IDOLON

An image; a false, mistaken or deceptive idea; an obscure vocabulary.

(See also: IDOLON, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

shabda kosha: (Sanskrit) "Sheath of sounds, or words." Vocabulary; a dictionary or glossary of terms.

(See also: Shabda kosha, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

Most of the vocabulary is derived from Portuguese and Spanish, and most of the time the real origin is unknown due to the great similarity between the two Iberian languages and the adaptations required by Papiamento. Linguistic studies have shown that roughly two thirds of the words in Papiamento's present vocabulary are of Spanish or Portuguese origin, a quarter are of Dutch origin, and the rest come from other tongues. Examples of words that can be impossible or where the determination is very difficult: Por fabor = Ple ...

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Papiamento, Papiamento - History, Papiamento - Classification and related languages, Papiamento - Geographic distribution, Papiamento - Dialects, Papiamento - Sounds, Papiamento - Grammar, Papiamento - Vocabulary, Papiamento - Dictionaries, Papiamento - Writing system, Papiamento - Examples, Papiamento - Phrase samples

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HELL-HOUND

There have been many. Cerberus and Orthos, the guardians of the Gates of Hell are notorious enough, but there was also Garn, the Moon dog; the hellhound of Arwan; Falinis, the hound of Lush; the Hound of the Baskervilles; the whelp of King Ioruaidhe (who turned water into wine) -- and numerous others, from Egypt's most exalted Psychopomp of the Dead, the Dog-God, Anubis, to Walt Disney's gentle pup, Pluto, who was indeed named (tongue well in cheek) after the self-same God of the Underworld.

Dogs are quite naturally associated with death and the lower reaches. It is fitting that it should be they, after death, who conduct us who led them in life. Not only do our canine friends watch over us by night, guarding against every intruder and nocturnal peril that menaces the sleeping household, but they are quite at home in underground caves and even expert at digging. They are unperturbed by corpses or corruption. And, although their vocabularies of human words are exasperatingly limited, they are, as every dog owner knows, fluent in the silent, non-linguistic communication of ESP.

For the above and many other reasons, demons were once believed to take the form of dogs, especially black dogs. The Devil himself, in fact, has a black dog as his companion. White dogs are more likely the companions of white magic.

(See also: HELL-HOUND, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

MAGIC WORD

The root of all Magic is The Word. Ho Logos . In every culture, the shaman is the person with the largest vocabulary (although, ironically, he may express himself clumsily). He is also the one who sees beyond a person's words to what that person really means. For the magician, as for the poet, words are fluid and changing. Puns, paradoxes and triple/quadruple meanings come and go with varying degrees of exactitude or "correctness". Magical meanings derive from context or intention. Etymology is always strictly, historically, accurate, but usually beyond the safe and unimaginative academic frontiers into the realm of historical intuition. Where history and genuine insight leave off and illusion begins it is sometimes difficult to say.

The Egyptian God of magic, Thoth (or Tahuti, "The Speaker") is self-created and dwells in chaos. As he speaks, each word becomes a created thing (as in Greek a "poem" means anything that has been made). Hunchback: Is Chaos the Void or is it merely the pre-linguistic, Briatic world?

In our time when the television commercial has raped and perverted language for the sake of profit, when words have little more value than the squawking of parrots, it is difficult to imagine that there was once a mighty and living oral tradition. The true magician has not forgotten.

Therefore the adept must be adept with words. The unitiatated believe that Magic is entirely the result of uttering certain catchwords or phrases: "Hocus-Pocus-Dominocus!" or "Hey Presto! Hi Jingo, begone!" Oddly enough, this bit of folk wisdom is not as far off the mark as it might seem. Words do have power. Spells can be evoked. PKD once said that for every individual in the world there exists a special word or phrase, for him alone, which upon his hearing, would result in his death. There is also another word that would heal him of anything. Most of us, however, go through our whole lives without hearing either of these vital words or phrases.

The words used by magicians, when they are not the nonsense syllables of charlatans, tend to be words from archaic languages. Today these are primarily Latin or Greek (in our culture), whereas in the 18th and 19th Century, ritual words were usually taken from Hebrew. Hebrew magic itself borrowed from the earlier Chaldaeans, Babylonians and Assyrians. Finally, there is Buddhism and Yoga from Sanskrit, Tantrism from Tibetan, Taoism from Chinese and Sufism from Arabic.

Says Her Bak , "Do not be negligent in finding and using the right word. Thoth never replies to inexact medus."

