on. Nax is darkness; Narl, death; Naria, sin or evil.
Nas--an uttermost condition of sin and evil--corruption. In writing,
they deem it irreverent to express the Supreme Being by any special
name. He is symbolized by what may be termed the heiroglyphic of a
pyramid, /\. In prayer they address Him by a name which they deem too
sacred to confide to a stranger, and I know it not. In conversation they
generally use a periphrastic epithet, such as the All-Good. The letter
V, symbolical of the inverted pyramid, where it is an initial, nearly
always denotes excellence of power; as Vril, of which I have said so
much; Veed, an immortal spirit; Veed-ya, immortality; Koom, pronounced
like the Welsh Cwm, denotes something of hollowness. Koom itself is
a cave; Koom-in, a hole; Zi-koom, a valley; Koom-zi, vacancy or void;
Bodh-koom, ignorance (literally, knowledge-void). Koom-posh is their
name for the government of the many, or the ascendancy of the most
ignorant or hollow. Posh is an almost untranslatable idiom, implying, as
the reader will see later, contempt. The closest rendering I can give to
it is our slang term, "bosh;" and this Koom-Posh may be loosely rendered
"Hollow-Bosh." But when Democracy or Koom-Posh degenerates from popular
ignorance into that popular passion or ferocity which precedes its
decease, as (to cite illustrations from the upper world) during the
French Reign of Terror, or for the fifty years of the Roman Republic
preceding the ascendancy of Augustus, their name for that state of
things is Glek-Nas. Ek is strife--Glek, the universal strife. Nas, as I
before said, is corruption or rot; thus, Glek-Nas may be construed, "the
universal strife-rot." Their compounds are very expressive; thus,
Bodh being knowledge, and Too a participle that implies the action of
cautiously approaching,--Too-bodh is their word for Philosophy; Pah is
a contemptuous exclamation analogous to our idiom, "stuff and nonsense;"
Pah-bodh (literally stuff and nonsense-knowledge) is their term for
futile and false philosophy, and applied to a species of metaphysical or
speculative ratiocination formerly in vogue, which consisted in making
inquiries that could not be answered, and were not worth making; such,
for instance, as "Why does an An have five toes to his feet instead of
four or six? Did the first An, created by the All-Good, have the same
number of toes as his descendants? In the form by which an An will be
recognised by his friends in