Llewellyn Worldwide: From the very advent of the spoken word among humanity, language has been considered something sacred and magickal. To be able to share ideas between people was a powerful innovation, as was the ability to name and train our work animals, such as hunting and herding dogs. To know the true name of a person also granted some power over them: you might warn them away from danger or lure them into an ambush at your own will. As our legal systems became more sophisticated over time, the true name of a person (especially in the form of a signature) became a very powerful political tool—and it remains such to this day. Right from the start, language extended to (or we might say from) the spiritual realm. Some of our earliest words, and the hieroglyphs that represented them in writing, were received by shamans communing with their Patron Gods via ecstatic trance. And, of course, many of these words were applied as names for the spiritual forces of nature. Much like the hunting and herding dogs mentioned previously, knowing the true name of any given spirit—along with the words of command to which it would respond—was to have control over it. To this day, both the name and signature of a spirit is considered a necessity if the spirit is to be addressed or exorcised. By the time we reach the historical era, we find that language has already ceased to be a state-of-the-art technology, and has instead become a “wisdom from the past.” As both speech and writing became more common in the secular world, priests began to look toward languages of the past for sacred and magickal considerations. For example, the priests of Babylon used Sumerian—the language of their predecessors—as their sacred tongue. Likewise, the priests of any Egyptian dynasty were most interested in the hieroglyphics used by previous dynasties, which were of course engraved upon many ancient temples and monuments throughout the land.
..read more>>>...
