Terms of art

Glossary

The vocabulary this subject uses is largely borrowed — from Greek philosophy, Roman administration, Egyptian astronomy and Jewish mysticism — and the borrowing is usually the point. Where a word’s history explains a figure’s history, it is said here.

119 terms, A to Z, each tagged with the kind of thing it is. Filter by kind:

Method and Texts are the study's own vocabulary; Change and Spirits are what the sources say; Apparatus is what they drew; Fields is what this site records; Modern is the twentieth century's.

A

13 terms

AdjurationApparatus: A formula that binds by invoking a higher authority. The term marks a whole genre of material in these books; naming and dating that genre is study, and reproducing its text is not, which is the line this corpus draws. What this corpus will not carry.See alsoExorcism Goetia
AfflictionSpirits: A harm a text attributes to a named spirit — a fever, a nightmare, a failing harvest, a form of madness. The affliction lists are the closest these books come to an aetiology, and they track the medicine of their century rather than the demonology of any other. Afflictions in the corpus.See alsoOffice Shedim Exorcism
Alignmentcelestial · infernal · fallen · ambiguousFields: Which side of the ledger a text puts a figure on, in four values. Celestial and infernal are what the sources assert; fallen marks a figure a text says crossed from one to the other; ambiguous is the honest answer where the sources disagree with each other, and it is not a hedge — it is a finding about the record. Browse by alignment.See alsoFallen angel Category Attestation
AmuletphylacteryTexts: A worn or carried object inscribed to avert harm. Amulets are the largest surviving body of evidence for what people actually feared, and their names for spirits often differ from the literary ones — which is a finding about the gap between learned demonology and lived practice. The marks.See alsoIncantation bowl Sigil Affliction
AniconismChange: The refusal to represent a deity in images. It shapes the evidence directly: traditions that made no images leave their figures to be reconstructed from text alone, while their neighbours leave faces, and the imbalance is a fact about doctrine rather than about importance. The marks.See alsoArgument from silence Sigil Survival
AntiphonApparatus: A short sung or spoken verse framing a psalm in liturgy. Its presence in a rite is a dating and setting marker: it places the text inside the ordinary offices of a church rather than in the private operative tradition the grimoires belong to.See alsoClause Exorcism Adjuration
Apocryphonplural apocryphaTexts: A writing outside a tradition's settled canon but circulating within it. Much of the angelology that later became orthodox — orders, names, the fall — entered through apocrypha and was never in the canonical books at all. The source texts.See alsoPseudepigraphon Watcher Merkavah
ApotheosisChange: The elevation of a human being to divine status — a dead emperor, a founder, a hero. It runs in the opposite direction to euhemerism and to demonisation, and where a tradition has all three at once the same figure can be found climbing and falling in different texts.See alsoEuhemerism Demonisation Culture hero
ArchangelSpirits: A chief angel. The word is rarer in scripture than in later systems, which is why the count of archangels varies from four to seven depending on which text you follow — and why the extras are named in apocrypha rather than in the canon. The courts of heaven.See alsoChoir Hierarchy Merkavah
Argument from silenceMethod: Inferring that something did not exist because no surviving text mentions it. It is weak in a field where survival is this arbitrary, and it is the error most often made about demons whose first appearance is late: the name may be old and the parchment merely young.See alsoCorpus Witness
AttestationMethod: One named text saying something about one figure. It is the atomic unit of this site: every claim on a profile belongs to an attestation, which records the name as that text gives it, the rank it assigns, and where possible the passage itself. How attestations are weighted.See alsoCorpus Witness Hapax legomenon
Attestation scoreFields: A 0–100 figure summing points from each attesting text, weighted by how early that text is and capped at 100. It measures how many independent sources describe a figure and how old they are. It measures nothing else — not importance, not fame, and emphatically not whether any of it is true. How the score is calculated.See alsoAttestation Corpus Argument from silence
AttributeFields: One keyed fact a text supplies about a figure — its planet, its metal, its element, its legion count, its position in a list. Attributes are stored with the key the corpus uses and the value the text gives, and where a scheme's own rule would supply a missing value the corpus leaves it missing instead.See alsoOrdinal Legion Office

B

1 term

Binding and loosingModern: A pair of terms from Matthew, originally rabbinic language for forbidding and permitting, read in deliverance writing as authority exercised directly over spirits. The shift from a ruling about conduct to an operation on a being is the whole history of the phrase in one step.See alsoStrongman Deliverance Adjuration

