Chants

To Śivā and Śiva. This is the refrain that closes every verse of the Ardhanārīśvara Stotram, the hymn to the half-woman, half-man form of Śiva traditionally attributed to Ādi Śaṅkarācārya — "… dhammillakāyai ca jaṭādharāya namaḥ śivāyai ca namaḥ śivāya." The whole force of it is grammatical: śivāyai is the feminine dative — "to Śivā," the Goddess — and śivāya the masculine dative — "to Śiva." One name, declined twice, so the salutation lands on both faces at once, which is precisely what the Ardhanārīśvara form depicts. The masculine half of the pair is the ancient Pañcākṣara, the five-syllable na-maḥ-śi-vā-ya of the Śrī Rudram (Kṛṣṇa Yajurveda, Taittirīya Saṃhitā). Set in Devanāgarī; transliteration in IAST.

The Threefold Refuge (Tisaraṇa). The refuge-formula of Theravāda Buddhism, chanted three times — the second and third rounds prefixed dutiyampi ("for a second time") and tatiyampi ("for a third time"). It is recited in Pāli, the canonical language of the earliest surviving Buddhist scriptures. Pāli has no script of its own; it has always been written in whatever local alphabet its readers used (Brāhmī, Sinhala, Thai, Burmese…). It is set here in Devanāgarī for legibility, with the transliteration in the scholarly IAST convention.

The Lord's Prayer. The script is the Classical Syriac of the Peshitta (Matthew 6 : 9–13) — the Aramaic of the ancient Syriac churches, the closest living liturgical descendant of the Aramaic that Jesus himself spoke (not the New-Age paraphrase "Abwoon d'bashmaya"). The consonantal Syriac carries minimal vowel-pointing; the transliteration follows West-Syriac vocalisation, in which the long ā is sounded o — hence Abun d-bashmayo. Read right-to-left. The English is the traditional Catholic "Our Father" (public domain). A note on "forgive us our trespasses": the Peshitta here reads ḥawbayn / ḥayyābayn, both from one root — and the Aramaic word ḥawbā means both "debt" and "sin" at once, sin conceived as a debt owed to God. So "trespasses," the Greek "debts," and "sins" are three English faces of a single Aramaic idea. (The Syriac churches' sung Our Father spells it out as "debts and sins," but that doubling is a later liturgical expansion, not the Peshitta scripture text.)

To Kālikā. The standard single-seed mantra of the goddess Kālī. Krīṃ is a bīja — a seed-syllable, held to be the sound-body of the goddess rather than a word with a dictionary sense, and so it is left untranslated. Kālikāyai is the feminine dative of Kālikā, "to Kālikā" — the same case, and the same gesture, as śivāyai above. Unlike the Refuge or the Rudram, seed-mantras of this kind belong to the Tantric transmission rather than to a single fixed scriptural chapter; it is widely current in practice and cited across the Kālī literature, and no one verse is claimed for it here.

The First Enochian Call. The first of the forty-eight "Keys" of the Angelic (Enochian) language received by Dr. John Dee and Edward Kelley in 1583. The transliteration is from Dee's manuscripts (as reproduced in Aleister Crowley's Equinox). The English here is a fresh rendering in a plain, formal register, adapted from Dee's own Elizabethan translation (e.g. "saith"→"declares", "admiration"→"wonder"). Script and English correspond by sense-phrase, following Dee's own clauses — not strictly word-for-word, since the received translation does not map one-to-one onto the Enochian, whose vocabulary is itself only partly understood. Dee wrote the script right-to-left; it is shown here left-to-right to sit beneath its transliteration.

Order. The two Sanskrit invocations frame the older material: Śivā-and-Śiva opens, and Kālikā stands immediately before the Enochian Call. Both are marked for eleven repetitions, with a tap-counter for keeping the round.

Type. Body: the reader's system serif. Devanāgarī: Noto Serif Devanagari. Syriac: Noto Sans Syriac (both SIL Open Font License). Angelic: Enochian (Plain), Digital Type Foundry, 1992 — freeware, non-commercial, after the specimen in The Equinox. All three are subsetted to the glyphs actually used on this page.