12 September 2002: The Ineffable Name of God

Tuesday night was the final session of the Trinity Lab. These labs are psychic depth charges; they release their payloads of wisdom, magic, and inspiration deep in the subconscious, to float to the surface piece by piece, over time. Already, things are surfacing. Information. Text. A lot of it is text. I wish I’d left myself time to write this semester, but I haven’t. I’ve got to get ready for work, but I wish I could just sit here and write all day.

I miss Zann, I miss Gemrise, I miss Moly.

Lexicat is back! Woot woot!

I recently went back and read the first couple of dozen entries in Geminica’s journal archive, from the Summer of 1999. Reading Geminica’s writing always reminds me to pay more attention to the simple pleasures, like the blackberries growing in my backyard. I went out in my bathrobe yesterday morning and picked a peck of them to eat on my cereal.

YHVH. Yod He Vau He. The Tetragrammaton, the Ineffable Name of God. Like all the truest things, it cannot be pronounced. In the temple services of my ancient ancestors, when the Rabbi would read from the Torah, every time he came to the Tetragrammaton, some dude standing by would crash a pair of cymbals together (this was a prearranged ritual for representing with the ineffability of the Name, not a tactic that people used to heckle Rabbis).

Most Jews could tell you that the Tetragrammaton cannot be spoken because no one knows what the vowel sounds are or where they should go, and that the ambiguity of the vowel sounds is deliberate, because the unspeakability of the Tetragrammaton honors its sacredness.

A good Kabbalist (and I am one) could tell you another reason that the Tetragrammaton cannot be spoken: it’s a formula. It’s not so much a proper noun as the representation of a process or function. As such, attempting to phonetically pronounce it, as if it were a word, is like attempting to phonetically pronounce eiø = cos ø + i sin ø.

Doing the Trinity Lab, I had occasion to experience the Name of God somatically (only partially, of course, or I wouldn’t be able to be writing this). And one of the first bits of verbal information to surface in my consciousness in the aftermath of the Lab was this: the Tetragrammaton is onomotopoeic.