C

14 terms

Calqueloan translation; cf. loanwordMethod: A phrase translated element by element into another language rather than borrowed as sound. A loanword keeps the noise and loses the sense; a calque keeps the sense and loses the noise, and telling them apart is often how a name's route between traditions is established.See alsoCognate Transliteration Interpretatio graeca
Categoryangelic · demonic · deity · realmFields: What kind of thing an entry is, as against whose side it is on. Three of the values are beings; the fourth, realm, is for places and states that the texts name and populate — Sheol, Gehenna, Tartarus — which belong in a corpus of spirits without being spirits.See alsoAlignment Realm Pantheon
CharactercharacteresApparatus: A mark that is written rather than drawn — letter-like signs, often ring-tipped, standing in rows as though they were script. Characters are older than the seals and appear on excavated objects, which makes them evidence from a period the seal tradition cannot reach. The marks.See alsoSigil Voces magicae Defixio
Cherubplural cherubimSpirits: A guardian figure of the throne and the sanctuary, with close relatives in the winged composite beasts of Assyrian and Babylonian palace gates. Nothing in the ancient material resembles the infant of Renaissance painting, and the drift between the two is a case study in reception.See alsoSeraph Choir Reception
ChoirorderSpirits: One tier of angels in a ranked scheme — seraphim, cherubim, thrones and the rest. The nine-choir arrangement most people know is a sixth-century synthesis by Pseudo-Dionysius, assembled from scattered scriptural nouns that were never a list. The hierarchies.See alsoHierarchy Archangel Rank
ChthonicChange: Of the earth and what is under it, as against the sky. Chthonic gods were addressed differently from celestial ones long before anyone thought them evil, and much of what later reads as infernal is this older distinction of direction misread as a distinction of morality.See alsoPsychopomp Realm Demonisation
CircleApparatus: The bounded ground the operator is described as standing within. As an object of study it is chiefly interesting for what is written around its edge, which is usually a list of divine names datable to the century of the manuscript rather than of Solomon.See alsoTriangle of art Pentacle
ClauseApparatus: One numbered part of a rite, as the book prints it. Splitting a rite into clauses is what lets this site describe its shape — how much of it is instruction to the priest and how little is addressed to the spirit — without reproducing it as a continuous script. The rites.See alsoRubric Sign Antiphon
CodexTexts: A book of bound leaves, as against a scroll. The change of format is a dating fact in its own right: it spread in the early centuries CE, and it is why a text surviving on a roll and a text surviving in a codex are usually being read at different periods even when their contents agree.See alsoWitness Palimpsest Provenance
CognateMethod: A word descended from the same ancestor as another, in a related language. Cognate names — the same divine name surfacing in Ugaritic, Hebrew and Phoenician — are evidence of shared inheritance, and are routinely mistaken for evidence of borrowing, which is a different claim.See alsoCalque Philology Syncretism
ColophonTexts: A note at the end of a manuscript or early printing giving the scribe, the place, the date, or all three. Colophons are the closest this material comes to a signed timestamp, and a text without one is a text whose date has to be argued rather than read.See alsoProvenance Witness Terminus ante quem
CorpusMethod: The closed set of texts a study is willing to count. Naming the corpus in advance is what stops a survey from becoming a list of whatever its author happened to have read, and it is why a figure absent from this site is better read as absent from these sources than as absent from history. The source texts.See alsoAttestation Argument from silence
Cult centreFields: The place a figure was actually worshipped, as against the place a later book says it rules. The distinction matters constantly here: a demon assigned a province of hell in 1863 usually had a temple somewhere much earlier, and only one of those two facts is archaeological. Places in the corpus.See alsoGenius Pantheon Demonisation
Culture heroChange: A figure credited with giving humanity a decisive gift — fire, metalworking, writing, law. The type recurs across unrelated traditions, and it is the same act the Watchers are condemned for: whether teaching humans a craft is a gift or a crime depends entirely on who is telling it.See alsoWatcher Trickster Apotheosis

