Etymology And Magic Yaskas Nirukta Flatos Cratylus And Riddle Of Semanticetymologies

Author(s): Johannes Bronkhorst
Publisher: Johannes Bronkhorst

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Johannes Bronkhorst
the appropriate material objects brings the theurgists into contact with the deities they represent."
For our present purposes it is interesting to note that some Neoplatonists, among them Proclus and others, extended these ideas beyond magic to the field of language. There is a similarity between words and objects which is of the same type as the similarity which exists between a god and his statue: "Wie die Konsekrationskunst durch gewisse Symbole und geheime Zeichen die Standbilder den Göttern ähnlich macht .... so bildet auch die Gesetzgebungskunst... die Wörter als Standbilder der Dinge, indem sie bald durch solche bald durch andere Laute die Natur der Dinge abbildet." And again: "Just as the demiurgic intellect brings into existence in matter the appearances of the very first Forms it contains in itself, produces temporal images of eternal beings, divisible images of indivisible beings, and from beings which are really beings produces images which have the consistency of shadow, in the same way. I think, our scientific knowledge also, which takes as its model the productive activity of the Intellect, makes by means of discourse similitudes of all the other realities and particularly of the gods themselves:... Since then it produces the names in that way, our scientific knowledge presents them in this ultimate degree as images of divine beings; in fact it produces each name as a statue of the gods, and just as theurgy invoked the generous goodness of the gods with a view to the illumination of statues artificially constructed, so also intellective knowledge related to divine beings, by composition and divisions of articulated sounds, reveals the hidden being of the gods."47
45 Note that a Christian author like Pseudo-Dionysius does not hesitate to describe the eucharist as theurgy. Here "[t]he bread and wine are representations of divine power in the same way that divine names are statues" (Janowitz, 1991: 370). For divine names as 'statues, see below.
46 Procli diadochi in Platonis Cratylum commentaria, ed. G. Pasquali. Leipzig 1908, p. 191. 12 ff. Tr. Hirschle, 1979: 12.
47 Platonic Theology (ed. H.D. Saffrey and L.G. Westerink, Paris 1968 f.) bk. 1, chap. 29. pp. 123-124. Tr. Janowitz, 1991: 368-369. See also Shaw, 1995: 179 ff. ("Naming the Gods").
Etymology and Magic
Since, then, words imitate their objects, one can arrive at a knowledge of objects through words, especially through etymologizing, i.e.. through the constituent syllables of the words (Hirschle, 1979: 20),** Be it noted that Proclus distinguishes three kinds of words: divine. daemonic, and human. Divine words are closest to their objects, they are 'coexistent with them, daemonic words less so, and human words have only limited similarity with their objects. Obviously human words are least capable of consequent etymological analysis. The situation is quite different with the secret names of gods, whose efficacy is the result of specially efficacious combinations of sounds." Hirschle (1979: 27-28) draws in this connection attention to certain secret names of gods found in Greek magical papyri from Egypt, which belong to no known language: "Es sind scheinbar bedeutungslose Namen, nichts anderes als bizarre Lautkombinationen, die bis zu 100 und mehr Buchstaben umfassen können". The parallelism with the meaningless bijamantras of Tantrism is striking. Both in India and in the Hellenistic world, it appears, the search for the elementary constituents of language went hand in hand with the postulation of higher levels of language, in which ordinary meanings are no longer present.
This is of course not the place for a general exposition of Neoplatonic philosophy as a whole, of which the above ideas about magic and etymologizing are part. For our present purposes it suffices to retain the following observation: Neoplatonism explained both the effectiveness of magical rites and the revealing potential of etymologies with the help of one mechanism, that of cosmic sympathy. Cosmic sympathy creates a network that links similar objects, and similar words, to
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8 This interest in non-historical etymologies is all the more striking in view of the fact that someone like Varro, many centuries before Proclus, seems to have made what he considered were historical etymologies (Pfaffel. 1980; cf. Barwick, 1957: 66 f.; Desbordes, 1991: 150). Regarding Plotinus' views on etymologizing, see Heiser. 1991: 20: "Plotinus himself has no comment to make on Plato's project in the Cratylus. and his occasional use of a Platonic etymology is not enough to indicate his view of the matter."
According to lamblichus, the seven vowels were connatural with the seven planetary gods; Shaw, 1995: 185 (