Book of the Hidden Name - Magick of the Shem HaMephorash Angels - Caitus X 2020
Concerning the Shem HaMeophorash
When there enters into it a glow from the Divine, the soul gathers strength, spreads true wings, and, however distracted by its proximate environment, speeds its buoyant way to something greater; ... its very nature bears it upwards, lifted by the Giver of that love. ... Surely we need not wonder that It possesses the power to draw the soul to Itself, calling it back from every wandering to rest before It. From It came everything; nothing is mightier.
-PLOTINUS
The adept magician’s goal is to create a union with God, Source, the Divine Creator of the Universe. One way to achieve this is with the correct invocation of one of the Divine’s hidden names. The system of working with the Shem HaMephorash Angels is named from the Hebrew “Shem Ha Mephorasch,” which is translated to mean “the Explicit Name” and was used to refer to the name of God, the Source of Creation of the Universe.
Even the novice magician is aware of the importance of the Holy Name of God, the Tetragrammaton, YHVH, or as written by Edgar Cayce as YAHVAH, As the Hebrews were forbidden to utter this name except for in rare ritual circumstances, over the course of two millennia, it has become subsequently necessary to vocalize the separate letters for invocation in the manner “Yod Heh Vav Heh”.
Practical Kabbalah can be defined as the interpretation of scripture through the sacred letters within the Hebrew alphabet. The letters of the alphabet themselves also possess numerical values. Gematria’s art is the interpretation by a numerical value, whereas the art of Temura relies on cryptographic sciences to locate hidden meanings within passages.
Kabbalistic knowledge propagates that our entire system, the Universe in which we live, was created according to the name of God composed of 4 letters Jehovah יהוה - “Yod-He-Vô-He”. It turns out that Hebrew has a particular aversion to vowels so that this name had to be adapted to other peoples, languages, etc., generating different changes, but maintaining the original formula in most cases.
The name Jehovah is a derivative of this name, even changing the meaning since, in Hebrew, the words are written from right to left. So we have this name, when we remove its vowels so that the consonants remain, it is JHVH, and in the original position, it refers to HVHJ.
God’s name can also be represented by a single letter, the “Yod” whose character is symbolic of a point “י”, the source particle from which all existence came forth. The four-letter name יהוה - “Yod Heh Vav Heh” is representative of everything in manifest in our plane and beyond.
Each Hebrew letter is represented by a number like this:
the letter Yod (I or J or י) represents the number 10
the letter “Heh” (H or ה) represents the number 5
the letter “Vav” (V or ו), represents the number 6
the letter “Heh” (H or ה) represents the number 5
The name HaShem or Adonai is used in place of God’s name, and other pronunciations include Yahweh and Jehovah, derived by using the vowels of Adonai with JHVH. So, Kabbalists used gematria in an attempt to find clues to the name of God so that its power could once again be used. The Tetragrammaton triangle is built upon this foundation with “Yod-Heh-Vav-Heh”, the first figure created by the union of three lines. Thus the names “Yod” (“י” Living God - Father), “Yah ’(“יה “True God - Son) and” Yaho “(“יהו “Holy God - Holy Spirit) are formed. The gematria calculated as a result of this format results in the following:
Y = (10) 10
YH = (10 + 5) 15
YHV = (10 + 5 + 6) 21
YHVH = (10 + 5 + 6 + 5) 26
10 + 15 + 21 + 26 = 72
Finding the number seventy-two, Kabbalists turned to the Torah and looked for all possible clues for anything that might add up to seventy-two. What they found was genuinely awe-inspiring. Within the Torah, they found three consecutive verses, each containing seventy-two letters, the Book of Exodus, Chapter 14 verses 19, 20, and 21. These are the verses narrate Israel’s children’s journey, made possible by the Red Sea parting. It seems fitting that the context of these verses should be centered around such a powerful event.
The seventy-two names of God are derived from triplets created from the three adjacent verses. When the permutation method of Temurah is applied to Exodus 14:19, 14:20 & 14:21 using a technique known as Boustaphedron or “as the ox plows,” The 216 letter name of God can be found to create seventy-two triple letter words. The names were discovered using the following formula:
The first verse, Exodus 14:19 is written and each character becomes the first letter of each name
“And the angel of God, which went before the camp of Israel, removed and went behind them; and the pillar of the cloud went from before them,and stood behind them”
Exodus 14:20 is written backwards to create the second row and second letter of each name
“And it came between the camp of the Egyptians and the camp of Israel; and it was a cloud of darkness,but it gave light by night:so that the one came not near the other all the night.”
