The Known Names I

Lilli - 𝌴𝍌

First there were the mononyms, and with these they struggled to name her. What could be said of other lemurs she made unspeakable. Many names they proposed for her, but the one they settled on was iiIii: five times the eighteenth glyph, to a total of ninety in sum. By this name she had no improper consonants, having none to speak of, and was proper in her sum and in her composition, for eighteen was as nine if it was reduced. Yet all knew that five times eighteen was not nine and zero, but rather, five and four—and so this name did not entirely suffice.

But nor did all the names of all the other lemurs, and so second there were the trinyms. These were not one name but three, each one equal in length. The trinyms were more demanding than the mononyms, asking perfection of each name. Each trinym was quasiphonic, using the consonants of the lemur’s zones fully and exclusively, and each was perfect in aquivalence: its glyphs, in sum and in reduced and unreduced decompositions, wended their way to the zones. Yet the trinyms badly failed to name her, more badly even than the mononyms. They found she could be called An Na Na, by which name at least one of her consonants were used and whose sum was nine and nine—though some preferred her as Aaa aAa aaA, nine and zero, nine ones and nine zeroes. Yet the perfection of this name was unspeakably lower than even the imperfect other trinyms, and its decomposition was lacking in purity even more greatly than iiIii. Her name was the most squalid of the names, though she was to many pristine among all others.

And so there were, third of all, the lesser novemnyms: the ninefold names of iiIii. The other lemurs they did not name in this fashion, for they sought a name in accord with her nature alone. In this pursuit, they abandoned the consonants of the zones, the quasiphonemes, and would use any letter of the twenty-six. The names of the name they sought would be five letters each, one letter from each syzygy as judged by its reduction: one reducing to one or eight, one to two or seven, one to three or six, one to four or five, one to nine. The sum of the total names would be composed of nines and of zeroes, and their decompositions would encompass all things: all values to the reduced decompositions, all zones to the unreduced. The letters of the total names were forty-five in sum, for the gate and the whole of Lemuria, and this was deemed to satisfy. In this day, iiIii was overnamed, innumerable in name: Jrelk Ogezi Isbel Rujeg Mralg Jureg Jipex Parex Eblai, she was sometimes called, or Misup Ipela Kejur Barex Arobe Zgrum Akomi Rable Umjib, or many other similar names. Even the names of these names could not be determined, for were they novenyms or novemnyms—for the sum of the former was of greater satisfaction but seemed to confuse lemu and nove, while the latter’s mn spoke to the gate of four and five. This was a time of clamour and confusion and much pointless indulgence. Yet it had been decreed by that first name, Uttunul, that the name would be found among the lesser.

The lemunymists had excluded quasiphonics from their initial search criteria. They judged it impossible to fulfill and perhaps of lesser relevance. One, however, carried on in search for a novemnym which would fulfill all the stated criteria without abandoning the quasiphonemes, for they unlike the others saw. For the consonants of nine are t and n, belonging to the second and fourth syzygy, while the vowels u and o could account for the third, i for the zeroth, and a for the first; perhaps it could become so. And so, by a tireless process of searching, this lemunymist derived from a slew of letters precisely one name. The name they found was this: Ainot Ainot Ainot Ainot Ainot Ainot Aeiot Aeiot Aeiot. This, with the letters and the words shuffled in various configurations, was the name in all its relevant criteria. And through a process of comprehensive searching, it was discerned that there could be no other.

This name, the Grand Novemnym, put a stop to all the searching for the perfect name of the unutterable one. It was here, in all its essential dimensions—the name, full and complete. The impulse of the glyphs contained the whole of the zones, and reduced, all the values of the zones. The letters were forty-five, the quasiphonic was in place, and the sum was nine and zero and nine. The words were of two types, three of one and six of the other—the mesh of nine and zero being three and six. At this time, such things were remembered as that the numogram is said to consist of nine keys, yet also of five keys, and to amount to four-five. The name contained the thing, and it was good. And yet the name was also a verse—and a verse with ambiguity, for what was the proper arrangement of the words and letters, and the proper mapping of the three and the six? Thus, those few who would name the lemurs shifted in their focus, changing from those who would multiply her names to those who found her names to be multiple.

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The earliest attested rendition of The Grand Novemnym is now lost to us. All that remains of it is a fragment, an abbreviation by which it was known: Nennennen. This notation, jotted down on the margins of a now-lost page, noted the two types of words within the name by their distinguishing character, that which corresponds to the zone of five. Its arrangement, which envelops the three within the six, is not a universal arrangement, and so it is believed there must have been a complete name for which the abbreviation merely stands in. This name, however, is utterly and irrecoverably lost, leaving only this ruin of itself. And yet the ruin is something quite splendid in itself, summing to ten times eighteen, twice ninety. It has often been noted that it shares this value with the sum of three + six.

