Shireroth

In the name of the Maker and all angels, I invoke all the Powers named herein to take mercy on my task of clearly expounding the magicks that support creation, and to grant all aid to the learner in his studies of these things. All that I record here, I record in glorification of the Maker and in profound reverence for his work. Amen.

Though this book be written in human speech, its subject matter is the actions of angels and spirits, who communicate in different modalities entirely. Neither the essence of things nor the nature of the life-force may be understood independently of the language of angels, with which their True Names are written. Therefore, I begin this work with a description of the primary angelic language. Unto the angels themselves it is nameless, but I hope I do not presume in referring to it as "the Runes of Creation", for it is by this speech that all the various substances and creatures come to be.

The Alphabet of Creation as envisioned in the mind of the Maker contains an infinitude of runes, but of these only ninety form the created world. Nine of these are blasphemous runes, used only in demonology. The permutations of the remaining eighty-one are responsible for the entirety of creation and all objects within it.

Gematria, the root of the True Kabbalah, is the numerology of the Runes of Creation. Kabbalists assign a numerical value to each rune, starting with ys, the rune of water, and proceeding to ouranos, the blasphemous rune of universal destruction. The kabbalistic value of a Word is the sum of the kabbalistic values of its component runes. Thus water, whose True Name is spelled ys-aer-ys has a kabbalistic value of 1+16+1=18. Performing gematria on the True Names of essences is a necessary first step in casting spells upon them.

Runes of Creation combine to form words. The vast majority of these words are nonsensical or blasphemous, and burst into flame and consume themselves upon being spoken. But a small subset of such words are Words of Power, the True Names of essences, which upon being spoken take shape and become those essences. In zoemancy, certain complex Words of Power are also the True Names of certain angels, who are summoned when the Word is spoken.

The First Rule of Summoning is that speaking the True Name of an essence summons that essence. Yet this rule must not be misinterpreted. The various poor imitations we mortal men make of the Runes of Creation are not the Runes themselves. They are only attempts to render the Runes in human languages and alphabets. Thus, when we write that the True Name of the essence called ambrosia by the zoemancers is dasedasesir'as'irad'aras'esid'aseras'id'aseras'id'aserasi'', it must not be presumed that speaking this word aloud with the human voice box will create ambrosia. This power belongs only to the Maker. The only power permitted humans is to break down other Words for their Runes, and rearrange the Runes into the True Name of ambrosia. These Runes, having already been spoken by the Maker, will then summon ambrosia rather than whatever essences they summoned before.

Our own alphabet is writ from left to right; that of the Yehudi and Mahometans from right to left; that of the Serians from top to bottom, yet the Alphabet of Creation is more difficult than all of these, for it can be written in all directions at once.

In order to transliterate the Alphabet of Creation into English, we take certain liberties with its structure. We interpret the ninety runes of the Alphabet as English consonants, or in the case of the less common ones, as syllables containing only the vowel 'u'. We interpret the four different directions in which runes can follow other runes as vowels. For example, the True Name of flammifer, the vapour which spews forth from vents in the ground, has the rune adamante at the center, and an ys rune on each side. Adamante is transliterated as "d", and ys as "s"; therefore the True Name of flammifer can be written "dasesisos'" - that is, a "d", followed by an "s" in the "a" position, an "s" in the "e" position, and so on.

Longer, more complex Words must be written such that entire strings of Runes are in a certain position. From this difficulty we derive our tradition of closing each rune (except those like ys and natros which take only the "a" position) with a stop. Triflammifer is a vapour closely related to flammifer, but its True Name has three adamante runes and eight ys runes. Its True Name is dasesisod'asesid'asesis. Closing each rune with a stop is proper runic grammar, and vital in preventing confusion between similar essences.

In certain Words, the runic speech actually loops back upon itself, so that the True Name can be read as an endless circle. In this case, two runes close at the same time, and we include two stops. In others, the same rune has two different positional relations. In this case, we include both vowels to form a dipthong. The substance called oleum by physiomancers is a good example of both cases. Its True Name is dasedaseid'ased'aseid'ased'asei''.

Let he who has understanding prove himself by naming dasedasesir'as'irad'aras'esid'aseras'id'aseras'id'aserasi'' according to his own tongue (in this example, "r" represents the rune aer)