How this is built
The attestation score, and what it does not claim.
A number appears on every card on this site, and a number with no stated basis is worth nothing. This page is the basis. It is also, deliberately, a list of the things the number refuses to say.
What is in the corpus?
328
Entities
121
Source texts
725
Attestations
42
Powers indexed
22
Traditions
Every source text is in the public domain, and every one of them is listed with its author, date and language. An attestation is one text naming one entity: the name as that text gives it, the rank it assigns, the powers it claims, and where possible the passage itself.
How is the score calculated?
Each attestation contributes points according to how early its source is. The points are summed and capped at 100. That is the whole formula — it is deliberately simple, because a complicated weighting would be harder to argue with and no more true.
| Source date | Points | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Before 1 BCE | 30 | Ugaritic tablets, Mesopotamian incantations, the Hebrew Bible's older strata. Independent of the later tradition entirely. |
| 1 – 599 CE | 25 | The Testament of Solomon, patristic writers, the Talmud. Early enough to be a source for the medieval material rather than a copy of it. |
| 600 – 1499 CE | 18 | Medieval angelology and the earlier grimoire tradition — drawing on the above, but still adding material of its own. |
| 1500 CE onward | 12 | Weyer, the Lesser Key, early-modern demonology. Enormously influential, and almost entirely derivative of what precedes it. |
Deep source base
Well sourced
Narrow source base
Single lineage
What does the score not mean?
It is not a claim about importance.
Some of the most culturally consequential figures on this site score in the middle, because their fame arrives late and through a single lineage of texts. Influence and attestation are different measurements and the site keeps them apart.
It is not a claim about existence.
The score measures how many independent texts describe a figure and how early they are. It says nothing whatsoever about whether the description is true, and ColossiansOne takes no position on that question.
It undercounts closely-related texts.
Weyer's Pseudomonarchia and the Lesser Key's Goetia are two witnesses to a single tradition, not two independent ones. The early-date weighting suppresses that duplication crudely rather than precisely, and this is the formula's weakest joint.
It is bounded by what has survived.
A Canaanite deity known from three tablets was probably named in a hundred more that burned. Attestation counts what reached us, which is not the same as what existed.
What happens when the sources disagree?
They are shown disagreeing. Where two texts give a figure different ranks, both ranks appear against the text that assigns them; where a name is spelled four ways, all four are recorded as given. This is the one editorial commitment the site makes that costs it something — a single resolved answer would read more cleanly — and it is the reason the site exists rather than a limitation of it.
The same applies to the syncretic chains. That a demon in one text descends from a god in another is a claim made by identifiable scholarship, not a fact the site asserts on its own authority, and each link in a chain is attributed.
Cite as: ColossiansOne, “Methodology: the attestation score”, https://colossiansone.com/methodology. The underlying texts are public domain; the compilation and scoring are the site’s own.