Attestation
Also: Attested
The evidence that something is actually recorded somewhere. A well-attested attribution appears in sources; an unattested one does not.
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.
342 terms · page 3 of 18
Bara, yatzar, asah
Also: bara, yatzar, asah
Created, formed, made. Three verbs standing together in Isaiah 43:7, read by kabbalists as naming three of the four worlds.
Barbarous names
Also: Voces magicae
Strings of syllables recited in invocations without being translated, and generally held to work as sound rather than as sense.
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.
Blackletter
Also: Gothic type, Fraktur
The dense angular type of early printing. Its scans defeat optical character recognition, which is why several books here are cited and never quoted.
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.
Brass vessel
A ritual tool in Ars Goetia. The legendary container of the seventy-two spirits, closed with the Secret Seal of Solomon and reproduced as part of the Goetia's ritual mythology.
Cadent house
A house falling away from an angle in traditional chart structure, distinct from angular and succedent houses.
Calcination
Strong heating that leaves a powdery residue or changes a material's properties. An alchemical operation, not a universal spiritual stage.
Cancer
The Cancer sign of the zodiac. Cancer is cardinal water: the instinct to gather, shelter, feed, remember, and make a living enclosure around whatever is tender or still forming.
Capricorn
The Capricorn sign of the zodiac. Capricorn is cardinal earth: ambition in its old sense of undertaking a climb, accepting weight, and building something that can bear consequence and time.
Cartomancy
Divination by cards. Tarot cartomancy is one form, but ordinary playing-card decks have also been used.
Cast
The initial production of four Mother figures in a geomantic reading, traditionally from sets of marks made without counting in advance.
Celestial magic
Agrippa's branch concerning stars, numbers, images and their proposed influence on earthly things.
Censer
A ritual tool in Key of Solomon. The fire-vessel that turns prepared aromatics into fumigation and marks the outer geometry of the circle.