MAGIC WORDS In Literature: • "'Lady Elaine, please come back. We miss you!' 'Oh, sweet music to my ears,' said Lady Elaine, and then King Friday could hear her saying, 'Boomerang, toomerang, soomerang!' No sooner had she said the magic words and waved her magic boomerang than she and the Museum-Go- Round were right back in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe where they belonged." -- Fred Rogers, Mister Rogers Talks With Parents (198 ) Bouquet Common Magician's Applications: Production of flowers. In Literature: • "'The tint is, perhaps, slightly pale. But the body is unquestionable. And as for the bouquet - ' Ah, that magic Bouquet! How vividly that magic word recalled the scene! The little beggar boy turning his somersault in the road -- the sweet little crippled maiden in my arm -- the mysterious evanes cent nursemaid -- all rushed tumultuously into my mind, like the creatures of a dream: and through this mental haze there still boomed on, like the tolling of a bell, the solemn voice of the great connoisseur of wine! Even his utterances had taken on themselves a strange and dream-like form." -- Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1889) Brahman Mystique: "Brahman was, at first, nothing else than the sacred word itself in the magic hymn and in the sacred myth; it was the magic word of power, the priests set in motion, which they attributed to the gods themselves and exalted above the gods, which they associated with the forces and the processes of nature, until it became identified -- still in a mystic sense -- with the ultimate principle of the world and nature itself." 4 Meanings: "The word 'brahman' is the greatest word in the whole history of Indian Philosophy. On it hangs largely the development of Indian thought. The meanings assigned to it are numerous and bewildering. It has been explained and translated by such various terms as worship, devotion, fervor, prayer, hymn, charm, incantation, sanctity, holiness, priesthood, spiritual exaltation, sacred writ, Veda, Vedic formula, priestly order, holy work, priestly dignity, inspiration, force, spiritual power, ultimate reality, absolute. Thus it seems to mean almost anything." 4 Jean J. Waardenburg, Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion (1999) 5 Hervey DeWitt Griswold, Brahman: A Study on the History of Indian Philosophy (1900)