What does remain from early days is a rendition quite wholly unlike Nennennen, bearing totally different first letters and ordering of words. This is the name referred to as The Verse, well known and sometimes muttered under the breath of a numogrammaticist. The Verse consists, in fact, of two verses, one of opening and one of closing: the first of these, the name of opening, is Tanio Tonia Eotia Tonai Tinao Eitao Tinoa Tanoi Eatoi; the second, the name of closing, is Eitoa Tanoi Tinoa Eotai Tinao Tonai Eatio Tonia Tanio. In these names, the six begin with T rather than N, before or after which can be found one of the three, forming the scarce-used abbreviations Ttettette and Ettettett; these sum to two-one-six, for “love of lemu.”

For each word, the first and third letter are fixed; for the three, the third is always t, while for the six, it is always n. With these removed from consideration, the letters can be seen to progress in a definite cycle. In the first word of opening, the vowels are arranged a-i-o, such as to follow from least to greatest; the second word flips this order, which becomes o-i-a, and the third is the same as the second. The fourth word’s vowels can be found by taking the first word’s and placing the last vowel into first place, becoming o-a-i. These are all the rules of the name of opening, for the fifth word, like the second, reverses the order of the fourth; the sixth word agrees with the fifth; and the seventh word makes the last vowel of the fourth the first, and so on, down to the ninth. The name of closing merely modifies these procedures; it is as the name of opening with the words in reverse order, save that the three agree with the inverse vowel progression of the word which would precede (and in reverse, succeeds) them. The effect is that there are really six unique words of the three, distributed across two names indecisively, as if unsure which were the proper vowel progressions to have chosen.

The Verse established certain crucial principles in the interpretation of the name. Interpreted conventionally, the Verse assimilates the six names whose five is n to the six zones of the decimal hex, with each pair comprising a syzygy. In its conventional interpretation, Tanio is one, Tonia is eight, Tonai is seven, Tinao is two, Tinoa is five, and Tanoi is four in the name of opening, following the headless cycle of motion within the hex. In the name of closing, however, the associations of the words flip, causing each word of the syzygy to pass through both of its zones. In this sense, the six words are not zones; rather, they are the twinned tests of their respective syzygies, with e.g. Tanio being the transit from one to eight and Tonia the transit from eight to one, the two of which together comprise the single path of Yuln. With the vowel progressions being understood as part of a single syzygetic rite, they likewise confer to the (doubled) three a specific nature—specifically, as the two gates of the syzygy, although which corresponds to which is left ambiguous. By accounting for the gates of the hex, proponents of The Verse understand it to account for the outer zones as well, the termini of the gates being three, six, and nine, with nine implicitly accounting for zero.

The ambiguity of which version of the three corresponds to which gate establishes the character of The Verse as opening and closing around those who recite it. Often, the name is used as a kind of votive prayer, with the numogrammaticist having memorized the opening name but not necessarily the closing name; at will, they recite the opening half, promising that they will later recite the closing such that the paths and their gates may come to fruition. Other times, it is recited to envelop the time of a ritual within the embrace of iiIii, just as the diplozygotic spiral is embraced by her at all times. On still other occasions, the name is used backward, the closing verse first and the opening verse last, as if to encompass the whole of time beyond the interim between the two. It has even been heard of for some to use the name for the (enormously tedious) utterance of tics in nullified xenotation. What The Verse is ultimately most notable for is its remarkable aptness for ritual; it has thrived less for its elegance than for its grounds for action.

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Despite the many uses of the Novemnym’s oldest known form, it has at times been seen as somewhat archaic and counter-intuitive. That the six begin with T, rather than N, strikes many people as odd, while the fixity of the third letter seems totally arbitrary. Further, the open-close structure of The Verse stretches its function as a name to a breaking point, given its reliance on eighteen words to be said in full. Ultimately, these gripes led to a new reading of the Novemnym, one which emerged through the revival of the Nennennen structure. Intended originally as a modernizing gesture, the name of resurrection can be said entirely within the nine words: Naiot Eoiat Noiat Noait Eiaot Niaot Nioat Eioat Naoit. The reform shifts the characteristic letters of each word to the front and back, beginning with the appropriate letter of zone five and ending with t. In practice, this leads to long strings of vowels which can be quite difficult to pronounce; an alternate pronunciation scheme, which shifts the t’s of the three to the centre and the n’s and t’s of the six to the second and fourth places respectively, is sometimes preferred: Anito Eotia Onita Onati Eitao Inato Inota Eitoa Anoti. Nevertheless, the two are considered modes of the same iteration of the name and both abbreviated Nennennen.

The vowel progression of the six in the name of resurrection exactly follows the rules of The Verse; it is in the three that they differ. Because this name lacks a second verse, the zonal attributions of its words are not complicated: Naiot, for example, remains zone one and does not become a test. Likewise, the three cannot take on a double nature by which to account for both gates of each syzygy; for them to bring in the three outer values, they must correspond to the gate of the correct inner zone. Consequently, each of the three is given the vowel progression of the zone whose gate leads outward, bucking the conventional order of the name of opening in the final case of Eioat, six, which corresponds with Nioat, five. The name amounts to a naming of the zones—with the exception of zero, which is left implied. This nature appears at first considerably less complex than The Verse, and indeed, the way this name is spoken of would seem to imply its utter simplicity. Even the name with which it is abbreviated is simple, for while the name of resurrection is formally called Nennennen, in practice it is usually simply abbreviated as “R”—the xenotative value of Nennennen if “nen” is considered equivalent to “(:).”

