” . . . the relationship among letters, words and reality is potent, magical and central to human life.” (Isabel Kliegman, in Tarot and the Tree of Life)

The truth of this quote is apparent in the lives of those for whom the spoken word seems to be vital to their sense of self-identity beyond just “hearing themselves speak.” I know individuals (not all of whom are salesmen) who barely pause long enough to take a breath between the uninflected syllables of their run-on monologues, to the point that I must butt in to have anything resembling a normal conversation with them. I don’t know why this should be so but it doesn’t strike me as arrogance, just a kind of unconscious “diarrhea of the mouth.” Then there are those who only lend half-an-ear to what I’m saying because they’re too engrossed in cuing up their next statement. Such people don’t appear to have a clue what meaningful discourse is all about, except to the extent that they want to get their points across with no interruption in the flow. I have a friend who told me that, unlike others of our mutual acquaintance, “You think before opening your mouth,” which I took to be high praise. But that isn’t my purpose in this essay.

I want to talk about the “ineffable” (and unpronounceable) “Name of God,” symbolized by the Tetragrammaton, the four letters of the Hebrew alphabet Yod, He, Vav and He (an Anglicized mirror-image of the right-to-left Hebrew sequence). I recently read that the Hebrew language has no provision for inserting vowels between the four consonants, so the common belief that it should be pronounced “Jehovah” or “Yahweh” is considered erroneous by orthodox Jews. In Kliegman’s book it is described as “the most nebulous of pronunciations – two breaths, as insubstantial as it can be.” I’m reminded of a foible of my Canadian forebears, who spoke the colloquialism “Yup” on an intake of breath rather than by expelling it, creating a kind of sub-vocal affirmation unlike its more robust American counterpart. (Believe me, it’s not as easy to pull off as it sounds, like trying to enunciate while sipping through a straw.)

In ceremonial magic there is a convention that one should “vibrate” the name of any entity one is hoping to evoke. I always took this to mean delivering it in a sonorous, “FM-radio-ready” voice rich in vibrato (something I can’t quite muster). But I was disabused of this assumption by the revelation that Aleister Crowley – one of the most accomplished occultists of the last century – had a rather thin, reedy manner of speech. Somehow I can’t imagine “The Great Beast” squeaking his way through a ritual. But of course intention is all that matters.

I love a good analogy, and the one here is excellent: the letter Yod can be envisioned as a “candle flame” though which a wind blows, releasing sparks that become the other twenty-one letters. Structurally and metaphysically, Yod is a fundamental component of the rest, so this makes a lot of sense. In the cards of the tarot, the motif of “falling Yods” is often repeated, although many writers have tried to turn the obvious symbolism into something else. In practice I primarily use the Tetragrammaton as an expression of the four classical elements, Fire, Water, Air and Earth, with no religious overtones (I call myself “devoutly nonreligious”).

There is also considerable merit in the association of the twenty-two letters to the Major Arcana but I’m not too anal about it, and to be honest I get a lot more narrative mileage out of their astrological correspondences. I’m more apt to apply gematria (numerical values equated with verbal concepts) in my approach to free-association from the images than to directly invoke the letter attributions given by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, not all of which seem credible.