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 vocabulary of the twentieth-century deliverance literature the corpus carries. Contested terms with datable origins, defined the same way as the ancient ones.
Showing 8 of 119 terms · clear the filter
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 alsoStrongmanDeliveranceAdjuration
D
2 terms- 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 alsoExorcismStrongmanGrade
- 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 alsoSignDeliveranceExorcism
G
1 term- 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 alsoDeliveranceLegal groundAffliction
L
1 term- 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 curseDeliveranceAffliction
S
2 terms- 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 spiritDeliverance
- 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 alsoHierarchyDeliveranceBinding and loosing
T
1 term- 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 alsoGeniusStrategic-level spiritual warfareCult centre