The Magician's Dictionary

GALILEAN

Preferred term for "christian" by non-christians, since it avoids the messianic designation.

GANESHA

Hindu elephant-headed God of Wisdom and Literature, who is invoked at the beginnings of all undertakings. He is also the God of those who have been disfigured or maimed through heroism, in the line of duty or through no fault of their own. His original head was severed because he once barred the door of his mother's (Parvati's) bath from his father (Siva). His mother replaced it with the elephant's head, as the first thing she could find. He then lost a tusk trying to prevent Rama from disturbing Shiva's sleep. The elephant's head enables him to overcome every obstacle in his path. He also rides on the back of a mouse attribute (or familiar), which grants him access to small places.

GARGOPHIAS

The 13th guardian of the dark Tarot. A parallel of the High Priestess. Grant calls it batrachian witchcraft, Hecate's, the goddess Frog-Head. As the High Priestess watches implacably at the cliff edge of the Abyss for the magician to make his solitary leap, Gargophias waits for him to leap into the depths of sexual union (the mating of Chaos and Time). Her magic is dream interpretation and clairvoyance. The disease of Gargophias is menstrual malfunction.

GEBURAH

The fifth qabalistic power chakra on the Tree of Life. It is important because it stands at the top of the pillar of "severity," just under the triangle of the upper "temple." It may also be said to represent one of the serpents entwined about the caduceus. Geburah (courage, heroism) is the abode of Mars and represents the will, discipline and perseverance necessary for the progress of the magician.

GEHENNA

Hell. The incinerator for rubbish. Here children were sacrificed to Moloch.

GEMATRIA

The Judaic esoteric tradition of interpreting words with the same numerical value as being significantly related.

GEMINI

A bipolar sign of opposites, hence the "twins." It is both creative (the twin with the lyre) and destructive (the twin with the club). It is the sign of all things pertaining to Hermes, Mercury or Thoth, that is, of intercourse between differing segments of reality or society and the intellect or intelligence: writing, communications media, bohemia, detection, medicine, fashion, crossroads, markets, theaters, dens of thieves, traveling, etc. Its element, of course, is air and its animal sometimes ascribed to the monkey (Thoth, the babboon-headed).

Well-known Geminians include: Mesmer, Elsa Maxwell, Bob Dylan, Emerson, Bennett Cerf, Gucci, Duchess of Windsor, Pauline Kael, Escher, Stravinsky, Pascal, Judy Garland, Velikovsky, Peter the Great, Allen Ginsberg, Josephine Baker, Christine Jorgensen, Bob Hope, Herman Wouk, Dante, Arthur Conan Doyle, Isadora Duncan, Dionne Quintuplets, Marilyn Monroe, Marquis de Sade, Sartre, Jefferson Davis.

GENOME

The entire gene-picture of man. So far we have named about 1% of the 1,000 or more genetic elements. To know them all means we would know the secrets of life, death and evolution.

GEOMANCY

Divination by means of interpreting marks in sand or thrown pebbles. The most common system involves random taps of a pencil over a grid composed of 16 squares, each containing a certain number of dots. The dot patterns have various names (Via, Carcer, Puella, Acquisitio, Rubeus, etc.) and esoteric meanings. The entire system is fully described in The Complete Golden Dawn System of Magic.

GIANTS

(See NEPHELIM.) in Norse mythology, we read how the giants plotted to bring down the Gods and sent three evil giantesses to Asgard. Gulveig-Hoder became Loki's wife and counseled him in evil. Thus we see that it is not Judaism alone that attributes evil to woman -- but this is no more than a seeming, for the Yin is only the negative, the absence that must stand apart from anything in order to give it substance. The Greeks called the giants "Titans" and amongst the jews they were the nephelim. So we must distinguish between the giants and the gods. The giants are the demiurgic forces, while the Gods are the higher aspects of man, his higher consciousness. The giants are also the "demons" of the Unconscious.

GLAMOUR

Glamour didn't always refer to the quality of a movie star. It is actually a corruption of grammar or gramarye, a word with two meanings: 1) grammar and 2) magic.

Magic has much to do with the casting of spells (and spelling goes back to Gematria and the meanings of the letters of words, an insight that the Jews picked up from the Egyptians). Once again, the connection between language and magic is quite clear. Remember, Gods are really cosmic magicians who create and mutate things through the Word and human magicians achieve their ends by invocation, evocation, chants, mantras, orisons, etc. All things are as they are because of the words we give to them.

Example, a mushroom can be called either a psychedelic or a death-dealing toadstool. Or if you call a man a king then he is a king and if you call him a fool then he is a fool. Grammar in the schoolroom sense is also magic, for knowing exactly and correctly how to phrase your thoughts you thereby affect reality for precision or imprecision.

