This is the invocation of the formula: 'First origin of my origin, aeêioyô; first beginning of my beginning, ppp sss phr; spirit of spirit, the first of the spirit in me, mmm; …'

The invocation works by taking the initiate apart. Each element of him — origin, beginning, breath, and (in the lines that follow) fire, water, and earth — is named twice over, “X of my X,” and then handed a sound. The doubling is the point: the priest reaches behind his own génesis to its source, the origin of his origin, so that his birth can be unmade and remade deathless. The same grammar of ascent runs through the Hermetica's “light of light, life of life” and the Gospel of John's “God of God” — the formula of a thing traced back to what it came from. What a translation cannot carry is the sound. After each element comes a vox magica: the seven vowels aeêioyô for the seven heavens, then ppp sss phr — not letters to read but the lips popping and the breath hissing, the body made into an instrument. Pneûma here is doing double duty, since it means both “spirit” and the literal breath the reciter is spending on these consonants; the rite never lets the word go bodiless. We render the sounds as what they are and refuse to translate them, because they were never meant to mean — only to be uttered.