To pronounce a word is to evoke a thought, and make it present: the magnetic potency of human speech is the commencement of every manifestation in the Occult World. To utter a Name is not only to define a Being [an Entity], but to place it under, and condemn it through the emission of the Word [Verbum] to the influence of, one or more Occult potencies. Things are, for every one of us, that which it [the Word] makes them while naming them. The Word [Verbum] or the speech of every man is, quite unconsciously to himself, a _blessing_ or a _curse_; this is why our present ignorance about the properties and attributes of the _idea_, as well as about the attributes and properties of _matter_, is often fatal to us. Yes, names [and words] are either _beneficent_ or _maleficent_; they are, in a certain sense, either venomous or health‐giving, according to the hidden influences attached by Supreme Wisdom to their elements, that is to say, to the _letters_ which compose them, and the _numbers_ correlative to these letters. This is strictly true as an esoteric teaching accepted by all the Eastern Schools of Occultism. In the Sanskrit, as also in the Hebrew and all other alphabets, every letter has its occult meaning and its _rationale_: it is a cause and an effect of a preceding cause, and a combination of these very often produces the most magical effect. The vowels, especially, contain the most occult and formidable potencies. The _Mantras_ (magical rather than religious invocations, esoterically) are chanted by the Brâhmans, and so are the rest of the _Vedas_ and other Scriptures. The “Army of the Voice” is the prototype of the “Host of the Logos,” or the “Word,” of the _Sepher Jetzirah_, called in the Secret Doctrine the “One Number issued from No‐Number”—the One Eternal Principle. The Esoteric Theogony begins with the One Manifested (therefore not eternal in its presence and being, if eternal in its essence), the Number of the Numbers and Numbered—the latter proceeding from the Voice, the feminine Vâch, “of the hundred forms,” Shatarûpâ, or Nature. It is from this Number, 10, or Creative Nature, the Mother (the Occult cypher, or “0,” ever procreating and multiplying in union with the unit “1,” or the Spirit of Life), that the whole Universe proceeds.