Vedanta is even more specific. Vedanta actually means linguistic grammar.

GNOMES

As of this writing I have not yet begun preparation for the other initiations, so I know only the earth intelligences: the gnomes, those peculiar dwarfs, known to Paracelsus, who dwell in the earth and are the guardians of its treasures. They have rather a "Gypsy" nature and gather festively at times in lovely hidden valleys covered with wildflowers and secret, sunlit meadows midway between the dreaming planes and the Malkuthian sphere, which is the Enigma of "The World." Children often dream of the "good people" or seem to remember them from the dim, nostalgic past of their infancy. Their friendship guarantess you will never want and with the gnomes in attendance, physical objects no longer break down when you use them or get in the way when you no longer need them. If you want the gnomes to protect you, they will provide a very strong physical defense system -- good locks and keys, thick walls, secrecy, etc. Confrontation and violence, however, are not their fortes.

Forunately, the gnomes are easily accessible, as they spring up continually from the earth around us. They are as eager to "use" us as we are to "use" them. The reason is that somehow the gnomes complement us and we help one another reciprocally by earthing and releasing opposing 'volutions (our e-volution, their in-volution) -- or rather, our entropy is grounded in the elementals while negentropy from them is anodically charged in spirit for us. The result in us is matter released in the form of creation, accumulation of wealth, whereas from us they learn how to collect energy into stasis or density.

In simpler terms, they are engaged in a downward spiral of involution toward ultimate crystallization. We, on the other hand, are engaged in the upward, evolutionary struggle towards total liberation of the spirit from its prison of flesh. Both we and the earth elementals occupy contrasting realms of reality normally inaccessible to one another. So the gnomes seek to unload on us the burden of their physical powers and material riches, as we seek to transcend the appetites of the flesh. In the mysterious exchange between our different levels of being the gnomes acquire from us the concretizations they need in order to shed abstraction and draw more deeply inward to their infinitely dense centers. We, on the other hand, discover a new respect within ourselves for the physical universe and a subtler understanding of how it operates. This enables us to work creatively with forms until we can free ourselves and break out of matter altogether. By learning how to stand on the earth firmly, trusting and depending upon its support, we can make successful launchings into "outer space".

The simplest rituals will attract earth elementals. They appreciate kindness and will meet generosity with redoubled generosity of their own. But you must avoid coarseness, grouchiness or impatience of any kind. Gnomes dislike these traits intensely. And any hint of laziness or greed acts as a repellant and the complementing is aborted.

GNOSIS

Knowing (with certainty, as opposed to Agnostic) or a specific teaching. Originally, Gnosticism was a pre-Xtian eclectic system with roots going back to Babylon, Egypy, Judaism, Zoroaster and the Greeks. It sprang up in Xtianity, probably through the Essenes. Their belief, essentially, is that the universe was created by an evil Demiurge (Yaldabaoth) and the real God dwells in a higher region of light completely out of touch with us. Since the world is evil, procreation is a great sin, because to bring children into the world is to perpetuate the evil condition. Arabic for Gnosis: Ma'arifat.

The chief difference between Xtians and Gnostic Xtians, however, was that the Gnostics insisted that Jesus was but a symbol of the cosmic consciousness already present in everyone. They insisted on the maxim, Know thyself and, for them, to be a Christian meant to become a Christ oneself. Orthodox Xtians insisted upon making Christ into an historical, flesh and blood personage called Jesus. Henceforth the argument of the priests would be that their God was genuine because he had historical reality, whereas all other gods were only myths. As our gods are assimilated by us, they inevitably become symbols while the common man worships his gods as idealized bodies of a philosophy he can never hope to understand.

The original and most fantastic Gnosis (out of which the Xtian version arose) derived from leakages from the Egyptian mysteries. The main body, however, died out with the priests who kept their silence.

GOAT

The goat has been chosen as the symbol of lust because, as Horapollo observed, it mates and even ejaculates (in sterility) the very first week after its birth.

GOD

Anything from a psychic projection to a full macrocosmic individual. Einstein, shunning Judeo-Xtian pleadings, defined God as the ultimate natural order. Deus est homo. Man is God. Indeed all beings are Gods or immortal entities. The Gods, as such, however, inhabit various levels of substantiality and, as superior entities, exist independently in their own right. And this is not just because strong personalities (as well as human society in general) create and batten projections and archetypes, but because semi-being actually wills itself to be born into that state between Matter and the Void. the Gods are being itself, rather than any particular substance. That is, they are pure substance or the conscious potentiality behind substance. Every mortal, Theosophy has pointed out, has his divine counterpart, his celestial doppelganger or heavenly prototype. It is this personal archetype that we call The Father (or Guardian Angel). Theophany is the rare union (in adepts) of the heavenly counterpart with its earth shadow-self. The divine archetypes are not confined to ordinary human beings, moreover, but ascend to ever more infinite celestial monads themselves. When we speak of The Gods or the God beyond the Gods, such as Allfather Odin or Zeus, Father of the Gods we refer to just these higher monads.

