Abracadabra — speak the monster’s name.
New parents thumbing through the Big Book of Baby Names hardly stop to think about the under-layers of their chosen moniker. We pick names based on popularity, characters or figures we admire, saints, etc. We understand it as a complex decision, but more from the viewpoint of “Do I really want a kid who’s called Sandra all my life?”.
Sadly, we’ve forgotten the great ancestral power of names, and what little of it we remember, our younger generations are all too eager to shed.
The Hebrew equivalent of “I create what I speak”, abracadabra has been stripped of its power, and turned into a cutesy, childish phrase used to refer to fairytale magic. But whatever connection there was actually denotes incredible power. Words, and more precisely, names are indeed magical. They’re the easiest, fastest way of spawning into existence things that weren’t there before, yet you do so at your peril.
I’ve always been uncomfortable using people’s names. I didn’t use to think much of it, yet a recent look through Quora revealed I’m not alone in this. And that’s when things started getting interesting.
Why are people afraid of naming things?
Because fear is the root of uneasiness. For instance, I’ve always struggled to call my father “dad”. Not just to his face, I can’t even refer to him by that moniker, nor do I normally use his name. It doesn’t take Sigmund Freud to trace that back to my own childhood suffering of growing up largely without him present. By not naming him, I shed that hurt, and keep it at arms’ length.
We do to refer to tumultuous relationships, ex-partners, and authority figures that marked our development. We also avoid naming things like disease, difficulty, or other traumatic events.
A cancer patient, for instance, may be tempted to refer to their illness by the ominous “It”. Indeed, we often employ such vague denominators when referring to disaster, death, break-ups, and other sources of sorrow. By naming our illness, our aggressor, or our ex, we make them real.
Using someone’s true name, you round out their personality. With good and bad. With the things you hate, but also the things you love about them. Naming things like cancer does make them more manageable. But it also reinforces the finality and grim prospects of many patients. It reminds the speaker that a lot of people with cancer die. On the other hand, a lot of people who are more vaguely “ill” survive. It’s easy to see why we’d avoid the name, in the hope of avoiding its connotations.
Yet by using the non-descriptive “It”, we rob cancer of its dictionary definition, treatment options, survival prognoses, and so on. In other words, avoiding the word itself actually makes it more powerful. “It” has finality, and foreboding. It’s unavoidable, and larger than life. In many instances, giving “It” its true name transforms it into a bite-sized, manageable monster.
Author J.M. Darhower says “if you give the monster a name, it takes away its power”. The driving idea here is that you name it, you tame it.
This is a driving theme through out folklore and fairytales as well. Famously, Rumpelstiltskin tells of a captive young girl who’ll only break free from her tormentor, if she guesses his true name. Historically, these fairytales served as more than a form of entertainment. They were a means of conveying ancient wisdom to our young. In this case, it’s telling you that names are not random, and that they do hold great power. Only by naming the unnamed can you shine a light on it, and only by acknowledging the darkness can you live in the light.
The deceivingly simple tale of Rumpelstiltskin leaves us with two takeaways.
1. Speak the monster’s name.
Be it illness, trauma, or a person who mattered greatly to you. It is normal to be afraid of cancer, of abuse, or a car accident. Yet stepping into the light can only begin once you say to the world
“I am afraid of X. I am afraid of being hurt.”
Using alternative nicknames and monikers for a monster doesn’t make it any less of a monster. It only turns you into someone who is so afraid of being hurt, and of their own trauma, to even speak its name.
In the Book of Genesis, God creates all the animals, then calls on man to name them. By doing that, God makes the word safe and tolerable for man. Without naming them, man would’ve lived in a strange land, surrounded by terrifying, nameless beasts.
We live with the naive belief that by not saying its name, we keep evil at a safe distance, except we can’t. It’s already up close and personal. It exists in your immediate proximity, and by avoiding its name, you’re not even giving yourself permission to breathe around it.
In the end, only by speaking its name do we understand that we’re more than the misfortune that has befallen, or been done to us.
2. Take pride in your own.
So much of our identity is tied to the names we’ve been given, or have chosen for ourselves. Our names bespeak our strengths, our successes, and the power and love and light of our ancestors. And yet, instead of banking on this power to remind us where we’ve come from (both ancestrally, and on a personal level), we so often shun, or hide our names.
We’re embarrassed by our names because they’re too different. Or because they’ve been passed down from generation to generation and are thus “old people names”. In many cultures, names denote a religious aspect of a person’s existence, or perhaps their trade, and that embarrasses us as well. We don’t want people to know our ancestors were poor, had menial jobs, or believed in so-and-so deity.
Yet given that most families can only trace their line back a few generations (to more than just names on a piece of paper, that is), these names may be the only thing we have left of the people we’ve come from, and whose blood runs in our veins. And that is not a genetic accident, or an object of shame to shut away in the darkness.
Studies show that hearing someone say your name is an unbridled source of joy. Anyone who’s had a lover, a crush, or a parent say their name fondly knows that to be true.
It’s true that names give the monster power. But they also give you, the hero who fights and escapes the monster’s clutches, power. And you’d be a fool not to take that.
