Glossary

# Alterhuman: an umbrella term for identities beyond the ordinary human experience, including identifying as wholly or partly non-human (such as otherkin and therians) or as human in an atypical way (such as walk-ins, who describe a different soul or self occupying their body). It is a self-identification, not a clinical diagnosis.

# Ásatrú (also Asatru): a modern revival of pre-Christian Norse and Germanic polytheism, honoring deities such as Odin, Thor and Freyja; Heathenry is the wider umbrella term for these traditions. Many Heathen organizations, such as The Troth, are explicitly inclusive, while “folkish” groups restrict the religion by ancestry in ways widely criticized as racist.

# Ascension: in occult and New Age contexts, the idea that a person can spiritually evolve into an “ascended master”, a highly evolved being beyond ordinary human limits. The concept comes from Theosophy and was popularized by 20th-century movements like the “I AM” Activity; today it’s also used loosely for raising one’s consciousness through spiritual practice.

# ATR: short for African Traditional Religions, an umbrella term for the indigenous religious traditions of Africa and, by extension, the religions of the African diaspora (such as Vodou and Lucumí), as distinct from Islam and Christianity in Africa. Many of these traditions are initiatory: they are learned through a lineage, community and elders rather than self-taught.

# Bibliomancy: divination by opening a book, often a sacred or meaningful one, at random and reading the passage that appears as an answer or omen. Stichomancy, divination from a single line or verse chosen this way, is a related term; some sources use it as a strict synonym for bibliomancy, others treat it as a narrower technique focused on one line rather than a whole passage.

# Chaldean: most often refers to Chaldean numerology, a system that assigns numbers to letters by their sound and that practitioners trace back to ancient Babylon. It can also mean the Chaldean Oracles, fragmentary Greek mystical verses from around the 2nd century CE that shaped Neoplatonist philosophy and were revived by 19th-century occultists such as the Golden Dawn.

# Channeling: a practice in which a person opens themselves to a deity, spirit or other entity and lets it communicate through them in speech, writing or other forms. Practitioners describe the entity’s consciousness or energy moving through them; it is a modern name for what has historically been called mediumship.

# Chaos Magick: a magical approach that emerged in England in the late 1970s, associated with Peter J. Carroll and Ray Sherwin, who founded the Illuminates of Thanateros. It treats belief as a tool to take up and set down for a given working rather than committing to one tradition, and practitioners mix methods experimentally, judging them by results.

# Clair-senses: intuitive or psychic senses that practitioners describe as reaching beyond the five physical senses, such as but not limited to:

• Clairvoyance (“clear seeing”), perceiving images or visions in the mind’s eye;
• Clairsentience (“clear feeling”), sensing emotions, energy or physical sensations that aren’t one’s own;
• Clairaudience (“clear hearing”), perceiving words or sounds that aren’t physically audible.

# Current: a stream of magical or esoteric practice, symbolism and energy that a tradition works with and passes on. The term is used both by practitioners and by scholars of Western esotericism (e.g. speaking of alchemy as a “current”); Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Order and Thomas Karlsson’s Dragon Rouge both describe their own tradition as the “Draconian current.” Traditions describe currents differently, but practitioners generally hold that working within one connects them to its accumulated body of work.

# Death work: spiritual or magical practice centered on death and the dead, such as honoring ancestors, tending graves, guiding spirits of the dead (psychopomp work) or using mortality as a touchstone for one’s philosophy. It can also include grief ritual and necromancy.

# Demonolatry: the religious veneration of demons as divine or semi-divine beings worthy of devotion rather than as enemies to fear. It is distinct from demonology (the study of demons) and from Satanism, though the two overlap for some practitioners.

# Demonology: the study of demons: their origins, natures, hierarchies and behavior. It covers academic study in religion and folklore as well as occult traditions that catalog individual demons and work with them.

# Divination: seeking knowledge of hidden or future things, such as one’s fate, the outcome of a choice or general guidance, through supernatural or intuitive means. It is found in nearly every culture and era, using tools such as tarot, pendulums and oracle cards, or intuition alone.

# Dowsing: a form of divination that uses rods or a pendulum to search for water, metals, lost objects and similar things. Controlled tests have found it no more accurate than chance, and researchers attribute the rods’ movement to the ideomotor effect; practitioners generally describe it as an intuitive skill.

