The ancient Egyptians were obsessed with the spoken word as a religious and metaphysical tool. It is this obsession which is the source of the Bible narrative. In Genesis, the Lord speaks, ‘Let there be light’, and it was so. God spoke his creation into existence. You can create your own world through this same magickal, metaphysical power. The Jews were forbidden to speak God’s name: here was a religious taboo on the spoken word, a taboo again originating with the Egyptians who were forbidden to speak their gods’ secret names, as opposed to their public names.
Prayers, spells, invocations, and so on, all consist, of course, of words. Words are the expressions, the materializations of thought. The power of a thought is doubled when it is spoken, as it has been transferred from the inner to the outer, being magnified in the process. Once words are spoken in magickal fashion, as in a wish or in a spell, they are heard and recorded by the universe. When the words are spoken with conviction their effect is strengthened. But how can the words make the wish come true? There are various metaphysical explanations, but they are complex and we need not concern ourselves with them; just as we need not concern ourselves with how we receive light when we switch it on. The correlation between a spoken wish and its manifestation in reality cannot be measured scientifically, for we are in the realms of magick. Magick is an expression of the irrational, and the irrational has its own strange logic, just as dreams with their bizarre images and sequences follow a strange inner logic.
