I’ve read a lot of books.
In those books, I’ve noticed mantras and incantations and entity names are typically written in vaguely English-esque phonetics and possibly Hebrew. I’ve also noticed many people showing up here to ask, “how do I pronounce this?” and English speakers being like, “It’s obvious” (because for us it is) and international multilingual folk being like, “No, it isn’t.” Mantras are also juggling pronunciations from ancient languages like Hebrew and Hindi, written in archaic Sanskrit or ancient woodcuts of Hebrew, channelled tongues and overall the information that comes through is garbled ever so slightly through the window of the receiver-operator.
The reality is, English letters do not contain all possible sounds that can be emitted through a human’s mouth. IPA does.
It confounds me that mantras are not translated into IPA, the international phonetic language, so I am making this topic.
First, here is an interactive chart to introduce you to how it sounds and looks. If you wish to get highly nerdy about the IPA, here’s the Wikipedia IPA article..
The most basic way to use IPA is to copy and paste from the pronunciation resource. There are several English to IPA translators for those who are transliterating from English, although a syllable must come from an English word to be translated in this manner. Such as writing “Home” when you want to have the syllable “OM”. There are also IPA keyboards, such as this point and click option, or IPA keyboards that can be installed, for those who have taken the measure of memorizing IPA in full.
If people write mantras in IPA instead of Anglicized phonetics, the mantras can then be pasted into this IPA reader which will pronounce the IPA letters accurately for you.
Let us consider as our first venture into IPA mantras, Darkest Knight’s Angelic Mantras channelled from the angel Raziel. Visit the original thread for discussion and experiences concerning this mantra. I am using the mantra To Open The Gates to the Divine as an example mantra for this consideration.
Written in this fashion, as most occult writers do in their publications, we’re left with uncertainty: is LA pronounced “L.A.” as in the city abbreviation, “LA” as in lake, “LA” as in lamb? What if a regional variation in an accent means my lake is pronounced as “lah-ck” instead of “lay-k”? Is TEK pronounced with a velar or uvular plosive? English is inconsistent with its vowels… is it T-UH-N or T-OH-N or T-OO-N or T-AH-N? An English speaker may have an educated, intuitive guess, and certainly you may feel the rush of energy that courses through you when you get it right… but why not get it right from the getgo? As an English speaker, I know that the “O” in Ton and Fo are not the same! Is the same true of a native Russian speaker who learned English at 32?
TEK - LA - TON - FO - KEM
- tɛk - læ - tən - foʊ - kɛm -
It may not have the sexy occult aesthetic of all caps English phonetics, but it removes all ambiguity. A non-English speaker may now paste this into an IPA reader and hear the correct vowel tones, and the generous writer of the original mantra need not explain exactly which English words sound closest to “FO”.
I would like this topic to serve as a holder for mantras and incantations and names of entities translated into IPA. If you have an occult term or phrase you would like translated into IPA or have translated into IPA, post it here. Or if you have a thread for your own mantras, consider posting them in IPA as well as English transliteration! If you are writing a book, also consider using IPA alongside your transliteration.
I hope my thoughts on the matter have convinced at least a couple of people of the benefit of the IPA for mantras and incantations in channelled divine language. Use IPA and we can finally bring forth the divine power of vibrating excellent non-English sounds such as ɮ with utmost clarity of intent.
Thank you for reading!