Meditations on the Veil Part 2

Ritual Signs II
Iman Abdullah Mahmud
(b. Iraq, 1956-)
colored pigments on paper

Ritual Signs II is a clear and typical example of the ancient form of table or tablet of corresponding mystic symbols, elements, and images. Almost a cookbook or roadmap for attempting to decipher the inner nature of deepest reality, and navigating the intricate connective relationships between all things in creation, this type of formula was developed and used extensively in the ancient world among the Hebrews, Egyptians, Chaldeans and many others and has survived into modern usage in forms little changed in either style or content.
Some examples of this form which thrive today are the anagrams and other common amusement puzzles found everywhere in popular culture from Barnes & Noble to the back pages of The New York Times. As with the tarot cards and their mundane cousins the playing card deck which lacks the major arcane or trumps, these modern puzzles and anagrams offer seemingly only amusement and distraction.
The intriguing feature of Mahmud’s table of sigils, is that it truly appears to be a “working magician’s” drawing board. It’s old and worn, tattered and frayed at the edges and clearly shows evidence of fevered erasings and mad scribbling, one can almost imagine by candlelight at the midnight hour. The bold and almost violent strokes across the surface of the work seem disturbingly new, perhaps the ink still damp, giving evidence of a final and triumphant AHA! Moment as these dramatic dark symbols almost leap from the page to preeminently wipe out all that has gone before, or has lead up to, this final secret and private revelation.
Even a light comparison between this work and other similar examples from cultures as disparate as the Hebrew, the Caribbean, and of the 16th, 19th, and 20th century European, as well as those of neo-occultists of the John Dee, Austin Osman Spare, and Aleister Crowley schools of thought, will reveal an uncanny similarity. One cannot easily dismiss the haunting universality of man’s attempt to categorize, symbolize, and then manipulate his observations and theories of the non-spatial and spiritual realms with the same hunger and precision, and with a similar methodology, as do the empirical scientists who scoff at them.