Can names do things?
🔮 Names that Heal, Help… or Hurt
Kimmel’s book opens with the idea that names - especially divine names - have historically been treated not as neutral labels, but as instruments of numinous force. In the ancient Mediterranean world, uttering the name of Jesus, Aphrodite, or an unnamed deity could be a pathway to healing, protection, or fertility. But in many cases, names were also used for darker purposes: to curse, to punish, to invoke pain upon enemies. As Kimmel shows, even early Christians could summon Jesus’ name not just to cast out demons, but to condemn adversaries with illness or death.
Chapters 1–3 analyze textual and material sources - gospel narratives, apocryphal acts, magical papyri, and amulets - to demonstrate how names functioned as tools of action. These were not metaphors: in 1st- and 2nd-century rituals, invoking a name was understood as doing something real in the world.
📿 From Judea to Tibet: A Comparative Turn
The middle of the book takes a surprising comparative turn. Kimmel brings in the Indo-Tibetan spell tradition, analyzing a 10th-century spellbook that centers on the name Bhṛkuṭī, a wrathful female deity. What emerges is a striking resonance between two seemingly unrelated traditions: both ancient Christians and medieval Tibetan Buddhists treated correct naming as a gateway to power - over nature, over spirits, and over fate.
By engaging with Tibetan mantras and the writings of scholars like André Padoux and Sam van Schaik, Kimmel demonstrates that this “onomastic logic” is not isolated to one religious stream. It’s a global phenomenon, one with profound theological and philosophical implications.
🧠 Philosophy, Ritual, and the Power of the Unspoken
In chapters 5 and 6, Kimmel shifts from ritual practice to intellectual history, exploring how thinkers like Plato, Origen, and Tertullian in the West - and Padoux and Tibetan ritual theorists in the East - grappled with the question of what a name is. Is it merely a symbol, or something closer to an emanation of essence? How tightly is a being bound to its name?
This exploration reveals sharp contrasts: while Mediterranean thinkers often debated whether a name could reflect or invoke essence, Indic traditions leaned more confidently toward a theory of mantra-as-force. Kimmel’s comparative lens shows both the overlap and dissonance in these cosmologies.
🔍 Why This Book Matters
Power in the Name makes bold contributions across several disciplines:
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Religious Studies & Early Christianity: It debunks outdated binaries like “Christian ritual vs. pagan magic,” showing that early Jesus-followers operated with magical expectations surrounding divine names.
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Linguistics & Onomastics: It reframes names not just as linguistic artifacts but as objects of power, capable of being activated, inscribed, and deployed.
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Comparative Religion & Anthropology: It challenges Western materialist assumptions by taking “the uncanny” seriously - healing, cursing, levitating, invoking - while keeping both feet grounded in rigorous textual analysis.
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Intellectual History: It links ancient Mediterranean and Tibetan Indian theories of language, making a rare and nuanced comparative gesture.
This book is an invitation - to historians of religion, to philosophers of language, and to anyone curious about how utterance becomes action.
🔗 About the Author
Joseph L. Kimmel earned his PhD in the Study of Religion at Harvard and now teaches at Boston College. He’s also an Episcopal priest, a Tibetan linguist, and co-editor of The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Comparative Theology. His forthcoming book, The Many Lives of Mantras, continues his cross-cultural study of names, language, and sacred sound.
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