Name magic

What it is

The belief that a name is not merely a label attached to a thing but participates in it — so that knowing the true name confers power, and speaking it has consequences.

Two practical corollaries follow, and both appear worldwide: conceal the true name, and acquire a new one at moments of transformation.

Where it came from

The examples are unusually well documented for this kind of material.

Egypt. A surviving magical papyrus tells how Isis, wanting power over the sun god, creates a serpent to poison Ra and refuses to cure him until he surrenders his secret name. He tries to fob her off with his public titles; she insists on the hidden one; and when she has it, she has him. The story is a theory of language as much as a myth: the public name is what you are called, the true name is what you are.

Israel. The Tetragrammaton, the four-letter name of God, is not pronounced. Readers substitute Adonai or HaShem — literally, "the Name". The prohibition is not embarrassment about a word; it reflects a view of what the name is, elaborated at length in Hebrew letter mysticism.

Rome. The tutelary deity of the city had a secret name, deliberately kept from public knowledge, because Roman military practice included evocatio — calling an enemy city's protective god out of it by name, with offers of better worship in Rome. If the technique works on your enemies, it works on you. Ancient sources record that revealing Rome's own protective name was a capital matter.

China and Japan. Naming taboos were legal and literary facts. The personal name of a reigning emperor could not be written, so scribes altered characters, omitted strokes, or substituted synonyms — which is why textual scholars can sometimes date a manuscript by which characters it avoids.

Europe. The folk tale in which power over a supernatural helper depends on discovering its name is so widespread that it has its own classification in the folklore index. Rumpelstiltskin is the German version; there are dozens.

Australia. Across many Aboriginal communities, the name of a person who has died is not spoken for a period after their death, and images and recordings are similarly restricted. Practices vary considerably between communities, and this article describes the existence of the custom rather than any community's specific protocol. It is why Australian broadcasters and publications carry warnings that content may contain names, voices or images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — a convention many Australians see weekly without knowing what it rests on.

Names of transformation. Baptismal and confirmation names, monastic names in Christianity and Buddhism, dharma names, names taken on conversion to Islam, and the magical mottos adopted in Western initiatory orders all express the same intuition from the other direction: change what a person is by changing what they are called.

How it is used

By concealment, by substitution, by conferral at initiation, and — in magical practice — by inscribing or reciting names to compel or invoke.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the belief is close to universal and its logic is consistent. A culture that treats names as participating in their bearers will conceal them, guard them, and change them at transitions, and that is what the record shows.

We can say there is no evidence that knowing a name confers any supernatural leverage.

And we can say that names determine outcomes anyway, which is the genuinely uncomfortable finding here.

The evidence is robust and comes from labour economics rather than folklore. In a widely replicated study design, researchers send matched résumés — identical qualifications and experience — differing only in the name at the top, and count callbacks. Bertrand and Mullainathan's 2004 field experiment in the United States found that applications with distinctively white-sounding names received substantially more callbacks than identical applications with distinctively African-American-sounding names. Comparable studies across many countries have found the same effect for ethnic-minority and foreign-sounding names, including in Australia.

A name really does open and close doors. It really does determine, in part, what happens to its bearer. The mechanism is not sympathetic resonance; it is other people, deciding.

That inversion is worth sitting with. The traditions were right that names have power over lives. They were wrong about where the power sits — and the true version is both more consequential and more fixable than the magical one, because prejudice can be measured, named and legislated against, and a secret syllable cannot.

Further reading

• Bertrand and Mullainathan, "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?" (2004).
• The Isis and Ra papyrus, available in translations of Egyptian magical texts.
• Guidance from Australian broadcasters and Aboriginal organisations on the naming of the deceased, for the practice in its own terms.