Careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, Zen. I’ve made that mistake myself.
There are golden nuggest buried in many traditional systems and religions. There’s just a lot of dogmatic bullshit surrounding them. As you develop and open your intuition and your connection to the spiritual realms strengthens, you’ll start to see them for yourself.
My UPG (Unverified Personal Gnosis) is that Yod He Vav He were powerful sounds. They were later claimed as “The Name of the One True God”.
I have an aversion to using anything from the mono-theistic religions, but I’ve got admit that those sounds have real power when they’re intoned.
Here’s a thought for you … completely unverified … just kind of a hunch really …
I believe I’ve heard mentioned that the Tetragramaton was 72 syllables long and priests trained for years to master their breath so they could intone as many of the 72 syllables of the Tetragramaton as they could in one exhalation.
Now, I can’t verify that … but isn’t it interesting how 72 appears again? Hmmm … makes you wonder if maybe the 72 syallables were really the 72 angelic names?
Ok, I was guided back that far myself for a reason. But it wasn’t to learn the magick they used.
The truth is they just petitioned the gods for stuff most of the time. They would just flatter the gods the way you would a human king and ask them to protect them or to curse their enemies or whatever it was they needed.
My own UPG was that the magick I’ve personally been taught was to teach me how to do for myself what the ancient gods did for the people at that time.
In other words, they have taught me and challenged to become my own living god rather than petitioning them.
I think you’re falling into the “ancient magick is real magick” trap. I’ve definitely fallen into that trap from time to time.
We get excited when we find an “ancient” grimoire that shares some bit of knowledge about “real magick”. But we forget that the grimoire was just a magickian’s own working notes and that he was experimenting with rituals himself.
In other words, the ancient sorcerers and magickians were just doing the same damn thing we are right now. They were trying learning from the sources that came before them, trying things on their own, and learning from them.
So your own magickal notes can become an “ancient grimoire” one day.
In the end, the real truth is the truth you discover through your experiences by DOING THE WORK. Everything revolves around DOING THE DAMN WORK. lol