# Egregore: in occultism, a non-physical entity said to arise from the shared thoughts, beliefs or energy of a group. The word comes from the Greek for “watcher” (as in the Book of Enoch’s fallen Watchers); the occultist Éliphas Lévi used it in this sense in his 1868 Le Grand Arcane, and practitioners describe egregores as able to become autonomous or even sentient.

# Eldritch: an old Scots and English word, in use since around 1500, meaning weird, uncanny or otherworldly, which H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction made famous for describing incomprehensible cosmic horrors. In some occult communities, including ours, it also names a kind of consuming, expanding energy similar to Void energy; that sense is practitioner usage, not something found in Lovecraft or older occult literature.

# Entheogen: a psychoactive substance used to bring about a religious or spiritual experience; the word was coined in 1979 from Greek roots meaning roughly “becoming divine within”. Examples include peyote, ayahuasca, iboga and psilocybin mushrooms, many of which belong to specific traditions and are legally restricted.

# Gematria: a Jewish method, used notably in Kabbalah, that assigns numerical values to Hebrew letters so words and phrases can be compared by their totals. It is used to find hidden connections between words, especially in interpreting scripture; Greek isopsephy is a similar system.

# Godform: in ceremonial magic, especially the Golden Dawn tradition, the image of a deity that a magician visualizes and “assumes” during ritual to attune with that deity’s qualities. Some communities also use the word for an egregore that has become independent and self-aware; that sense is community usage.

# Godphone: pagan and polytheist slang for a clear, direct line of communication with a deity or spirit, as if you had their phone number. Even within those communities a clear two-way connection is described as rare, and how reliable it is gets debated.

# Godspouse: a modern pagan and polytheist term for a person in a committed, often romantic relationship with a deity, sometimes formalized as a marriage. Other traditions have comparable ideas, such as nuns as “brides of Christ” or spiritual marriage to a lwa in Haitian Vodou, though they don’t use this word.

# Hellenism: also called Hellenismos or Hellenic polytheism, a modern religion that worships the ancient Greek gods and reconstructs their rituals and festivals from surviving texts and archaeology. Most Hellenists emphasize correct practice over shared belief, and many practice alone or in small local groups.

# Hermeticism: a philosophical and spiritual tradition based on writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary figure blending the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth. The core texts (the Corpus Hermeticum) date from Greco-Roman Egypt in late antiquity; the “as above, so below” line comes from the Emerald Tablet, a separate, later text only translated into Latin (from Arabic) in the 12th century. Its idea of correspondence between the small and the great shaped Renaissance thought and modern Western occultism.

# Hoodoo: an African American folk magic tradition, also called rootwork or conjure, that blends West and Central African practices with Christian and other influences, including herbal work, ancestor veneration and protective charms. Many practitioners consider it a closed practice rooted in Black American history and lineage, and ask outsiders to learn about it respectfully rather than adopt it.

# Horsing: spirit possession as described in Haitian Vodou and related Afro-diasporic traditions, where a spirit (lwa or other) is said to “mount” or “ride” a person, called its horse (chwal in Haitian Creole). Within those traditions it is a sacred event that happens in ceremony. Some modern Pagan and polytheist practitioners have also adopted “horse”/”horsing” for deity possession outside those traditions.

# Hydromancy: divination by water, reading ripples, reflections, currents or the color of a liquid in a bowl or pool. It is an ancient method described in classical sources, and variants have their own names, such as pegomancy (divination by springs).

# Kemeticism: modern religion based on the beliefs and practices of ancient Egypt (Kemet). It includes reconstructionist Kemetics, who rebuild ancient practice from the historical record, and Kemetic Orthodoxy, an organized movement founded in 1988 that teaches the Egyptian deities are aspects of one divine power called Netjer.

# Left Hand Path: an umbrella term for spiritual paths centered on the self, which scholars such as Kennet Granholm characterize by individualism, self-deification and antinomianism (questioning or breaking with inherited moral and religious norms). The name comes from the Sanskrit vāmācāra (“left-hand practice”), a Tantric current that used taboo-breaking ritual. English scholars of Hinduism had translated it as “left-hand” since the early 19th century, and Helena Blavatsky, in The Secret Doctrine (1888) and The Theosophical Glossary (1892), carried it into Western esotericism as a label for black magic. Today it describes currents such as modern Satanism and Luciferianism, and it does not mean “evil”.