D

9 terms

DaimonLatin daemonSpirits: The Greek word for an intermediate spirit, morally neutral and often benign — Socrates's daimon was a guiding voice. Early Christian writers translated it into Latin as daemon and used it for the gods of everyone else, which is how a word meaning 'spirit' came to mean 'demon'.See alsoDemonisation Genius Shedim
Damnatio memoriaeChange: The deliberate erasure of a name from monuments and records. It is the sharpest form of the survival problem: absence from the record can mean a figure was never there, or that somebody went to considerable trouble to make it look that way.See alsoArgument from silence Survival Provenance
DecanSpirits: One of thirty-six ten-degree divisions of the zodiac, each governed by a spirit in Egyptian and later Hellenistic astrology. The decan spirits are among the oldest named entities that later grimoires absorb wholesale. How old the Goetic demons are.See alsoMagical papyri Syncretism
Defixiocurse tablet, plural defixionesTexts: A thin lead sheet inscribed with a binding curse, folded, pierced and deposited in a grave or a spring. Like the bowls, they are excavated rather than transmitted, and they show what ordinary people asked spirits for, as against what the literary handbooks say they should have.See alsoIncantation bowl Magical papyri Voces magicae
DeliveranceModern: The twentieth-century Protestant practice of expelling spirits from believers, distinguished by its own writers from formal exorcism and requiring no ecclesiastical permission. The literature is recent — the foundational popular manual dates from 1973 — and the corpus carries it as a dated tradition like any other. Afflictions in the corpus.See alsoExorcism Strongman Grade
DemonisationChange: The process by which a rival tradition's god becomes the new tradition's demon. It is the single most common origin story on this site, and it is usually visible in the name: the demon keeps the god's name long after it has lost the god's function. How a god becomes a demon.See alsoSyncretism Survival Daimon
Discernment of spiritsModern: Judging what kind of spirit is at work, listed in Paul as a gift and developed at length in Catholic spiritual direction long before the modern movements adopted the phrase. In every version its stated purpose is restraint — establishing that something is not what it is being taken for.See alsoSign Deliverance Exorcism
DoubletChange: Two figures who are demonstrably one figure split by transmission — a name copied twice in variant spellings, then given separate ranks and separate offices by a later compiler tidying the list. Several seventy-two-spirit catalogues are shorter than they look. Compare two figures.See alsoRecension Interpolation Legion
DybbukSpirits: In Jewish folk tradition from the sixteenth century onward, the spirit of a dead person clinging to a living one. Its late arrival is the point: it comes after Lurianic Kabbalah supplies a theory of wandering souls, so the belief follows the doctrine rather than preceding it.See alsoShedim Revenant Affliction

E

6 terms

Editio princepsTexts: The first printed edition of a text. It is routinely the moment a work becomes fixed — the version everything later quotes — and on this site it is kept distinct from the date of composition, because conflating the two is how a seventeenth-century compilation acquires an ancient reputation. First attestation against first printing.See alsoIncunable Recension Terminus post quem
EgregoreSpirits: A collective thought-form said to be generated and sustained by a group, in twentieth-century occult writing. The word is lifted from a Greek rendering of the Watchers, but the concept is modern and has no ancient antecedent — it is included here because it is frequently claimed to have one.See alsoWatcher Reception Hypostasis
EmendationconjectureMethod: An editor's correction of a text believed to be corrupt, sometimes with manuscript support and sometimes on judgement alone. Printed grimoires are full of silent emendations, and a reader who does not know an edition's habits cannot tell the scribe's demon from the editor's.See alsoWitness Recension Reconstructed form
EpithetFields: A title or descriptive phrase a text attaches to a name — rider of the clouds, lord of flies, prince of the power of the air. Epithets travel between figures more readily than names do, and an epithet turning up on a new figure is often the first sign of an identification being made.See alsoTheophoric name Rank Survival
EuhemerismChange: Explaining gods as exaggerated memories of real historical people. Christian monks recording Irish and Norse material used it heavily, which is why so many pre-Christian deities survive in the manuscripts as ancestral kings rather than as gods.See alsoDemonisation Survival
ExorcismApparatus: A rite whose direction of travel is a spirit being sent away rather than called. The surviving rites are liturgical documents with their own rubrics of restraint, and they are carried here as historical evidence of what a church believed it was dealing with. The rites.See alsoAdjuration Affliction