Exodus 14:21 creates the last letters of each triplet by writing it forwards
“And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the LORD caused the sea to go by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea dry and the waters were divided.”
Dividing 216 letters of these three verses into these sub-name triplets in new permutations is what creates the secret of the seventy-two letter name. These then are the seventy-two Angels bearing the hidden names and are divided into nine sets of eight, organized under nine choirs of Angels.
Ancient occultists of Kaballistic traditions created this system. With this system, the seventy-two angels are appointed to a divided aspect of God’s manifestations and thus illuminated their respective powers. These angels are often called the Guardians or Teaching Angels, who are inhabitants of ten Sephira, with twenty-two paths interconnecting them along the Tree of Life. Each can encourage and motivate us to make positive changes in our lives and carry out our requests. Once you have contacted these angels, they will prompt you to work hard and to build upon your existing talents and skills by awakening aspects of divine consciousness that exist within us.
Through these correspondences, we may identify the angels responsible for the manifestation of various forces in our reality. It is also a collection of seventy-two names that embody the wheel of the Zodiac. These names operate with tremendous spiritual vibration, and it is with great responsibility that they are wielded.
Before it was destroyed by the Romans, once a year on Yom Kippur, the Kohen Gadol (High Priest of Israel) would enter the Kadshei Kadashim, known as the Holy of Holies, which was the innermost and most sacred part of the Temple of Jerusalem and located at the West end of the Temple. This was the only day that the Kadshei Kadashim would be accessed, and it was only entered upon by the Kohen Gadol himself. In Solomon’s Temple, this chamber enshrined the original Aron Habit, known as the Ark of the Covenant.
Within the chamber of the Kadshei Kadashim, The Kohen Gadol would recite the seventy-two names in a secret format, which was only passed verbally only from one high priest to the next. This ritual was conducted as part of the ceremony on Yom Kippur for the priest to atone for his sins and that of the priesthood and draw power and guidance for the coming year. When the Romans killed the last Kohen Gadol, the secret died with him, and this secret formula has not re-manifested.
You may find it confusing that some of the angel names are incredibly similar or duplicate in nature. Due to the Hebrew characters’ configuration and transliteration, these language issues arise; however, note that the correspondences and invocation do differ, so there is no concern of mistakenly calling forth the incorrect angel for your operation.
The various systems of working with these names have developed over time. The layers created by these developments have resulted in a winding path of correspondences, some of which conflict in their nature. The Sefer Raziel HaMalakh or “The Book of Raziel the Angel” is a grimoire attributed to Archangel Raziel. This book’s legend is that it was given to Adam as he was leaving Eden, and eventually made it’s way to both the prophet Enoch as well as King Solomon.
It is said that the book was lost for over a thousand years before reappearing. The Sefer Raziel we have available today is partially attributed to Eleazar of Worms (1160—1237). Until this point, most of the information regarding the 72-fold name is scattered into many documents creating difficulty in making use of the essential material.
The earliest organized works on the angels of the Shem HaMephorash are found in the Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s7 Three Books of Occult Philosophy, in which tables of reference Angels are clearly listed and a primer in working with their energy is provided. There are several more detailed descriptions within the Blaise de Vigenère’s Arsenal 2495 Manuscript8 as well as the works of Dr. Thomas Rudd, who attributes each of the angels as balancing energy against when interacting with the Spirits of Solomon found within the Ars Goetia. Œedipus Aegyptiacus by Athanasius Kircher further developed the system and integrated them into his working of magickal cosmology. Kircher added the additional name title correspondence in Latin and the codified invocation scriptures (seventy-one of which being psalms, and Angel number seventy which is attributed to Genesis 1:1 which contains the trigram of the seventieth name “יֹבֵמֵ” (Yod Bet Mem) within the scripture. Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, in his works for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn as well as The Societas Rosicruciana, discovered additional correspondences with the Angels.
Using these systems, one can find correspondences as well for each of the days of the year. Each angel exercises authority over a quinance or is half of a decan (five days) while each sign of the Zodiac has three decanates, which derive from the proper celestial sphere. Members of this angelic realm oversee specific twenty-minute intervals daily. The corresponding date associated with the angel is, in many cases, considered to reveal the guardian angel of an individual born on that particular date. This concept must not be confused with the personal Holy Guardian Angel’s presence as described in The Book of Abramelin.
Each of the Shem HaMephorash angels have specific qualities that distinguish their characteristics and their particular angelic responsibilities. The angel’s particular sacred task is to reveal to us, when merited, poignant and useful power and guidance from the Divine to be expressed through our lives.