E Rehmus - The Magician's Dictionary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------NECRONOMICON Lovecraft's (fictional?) grimoire. (See CTHULHU.) Its motto: "That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange eons even death may die."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------NEGENTROPY Negative entropy. The degree to which any system is coherent is an indication of its impulse away from entropy.

Information, in general, is considered to be "negentropic."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------NEOMENIUM Conjunction of Sun and Moon. New Moon. Time of greatest division between Conscious and Unconscious. Time for beginning new projects.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------NEOLEXICAL ENCODING Naming of any biode or machine circuit that has not been named before.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------NEOPLATONISM By the 3rd Century A.D., an eclectic occultism composed of Neoplatonism and Qabalah seriously rivalled Christianity.

All those who wrote on this subject went under the name of "Hermes," the best known book of which is "The Pymander." Later, Hermes was equated with alchemy. With Ammonius Saccas and Plotinus, the religion of the Orient were fused to Plato, Pythagoras, Aristotle and Stoicism eventually to form a doctrine of three hypostases (Monos, Nous, Psyche). The material world and its glories are the work of demons but union with the gods, our higher souls, our higher egos, can be accomplished only by theurgical means, which join us according to individual capacity to the divinely creative realm. Vatic powers reside in the higher ego which we all possess. In the 4th Century, Iamblichus (author of De Mysteriis), in struggling against the Galileans, stressed intellectual meditation and vigorously opposed magic and religion. But he virtually equated theurgy with raja yoga, calling samadhi manteia. In the 5th Century, Neoplatonism under Porphyry (who was Jewish), split into a Xtian version at Alexandria and an extremely short-lived Pagan version at Athens under Proclus. Porphyry and Plotinus also disapproved of "phenomenal theurgy" (physical magic).

Neoplatonism was revived during the Renaissance by Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, whereafter it survived through the XIXth Century.

Its chief philosophy can probably be summed up as simple pantheism, but which the Xtians complexified to "the Logos that derives from One Divine Source."

Neoplatonism regarded Egypt as the source of all occult knowledge. Saccas himself rejected Xtianity totally, as it had in it nothing that could not be found in previous teachings. Paul Christian in his History of Magic tells us that, according to Proclus, Plato underwent a 13-year initiation in the mysteries of Thoth-Hermes by famed magi of Memphis -Patheneitb, Ochoaps, Sechtnouphis and Etymon of Sebennithis. He emerged with what we now know as the "Platonic Doctrine."

At its best, Neoplatonism encouraged in the West an interest in Oriental systems, picking up Qabalah, Buddhism and Hinduism as enrichments. At its worst, it popularized an "anything goes" bubble-headed mysticism.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------NEOTERISM The study of and predilection for the new, to a somewhat morbid (hence, very interesting) degree.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------NEPHELIM