Note 260 — Chapter IX

Horst inserts in his Zauberbibliothek the whole of a once famous cabbalistic treatise, entitled Semiphoras et Shemhamphoras Salomonis Regis, a medley of astrological and theurgic doctrine and prescription. The word Shemhamphorash is not the real word of power, but an expression or conventional representative of it. The Rabbis dispute whether the genuine word consisted of twelve, two-and-forty, or two-and seventy-letters. Their Gematria or cabbalistic arithmetic, endeavours partially to reconstruct it. They are agreed that the prayers of Israel avail now so little because this word is lost, and they know not ‘the name of the Lord.’ But a couple of its real letters, inscribed by a potent cabbalist on a tablet, and thrown into the sea, raised the storm which destroyed the fleet of Charles V. in 1542. Write it on the person of a prince (a ticklish business, surely), and you are sure of his abiding favour. Eisenmenger gives a full account of all the legends connected therewith, Entdecktes Judenthum, vol. i. pp. 157, 424, 581, &c. (Ed. 1711).

The rationale of its virtue, if we may so call it, affords a characteristic illustration of the cabbalistic principle. The Divine Being was supposed to have commenced the work of creation by concentrating on certain points the primal universal Light. Within the region of these was the appointed place of our world. Out of the remaining luminous points, or foci, he constructed certain letters—a heavenly alphabet. These characters he again combined into certain creative words, whose secret potency produced the forms of the material world. The word Shemhamphorash contains the sum of these celestial letters, with all their inherent virtue, in its mightiest combination.—Horst, Zauberbibliothek, vol. iv. p. 131.