F

3 terms

Fallen angelSpirits: An angel that rebelled and was cast down. The category is a late synthesis: it fuses the Watchers, an Isaiah passage about a Babylonian king, and the serpent of Genesis into a single biography that none of those texts gives it. Who invented the infernal court.See alsoWatcher Hierarchy Demonisation
Familiarfamiliar spiritSpirits: A spirit attached to an individual, often in animal form, and in English witch-trial records a piece of evidence rather than a theological category. It is a good example of a demonology built by courts: the familiar is prominent in England and largely absent on the continent.See alsoGenius Daimon Office
Folk etymologyChange: A name reshaped to resemble a word its users already know, and then explained by that resemblance. Demon names are unusually exposed to it, because a name carried across three languages by copyists who spoke none of them will be pulled toward sense at every stage.See alsoHapax legomenon Theophoric name Voces magicae

G

8 terms

Gematriaisopsephy; cf. notarikonApparatus: Reading the numerical values of letters to connect words with equal sums — isopsephy is the Greek equivalent, and notarikon the related practice of treating a word as initials. It generates identifications rather than recording them, which is why a link established this way is evidence about its author and not about its subject.See alsoMagic square Folk etymology Voces magicae
Generational curseModern: The claim that a spirit or affliction attaches to a family line and passes down it until broken. It reads a handful of verses about visiting iniquity on later generations as a mechanism, and it has no counterpart in the ancient demonologies on this site, which locate affliction in an event rather than an inheritance.See alsoDeliverance Legal ground Affliction
Geniusplural genii; genius lociSpirits: In Roman religion, the attendant spirit of a person, a household or a place. The tutelary spirit of a place — genius loci — is the ancestor of a good deal of later local demonology, in which the spirit stays put and only its reputation changes. Places in the corpus.See alsoDaimon Pantheon
Ghulanglicised ghoulSpirits: In Arabian tradition a shape-changing desert being that preys on travellers and haunts burial grounds, reckoned among the jinn rather than among the dead. The English word arrives in the eighteenth century by way of translated tales and immediately means something else.See alsoJinn Reception Revenant
GlossmarginaliaTexts: An explanatory note written between the lines or in the margin. Glosses migrate into the body of a text with startling ease — a scribe copying a page cannot always tell what the last one meant as commentary — which is one of the commonest ways a spirit acquires a power it was never given.See alsoInterpolation Recension Witness
GoetiaGreek goēteia, 'sorcery, howling'Texts: The branch of the grimoire tradition concerned with summoning and constraining spirits by name, as against the theurgic strand that addresses itself upward. The Ars Goetia — the first book of the Lesser Key of Solomon — is the best-known example and the source of the seventy-two-spirit list. The hierarchies.See alsoGrimoire Theurgy Legion
GradeFields: How well an attribution is grounded in the passage it cites. It is carried mainly for the modern deliverance material, whose own writers argue about which verses support which claim, and it lets the corpus record a claim and its weakness in the same row. Afflictions in the corpus.See alsoAffliction Attestation Deliverance
GrimoireTexts: A book of magical instruction: catalogues of spirits, their seals, and the procedures for calling them. Most are medieval or early-modern, most claim vastly greater antiquity than they have, and most copy each other extensively. The source texts.See alsoGoetia Pseudepigraphon Recension

H

4 terms

Hapax legomenonplural hapax legomenaMethod: A word occurring exactly once in a given body of text. A great many demon names are hapax legomena, which means their sense is reconstructed from context and etymology alone, and that later confident glosses of them are inventions.See alsoAttestation Folk etymology
HenotheismChange: Worshipping one god without denying that others exist. It is the setting most of the older material on this site comes from, and it explains why rival gods can be real and hostile in the same text — a possibility that later monotheism has to resolve, and usually resolves downward.See alsoMonolatry Pantheon Demonisation
HierarchySpirits: A ranked scheme of spirits, infernal or celestial. Every such scheme on this site is dated and attributed, because they are authored documents rather than descriptions, and the infernal ones are consistently modelled on the courts of the writers' own century. The hierarchies.See alsoRank Choir Legion
HypostasisChange: An abstraction treated as a person — Wisdom, Justice, Death given a name and a will. Several figures on this site began as a hypostasis of a divine attribute and only later acquired a biography.See alsoTheurgy Theophoric name