# Lilith: a female demon of Jewish folklore. Her name is often connected with the Mesopotamian lilītu demons, though the link is debated. The Hebrew word lilit appears once in the Hebrew Bible (Isaiah 34:14), among the creatures of a desolate ruin, and translators disagree on how to render it. The best-known story comes from the medieval, satirical Alphabet of Ben Sira: made from earth like Adam as his first wife, she refused to lie beneath him, spoke God’s name and flew away. In Kabbalah she appears as Samael’s consort, notably in the Zohar, and as a queen of the demonic “other side” (compare Qliphoth). Since the early 1970s Jewish feminists have reclaimed her as a symbol of women’s independence, and some Left Hand Path and Luciferian practitioners honor her as a goddess or dark mother.

# Luciferianism: a range of beliefs that honor Lucifer as a bringer of light, knowledge and liberation rather than as the Christian Devil; he is often compared to Prometheus. It is distinct from Satanism, though the two overlap and are often confused. Some Luciferians regard Lucifer as a real being, while others treat him as a symbol of the pursuit of wisdom and self-liberation.

# Magick: the spelling Aleister Crowley popularized to set occult magic apart from stage conjuring; he defined it as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” Many occultists keep the “k” for magical practice in general, whether or not they follow Crowley’s Thelema.

# Middle Path: in discussions of the Left and Right Hand Paths, a practitioner term for an approach that balances the two rather than choosing one. It is used informally in occult communities rather than as a scholarly category, and is unrelated to the Buddhist Middle Way.

# Necromancy: divination by communicating with the dead, historically used to gain hidden knowledge or foresee the future; it is attested in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome. Since the Middle Ages the word has also taken on a broader sinister sense (black magic in general, or raising corpses in fiction) that differs from its original meaning.

# Neo Druidry: a modern religious movement inspired by the ancient Celtic druids and developed in Britain from the 18th century onward. It is not a direct continuation of ancient druidry, about which very little is known. Modern Druids are often animist or polytheist, and honor nature through ritual, poetry and seasonal festivals.

# Neo Paganism: an umbrella term for modern religious movements, such as Wicca, Druidry, Heathenry, Hellenism and Kemeticism, that draw on pre-Christian traditions. They are new religious movements rather than unbroken survivals of ancient religions. Common threads include reverence for nature and polytheism or pantheism, though traditions vary widely.

# Non-human: identifying as something other than human in spirit, soul or experience, without necessarily naming a specific kind of being. It is narrower than alterhuman, which was coined in 2014 to also cover atypical human experiences such as walk-ins, though many people use the two interchangeably. As with other alterhuman identities, the community understands it as an identity, not a disorder.

# Oracle: in modern divination, usually a deck of oracle cards, which work like tarot but have no fixed structure or number of cards; each deck follows its creator’s own themes. Originally the word meant a shrine or person through whom a god was believed to speak, most famously the Oracle of Delphi.

# Otherkin: people who identify as partly or wholly non-human, often as beings from myth and folklore such as elves, fae, vampires or dragons; those who identify with real animals usually call themselves therians. The community understands this as an identity, not a belief to argue over or a disorder.

# Pendulum: a weighted object, often a crystal, hung on a chain or string and used for divination, usually to get “yes” or “no” answers from how it swings. Practitioners variously attribute the movement to the user’s subconscious, to spirits or to energy; researchers explain it by the ideomotor effect (small unconscious muscle movements). It is a form of dowsing.

# PluralKit: a Discord bot designed for plural systems (multiple people or identities sharing one body), also used for roleplay. It lets each member post under their own name and avatar through webhook proxying, and tracks switches and system and member profiles.

# Psychic abilities: claimed abilities to perceive or affect things beyond the physical senses, such as telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition (see Clair-senses). Many practitioners believe in them from personal experience, but controlled studies have not produced reproducible evidence, and mainstream science regards parapsychology as a pseudoscience.

# Psychic vampirism: the belief or practice of drawing life force or energy from people, places or other sources rather than blood (compare Sanguinarian vampirism). Within the real vampire community it is usually described as a need the person has in order to feel well, and there is no scientific evidence for the energy involved.

