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:
How a claim is recorded here, and the dating vocabulary that decides how much weight it gets.
Showing 14 of 119 terms · clear the filter
A
2 terms- 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 alsoCorpusWitness
- 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 alsoCorpusWitnessHapax legomenon
C
3 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 alsoCognateTransliterationInterpretatio graeca
- 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 alsoCalquePhilologySyncretism
- 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 alsoAttestationArgument from silence
E
1 term- 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 alsoWitnessRecensionReconstructed form
H
1 term- 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 alsoAttestationFolk etymology
I
1 term- 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 alsoAttestationWitnessCorpus
P
2 terms- 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 alsoCognateEmendationTransliteration
- 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 alsoPseudepigraphonWitness
R
1 term- 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 alsoCognateAttestationArgument from silence
T
3 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 quemAttestation
- 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 quemPseudepigraphon
- 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 nameFolk etymologyPhilology