ‘ten,’ but when expanded back out maps to, among other terms, the word ‘Pentecost.’ Bringing us full circle.

The Nameless City and its subterranean temple, which is (due to the duplicate mentions of Memnos) probably the chthonic residence of the god Helios, by its description, is defined by the warm wooden cabinets and ornamental glass that display the now ritually pure anthroportmanteu ancient alien race entombed in the earth beneath it. The sterility of the desert, as Hildegard would have viewed it, means that our archetype is a warning to those that might traffic with daemons, that fasting and purity is of the utmost importance. The searcher, who is also nameless, and his litany of quotes and songs from his memory of the dark literature he had studied, show us that the path through the arid Sea of Death to ritual purity, to the Nameless City, is in fact paved with the pages of books.

#ritual #purity #language

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