Glossary, terms of the classes of beings explained

God / goddess: Personified highest power in the pantheon of a culture. Gods have a proper name, defined areas of responsibility (sky, war, death, love, creation), fixed attributes (animals, plants, tools) and stand within a hierarchical pantheon structure.

On iWell Guard the term god is reserved for the pinnacle of the respective religious tradition; lower supernatural beings are classified as demons, spirits or beings of light. See overview Gods.

Demon: Supernatural being below the gods, in the narrower sense of religious history oriented towards harm. The term carries a semantic shift: in the Greek daimonion originally ambivalent or neutral (Socrates’ inner voice is called this too), in Christian theology and its received form charged exclusively negatively.

We use the term in the modern sense common in religious studies, a being oriented towards harm, and make shifts of meaning explicit in the individual presentations. See overview Demons.

Spirit: Being connected to the deceased, to places in nature or to threshold experiences. Spirits are often bound to a place (spring, forest, cemetery) or to a time (spirits of the hours).

The class encompasses both apparitions of the deceased (Yuurei, Edimmu, Preta) and nature and elemental beings (Rusalka, Kappa, kobold). See overview Spirits.

Beings of light: Spiritual helper figure of Western esotericism, of the theosophical and the New Age corpus: archangels, ascended masters, high-frequency beings.

The class is young in religious history; older components (the Jewish-Christian-Islamic hierarchy of archangels) are treated with full source material, newer components (ascended masters) with an explicit reference to the theosophical-modern origin. See overview Beings of light.

High deities: The highest gods of a pantheon, Zeus in the Olympian, Odin in the Germanic, An in the Sumerian, Re or Amun in the Egyptian system. High deities are as a rule patrilineal, linked with sky and thunder attributes, often with a creation or order function.

Death deities: rulers of the underworld, Hades, Osiris, Hel, Yama. Death deities are especially constant in religious history; many cultures distinguish between a death deity (with its own royal status in the underworld) and spirits of the dead (the deceased themselves).

Protective deities: guardians and keepers of persons, places, professions, Bes as protective god of pregnant women in Egypt, Tyche/Fortuna as protective goddess of the city in the Hellenistic-Roman world, Inari as protector of rice farmers in Japan.

Anti-gods: powers of chaos and adversaries, often as a counterpole to the high deities, Tiamat in the Babylonian creation myth, Apophis as the serpent opponent of Re, Loki in Germanic mythology, Mara in the Buddhist corpus.

Spirits of the dead: spirits of the deceased, Edimmu (Mesopotamian), Yuurei (Japanese), Preta (Buddhist), Banshee (Irish). The class is especially broadly documented across cultures.

Water spirits, forest spirits, shapeshifters: nature spirits bound to a place. Water spirits are often female (Rusalka, nixie, Mami Wata), bound to springs, rivers or lakes. Forest spirits are central in the Slavic and Germanic traditions (Leshy, wood-maiden); shapeshifters are especially differentiated as a category of their own in the Celtic, Japanese and Chinese tradition.

Angels and archangels: messengers and figures of hierarchy of the Jewish-Christian-Islamic tradition; on iWell Guard listed under beings of light, with the four archangels Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel as well as Metatron as central figures.

Terms and methods

This section supplements the glossary of the classes of beings with the methodical, religious-historical and technical-language apparatus with which the detail pages of the site work. The entries are organised by subject field.

Anyone who is shown a term as a tooltip in the text of a detail page and wants to read more will find the detailed entry here, with reference works and cross-references.

Source corpus

Lemegeton. The Lemegeton, also the Lesser Key of Solomon, is a collective manuscript of the early modern ritual-magical tradition from the 17th century.

It comprises five books: Goetia (invocation of the 72 demons), Theurgia-Goetia (invocation of mediating spirits of the cardinal directions), Ars Paulina (angel magic by planetary hours), Ars Almadel (invocation at a wax tablet) and Ars Notoria (memorisation practice, oldest layer from the 13th century).

The standard editions are Joseph Peterson, The Lesser Key of Solomon (Weiser, 2001), and Stephen Skinner / David Rankine, The Goetia of Dr Rudd (Golden Hoard Press, 2007). A detailed presentation of the Goetia part is on /goetia/.

Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. Appendix to Johann Weyer’s main work De praestigiis daemonum (Basel, 1577). Oldest systematic list of the 72 spirits, which later entered the Lemegeton.