I

7 terms

Incantation bowlTexts: An earthenware bowl inscribed in a spiral with Aramaic protective text, buried under the floors of Mesopotamian houses in late antiquity. They are physical objects with archaeological contexts, which makes them some of the best-dated evidence in this field and a check on literary sources that have none.See alsoMagical papyri Shedim Amulet
Incubus and succubusSpirits: Spirits held in medieval and early-modern demonology to visit sleepers, named from Latin for lying upon and lying beneath. The category does substantial legal work in the witch trials, which is the honest reason it is prominent in the literature at all.See alsoNephilim Affliction Watcher
Incunableincunabulum, plural incunabulaTexts: A book printed before 1501, in the first fifty years of European printing. The category matters here because the demonological boom follows the press rather than preceding it: the Malleus Maleficarum is an incunable, and its circulation is a fact about printing as much as about belief.See alsoEditio princeps Grimoire Terminus post quem
InterpolationTexts: Material inserted into a text by a later hand and passed on as though original. Whole spirits enter the tradition this way, appearing in one late witness of an old book and thereafter in everything copied from it.See alsoRecension Witness
Interpretatio christianaChange: Reading pre-Christian material through Christian categories — a local god becomes a demon, a festival becomes a saint's day, a hero becomes a king. It is the specific engine behind most of the demonisations on this site, and it usually leaves the older thing intact underneath. How a god becomes a demon.See alsoInterpretatio graeca Demonisation Euhemerism
Interpretatio graecainterpretatio romanaChange: The habit of naming a foreign god by the nearest domestic equivalent — Thoth called Hermes, a Germanic god called Mercury. It is syncretism performed by outsiders, and it means a great many ancient reports of foreign religion have already translated away the thing they claim to describe. The syncretic chains.See alsoSyncretism Pantheon
Ipsissima verbaMethod: The very words of a source, as against a paraphrase or a summary of them. This site distinguishes the two everywhere it can, because a claim carried in a text's own wording and a claim carried in somebody's account of it fail in different ways.See alsoAttestation Witness Corpus

J

1 term

Jinnsingular jinnī; anglicised genieSpirits: In Arabian tradition and later in Islam, a created order of beings parallel to humanity — mortal, morally mixed, and not fallen angels. European translators mapped them onto demons, which is a category error that the Solomonic material then inherited.See alsoDaimon Interpretatio graeca

L

5 terms

LamenApparatus: A plate or plaque worn on the breast in the ceremonial books, carrying the seal of the spirit being addressed. Its function in the texts is identification and protection — it declares who is standing there and under what authority.See alsoSigil Pentacle
Legal groundopen doorModern: The claim that a spirit needs a specific permission — a sin, a trauma, an object, an ancestor — before it can afflict someone, and that removing it removes the spirit's right to remain. The vocabulary is juridical throughout, which puts this literature in a long line of demonologies that imagine the unseen world as a court. The courts of heaven.See alsoGenerational curse Deliverance Affliction
LegionSpirits: The unit in which grimoires count a spirit's subordinates, borrowed from the Roman army and from the Gospel demon who answers 'my name is Legion, for we are many'. The numbers are conventional rather than observational, and the fact that they cluster on round figures is itself informative.See alsoRank Hierarchy
Lemegetonthe Lesser Key of SolomonTexts: A seventeenth-century compilation of five separate books — Goetia, Theurgia Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel and Ars Notoria — assembled from older material of quite different dates. Treating it as one work is the single most common error made about it, and most claims about its antiquity are true of one part and false of the rest. The source texts.See alsoGoetia Grimoire Recension
LemureslarvaeSpirits: The restless or malevolent dead of Roman religion, placated at a household festival each May. They are dead people rather than demons, and their presence in the record is a reminder that the ancient categories divide the unseen world along lines the later ones ignore.See alsoGenius Revenant Psychopomp

M

4 terms

Magic squarekameaApparatus: A grid of numbers summing equally along every row and column, assigned to a planet in the Renaissance occult books and used to generate seals by tracing a name's numerical values across it. The construction is arithmetic, which is why several sigils can be checked rather than merely described. The seals are younger than the list.See alsoSigil Gematria Planetary hours
Magical papyriPGM, Papyri Graecae MagicaeTexts: A body of Greek, Demotic and Coptic ritual texts from Roman Egypt, recovered as physical papyri rather than transmitted by copying. They matter because they are dated by their material: where a later grimoire and a papyrus share a name, the papyrus settles which end of the chain is old.See alsoVoces magicae Syncretism Decan
MerkavahHekhalot literatureTexts: Early Jewish mystical literature centred on Ezekiel's vision of the divine chariot. It is where much of the angelic hierarchy that Christian writers later systematised is first worked out in detail.See alsoChoir Archangel Apocryphon
MonolatryChange: Worship restricted to one god as a matter of obligation, with others acknowledged as existing. The distinction from full monotheism is not pedantry here: a god who exists but must not be served is exactly the position from which a god becomes a demon.See alsoHenotheism Demonisation Survival

