Holy Gibberish

 

     The business of an artist centers on the construction of meaningful patterns of words, sounds, forms, or movement, yet the creator is often acutely aware that the object produced falls short of the initial vision.  The same gap is unlikely to be experienced by authors of texts meant to convey less subtle information such as warehouse data or scientific research.   For such purposes language seems wholly adequate, while, on the other end of the spectrum, ordinary verbal usages fail the mind that ventures to plumb beyond the horizon.  Words encounter their acid test in Ultimate Reality.  What name can the ineffable bear?

     Various spiritual techniques have sought to transcend the limits of words, some, such as Hatha Yoga, largely non-verbal, others like the koan practice of Rinzai Zen, using language to subvert itself.  Often people seeking illumination have used nonsense syllables, vocables with no conventional meaning, to indicate or to evoke insight beyond the bonds of ordinary speech. 

     The mystical significance of gibberish is usually distinguishable from its artistic use in such manifestations as Dadaist sound poetry, the zaum of the Russian Futurists, or the work of those who produce asemic writing (an abstract form using no familiar characters).  Though many writers entertain spiritual as well as aesthetic pretensions their work is usually classed among their fellow avant-gardists rather than among the practices labelled religious. 

     Likewise excluded here are purely musical uses of nonsense vocables such as the scat singing of jazz vocalists, Celtic “lilting,” Jewish Nigun, Sami joik or luohti, the chanting of tabla bols in Indian music, and the familiar use of nonsense in children’s rhymes, folksong, doo wop, and hip hop.  [1] 

    I find no clearly demarcated borderline, though, between religious and magical gibberish, as both involve supernatural claims.  In each case the individual expects to use a series of unintelligible vocables to derive some benefit from the unseen powers.  What seems to the believer a sublime spiritual activity might strike subscribers to other belief systems as utter superstition, while the skeptical observer would convict all the believers alike of credulity. 

     All such practices have a good deal in common.  Both priest and magician employ what might be called the principle of Mumbo Jumbo [2], the notion that mysteries are likely to be associated with unintelligible speech.  This is evident in the world-wide belief in the efficacy of magico-religious formulae such as spells.  The best known such expression in the Western tradition is probably abracadabra which dates from Roman times when it was used in medical treatments [3] though today it is more common in cartoons and stage shows. Hocus pocus and alakazam, though formed of sounds reminiscent of Latin and Arabic respectively, are both latecomers, lacking the pedigree of having once been used for conjuring. 

     In religion proper, the use of mysterious words to seal a contract with the supernatural is probably as old as language.  Many Roman Catholics felt that the mass lost a good deal of its impact if not its efficacy when vernacular was substituted for Latin, while Jewish and Hindu congregants may well yet hear ceremonies in words they do not understand.  A middle-class American sitting in temple or in a mandir may share more than is immediately apparent with the purchaser of a useful spell from the local magic-worker in the Nigerian bush.  Like the elaborate directions such a shaman might insist must be precisely fulfilled, or like the dials and blinking lights on a quack medical device, the very inscrutability of the sounds seems to their users a guarantee of their value.  Such magic phrases in antiquity sometimes included the deeper mystery of “charaktêres,” signs with no associated sound or significance.

     One group of magical formulae in ancient times was called “Ephesian words,” said by Pausanias to be written on the cult image at the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus.  These phrases were employed for a variety of purposes.  Among the attested uses are to guarantee athletic victory, to bless a marriage, and to avert demons. The fire meant to burn Croesus was drenched after the king, it was said, pronounced an Ephesian spell.  [4]  Other similar charms were called voces magicae by the Romans.   Another label was “barbarous names,” due to untranslated magic formulae being imported from other languages, Egyptian, Persian and Hebrew.  Such terms were widely used by the Neo-Platonists.  Iamblichus explains that such unintelligible foreign terms are preferable in controlling certain divine powers. [5]  These texts and their names were revived by Renaissance practitioners of magic such as the author of the Ars Goetia, compiled in  the mid seventeenth century which was in turn used by later occultists such as Aleister Crowley who notes that such phrases should remain untranslated to retain their purity and power as they “are very sonorous” when pronounced in “a certain magical voice.” [6]

     The Hindu use of mantras such as “Om” depends upon the sound’s lacking any denotation.  [7]  It is thus even more empty of meaning (and thus to some potentially full) than the Zen “Mu” which retains traces of signification, though only of negation.    