# Qliphoth: in Kabbalah, the “shells” or “husks” of impure spiritual force that stand opposite the sefirot of the Tree of Life; in Lurianic Kabbalah they arise when the vessels holding divine light shatter. Modern Left Hand Path currents, notably Kenneth Grant’s Typhonian Order and Thomas Karlsson’s Dragon Rouge, reinterpret them as a “Tree of Death” for initiatory work, well outside their original Jewish mystical context.

# Reconstructionism: an approach to modern polytheism that tries to rebuild the beliefs and practices of a specific pre-Christian religion (such as Greek, Norse, Celtic or Egyptian) from historical, archaeological and linguistic research, rather than mixing traditions freely. It is often contrasted with eclectic paths such as Wicca.

# Right hand path: the counterpart to the Left Hand Path. Writers who use the pair describe it as paths that seek union with, or submission to, the divine and follow established religious and moral conventions, a category that on this view includes most mainstream religions. The terms describe different orientations toward the self, although some occultists do use them to mean good and evil.

# Sanguinarian vampirism: within the real vampire community, the experience of needing to take small amounts of blood, from willing donors, to feel physically or mentally well; it contrasts with psychic vampirism, which draws energy instead. The community treats it as an identity rather than a supernatural claim, and its organizations stress donor consent, testing for bloodborne diseases and sterile technique.

# Santería: an Afro-Cuban religion, also called Lucumí or Regla de Ocha, that grew from the Yoruba traditions of enslaved West Africans blended with Catholicism and Spiritism, and centers on the orishas. It is initiatory: it is learned through a house and its elders, not from books alone. Many practitioners prefer Lucumí or Regla de Ocha. Some scholars (e.g. Miguel De La Torre) describe “Santería” as a derogatory name imposed by white Cuban Catholic clergy to distance the religion from Christianity, though other sources treat it as a neutral name.

# Satan: in the Hebrew Bible, ha-satan (“the adversary” or “the accuser”) is a title for a member of God’s heavenly court, not an independent evil power, as in the Book of Job. Christianity later developed the figure into the Devil, a fallen angel opposed to God. Modern Satanists read Satan in yet other ways, often as a symbol of pride, rebellion or liberation.

# Satanism: an umbrella term for several different modern movements that take Satan as a central symbol. The Church of Satan, founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, is atheistic and treats Satan as a symbol of human nature; The Satanic Temple, founded in 2013, is also nontheistic and uses Satan as a symbol of rebellion in activism for religious pluralism and secular government; theistic Satanists regard Satan as a real being to revere. Scholars of religion study Satanism as a real and diverse religious phenomenon, separate from the unfounded “Satanic ritual abuse” panic of the 1980s.

# Servitor: in chaos magick, a thoughtform a practitioner deliberately creates, usually with a name, a sigil and one narrow task, such as guarding a space or reinforcing a habit. Practitioners usually plan a way to dissolve it once its task is done.

# Seven Tenets (also the Seven Satanic Tenets): the seven fundamental tenets of The Satanic Temple (see Satanism), its statement of core values, which it presents as guiding principles rather than commandments. In The Satanic Temple’s words:

1. One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason.
2. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should prevail over laws and institutions.
3. One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone.
4. The freedoms of others should be respected, including the freedom to offend. To willfully and unjustly encroach upon the freedoms of another is to forgo one’s own.
5. Beliefs should conform to one’s best scientific understanding of the world. One should take care never to distort scientific facts to fit one’s beliefs.
6. People are fallible. If one makes a mistake, one should do one’s best to rectify it and resolve any harm that might have been caused.
7. Every tenet is a guiding principle designed to inspire nobility in action and thought. The spirit of compassion, wisdom, and justice should always prevail over the written or spoken word.

# Shield: energetic or psychic protection, usually a barrier a practitioner visualizes or raises around themselves or a space to keep out unwanted energy or influence. It is one of the most common protective techniques in modern occult and energy work.

# Shufflemancy: divination by asking a question and shuffling a music playlist, treating the song or lyric that comes up as the answer, much like drawing a tarot card. It is a recent, internet-era practice.

# Sigil: a symbol charged with a specific intent or meaning. In older grimoires such as the Goetia, sigils are the seals of individual spirits, used to identify and call on them; the artist and occultist Austin Osman Spare popularized a different method, condensing a written statement of intent into an abstract glyph, which chaos magick later adopted.