Reginald Scot translated it into English in 1584 in his Discoverie of Witchcraft. Historical research (Owen Davies, Grimoires, Oxford 2009) sees in Weyer’s list the connecting line between medieval-clerical and early modern bourgeois magic.

Malleus Maleficarum (Hexenhammer). The most important textbook of the early modern witch hunt, written in 1487 by Heinrich Kramer (Institoris) and Jakob Sprenger. Three parts: theoretical foundation of witchcraft, practical inquisition instructions and apparatus of sanctions.

Historical research (Wolfgang Behringer, Brian Levack) has worked out in detail the effect of the work on the persecutions in central and eastern Europe. For the succubus-incubus theology it is a central source text.

Sefer Yetzira. Short mystical work of the Jewish tradition, probably written between the 2nd and 6th century AD. Regarded as the foundational text of the Kabbalah and introduces the teaching of the 22 Hebrew letters and 10 Sephirot. Ariel Bension, Aryeh Kaplan and Gershom Scholem have translated and commented on it in modern languages.

Apocryphon of John. Gnostic text from the Library of Nag Hammadi (Codex II,1, Codex III,1, Codex IV,1, Codex Berolinensis 8502). Probably written in the 2nd century AD. Most detailed presentation of the gnostic archon theology and of the Yaldabaoth figure.

Edition: Nag Hammadi Deutsch (Schenke / Bethge / Kaiser, 2 volumes, de Gruyter, 2001, 2003). A treatment of the archon teaching on the basis of this text is on /archonten/.

Garuda Purana. Hindu Purana from the 8th to 10th century. Regarded as a central text for the topography of the dead, the Yamaduta and the karmic system of hells. Recited in Hindu ritual practice during dying processes. Standard translation: Ernest Wood / S. V. Subrahmanyam, Garuda Purana (Sacred Books of the Hindus, 1911).

Atharvaveda. Fourth Veda, ca. 1000 BC. Oldest systematic collection of protection and conjuration of the Indian tradition. Contains protective mantras, healing formulas and rituals against disease demons. Maurice Bloomfield (Hymns of the Atharva Veda, 1897) and Klaus Mylius (Geschichte der Literatur im alten Indien, 1983) are standard references.

Eyrbyggja Saga. Icelandic saga from the 13th century. One of the most important sources on the draugr tradition, with detailed revenant episodes. The saga deals with family conflicts in the Snaefellsnes of the 10th century and depicts several revenant cases that have to be ended ritually or judicially.

Konjaku Monogatari. Japanese collection of tales from the 12th century (1120, 1140). Over 1000 stories from the Indian-Buddhist, Chinese and Japanese tradition. Central early source for the Tengu, Yuurei and Yokai classification. Standard translation into German by Klaus Mueller (Iudicium, 2001).

Talmud, Mishnah, Zohar. Three layers of the Jewish tradition. The Mishnah (redacted around 200 AD by Judah ha-Nasi) is the oldest codification of the oral Torah.

The Talmud in its Babylonian and Jerusalem versions supplements it with Gemara interpretations (4th to 6th century). The Zohar (13th century, Spain, attributed to Moses de León) is the main work of medieval Jewish mysticism.

Key terms of the technical language

Theurgy. Higher ritual-magical practice for connection with gods or higher spirits. Iamblichus delimited it in De mysteriis (ca. 300 AD) against the lower Goetia.

Theurgy works with invocation formulas, ritual purity and a teaching of the spheres of ascent. Received again in the Renaissance through Marsilio Ficino and in the Golden Dawn of the 19th century.

Sigil. Magical written sign that graphically condenses a spirit, an intention or an energy. Oldest evidence: the Jewish Hekhalot literature, later elaborated in medieval angel magic.

In the Lemegeton tradition each of the 72 spirits carries its own sigil; in chaos magic after Spare and Carroll the sigil method is used as a deliberate channelling of wishes.

Shem HaMephorash. In the Kabbalah the 72-part name of God, obtained from the three verses Exodus 14:19, 21 (each verse 72 letters).

In medieval Jewish mysticism 72 angels are assigned to the 72 verses (Sefer Raziel HaMalakh), which in turn are set against the 72 Goetia demons as a protective layer. This constellation is a secondary synthesis in religious history, but established in the lightworker tradition.

Tetragrammaton, Sephirot, Qliphoth. Three key terms of Jewish mysticism. The Tetragrammaton YHWH is the sacred four-letter name of God.

