because I invoke, on account of the pressing and bitter and inexorable necessity, the immortal, living, and honored names that have never yet passed into mortal nature nor been articulated by human tongue or mortal sound or mortal voice: ēeō oēeō iōō … ēuō oē eiō ēō ōē ōē ee ooo uiōē.'

Before the vowels, the rite states its philosophy of language. The names it is about to sound are immortal, living, honored — and, crucially, they have never passed into mortal nature nor been articulated (phrasthénta en diarthrḗsei, jointed into distinct speech) by any human tongue. They are, by definition, what language cannot hold. So the initiate does not say them; he sounds them. What follows is the great vowel-series — the seven Greek vowels in surging combinations, arranged (the apparatus notes) as twenty-three by seven. The seven vowels were the seven planets, the seven heavens; to run them in every permutation is to play the whole cosmos like a scale. This is the purest statement of the book's whole method, and the thing every ordinary translation simply deletes as untranslatable: the holiest names are not words but tones, and to give them back their vowels — to let the page sound ēeō oēeō iōō — is to restore the incantation to what it always was, a music sung up at the door of heaven.