N

1 term

NephilimSpirits: The offspring of the Watchers and human women, and in the Enochic account the source of the disembodied spirits that afflict the living after the flood. It is the tradition's own explanation of where demons come from, and it is older than any of the grimoires.See alsoWatcher Affliction

O

2 terms

Officepower, skillSpirits: What a text says a spirit can do — teach a language, find treasure, reconcile enemies, answer for the past. Offices are the most comparable thing in the corpus, since the same handful recur across cultures that had no contact with each other. Powers across the corpus.See alsoRank Affliction
OrdinalFields: A figure's position within a text's own enumeration — the thirty-second spirit, the seventy-second. Ordinals differ between recensions of the same list, which is why they are recorded per text rather than as a property of the figure.See alsoRecension Attribute Doublet

P

9 terms

PalimpsestTexts: A manuscript whose original writing was scraped away so the parchment could be reused. Some of the oldest evidence in this field survives only underneath something else, which is a useful reminder that what a period preserved and what it valued are the same question.See alsoCodex Witness Argument from silence
PantheonChange: The full set of gods of one culture, considered together. On this site it is a field on every entity of divine origin, and it is what the tradition hubs are built from. Browse by tradition.See alsoSyncretism Interpretatio graeca
PentacleApparatus: A disc or figure bearing inscribed names and geometry, used in the Solomonic books as a protective object rather than a summoning one. The word has been attached to a five-pointed star only since the nineteenth century; in the manuscripts it names the medium, not the shape.See alsoSigil Lamen Circle
PhilologyMethod: The study of language in historical texts — what a word meant to the people writing it, and how it changed. It is the discipline most of this site's conclusions rest on, and it is why an argument here usually ends in a manuscript rather than in a theory about religion.See alsoCognate Emendation Transliteration
Planetary hoursApparatus: A scheme dividing daylight and night each into twelve unequal hours ruled in turn by the seven planets. Its presence in a book is a dating marker rather than a curiosity: it ties that text to a particular astrological tradition and to the centuries in which that tradition was current.See alsoDecan Grimoire Magic square
Principalities and powersSpirits: A cluster of nouns in the Pauline letters — rulers, authorities, powers, dominions — naming unseen structures of dominance. They are not a list of angelic ranks in the text itself; they were made into one later, and that reading is what supplies half the nine choirs. The hierarchies.See alsoChoir Hierarchy Territorial spirit
ProvenanceMethod: The chain of custody of a manuscript — who owned it, where it sat, how it reached the shelf it is now catalogued on. A text with no provenance before its first printing is a text whose claimed antiquity rests on nothing but its own title page.See alsoPseudepigraphon Witness
Pseudepigraphonplural pseudepigraphaTexts: A work attributed to someone who did not write it, usually someone far older and more authoritative. The Solomonic literature is almost entirely pseudepigraphic: Solomon's name is doing the work that the text's actual date cannot.See alsoApocryphon Provenance Terminus post quem
PsychopompSpirits: A figure whose function is to conduct the dead — Hermes, Anubis, the angel of death. Psychopomps demonise unusually often, because a tradition that inherits the role and rejects the god keeps the job and reassigns it downward.See alsoDemonisation Genius

Q

1 term

Qliphothsingular qlipah; the shells, the husksSpirits: In Lurianic Kabbalah, the shells left over from the vessels that shattered at creation, and by extension a counter-structure of impurity shadowing the sefirot. It is the clearest case in this corpus of a demonology generated by a cosmology rather than collected from folklore — the shells exist because the system needs somewhere for the residue to go. The hierarchies.See alsoHierarchy Dybbuk Hypostasis

