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:
The processes that turn one culture's god into another's demon, and leave tracks in the name.
Showing 20 of 119 terms · clear the filter
A
2 terms- 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 silenceSigilSurvival
- 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 alsoEuhemerismDemonisationCulture hero
C
2 terms- 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 alsoPsychopompRealmDemonisation
- 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 alsoWatcherTricksterApotheosis
D
3 terms- 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 silenceSurvivalProvenance
- 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 alsoSyncretismSurvivalDaimon
- 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 alsoRecensionInterpolationLegion
E
1 term- 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 alsoDemonisationSurvival
F
1 term- 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 legomenonTheophoric nameVoces magicae
H
2 terms- 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 alsoMonolatryPantheonDemonisation
- 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 alsoTheurgyTheophoric name
I
2 terms- 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 graecaDemonisationEuhemerism
- 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 alsoSyncretismPantheon
M
1 term- 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 alsoHenotheismDemonisationSurvival
P
1 term- 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 alsoSyncretismInterpretatio graeca
S
2 terms- 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 alsoDemonisationEuhemerismTheophoric 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 graecaDemonisationPantheon
T
3 terms- 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 alsoSurvivalFolk etymologyArchangel
- 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 heroAlignmentDemonisation
- 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 alsoGeniusTerritorial spiritSurvival