(See also: MAGIC WORD, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

AETHYRS (or Aires)

Each of us stands at the center of the Universe, within a four-part series of tablets, cornered by the elemental Watchtowers. Beyond the aethyric dimensions is the Astral, the mental circle, the Abyss, the spiritual circle and the divine. The aethyrs themselves are Dr. Dee's thirty otherworldly dimensions of consciousness, which he describes as "angelic" (or Enochian). They can be reached, however, only through the 19 "Keyes" or "Calls", the first 18 of which summon the Angels of the magic squares. The 19th call lifts the magician's mind to the æthyrs and can be used to summon any one of the Aires. Actually there are 49 Calls (Zero being the first), but only the latter 30 are the æthyrs themselves. There are also 92 Governors, whose names can be found in the Watchtowers. At least 3 Governors are assigned to each aethyr. There are also 24 Seniors, 4 Kings, 192 Angels and 128 Demons in the 4 Watchtowers.

It is in his writings about the aethyrs (The Vision and the Voice) that Crowley hides the most important of his teachings. From my own meditations it occurs to me that had Dee received tablets from different angels, such as the fiery, watery or material universes, he might have had real power and not merely airy or "mental" power (not to disparage the power accruing to Knowledge, it being the strongest known to man!). He'd have had Will, Daring and Silence as well. Just so, of Water we cannot speak and of Fire we have not prepared. But of Earth, who has endured preparation and initiation, can venture a call for materialization of a universe. Such possibilities should cause the magus to feel a strong shudder of fear, for according to Babylon, to create a world is to destroy a God.

Thus for "materialization" we'd need new vocabularies to correspond to the hooks (vavs) of the æthyrs. The build-up would be similar, but the "Aires" would now be "Earthes". For instance, PAZ (In Enochian, "Be as they"), might be PAGZ ("Be NOT as they").

Since the Aires are all 3-lettered, presumably Earthes would be 4-lettered, Waters 2-lettered and Fyres 1-lettered. However, if the Ayres all have 3-lettered names, there is a reason for that. The other elementals might have different numbered names only if we think of them as separate and perhaps the 4th is simply the "understood" rest of the quaternity. At any rate, now we see why there are only Aires. We'd better learn their meanings before we attempt any materializations.

(See also: AETHYRS, Aires, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

ALCHEMY

Chemistry is the child of the Alchemists. It's the legacy of "the puffers," those charlatan imitators who tried to fake the production of real gold. Alchemy was called "the Hermetic Science" because it supposedly began with Hermes (or Thoth). Paracelsus saw it chiefly as a means of producing medicine. The classical goals of Alchemy, however, have been to transmute lower metals into gold, to prolong life via an elixir, to search for the Mysterium Magnum, to create a homunculus and to find a universal solvent. This was to be accomplished via the manufacture or discovery of the Lapis Philosophorum, The Sophic Hydrolith, "Our Mercury" or "Philosopher's Stone." Other names for the "Stone" (achieved through the hieros gamos "marriage" of opposites) are: Virgin's Milk, Cock's Egg, Dry Water and similar contradictions. Generally, a cryptic vocabulary is used to disguise psychological and materialistic parallels, e.g. "red lion", "nigredo", etc. There are supposedly seven stages of the alchemical Great Work, which are symbolical as well as chemical/metallurgical steps: Calcination, Putrefaction, Solution, Distillation, Conjunction, Sublimation and Philosophic Congelation. There are also minor, intermediary steps, such as Coloratio, Corrosio, Ceratio, Extractio, Separatio etc.

We should bear in mind, however, that true alchemists consider the Great Work to be not merely aureofaction or the transmogrification of matter, but rather, as Alice Bailey points out "to transfer consciousness to one of the higher vehicles..." In other words, the integrity of the inner transformation is more important than any flashy theatrical results.

According to some theories alchemy is the raising of vibrations. The vegetable kingdom resonates at the lowest level. In between vibrates the animal kingdom. It is for this reason that the extraction of plant essence is easy, while the extraction of mineral essence is extremely difficult. This is also why man, situated midway between the two kingdoms, can, by simultaneously distilling his own essence, assist the mineral.

From a psychological standpoint, any work, on the most general level, is the process of separating the important from the non-essential and the decision as to whether to continue further to distill that residue to any degree of perfection and finally the determination of when the whole is of a piece and completely finished. This process can apply to a work of art, to self-analysis, to the quest for the elixir of life or even, for that matter, to metallurgy - because (according to the Emerald Tablet) all things are one.

It is no accident or coincidence, for instance, that there is a correlation between the atomic numbers of modern physics and the ancient progression of metals in their metamorphosis into gold:

                Lead          82

                Thallium      81

                Mercury       80

                Gold          79

                Platinum      78

The most important alchemical instruction is "Solve et Coagula", but an even more specific hint is "Flee contraction, seek dispersion."

