The clearest instruction in this whole section is a worked example with two names in it.
An Apprentice named Peter chooses the name Abrelin. Every time he casts an incantation it should be cast knowing that Abrelin, not Peter, is casting the spell.1
And the consequence of forgetting: every time Abrelin the Apprentice casts a spell concentrating on this fact, the spells are imbued with the vibrations of the name. But when this is not done, the magical energies of the name are lost and the spell doesn't benefit from the magical name's vibration. So the name is not a title. It is a thing you have to actively be, at the moment of casting, or a component of the working is missing.
The argument against your birth name is about accumulated history, and it is the same logic the psalm passage uses in reverse. The common name has a particular charge, since it has been used in the past with a wide variety of meanings, intentions, and has been tied to an almost infinite host of events, both good and bad. For that reason common names are tied to cause and effect regulations originated by persons and by cultural consciousnesses.
A psalm is powerful because many people have said it, and the accumulated faith of centuries has soaked into it. Your own name is compromised for exactly the same reason — decades of use have soaked events into it, and not all of them were good. So the magical name's first property is that it has none of that. It is a brand new name, with no negative charges, with which the Apprentice can cast their spells without any ill effects.
Four effects are claimed, and they build on each other. It changes what you are. The acquisition of the magical name represents a change of the normal, common person into a magical entity — and by assuming it, the universe will begin to acknowledge the name and the person as one.
It carries your essence into the work. The magical name will bestow the Apprentice's spells and magical creations with a part of his or her own essence, done each time you cast knowing your true magical self is represented by it. It raises your frequency. Magical names vibrate at a higher rate than the original name, because it is new in the universe and it has no charges weighing it down.
And it disconnects the old one. This is the strongest claim: the Apprentice's original name no longer represents the Apprentice in any way — so no energy in the universe will ever be able to lodge onto the Apprentice, since his or her magical name is not known and the original name no longer receives magical energies. Read that as a defensive mechanism. Anything aimed at you by name is aimed at an address you have vacated, and the forwarding address is secret. The stated result: the practitioner is pulled upwards into the magical realms, and the lower vibration of enmity, hatred, evil and darkness are kept away.
The secrecy requirement is what produces the three-name structure, and the logic is stated before the structure is. The Apprentice has to be really careful to whom this magical name is revealed or entrusted — because those who do know the magical name will be able to contact the Wizard on many levels, including the magical. That is a security problem with a specific shape. A name that protects you by being unknown loses its protection the moment somebody learns it. But a name nobody knows cannot be used socially at all.
The solution is to have several. Many Wizards develop a secondary and even tertiary magical name:
One which serves to identify them with the rest of their wizarding folks. Public within the practice — a name to be known by. One to be employed while casting incantations. Operational, and presumably narrower.
And a name so private it is never revealed to anyone, not even the mentor. Three names, three radii. Known to peers, known to the work, known to nobody. And note which one has no listed function — the third is defined entirely by who does not have it.
The construction method is genuinely practical, and it is the most usable procedure in this part of the material. Start from meaning. All historical formulas for devising a magical name vary, but they all hold one single thing in common: the meaning of the name. It must mean something important, relevant and useful in Magic.
The worked precedents. Hortus means to plant in Latin, chosen by somebody who always spoke of the divine seed in creation and how Nature's cycles were intimately related to the various alchemical stages. Philaletes: philos means to love in ancient Greek, and letes probably from the Dorian lato, the hidden and esoterically mysterious — so the name means a philosophical passion for the hidden universe.
The method. Grab an ancient Greek, Latin or Hebrew dictionary and start looking for possibilities. And before that, make a list of things that describe you on many different levels — how you define yourself spiritually and socially, what sort of virtues describe you better, what natural events are more similar to you, what mystical creatures or significant objects could represent you, what your aspirations in life are. Then look those words up in the ancient languages.
Then compound them. The worked example is followed all the way through. Somebody likes the power inherent in a lightning and the power represented by the griffon. Latin for lightning is Fulmen. Add it to griffon and you get Grimen or Fulmenfon. Or take Fulmen alone and add it a little magical flavour: Fulmentor, Menfulius, Fulminus, Ulmenfur, even Ferulmenius.
And the aesthetic rule. Come up with a name which has a nice ring to it, avoiding bombastic and exaggerated names.
Two prohibitions follow, and both have the same mechanism behind them. Do not take a divine name and modify it. To use divine names and then modify them is not suggested, for it will have a strong spiritual connotation that will result in identifying the name with the divinity and not the Apprentice. Do not use planetary, angelic or animal names by themselves. These also possess a charge, and might join the Apprentice with the corresponding spirits of those names instead of elevating the Wizard into a higher frequency. Both failures are the same failure. The whole point of a magical name is to be new and uncharged; a divine, planetary, angelic or animal name arrives pre-loaded, and what it connects you to is whatever already answers to it. You would have swapped a name burdened with your own history for one burdened with somebody else's identity.
