The Divine Name
In Jewish mysticism great emphasis is placed upon the importance
of the Divine Name. It is said to consist of 42 letters;
not, as Moses Maimonides pointed out, comprised in one word,
but in a phrase of several words that convey an exact notion of
the essence of God. With the priestly decadence in the last days
of the Temple, a name of 12 letters was substituted for the Divine
Name, and as time went on even this secondary name was
not divulged to every priest, only to a few. The longer name was
sometimes said to contain 45 or 72 letters. The ten Sefiroth are
also supposed, in a mystical sense, to be the names of the Deity
(see Kabala). The Divine Name Yahveh is greater than I am
that I am, since the latter signifies God as he was before the
creation, the Absolute, the Unknowable, the Hidden One,
while but the former denotes the Supreme Manifestation, the
immanence of God in the Cosmos.
In the course of time, the Divine Name was preserved as a
tradition but only whispered aloud once a year by the high
priest when he entered the Holy of Holies in the temple on the
Day of Atonement. In general usage, the Name was indicated
by secondary terms such as Elohim (the god), Adonai (the Lord),
or Sabaoth (Lord of Hosts) to avoid the true names being profaned.
The Shemhamforash (Name That Rusheth Through the
Universe) was the greatest of mysteries of kabalistic folklore,
which contains many stories of its power, telling how correct utterance
of this supreme sound could hasten the redemption of
a sick and sinful world. The creative power of divine utterance
is indicated in Genesis in the phrase and God said, which
precedes creation; this is repeated in the Christian fourth gospel
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with
God and the Word was God (John 11).
The concept of the Logos as the Word of God, immanent and
creative, derived from Philo Judaeus of Alexandria in the first
half-century of the Christian era. Philo fused together traditional
Jewish teachings from the Talmud and the Hellenistic
philosophy of Greece (influenced by Hindu mysticism). The
72-syllable name became the Tetragrammaton of four-syllable
form. A Christian Kabalist of the sixteenth century developed
a Pentagrammaton said to increase the power of the Tetragrammaton
by adding the letter S to express the name of Jesus.
According to Hindu mysticism, the universe was created
through divine utterance, symbolized by a Trigrammaton of
three letters A-U-M. This sacred sound prefixes and concludes
reading of Hindu scriptures, and a whole scripture (Mandukya
Upanishad) is devoted to its symbolism. AUM is often rendered
as OM, the middle syllable being implicit in correct pronunciation,
and its repetition constitutes one of the more popular Indian
mantras.
Sources
Schaya, Leo. The Universal Meaning of the Kabbalah. Baltimore,
MD Penguin Books, 1973.
Wood, Thomas E. The Mandukya Upanishad and the Agama
Shastra An Investigation into the Meaning of the Vedanta. Honolulu
University of Hawaii Press, 1990.
