Angelic alphabet
The special letterforms recorded for Dee's angelic language. Their names and shapes are matters of textual witness, not ordinary English translations.
Reference · Glossary
Glossary
A guide to the words used across this site and in the texts behind it. Definitions describe historical usage, not proven supernatural effects. A term may mean different things in different traditions; the tradition label tells you which sense is meant here.
Looking for a sign rather than a word? Symbols draws the signs of astrology, alchemy and geomancy and links each to what this study says about it.
243 terms · page 2 of 13
Angular house
A house connected with a primary chart angle. Traditional astrology distinguishes angular, succedent and cadent places.
Apocryphon of John
A late-antique revelatory text whose myth of divine realms and the lower creator is central to many modern studies of Sethian material.
Apotropaic
Intended to avert danger or harmful influence, for example when a text prescribes a protective sign or object.
Aquarius
The Aquarius sign of the zodiac. Aquarius is fixed air: a sustained idea, rule, or common cause, with the distance to see a social pattern and the stubbornness to keep testing it.
Archangel
A high-ranking angel in several religious and esoteric classifications. Lists and roles vary by source and tradition.
Archon
A ruler or cosmic power in some Gnostic accounts, often associated with the lower world and obstacles to a soul's ascent.
Aries
The Aries sign of the zodiac. The wheel begins here. Aries is cardinal fire: the first push, the clean break, and the courage to move while the road is still being made.
Ars Goetia
The first book of the Lemegeton, presenting a catalogue of seventy-two spirits and a ritual apparatus for addressing them.
Ascendant
Also: Rising sign
The point of the ecliptic rising at the eastern horizon for a chart's time and place; it begins the first house in many house systems.
Ascent
The soul's movement toward a divine realm or condition in some late-antique philosophical and religious texts, often narrated through cosmic levels.
Aspect
A measured angular relationship between chart positions. A sign-to-sign relationship is only an approximation of an exact planetary aspect.
Athanor
A furnace associated with sustained heating in an alchemist's workshop.
Black-hilt knife
A ritual tool in Key of Solomon. The circle-making knife of the Key of Solomon's Book II, separately prepared and stored from its white-hilt counterpart.
Book 4 Cup
A ritual tool in Crowley, Book 4. The receptive counterpart to the wand, figured as understanding, purification, and the capacity to receive and organize experience.
Book 4 Lamen
A ritual tool in Crowley, Book 4. A breastplate worn over the heart that combines the operator's symbols into a single image of forces already at work.
Book 4 Pantacle
A ritual tool in Crowley, Book 4. A flat wax disc of Earth and Malkuth, imagined as the practitioner's body, field of experience, and storehouse of everything that may be worked upon.
Book 4 Sword
A ritual tool in Crowley, Book 4. The weapon of analytical reason: a steel blade with copper hilt and back-to-back lunar crescents on the guard.
Book 4 Wand
A ritual tool in Crowley, Book 4. The principal weapon of Book 4: directed will, wisdom, speech, and the magical oath made concrete.
Book of conjurations
A ritual tool in Crowley, Book 4. The practitioner's continuous record of thought, speech, and action, treated as both magical diary and book of spells.