It is difficult to remember that all seemingly separate things -- all individuals -- created themselves out of the Original Void and go on forever creating themselves. Thus, spirit manifests itself through matter; we never cease to embody and demonstrate divinity -- sometimes wisely, more often not. It is the gravest error to reproduce and propagate life indiscriminately. Such attempts to reincarnate oneself on the merely material plane, to maintain the same identity perptually through the generation of progeny -- this form of lust vitiates the Spirit and greedily confines matter disproportionately to a single, inferior and separationist aim. That in turn results in premature entropy and the abortion of Cosmic Purpose.

We should distinguish between various divine synonyms. Daimon, for instance, did not, amongst the Greeks, have our sense of demon, but was rather a spirit or higher self. Socrates spoke often of his daimon who conversed with him. The Sanskrit deva, although translated god, amongst the Hindus means any God, but in the Zend Avesta it is always a malevolent spirit. In Buddhism deva refers to almost anything from a legendary hero to a hobgoblin, but pure Buddhism attaches no importance to Gods of any kind. It considers them to be illusions, like everything else.

Whether reflective of reality or not, it is easy enough to plot an origin for God in the singular, but whence the proliferation of multi-deities? In Egypt they were seen simply as the natures of things (neteru). Iamblichus asks of the Egyptians, however, what the cause of the distinction between them is and whether it is from their energies, or their passive motions, or from things that are consequent, or from their different arrangement with respect to bodies. By the latter, he goes on to say that he means, for example, that Gods inhabit the ethereal, that demons inhabit the air and that souls inhabit terrestrial bodies.

Of course, it is differentiation that being comes to be in the first place. Before differentiation there is nothing but tohu-bohu -- indeed between the Void and confusion (or chaos), there is little difference. With the utterance of the command Be! the zero is annihilated.

GOD COMPARISON

The theory of Monogenesis, or the single origin of language, was first proposed by the Italian linguist Alfredo Trombetti in his book L'Unit� del Origine del Linguaggio, published in Bologna circa 1900 and still unavailable in English.

Trombetti hoped one day to see a lexicon of universal word comparisons, but in his day all his energies were absorbed in fighting an academic establishment that strongly resisted new ideas. Babel Rebuilt (as yet unpublished) is my attempt to provide such a lexicon of juxtapositions. It is the source of these words for God taken from various languages and juxtaposed strictly by similarity of form, without regard to family origin or historical sequence.

U	Semitic root	(the heavens, light, fire, rain)
iu	Indo-Germanic root
lj�	Margi	(GOD)
ju-Piter	Latin	(the Father-God)
l�v�is	Oscan
Jao	Old Hebrew	(as in El-Shadeh-Yao, God Almighty
Jehovah	Hebrew	from IHVH, hayah, to be or ihoah, self-existent)
Johonaaeff	Navajo	(Ruler of the Day, ji = day, hence: The Sun)
Jaun	Basque	(God)
Jin(koa)	Basque	(Lord on High)
Dingirre	Sumerian	(gods)
Janus	Roman	(god)
Ju-mala	Finnish	(GOD)
jowl	Cornish	devil
(2)
dyau	Sanskrit	(heaven; sky)
diyu	Tartar	(demon)
D�w�	Javanese	(GOD)
Deok	Kafir
teuctli	Aztec	(leader; god)
taku	Sioux	(Something)
dux	Latin	(leader
Dxui	Bushman	(name of a god)
Dievs	Latvian	(GOD)
odev�	Kodagu	(master; god)
deva(s)	Sanskrit
O Devel, O Del	Gypsy	(The God)
Ziu	Old High German	(war-god)
Zeus	Greek
theos	Greek
Thoth	Egyptian	(god; Tehuti)
teotl	Aztec
(Bhagawan) thudu	Telugu
themugu	Telugu
Temayawet	Cupe�o
Metod	Beowulf

Self draws strength, in other words, not from identity, but from contrast. This means that if we want to raise the self to a higher level, we somehow have to raise the world first. Archimedes can do nothing in an anthill. The materialist, on the other hand, being concerned only with his isolation, sees the world in a parasitic fashion, strictly as his life-support system. Thus Evil stands revealed as self-preoccupation at the expense of the world and Good as the Self striving to be an enhancement of the world. More esoterically, we can define Positive Evil as that which goes against the evolutionary current, Negative Evil as the opposition of an interior momentum not yet overcome.

GRACE

This dictionary, I hope we can say, is an attempt to bridge both the ancient and modern senses of the word at the same time.

GURDJIEFF, GEORGE IVANOVICH