(See also: ALCHEMY, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

Amara-Kosha (Sanskrit). The "immortal vocabulary". The oldest dictionary known in the world and the most perfect vocabulary of classical Sanskrit ; by Amara Sinha, a sage of the second century.

(See also: Amara-Kosha, Theosophy, Spirituality, Body mind and Soul, Spiritual Dictionary, )

Kwan, Kuan (Chinese) Taoist term equivalent to the Sanskrit dhyana (meditation).

"Kuan means originally to 'watch' for omens, and in the dictionaries it is defined as 'looking at unusual things,' as opposed to ordinary seeing or looking. Hence, in accordance with the general 'inward-turning' of Chinese thought and vocabulary, it comes to mean 'what one sees when one in is an abnormal state'; and in Taoist literature it is often practically equivalent to our own mystic world 'Vision.'

The root from which dhyana comes has however nothing to do with 'seeing' but means simply 'pondering, meditating'; and it was only because kuan already possessed a technical sense closely akin to that of dhyana that it was chosen as an equivalent, in preference to some such word as nien, or ssu, which are the natural equivalents" (Waley, The Way and Its Power 119-20).

(See also: Kwan, Kuan, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Occultism, Occultism Dictionary)

Devi: (Sanskrit) "Goddess."

A name of Shakti, used especially in Shaktism.

See: Shakti, Shaktism.

(See also: Devi, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

devoid: Completely without; empty.

(See also: Devoid, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

devonic: Of or relating to the devas or their world. See: deva.

(See also: Devonic, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

devotee: A person strongly dedicated to something or someone, such as to a God or a guru. The term disciple implies an even deeper commitment. See: guru bhakti.

(See also: Devotee, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

Dhammapada: (Sanskrit) The holy book of Buddhism. See: Buddhism.

(See also: Dhammapada, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

Dhanurveda: (Sanskrit) "Science of archery."

A class of ancient texts on the military arts, comprising the Upaveda of the Yajur Veda. Dhanurveda teaches concentration, meditation, hatha yoga, etc., as integral to the science of warfare.

See: Upaveda.

(See also: Dhanurveda, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

dharana: (Sanskrit) "Concentration." From dri, "to hold." See: meditation, raja yoga, shraddadharana, yoga.

(See also: Dharana, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

There are four principal kinds of dharma, as follows. They are known collectively as - chaturdharma: "four religious laws."

1. rita: "Universal law." The inherent order of the cosmos. The laws of being and nature that contain and govern all forms, functions and processes, from galaxy clusters to the power of mental thought and perception.
2. varna dharma: (Sanskrit) "Law of one's kind." Social duty. Varna can mean "race, tribe, appearance, character, color, social standing, etc." Varna dharma defines the individual's obligations and responsibilities within the nation, society, community, class, occupational subgroup and family. An important part of this dharma is religious and moral law. See: jati, varna dharma.
3. ashrama dharma: "Duties of life's stages." Human or developmental dharma. The natural process of maturing from childhood to old age through fulfillment of the duties of each of the four stages of life- brahmachari (student), grihastha (householder), vanaprastha (elder advisor) and sannyasa (religious solitaire)- in pursuit of the four human goals: dharma (righteousness), artha (wealth), kama (pleasure) and moksha (liberation). See: ashrama dharma.
4. svadharma: "Personal path, pattern or obligation." One's perfect individual pattern through life, according to one's own particular physical, mental and emotional nature. Svadharma is determined by the sum of past karmas and the cumulative effect of the other three dharmas. It is the individualized application of dharma, dependent on personal karma, reflected on one's race, community, physical characteristics, health, intelligence, skills and aptitudes, desires and tendencies, religion, sampradaya, family and guru.

(See also: Chaturdharma, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

svadharma: "Personal path, pattern or obligation."

One's perfect individual pattern through life, according to one's own particular physical, mental and emotional nature. Svadharma is determined by the sum of past karmas and the cumulative effect of the other three dharmas. It is the individualized application of dharma, dependent on personal karma, reflected on one's race, community, physical characteristics, health, intelligence, skills and aptitudes, desires and tendencies, religion, sampradaya, family and guru.

(See also: Svadharma, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

rita: "Universal law." The inherent order of the cosmos. The laws of being and nature that contain and govern all forms, functions and processes, from galaxy clusters to the power of mental thought and perception.

(See also: Rita, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

depraved: Immoral; corrupt; bad; perverted.

(See also: Depraved, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)