Were it uttered on earth, fire would burst from the ground.”[110]
The knowledge of this name by another enabled him to exert a power over the god himself. That by naming a demon, he can be forced to appear, was a cardinal principle of ancient magic. “The list of divine names possessed by the Roman pontiffs in their indigitamenta was their most efficacious magical instrument, laying at their mercy all the forces of the spirit world.”[111]
For this reason, the gods of ancient Egypt sedulously concealed their names, and we cannot doubt that it was the fear of some such subjection of their deity through the malicious use of his name, which led the early Jews to conceal it so well that it is now lost. It was the same with the Semitic Arabians. Instead of the true divine name, they substituted Allah, the Mighty One, so that now the original is conjectural or unknown.
This extends to the rudest tribes. The African traveller Holub says that the actual name of the god of the Marutse and allied tribes along the Zambesi river is Njambe; but to avoid revealing this, they employ the term Molemo, “He above.” Among the south-eastern Australian tribes their leading deity is Turramulun (the One-legged), who lives in the sky. His name is never revealed to women, nor to youths before their initiation to manhood.[112]
The Choctaw Indians regarded the name of their highest divinity as self-existing, essential, and unspeakable. Therefore, when it was necessary to refer to him, they adopted a circumlocution, for, says their historian, “according to their fixed standard of speech, had they made any nearer approach to the beloved Name, it would have been reckoned a profanation.”[113]
How completely this notion has survived among ourselves is shown by the second clause of that prayer on which we have all been brought up, “Hallowed be Thy Name.” But how few who repeat it reflect that the name referred to, whatever it was, is now through long concealment totally lost!
Thus we see that the doctrine of “the ineffable Name” is the common property of savage and cultured faiths.
From the misuse of the name to compel the obedience of the god, or to injure his dignity and worth, came the idea of profanity, sternly forbidden by the early Jewish law,—“Take not the name of the Lord in vain”—and by many other faiths of a primitive aspect.
Quite consistently with this idea of real existence in names, the god who had many names had just as many powers or faculties. For that reason, the prominent gods of ancient Egypt, especially Isis, were called upon by so numerous epithets that the Greeks spoke of them as “myrionomous,” ten-thousand-named. In later Babylonian times all the names of the fifty great gods were ascribed to Êa, by which process they were themselves absorbed into his being. “When they lost their names, they lost their personality as well.”[114] To the Mohammedan the “One hundred names of God” repeated in the Koran express the multitude of His powers.
The same tendency is visible in the native religions of America. The Mexicans applied many names to the same divinity, and in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiches, the chief deity is called by a variety of titles, some sounding strange to us, as “the opossum-hunter,” the “green snake,” the “calebash,” all of symbolic sense.[115]