     Holy gibberish is generated ever anew in some Native American cultures (Dakota, Blackfoot, and Native American Church peyote songs, among others), but perhaps its most spectacular contemporary expression is among Pentecostalists who practice speaking in tongues.  Though speaking in tongues has sporadically appeared among other sects in the past including fifteenth century Moravians, seventeenth century Camisard Huguenots and Quakers, and nineteenth century Mormons, those most identified with the practice today are fundamentalist Christians such as those in the Assemblies of God, the Church of God, Foursquare churches, Apostolic churches, and Vineyard churches.

     The scriptural warrant for this activity is the day of Pentecost when “there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” In this incident it is clear that the Christians are thought to be miraculously able to proselytize in all languages.  In some Biblical references speaking in tongues seems to be simply a spiritual gift that descends on some believers requiring no interpretation, while in others it refers to the ability to communicate in any earthly tongue, or to prophesy, or to possess esoteric knowledge of a divine language used by god or by angels. [8]

     A number of individuals have in fact composed secret languages.  Though others have invented languages meant for purely practical ends such as Esperanto and Interlingua, some have constructed languages that they supposed would enable communication with god.   Feeling, surely, that neither German nor Latin was quite up to the task of supporting her meditations, Hildegarde of Bingen devised a phonetic alphabet to embody her “lingua ignota,” used, as far as is known, by herself alone.  Anticipating her death, her friend Womarus asked elegiacally, "where, then, the voice of the unheard melody? And the voice of the unheard language?" [9] 

     Apart from Hildegarde, perhaps the most significant language constructor in the European religious tradition was John Dee, the Elizabethan scholar, scientist, and occultist widely thought to be Shakespeare’s model for the character of Prospero, who developed what he called “Angelic” language but which was later labeled “Enochian.”  Dee also called his language “Adamic” because, according to his angels, it was spoken until the confusion of tongues after Babel.  Beginning in 1583 Dee with the aid of a medium recorded first a new alphabet and then a series of seven-by-seven tables as well as poems (for some of which he provided translations) in this angelic speech. His work is celebrated today by the Theosophical Society and other esotericists, though a recent student of his system maintains that much of what he produced was meaningless, mere random syllables. [10] 

     Other constructed languages with spiritual aims include Balaibalan, devised by Sufis in the Ottoman Empire, Damin used by a group of Australian aborigines of the Lardil and Yangkaal groups, and the Medefaidrin invented by an Ibibio congregation in Nigeria during the nineteen-thirties who came into conflict with the government when they sought to use the language for their children’s school.

          Each of these uses of holy gibberish begins from the assumption that ordinary language is inadequate, that the words used in daily discourse cannot bear the weight, the infinite significance of the divine.  Yet unintelligible utterances can do no more than gesture in the direction of the numinous godhead.  Intimating something beyond and confessing that what one has seen one cannot tell.   Strained to the breaking point, words fracture and fail, yet in this broken state, they preserve the passionate desire of the individual to establish contact with the macrocosm.  If, in the via negativa, god is that which we do not know, perhaps his most eloquent liturgy must be likewise incomprehensible.

 

  

1.  Among modern musical ensembles that have used constructed languages of their own invention are Magma in France and Sigur Rós in Iceland. 

2.  The term, which came to mean incomprehensible language, as I here use it, originally signified a divine being, his sculptural representation, or his impersonation by a person in masquerade.  Mungo Parks introduced the term to English in Travels in the Interior of Africa (1795).

3.   In the Liber Medicinalis of Serenus Sammonicus where it is presented in a “reduction pattern” with one less letter per line, forming a triangle suitable for inscribing in amulets.  The phrase is clearly based on the opening letters of the alphabet.

4.  See Chester C. McCown, “The Ephesia Grammata in Popular Belief,” TAPA 54 (1923).

5.  See Iamblichus Theurgia, or the Egyptian Mysteries I, 7.  The concept of barbarous names appears as well in the Chaldean Oracles.

6.  Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, Ch. IX.

7.  The syllable also occurs in Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh texts.