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 site's own vocabulary — the columns on an entity page and what each one is allowed to hold.
Showing 11 of 119 terms · clear the filter
A
3 terms- 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 angelCategoryAttestation
- 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 alsoAttestationCorpusArgument 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 alsoOrdinalLegionOffice
C
2 terms- 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 alsoAlignmentRealmPantheon
- 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 alsoGeniusPantheonDemonisation
E
1 term- 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 nameRankSurvival
G
1 term- 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 alsoAfflictionAttestationDeliverance
O
1 termR
2 terms- 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 alsoCategoryPsychopomp
- 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 alsoAttestationSurvivalFolk etymology
V
1 term- 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 alsoDoubletFolk etymologyTheophoric name