THE ARCANE SCHOOLS - Fort Myers Beach Masonic Lodge No. 362

who are will at once appreciate its peculiar character, and will excuse
the explanatory details, of course unnecessary to them.
The ineffable name, the tetragrammaton, the shem hamphorash,--for it is
known by all these appellations,--consists of four letters, _yod, heh,
vau_, and _heh_, forming the word [Hebrew: yod-heh-vau-heh]. This word,
of
course, in accordance with the genius of the Hebrew language, is read,
as
we would say, backward, or from right to left, beginning with _yod_,
and
ending with _heh_.
Of these letters, the first, _yod_, is equivalent to the English _i_
pronounced as _e_ in the word _machine_.
The second and fourth letter, _heh_, is an aspirate, and has here the
sound of the English _h_.
And the third letter, _vau_, has the sound of open _o_.
Now, reading these four letters, [Hebrew: yod], or I, [Hebrew: heh], or
H,
[Hebrew: vau], or O, and [Hebrew: heh], or H, as the Hebrew requires,
from
right to left, we have the word [Hebrew: yod-heh-vau-heh], equivalent
in
English to IH-OH, which is really as near to the pronunciation as we
can
well come, notwithstanding it forms neither of the seven ways in which
the
word is said to have been pronounced, at different times, by the
patriarchs.[134]
But, thus pronounced, the word gives us no meaning, for there is no
such
word in Hebrew as _ihoh_; and, as all the Hebrew names were
significative
of something, it is but fair to conclude that this was not the original
pronunciation, and that we must look for another which will give a
meaning to the word. Now, Lanci proceeds to the discovery of this true
pronunciation, as follows:--
In the Cabala, a hidden meaning is often deduced from a word by
transposing or reversing its letters, and it was in this way that the
Cabalists concealed many of their mysteries.
Now, to reverse a word in English is to read its letters from _right to
left_, because our normal mode of reading is from _left to right_. But
in
Hebrew the contrary rule takes place, for there the normal mode of
reading
is from _right to left_; and therefore, to reverse the reading of a
word,
is to read it from _left to right_.
Lanci applied this cabalistic mode to the tetragrammaton, when he found