Magick Without Tears

THE GOD-LETTERS 411 Good! We'll call it D-Day and drop our paratroops . 0 is a sharp, sudden, forceful explosive sound, cut off smartly. Now then I can't tell whether you will connect this with ejaculation, with the idea of paternity. Whether or no, a vast number of people did so in the dawn of speech. Even to-day children seem instinctively to say "Dad" for "Father," though no allowance can be made for cases of mistaken identity. And the most ancient Father-Gods of the oldest and simplest civilizations are thus named. In Sumer, He was AD, or ADAD, whence the later Egyptian Hadit, and the Semitic Adonai. (There are also words like AVO, the creative Magick.) So also the Greeks in Syria knew Adonis, and the Latin Deus is itself the general word for God. Again, Valhalla houses Odin, Woden; and there are others. When the dental is complicated to a sibilant, as we shall see later, another idea is introduced ; while the lightening of the sound to T has yet another effect. Sanskrit also helps us with such roots as DETH to show, DAM to tame, DEVK to lead, DHEIGH, to knead, mOUld, DHER, to support, DO to give, DHE to put, and a whole group of words like Deva, a divine being. But that comes later : meanwhile, practise pronouncing these names, as also English words such as Do, Deed, Dare, Drive, Doubt, Dig, Dog, Dive, Duck, Dub while exploring the Abyss of your mind, and see whether ' you do not soon associate the D-sound with a swift, hard, definite, fertile and completed act. For a fair test, take only the oldest and simplest words, words which might naturally be wanted in the Stone Age. The next sound-group to be considered may conveniently be N. Here at once we have innumerable Gods and Goddesses flocking up: Nu, Nuit , Anu, Noah, John, Oannes, On, Jonah, et al. With the exception of On, a special case, all these divine or semi-divine Beings refer to the Night, the Starry Heavens, the Element of Water, the North, the Mother-Goddess, as appears when we consider their legends and rituals. N, Nun, means a fish and refers to the watery sign of Scorpio. To me