And the escape clause is given. If you feel compelled to employ the name of a divinity, planet, angel or animal, please make sure to fuse it with something else. Fusion neutralises the charge — which is exactly what the Fulmen examples demonstrate, and why Fulmentor is acceptable where a bare planetary name would not be.
One line settles the question of authority, and it has a fallback. The magical name is usually given to the Apprentice by a Mentor or Master Wizard, who chooses it taking into account everything above. When there is no Master Wizard, the Apprentice needs to choose the magical name with rigorous study and great care.
So the name is normally conferred and can be self-assigned, and the self-assigned version comes with an intensifier — rigorous study and great care — rather than a warning. This is one of the few places where the material explicitly provides for a reader working with no teacher, which is the position almost every reader is actually in.
A footnote adds a practice that runs alongside all of this, attributed to a mentor. Every Apprentice should try to decode his or her name. In every name there is a message, a meaning and a hidden message. And the method, as the mentor gave it: count its letters, add them up to a number, look for similar words in other languages, and you will write a very long scroll regarding the teachings inlaid in your name.
That is the gematria technique applied to the one word every reader already owns — and it is the setup for the worked example the material performs on its own author's name.
The whole procedure. List what describes you. Spiritually, socially, by virtue, by natural event, by creature, by object, by aspiration. Several levels, several words.
Look those words up in an ancient Greek, Latin or Hebrew dictionary. Compound two of them, or take one and shape it — Fulmen becomes Fulmentor, Menfulius, Fulminus. Aim for a nice ring and avoid the bombastic.
Do not use a bare divine, planetary, angelic or animal name. If you want one, fuse it with something else. Then use it correctly. Every time you cast, cast knowing that the magical name — not your birth name — is the one doing it. Skip that and the name's vibration is not in the spell.
Guard it. Anyone who knows it can contact you on many levels, including the magical. Which is why you will want a second name for your peers, and a third that nobody, including your teacher, ever hears.
The naming doctrine, the three-name structure and the construction method are asserted with no tradition named. This is the Eldest Tradition warrant on the source stub. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE.
Taking a new name on initiation is genuinely widespread — monastic, magical and fraternal traditions all do it — and the practice of building one from meaningful roots in Latin or Greek is standard in Western esoteric orders. The two precedents are real people. Philalethes was used by several seventeenth-century alchemical writers, and the Greek derivation given — philos plus a root for the hidden — is essentially correct. 🚩 Hortus means garden in Latin rather than to plant; the verb is serere. Reported as printed.
⚠ The claim that a magical name means no energy in the universe will ever be able to lodge onto the Apprentice is unusually absolute, and it sits oddly beside the rest of the practice, which supplies extensive protective equipment for a practitioner who should, on this account, already be unreachable. Unresolved: nothing states what happens to the protection if a magical name is discovered, or whether a compromised name can be replaced.
Follow the security argument and the name works by being unknown. Anyone who learns it can reach you magically; the old name is vacated and the new one is hidden; the third name is told to nobody at all. Follow the identification argument and the name works by being adopted. The universe acknowledges the name and the person as one, the name carries part of your essence into every casting, and it must be consciously assumed at the moment of the spell or its vibration is absent.
Both are given as what the name is for. And they pull opposite ways on the second name — the one which serves to identify them with the rest of their wizarding folks — which is by definition known to others, and therefore an address other people hold.
Identity Formation Model: How Masks Crystallize Into Personality — Both traditions describe a chosen persona that stops being a costume and becomes what the person actually is, and both treat that hardening as the point rather than as a side effect. The influence account watches it happen without anyone deciding: a functional adaptation, the way I act to get what I need, gradually becomes who I am, and by the end the mask and the face fuse. The person did not plan it and cannot easily undo it, which is exactly what makes identity so much more defended than behaviour.
Here the same fusion is the deliberate goal, and neither corpus notices what that changes about reversal. The universe is said to acknowledge the name and the person as one, and the practitioner works at it — casting each spell knowing Abrelin and not Peter is casting. A crystallisation you chose has a date and a construction method, which means it can in principle be examined, revised, or replaced with a fourth name. One that happened to you has neither, which is why the influence material treats changing it as requiring the person to die a little.
Sharpest implication. The name only works while you are holding it. When this is not done, the magical energies of the name are lost and the spell doesn't benefit from the magical name's vibration — so a wizard who forgets, mid-casting, that Abrelin rather than Peter is speaking has cast a weaker spell, and nothing external would show it.
Generative questions.