R

8 terms

RankSpirits: The office a text assigns a spirit — king, duke, marquis, president, prelate. The vocabulary is borrowed wholesale from secular and ecclesiastical administration, and a figure's rank routinely differs between two texts that otherwise agree about it. Every rank, and who holds it.See alsoHierarchy Legion Office
RealmFields: A named place or state of the dead, carried here as an entry in its own right. Realms behave like figures in the sources — they are described, located, given rulers and gates — and separating them out is what stops a list of demons from quietly asserting that Sheol is one.See alsoCategory Psychopomp
RecensionTexts: One deliberately revised version of a text, as against a copy that merely accumulated errors. Grimoires typically survive in several recensions that disagree about how many spirits there are, which is why a figure's rank can differ between two books with the same title.See alsoWitness Interpolation Stemma
ReceptionFields: What later tradition, popular culture and misidentification made of a figure, kept in a field of its own. It is separated from the description on purpose, so that a nineteenth-century engraving or a film can be recorded without being blended into what the ancient sources say.See alsoAttestation Survival Folk etymology
Reconstructed formwritten with an asterisk, e.g. *deiwosMethod: A word inferred from its descendants and attested nowhere, marked with an asterisk by convention. The asterisk is a warning label, and it disappears with suspicious frequency when a reconstructed divine name is quoted at second hand.See alsoCognate Attestation Argument from silence
RedactionTexts: Editing that combines or reshapes existing material into a new whole, and by extension the study of where the seams are. Much of the biblical and Enochic material this site draws on is composite, and the seams are frequently where the demonology sits.See alsoRecension Interpolation Apocryphon
RevenantSpirits: One who returns bodily from the grave, as distinct from a spirit or a ghost. Medieval accounts treat revenants as a problem of the corpse and its burial, which puts them in a different department from demons entirely — a distinction that later collapses.See alsoLemures Psychopomp Realm
RubricApparatus: An instruction to the officiant rather than words to be said, printed in red in the manuscripts — which is where the word comes from. The rubrics of the exorcism rites are the most restrained part of them: they are largely warnings about when not to proceed. The rites.See alsoClause Exorcism Sign

S

9 terms

Seraphplural seraphimSpirits: The burning ones of Isaiah's vision, six-winged and stationed above the throne. The Hebrew root means to burn, and the same word elsewhere in scripture means a serpent — an ambiguity the later angelology inherits and quietly resolves in favour of the wings.See alsoChoir Cherub Merkavah
Shedimsingular shedSpirits: The Hebrew Bible's own class of harmful spirits, distinct from the fallen angels of later literature and probably borrowed from the Akkadian šēdu, a protective guardian figure. The moral inversion happened in transit.See alsoDaimon Demonisation Affliction
Sigilseal, characterApparatus: A drawn mark standing for a named spirit. This site treats sigils as dated objects: the seventy-two Goetic seals are attested centuries later than the list of names they belong to, which makes them evidence about the seventeenth century and not about antiquity. The seals are younger than the list.See alsoLamen Pentacle Grimoire
SignApparatus: A criterion a rite gives for judging that a spirit is present at all. The 1614 Roman rite gives three, and the far longer list the public believes it gives comes from film. Counting the signs a text actually prints is one of the cheaper corrections this corpus can make. The rites.See alsoRubric Exorcism Affliction
Stemmastemma codicumTexts: A family tree of manuscripts, built by working out which copies inherited which errors. It is the closest this field comes to a laboratory result: shared mistakes prove descent in a way that shared content never can. Which source texts copy each other.See alsoWitness Recension
Strategic-level spiritual warfareModern: A 1990s missiological programme of identifying and confronting territorial spirits over named places, most associated with the Spiritual Warfare Network. It was contested inside its own movement from the start, and the corpus records both the claim and that dispute.See alsoTerritorial spirit Deliverance
StrongmanModern: In deliverance writing, a chief spirit held to govern lesser ones over a person or place, from a Gospel parable about binding a strong man before plundering his house. It is a hierarchy of the same shape as the grimoires', built from a parable rather than from a court.See alsoHierarchy Deliverance Binding and loosing
SurvivalChange: An element that outlives the system that gave it meaning — a festival kept after the god is forgotten, an epithet copied by a scribe who no longer knows what it meant. Survivals are the most reliable evidence this field has, because nobody preserved them on purpose.See alsoDemonisation Euhemerism Theophoric name
SyncretismChange: The merging of two religious figures or systems into one. Roman religion identifying Jupiter with Zeus is the textbook case; Yoruba orisha surviving under the names of Catholic saints is the case where the stakes were survival. The syncretic chains.See alsoInterpretatio graeca Demonisation Pantheon

