Yes, names [and words] are either _beneficent_ or _maleficent_; they are, in a certain sense, either venomous or health‐giving, according to the hidden influences attached by Supreme Wisdom to their elements, that is to say, to the _letters_ which compose them, and the _numbers_ correlative to these letters.
This is strictly true as an esoteric teaching accepted by all the Eastern Schools of Occultism. In the Sanskrit, as also in the Hebrew and all other alphabets, every letter has its occult meaning and its _rationale_: it is a cause and an effect of a preceding cause, and a combination of these very often produces the most magical effect. The vowels, especially, contain the most occult and formidable potencies. The _Mantras_ (magical rather than religious invocations, esoterically) are chanted by the Brâhmans, and so are the rest of the _Vedas_ and other Scriptures.
The “Army of the Voice” is the prototype of the “Host of the Logos,” or the “Word,” of the _Sepher Jetzirah_, called in the Secret Doctrine the “One Number issued from No‐Number”—the One Eternal Principle. The Esoteric Theogony begins with the One Manifested (therefore not eternal in its presence and being, if eternal in its essence), the Number of the Numbers and Numbered—the latter proceeding from the Voice, the feminine Vâch, “of the hundred forms,” Shatarûpâ, or Nature. It is from this Number, 10, or Creative Nature, the Mother (the Occult cypher, or “0,” ever procreating and multiplying in union with the unit “1,” or the Spirit of Life), that the whole Universe proceeds.
In the _Anugîtâ_,(164) a conversation is given between a Brâhmana and his wife on the origin of Speech and its Occult properties. The wife asks how Speech came into existence, and which was prior to the other, Speech or Mind. The Brâhmana tells her that the Apâna (_inspirational __ breath_) becoming lord, changes that intelligence, which does not understand Speech or Words, into the state of Apâna, and thus opens the Mind. Thereupon he tells her a story, a dialogue between Speech and Mind. Both went to the Self of Being (_i.e._, to the individual Higher Self, as Nîlakantha thinks; to Prajâpati, according to the commentator Arjuna Mishra), and asked him to destroy their doubts, and decide which of them preceded and was superior to the other. To this the Lord said: “Mind (is superior).” But Speech answered the Self of Being, by saying: “I verily yield (you) your desires,” meaning that by Speech he acquired what he desired. Thereupon again, the Self told her that there are two Minds, the “movable” and the “immovable.” “The immovable is with me,” he said, “the movable is in your dominion” (_i.e._ of Speech), on the plane of matter. “To that you are superior.”