Magick Without Tears

68 The God-Letters Cara Soror, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Maybe it was Devanagari that began it! This "sacred" character , used rightly for Sanskrit alone , is supposed (so Allan Bennett told me) to be constructed on-can one call them ideographic?-principles. The upright line is the soft palate ; the horizontal the hard ; and the line between them shows the position of the tongue when one pronounces the letter. He demonstrated this most elegantly for the letter T ( ); but I was never able to follow this up with most of the other fifty-five (isn't it?) letters . However, it did start me thinking (why?) about the possibility of a direct relation between the sound of a letter and its meaning in some primitive manner of speech. So I used to alarm my fellow-citizens , usually passengers on a liner, by spending most of my time repeating some unhappy letter over and over, while I looked into my mind to see if the sound suggested any particular idea. (It was rather fun, you know ; but it was most certainly one of the most delicate , subtle , and difficult experiments that I have ever undertaken .) Bound to flop, obviously, from the word "gun," if only because the same-sounding word in different languages-sometimes even in the same!-has often not merely diverse, but diametrically opposed, meanings. Think of Bog, or Bug, the Russian word for God (I do think 407