If such was the case with the names of men and beasts, how sacred must be the names of the gods!
This is an extraordinary feature, common to the rudest superstitions of savage and the most developed faiths of civilised lands, and it has for its basis the conception of the name as a real attribute, a part of the Self.
“In all the religions of ancient Asia,” writes Lenormant, “the mysterious Name was considered a real and divine being, who had a personal existence and exclusive power over both nature and the world of spirits.”[109]
In the name dwelt the essential power of the deity. An Egyptian magical formula, placed in the mouth of a god, reads:
“I am the elect of millions of years. Were my name spoken on the bank of a river, it would be consumed; 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]