In 1991 I was talking by invitation to a group of pagans, mostly Wiccans, and someone raised the question of rituals like the Banishing Pentagram and Hexagram and other practices which seemed to be connected to magickal work based on the Kabbalah.

His question was: What does Kabbalah have to do with Wicca? Isn’t that all just Jewish stuff? My reply, though necessarily long, is still relevant, and may interest some readers. Here it is.

Josh Billings once said “It isn’t what folks don’t know that’s the trouble…it’s what they do know that ain’t so.”

EVERYBODY knows that witches worship Satan, kidnap babies for sacrifice, desecrate the Host, and enjoy cursing their innocent neighbors and anybody who offends them. And none of this is true.

Chanting the name of a God or Goddess is a world wide activity. Sometimes I join my Indian friends in their temple and we chant Kali Durge or Shiva Shambo in call and response fashion for an hour or so and everyone goes up tone and feels wonderful. I have taught people how to do this in meditation using the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, a prayer that energizes and cleans out debris in the chakras, a fine piece of magick in the language that Jesus…Yeheshuah would have spoken. The translations from the Greek into any other language are like proof reading telephone directories in comparison to the original language. The spiritual reason is obvious, what you think is what you see, and what you see is what you get. The name expressed rhythmically connects you to the spiritual energy of the deity. And it doesn’t matter which deity. They are all fundamentally connected.

The physiological reason is not so obvious. It has been found by investigating the Benedictine monks scientifically that as long as they chanted for six hours a day they could do well on three hours sleep. The basic reason behind this phenomenon is that when you chant or sing you take short breaths in and long breaths out. The in-breath energizes the sympathetic nervous system and the out-breath energizes the parasympathetic nervous system. It is the parasympathetic that lowers blood pressure, relaxes tense muscles and brings about a feeling of wellbeing, and a meditative state. This is why even a boring morning in church listening to a guilt trip about your amazing sin collection can be made worth while if the congregation joins enthusiastically in singing favorite hymns. The preacher may take the credit for the high feelings of the flock, but it’s more likely due to their parasympathetic nervous systems and their breathing patterns..

There is a Communion of Sophia on Hawaii with which I am connected through the healing modality Dar’ Shem and common modes of worship of a functional goddees. For those people I suggested and put together extra verses of many other goddesses, all verses having the same syllable pattern, but ending with Sophia, their goddess who contains all goddesses. Here are the verses I composed for them. Use the same idea and custom-make your own chants using hymn tunes or rock music, whatever. Praise is praise and does you nothing but good. I often use the hymn tunes and old songs of my youth when making new chants. As General Boothe said when the usual negators complained about the popular tunes used in the joyful singing of his Salvation Army folks, "Why should the devil have all the good tunes?"

Here then is an example of how I modified a well-known chant to place emphasis where I wanted to place emphasis. Sophia is the Goddess of Wisdom and was the name of the Holy Spirit for the first followers of the teachings of Jesus. The word for Spirit is feminine in Hebrew, masculine in Latin and neutral in Greek, which was one way used by translators to take away the original, feminine aspect of the Holy Spirit in later Church politics. They translated everything into Latin or Greek, and the feminine aspect of God disappeared in the grammar of the language. Sneaky, but clever. People are limited in what they can think by the language they use. Some thoughts cannot be articulated in some languages, there are no words. Many readers will know the lovely chant on the "Wings of Song" CD by Robert Gass.

"We belong to the Goddess, and to Her we shall return
Like a drop of rain, flowing to the ocean..."
Chorus: "Isis Astarte Diana
Hecate Demeter Kali, Inanna..."

Here are the extra verses I cobbled together for the Sophia devotees in
Hawaii. Feel free to use them if you want or do your own thing with your own
tune and your own deities.

"Isis Astarte Diana
Hecate Demeter Kali, Sophia..."

"Venus Blodeuwedd Hestia
Cerridwen Shekinah Freya, Sophia..."

If there is a goddess here you don't know, do a little research. You might
find someone you really like. All have been worshiped for centuries in one
place or another, and most of them still are, somewhere, by somebody or bodies.

I am always interested when some NEW, cutting edge technology just discovered, and breathlessly reported on NPR, validates what people in the know have been reporting into deaf ears for centuries. Quantum physics and sub-atomic physics just keep right on discovering things that the mystics talked about millennia ago. Even materialistic medicine, one of the latest and most intolerant of religions, is finally coming to terms with the facts of subtle energies,the aura and the etheric bodies, and the validity of medical intuitives, not to mention acupuncture practiced elsewhere for thousands of years.

It is a common complaint among pagans, Buddhists, Hindus and New Agers that whenever the U.S. media mentions "religion" it always refers to Christianity as though that's all there is. Even the existence of other religions has been erased from much of the public mind unless you count Muslim extremists, as a religious group.

Similarly when someone says "God" everybody thinks they know what is meant. But if you said "Goddess," those who weren't freaked out would say "Which goddess?" The existence of Goddess has been erased from the public mind. So when Dar' Shem, for example, is described as the "Reiki of Sophia" it is, to many people, a case of two unknowns in the same sentence.