ColossiansOne

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 classes and orders the texts sort their figures into.

Showing 27 of 119 terms · clear the filter

A

2 terms
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 alsoOfficeShedimExorcism
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 alsoChoirHierarchyMerkavah

C

2 terms
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 alsoSeraphChoirReception
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 alsoHierarchyArchangelRank

D

3 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 alsoDemonisationGeniusShedim
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 papyriSyncretism
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 alsoShedimRevenantAffliction

E

1 term
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 alsoWatcherReceptionHypostasis

F

2 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 alsoWatcherHierarchyDemonisation
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 alsoGeniusDaimonOffice

G

2 terms
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 alsoDaimonPantheon
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 alsoJinnReceptionRevenant

H

1 term
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 alsoRankChoirLegion

I

1 term
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 alsoNephilimAfflictionWatcher

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 alsoDaimonInterpretatio graeca

L

2 terms
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 alsoRankHierarchy
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 alsoGeniusRevenantPsychopomp

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 alsoWatcherAffliction

O

1 term
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 alsoRankAffliction

P

2 terms
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 alsoChoirHierarchyTerritorial spirit
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 alsoDemonisationGenius

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 alsoHierarchyDybbukHypostasis

R

2 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 alsoHierarchyLegionOffice
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 alsoLemuresPsychopompRealm

S

2 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 alsoChoirCherubMerkavah
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 alsoDaimonDemonisationAffliction

W

1 term
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 alsoNephilimApocryphonFallen angel