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 kinds of book this material survives in, and what each kind is worth as evidence.
Showing 23 of 119 terms · clear the filter
A
2 terms- AmuletphylacteryTexts
- A worn or carried object inscribed to avert harm. Amulets are the largest surviving body of evidence for what people actually feared, and their names for spirits often differ from the literary ones — which is a finding about the gap between learned demonology and lived practice. The marks.See alsoIncantation bowlSigilAffliction
- Apocryphonplural apocryphaTexts
- A writing outside a tradition's settled canon but circulating within it. Much of the angelology that later became orthodox — orders, names, the fall — entered through apocrypha and was never in the canonical books at all. The source texts.See alsoPseudepigraphonWatcherMerkavah
C
2 terms- CodexTexts
- A book of bound leaves, as against a scroll. The change of format is a dating fact in its own right: it spread in the early centuries CE, and it is why a text surviving on a roll and a text surviving in a codex are usually being read at different periods even when their contents agree.See alsoWitnessPalimpsestProvenance
- ColophonTexts
- A note at the end of a manuscript or early printing giving the scribe, the place, the date, or all three. Colophons are the closest this material comes to a signed timestamp, and a text without one is a text whose date has to be argued rather than read.See alsoProvenanceWitnessTerminus ante quem
D
1 term- Defixiocurse tablet, plural defixionesTexts
- A thin lead sheet inscribed with a binding curse, folded, pierced and deposited in a grave or a spring. Like the bowls, they are excavated rather than transmitted, and they show what ordinary people asked spirits for, as against what the literary handbooks say they should have.See alsoIncantation bowlMagical papyriVoces magicae
E
1 term- Editio princepsTexts
- The first printed edition of a text. It is routinely the moment a work becomes fixed — the version everything later quotes — and on this site it is kept distinct from the date of composition, because conflating the two is how a seventeenth-century compilation acquires an ancient reputation. First attestation against first printing.See alsoIncunableRecensionTerminus post quem
G
3 terms- GlossmarginaliaTexts
- An explanatory note written between the lines or in the margin. Glosses migrate into the body of a text with startling ease — a scribe copying a page cannot always tell what the last one meant as commentary — which is one of the commonest ways a spirit acquires a power it was never given.See alsoInterpolationRecensionWitness
- GoetiaGreek goēteia, 'sorcery, howling'Texts
- The branch of the grimoire tradition concerned with summoning and constraining spirits by name, as against the theurgic strand that addresses itself upward. The Ars Goetia — the first book of the Lesser Key of Solomon — is the best-known example and the source of the seventy-two-spirit list. The hierarchies.See alsoGrimoireTheurgyLegion
- GrimoireTexts
- A book of magical instruction: catalogues of spirits, their seals, and the procedures for calling them. Most are medieval or early-modern, most claim vastly greater antiquity than they have, and most copy each other extensively. The source texts.See alsoGoetiaPseudepigraphonRecension
I
3 terms- Incantation bowlTexts
- An earthenware bowl inscribed in a spiral with Aramaic protective text, buried under the floors of Mesopotamian houses in late antiquity. They are physical objects with archaeological contexts, which makes them some of the best-dated evidence in this field and a check on literary sources that have none.See alsoMagical papyriShedimAmulet
- Incunableincunabulum, plural incunabulaTexts
- A book printed before 1501, in the first fifty years of European printing. The category matters here because the demonological boom follows the press rather than preceding it: the Malleus Maleficarum is an incunable, and its circulation is a fact about printing as much as about belief.See alsoEditio princepsGrimoireTerminus post quem
L
1 term- Lemegetonthe Lesser Key of SolomonTexts
- A seventeenth-century compilation of five separate books — Goetia, Theurgia Goetia, Ars Paulina, Ars Almadel and Ars Notoria — assembled from older material of quite different dates. Treating it as one work is the single most common error made about it, and most claims about its antiquity are true of one part and false of the rest. The source texts.See alsoGoetiaGrimoireRecension
M
2 terms- Magical papyriPGM, Papyri Graecae MagicaeTexts
- A body of Greek, Demotic and Coptic ritual texts from Roman Egypt, recovered as physical papyri rather than transmitted by copying. They matter because they are dated by their material: where a later grimoire and a papyrus share a name, the papyrus settles which end of the chain is old.See alsoVoces magicaeSyncretismDecan
- MerkavahHekhalot literatureTexts
- Early Jewish mystical literature centred on Ezekiel's vision of the divine chariot. It is where much of the angelic hierarchy that Christian writers later systematised is first worked out in detail.See alsoChoirArchangelApocryphon
P
2 terms- PalimpsestTexts
- A manuscript whose original writing was scraped away so the parchment could be reused. Some of the oldest evidence in this field survives only underneath something else, which is a useful reminder that what a period preserved and what it valued are the same question.See alsoCodexWitnessArgument from silence
- Pseudepigraphonplural pseudepigraphaTexts
- A work attributed to someone who did not write it, usually someone far older and more authoritative. The Solomonic literature is almost entirely pseudepigraphic: Solomon's name is doing the work that the text's actual date cannot.See alsoApocryphonProvenanceTerminus post quem
R
2 terms- RecensionTexts
- One deliberately revised version of a text, as against a copy that merely accumulated errors. Grimoires typically survive in several recensions that disagree about how many spirits there are, which is why a figure's rank can differ between two books with the same title.See alsoWitnessInterpolationStemma
- RedactionTexts
- Editing that combines or reshapes existing material into a new whole, and by extension the study of where the seams are. Much of the biblical and Enochic material this site draws on is composite, and the seams are frequently where the demonology sits.See alsoRecensionInterpolationApocryphon
S
1 term- Stemmastemma codicumTexts
- A family tree of manuscripts, built by working out which copies inherited which errors. It is the closest this field comes to a laboratory result: shared mistakes prove descent in a way that shared content never can. Which source texts copy each other.See alsoWitnessRecension
T
2 terms- Testament literatureTexts
- A genre in which a dying patriarch narrates his life and instructs his heirs. The Testament of Solomon takes the form and fills it with a spirit catalogue, which is why a text that reads like a demonology is shaped like a deathbed speech.See alsoPseudepigraphonApocryphonDecan
- TheurgyTexts
- Ritual philosophy aimed at union with the divine, as practised by the later Neoplatonists. It shares an apparatus with goetia and defines itself against it, and the boundary between the two is drawn by whoever is writing rather than by anything in the rites.See alsoGoetiaHypostasis
W
1 term- WitnessTexts
- A single surviving manuscript or printing of a text, considered as evidence for what the text once said. No grimoire is known from its original; every one of them is known only from its witnesses, and where they disagree an editor has to choose.See alsoRecensionStemmaProvenance