T

10 terms

Terminus ante quemTAQ; 'limit before which'Method: The latest date a text can have been written, fixed by the earliest thing that quotes or copies it. Paired with its opposite it gives a window rather than a guess, and on this site the two together are what a date range means.See alsoTerminus post quem Attestation
Terminus post quemTPQ; 'limit after which'Method: The earliest date a text can have been written, fixed by the latest thing it mentions. A grimoire naming a printed book cannot predate that book, however loudly it claims Solomon as its author. First attestation against first printing.See alsoTerminus ante quem Pseudepigraphon
Territorial spiritModern: A spirit held to hold authority over a city, region or nation. The idea has a genuine ancient ancestor in the tutelary gods of places and in Daniel's princes of Persia and Greece; the modern version, dating from the late 1980s, is distinguished by treating those princes as a live map. Places in the corpus.See alsoGenius Strategic-level spiritual warfare Cult centre
Testament literatureTexts: A genre in which a dying patriarch narrates his life and instructs his heirs. The Testament of Solomon takes the form and fills it with a spirit catalogue, which is why a text that reads like a demonology is shaped like a deathbed speech.See alsoPseudepigraphon Apocryphon Decan
Theophoric nameChange: A personal or place name containing a god's name — Michael, 'who is like El'; Gabriel, 'strength of El'. Theophoric elements are often the last surviving evidence that a particular god was worshipped somewhere. Names by tradition.See alsoSurvival Folk etymology Archangel
TheurgyTexts: Ritual philosophy aimed at union with the divine, as practised by the later Neoplatonists. It shares an apparatus with goetia and defines itself against it, and the boundary between the two is drawn by whoever is writing rather than by anything in the rites.See alsoGoetia Hypostasis
TransliterationMethod: Writing a name from one script in the letters of another. Every demon name on this site has been transliterated at least once, usually more, and the variants that result are not noise — they are the record of which languages a name passed through.See alsoVariant name Folk etymology Philology
Triangle of artApparatus: A triangle drawn outside the circle, which the Lemegeton describes as the place a spirit is to become visible. It appears late and in few witnesses, and its familiarity today owes more to nineteenth- and twentieth-century printings than to the manuscript tradition.See alsoCircle Sigil
TricksterChange: A figure who works by inversion, deceit and boundary-crossing, and who is neither straightforwardly good nor evil. Tricksters demonise badly — the categories do not fit — and several of the more incoherent demons in the later books are tricksters that a moral scheme has tried to sort.See alsoCulture hero Alignment Demonisation
TutelaryChange: Guardian of a specific place, household, trade or person. The tutelary role is remarkably durable — it survives conversion, renaming and demonisation alike — which is why the spirit attached to a hill is so often the last pre-Christian thing left in a landscape. Places in the corpus.See alsoGenius Territorial spirit Survival

V

2 terms

Variant namealt name, transliterationFields: An alternate spelling or transliteration of a name, carried alongside the headword rather than silently normalised to it. The variants are frequently the evidence — a single figure spelled four ways across three alphabets is what a transmission chain looks like from the inside.See alsoDoublet Folk etymology Theophoric name
Voces magicaebarbarous namesApparatus: Strings of untranslatable syllables in ritual texts, often garbled Egyptian, Hebrew or nonsense preserved for its sound. Scholars study their transmission — how a divine name degrades over three languages of copying — and this site describes that process without reproducing the strings themselves.See alsoMagical papyri Folk etymology Hapax legomenon

W

2 terms

WatcherAramaic ʿir, 'wakeful one'Spirits: In 1 Enoch, an order of angels who descend, take human wives and teach forbidden arts. The Watchers are the oldest full narrative account of angelic rebellion and the direct ancestor of the later fallen-angel tradition. Entities in the corpus.See alsoNephilim Apocryphon Fallen angel
WitnessTexts: A single surviving manuscript or printing of a text, considered as evidence for what the text once said. No grimoire is known from its original; every one of them is known only from its witnesses, and where they disagree an editor has to choose.See alsoRecension Stemma Provenance