Tetragrammaton in Palaeo-Hebrew, ancient Aramaic and modern Hebrew scripts created by Zappaz and Bryan Derksen for Wikipedia and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
(5) NOMANCY / ONOMANCY
“The name is the thing, and the true name is the true thing.”
Yes – we’re talking the divination or magic of names. Although typically it involves not just any names, particularly the names we so casually toss about for ourselves in our daily lives, but true names or names of power, even if they have to be discovered through nomancy or onomancy itself, sometimes to those who have forgotten or don’t know their own true name or nature.
“A person’s true name might be self-determined, or bestowed on them by someone else — possibly in a religious or magical ritual, or it could be stolen, or given away”. It also tends to be something a person or being jealously guards or keeps secret – although that often applies to names in general, as with Odysseus with his name to Polyphemus.
A true name perfectly describes something’s essential nature – one might well say its soul or spirit – and knowing a true name gives one power over the owner of the name.
It is a concept with a long pedigree in mythology and folklore which I suspect originates in prehistory with human language itself and our ability to vocalise or for verbal thought, which often seem magical of themselves.
Some of the most striking illustrations of it are in the Bible, particularly in the creation myths of Genesis – from God essentially naming or speaking creation into existence to Adam naming the animals. True names might be said to reflect the divine language of heaven or the primal language of creation.
Interestingly, that goes for the name of God as well and there’s a whole running theme in or from the Bible about the power of God’s true name or names – from the Tetragrammaton (or four letters YHWH representing God) to the multiple or secret names of God giving power over creation, hence the various taboos revolving around the name (or names) of God (including one of the Ten Commandments).
I would argue that it also underlies the concept of Plato’s Forms – indeed, it might be argued that one’s true name essentially corresponds to one’s Form. It also perhaps underlies magic words or incantations in general.
There is even a myth, whether it has any historical truth or otherwise, that the city of Rome had a true name, safeguarded and kept secret lest her enemies learn of it to curse her or gain power over her.
All that is very well but it doesn’t seem to make for much by way of a method of divination – except of course to divine a true name as part of magic. Well, perhaps for things like those childhood or adolescent games in which one “calculates” the compatibility of a crush or love interest, although they tend to involve alphanumeric keys based on letters.
As a system or school of magic, it comes close even to oneiromancy as arguably the original source of all divination, as well as magic and religion in general – the ability to shape reality to our conceptual and verbal thought, perhaps even to define things into existence.
Not coincidentally, it is a concept that often underlies or is at least invoked by game mechanics for magic in Dungeons and Dragons – although not as a core mechanic given its potential power. Hence the class of truenamer, which on paper was a decent concept, but its actual mechanics in game play were so bad that it was widely acknowledged to be so hopelessly broken as the worst class of the game.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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