# Tetragrammaton

*The four letters, YHWH*

**Known today as.** The four-letter name of God in the Hebrew Bible, not pronounced in Jewish practice.

Kind: Amulet

## What was it used for?

Invoked and written, first among the “holie names of God,” in the conjurations of Christian ritual magic, as on the conjurer’s hazel wand.

## What does modern science say?

Modern scholars generally read it *Yahweh*.

## What lore surrounds it?

In Cornelius Agrippa’s *Occult Philosophy* it stands apart from all the other names of God, as the one “signifying the substance of the Creator in a pure signification.”

*Jehovah* comes of reading the consonants of the name with the vowels of *Adonai*, which accompany them in the Hebrew text; the form is found as early as the *Pugio fidei* of Raymund Martin, written about 1270. In round numbers the name occurs 6,000 times in the Old Testament.

## What did the older authorities say?

**The Second Temple.** On the Day of Atonement, the Mishnah says, when the priests and the people in the Temple court heard the Explicit Name from the mouth of the high priest, they knelt, bowed down, and fell on their faces. Maimonides, as the Catholic Encyclopedia reports, held that the true name was used only by the priests giving the blessing in the sanctuary and by the high priest on that day; it seems not to have been spoken after the Temple was destroyed, and *Adonai*, “Lord,” is read in its place.

**Cornelius Agrippa.** In the *Occult Philosophy* sets it apart from all God’s other names, citing “Moses the Egyptian”: it signifies “the substance of the Creator in a pure signification,” and “is called the separated name, which is written and not read”; yet after Christ, he holds, “the name of four letters is no further necessary, the whole vertue thereof being translated into the name of Jesus.”

**The Catholic Encyclopedia.** The Catholic Encyclopedia states that “the Fathers and the Rabbinic writers agree in representing Jehovah as an ineffable name,” that the Septuagint translators “always substitute Kyrios (Lord) for Jehovah,” and that “according to a Rabbinic tradition the real pronunciation of Jehovah ceased to be used at the time of Simeon the Just.” By the Mishna “Abba Shaul refuses any share in the future world to those who pronounce it as it is written,” and the true name “was used only by the priests in the sanctuary who imparted the blessing, and by the high-priest on the Day of Atonement.” Leusden “could not induce a certain Jew, in spite of his poverty, to pronounce the real name of God, though he held out the most alluring promises.”

## Sources

- Kieckhefer, R. (1989). *Magic in the Middle Ages*. Cambridge University Press.
- Agrippa, H. C. (1533). *De occulta philosophia* III.
- Mishnah, *Yoma* 6:2.
- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Jehovah.” newadvent.org/cathen/08329a.htm
- Scot, R. (1584). *The Discoverie of Witchcraft*, book XV. Ed. B. Nicholson (1886).

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*Tetragrammaton.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-03. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/tetragrammaton

Historical description, not medical advice.