# SPG: Shared Personal Gnosis, a spiritual insight (see UPG) that several people report having received independently. Many polytheists give SPG more weight than one person’s UPG, though it still isn’t the same as knowledge backed by historical sources.

# Stregheria: a modern Italian-inspired witchcraft tradition popularized by the American author Raven Grimassi from the 1980s, drawing on Charles Leland’s Aradia (1899) and Italian folklore. Grimassi presented it as a surviving ancient religion, but scholars find no evidence of that and regard it as a modern revival related to Wicca. It is distinct from stregoneria, the everyday Italian word for witchcraft or sorcery.

# Tantric vampirism: in the real vampire community, a form of psychic vampirism that draws on sexual or romantic energy, ideally as a mutual exchange with a partner. Michelle Belanger’s influential Psychic Vampire Codex names this a “Tantric Exchange,” centered on the root chakra; it borrows the word “Tantric” loosely and has no connection to historical Hindu or Buddhist Tantra, and it remains documented mainly within community and vampire-studies literature rather than independent scholarship.

# Tarot: a deck of cards created in 15th-century Italy for a card game (tarocchi), with no occult meaning at first. Divinatory and occult use began in 18th-century France, when Antoine Court de Gébelin wrongly claimed the cards held ancient Egyptian wisdom and Jean-Baptiste Alliette (“Etteilla”) published a deck and system for fortune-telling.

# Tasseomancy (tasseography): divination by reading the patterns of tea leaves, coffee grounds or wine sediment. Its origins are uncertain; it spread in Europe after tea arrived in the 17th century and was especially popular in Victorian Britain.

# Thelema: a religious and philosophical system founded by Aleister Crowley, who said The Book of the Law was dictated to him by an entity called Aiwass in Cairo in 1904. Its central maxims are “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” and “Love is the law, love under will”, which Thelemites understand as finding and following one’s true Will, not as permission for whim.

# Thoughtform: a mental construct that practitioners believe can gain some independent existence through focused will or emotion. A servitor is a thoughtform made by one person for a narrow task, while an egregore arises from a group; how autonomous a thoughtform can become is a matter of belief.

# Tulpamancy: the practice of creating a tulpa, a persistent inner companion formed through sustained visualization and attention, which practitioners experience as having its own thoughts and voice. The name borrows loosely from a Tibetan Buddhist term via Alexandra David-Néel’s 1920s writing, but the modern practice grew in online communities in the 2010s and has been studied by the anthropologist Samuel Veissière.

# UPG: Unverified Personal Gnosis, a term from modern polytheist and pagan communities for a personal spiritual insight about a deity, spirit or practice that comes from experience, intuition or divination rather than historical sources. The term seems to have begun in Heathen reconstructionist circles, and how much weight to give UPG remains debated.

# Vodou: a Haitian religion rooted in West African Vodún, blended with Catholicism, that serves the lwa (spirits) through community ritual. Related traditions are spelled differently: Vodún for the West African religion and Voodoo for the Louisiana tradition, which is also the pop-culture spelling many consider inaccurate for Haitian Vodou. Vodou is initiatory: its inner teachings are passed on through initiation (kanzo) under initiated clergy.

# Void: in some modern occult and witchcraft practice, the formless state that all things, energy included, are said to come from and return to; some practitioners work with it in meditation or shadow work as a force that both creates and destroys. There is no agreed definition, and its meaning varies between traditions and individuals.

# Ward: most often, a protective spell, symbol or magical barrier placed on a location, such as a home, room or temple, to guard it against unwanted energy, entities or influence. Some practitioners reserve the word for this location-bound magic and use “amulet” or “charm” for protecting a person or object, though everyday usage often blurs the line. Wards can be temporary, like a circle taken down after ritual, or long-lasting, like one placed on a home; they continue older apotropaic (evil-averting) folk magic found in many cultures.

# Wicca: a modern Pagan religion that emerged publicly in England in the 1950s, largely through Gerald Gardner. It draws on pre-Christian and folk-magic themes; historians such as Ronald Hutton regard it as a 20th-century new religious movement rather than a survival of an ancient religion, though some practitioners hold to the survival story.

# Witchcraft: broadly, the use of magic to influence people or events. Historically the word named alleged harmful magic, as in the European witch trials; in modern, reclaimed use it covers a wide range of practices, many pagan or nature-focused and some entirely secular.