Yet the R interpretation of the Novemnym is not without ritual significance; it is from this version of the name that the Sign of Enunciation was derived. The origins of the Sign lie within efforts to study the inner geometry of the name according to numogrammatic principles, mapping it onto its immanent transits. To form it, the six are placed equidistantly in a circle which is doubled and decimated as it moves clockwise, to the effect that a syzygy consists of the two words opposite each other. Where this circle begins and ends is not tremendously relevant, but usually the final word—four, Naoit—is placed at its nadir. From these points in the circle, a line is drawn from the first word, Naiot, through to the points of the rest of the six, ignoring for now the three. The effect of this instruction is to draw three diameter lines intersecting at sixty degree angles, these being the syzygies of the hex, which are connected by two other lines: Noiat passing upward to Noait, one space clockwise, and Niaot passing diagonally up to Nioat, two spaces counterclockwise. Naiot and Naoit only connect once, to their syzygetic pairs; a line is usually drawn perpendicular to the end of Naoit to visually “end” the line. Finally, three squares are drawn around the three points with outward-leading gates: Noiat, Niaot, and Nioat. These are the three, placed around the points whose vowel progression they correspond to.

When proponents of the R Novemnym recite the name, they usually draw the Sign in order to guide and reinforce their recitation. The reciter begins simply by placing their finger on the first point of the Sign and saying the first word, then tracing to each point in turn, saying the relevant word or two words depending on whether the point is enclosed. The Sign is considered a visual echo of the name as it is audibly spoken; by doubly saying the name, one treats it with greater reverence. Although some have considered its doubling a means of amplifying its power and thus its possible utility to the speaker, the High Temple Neolemurians who originally derived it consider this view almost heretically crude.

Generally speaking, the ritual practices of the R and Verse Novemnyms overlap very little; each keeps to their articulation of the name and its particular capacities. Yet in recent days, some have claimed to find a shadow of the Verse within the motions of the Sign, one which appears only by combining the opening and closing names. This name of shadows is Eatio Tanio Tonia Eotai Tonai Tinao Tinoa Tanoi Eatoi; beginning with one of the three words of closing and ending with the last word of opening, its qualities are thoroughly scrambled. As the reverse of the R Novemnym, the three are recited not at the points enclosed in squares, but rather at the unenclosed points: for example, the recitation begins with “Eatio Tanio” and ends with “Tanoi Eatoi.” As such, the three words of this Novemnym cannot refer to the exterior gates, unlike both Novemnyms by which it is influenced. They serve a different function.

The interior gates of the hex are always those which connect to one. In the recitation of the Sign, the first of these encountered is always Gate One, which passes from one to one. This gate creates no difference whatsoever, and so it is considered, by its difference, to account for zero in the name of shadows—thus, Eatio is zero. The next of the three, Eotai, corresponds with the name of seven, whose gate passes to one—a difference of six, and so, Eotai is six. Finally, Eatoi corresponds with the name of four, whose difference with one, and consequent value, is three. This mapping is literally a shadowed mapping, associating the zone of each syzygy which is not used in the R Novemnym with the opposite zone of the one the used zone connects to; for example, eight-to-nine becomes one-to-zero. It thus becomes possible to pair the R Novemnym with this shadow of itself, treating one as an opening verse and the other as a closing. Through this compatibility, the schism in the name folds inwards.

There is one final observation of note derived from the Sign of Enunciation: the exterior zones appear not only in how the sign is read, but in the sign itself. The Sign of Enunciation is ultimately an incomplete star, a star which would be a pentagram with one of its triangular arms inverted. Were the star complete, its transits would be: three passages over a gap of three spaces, i.e. the syzygies; two over a gap of two spaces; and one over a gap of one space. However, the Sign removes one transit from these, the two-space gap between four and one. Consequently, the non-syzygetic transits of the sign are: one over two, one over one, one over zero. These correspond to the exterior values by multiples of three: one times three is three; two times three is six; three times three is nine which is equivalent to zero, zero times three. These values correspond in the sign with a test of activity: three is eight-to-seven, six is two-to-five, and zero is four-to-one. Of these, the last test is special: it is not only activity, but patience, the hidden motion on the sunken tract which is never made explicit. That this line, then, is submerged in the Sign is only natural. Some argue it could never have been any other way, that the Novemnym has always been a commentary on that hidden test. “The sum of each word of the six is 104,“ they say, “and the sum of the three, 95: the 41st lemur. Her name is of a sound only spoken by Fate.”