The ten Sephirot form the kabbalistic Tree of Life, from Keter (crown) to Malkuth (kingdom). The Qliphoth (shells) of Lurianic Kabbalah are manifestations of contaminated energy that have to be freed in the Tikkun practice.

Apophaticism. Theological speech that describes God or the Absolute only through negation (“God is not Father in the human sense”).

Classically in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (De mystica theologia), in Meister Eckhart’s German mysticism and in the Jewish apophaticism of Maimonides. The term is important in the phenomenology of religion because it names an entire theological method.

Syncretism. Fusion of elements of different religions or cults into new mixed forms. Classic examples: Haitian Vodou (Lwa and Catholic saints), the Latin American Marian cult with an Aztec Tonantzin layer, the Japanese Shinbutsu-shugo tradition with a Buddhist and Shinto double layer. Neutral in religious history; not to be confused with eclecticism.

Sleep paralysis. State of perception in which the consciousness wakes but the body is still paralysed by REM atonia. Connected in cultural history with succubus, incubus, Mahr, Alp and the Old Hag phenomenon.

David Hufford documented the phenomenological constancy across cultures in The Terror that Comes in the Night (1982); Owen Davies (Paranormal, 2009) worked out the folkloristic context for the English-speaking world.

Aretalogy. Ancient text of praise that lists the achievements and miraculous deeds of a deity. Established as a form of invocation in the Hellenistic magical papyri. Structurally every aretalogy presupposes that the speaker knows precisely the functions of the deity; it is thus a teaching text with a ritual function.

Liminal, liminal phase. Term of anthropology (Arnold van Gennep, Les rites de passage, 1909; Victor Turner, The Ritual Process, 1969). Denotes the threshold phase in the transition between two states, such as between life and death, waking and dream, childhood and adulthood. Relevant in religious history for initiation, burial, shamanic dance.

Soteriology. Teaching of the redemption or liberation of the soul. In the Christian tradition salvation through Christ’s sacrifice; in the Buddhist tradition liberation from samsara through enlightenment; in the Hindu tradition moksha through knowledge (jnana), devotion (bhakti) or works (karma). Soteriological statements make assertions about the ultimate goal of existence.

Figures of religious studies

Mircea Eliade (1907, 1986). Romanian-American scholar of religious studies. Main works: Shamanism and Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (1951), The Sacred and the Profane (1949), A History of Religious Ideas (4 volumes, 1976, 1991).

Eliade shaped the phenomenological method of religion with its key terms hierophany, axis mundi, illud tempus. In more recent times critically reassessed because of his political-fascist entanglements in the 1930s.

Walter Burkert (1931, 2015). German scholar of religious studies and classical philologist. Main works: Greek Religion of the Archaic and Classical Epoch (Kohlhammer, 1977), Homo Necans (1972), Anthropology of Religious Sacrifice (1984). Standard reference for ancient mythology and religion in the German language.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875, 1961). Swiss depth psychologist, founder of analytical psychology. Main works on archetypes (On the Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, 1934), shadow (Aion, 1951), individuation and synchronicity. Still an authoritative reference for the phenomenological interpretation of dreams, visions and mediumistic experiences.

Wouter Hanegraaff (b. 1961). Dutch esotericism researcher, head of the chair for “History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents” at the University of Amsterdam. Main works: New Age Religion and Western Culture (Brill, 1996), Esotericism and the Academy (Cambridge UP, 2012). Co-founder of the ESSWE (European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism).

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (1831, 1891). Russian-American esotericist, co-founder of the Theosophical Society (New York, 1875). Main works: Isis Unveiled (1877), The Secret Doctrine (1888). Founder of the modern theosophical-esoteric synthesis of Eastern wisdom, spiritism and Western occultism.

Aleister Crowley (1875, 1947). British magician, writer and mountaineer. Founder of the Thelemic tradition (Liber AL vel Legis, 1904) and editor of the English Goetia edition (1904, with Mathers). Highly contested figure of Western esotericism, with a controversial personality and a great influence on the subsequent ritual-magical tradition.

Jeffrey Burton Russell (b. 1934). US historian of religion.

Four-volume study on the history of the devil: The Devil. Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity (1977), Satan. The Early Christian Tradition (1981), Lucifer. The Devil in the Middle Ages (1984), Mephistopheles. The Devil in the Modern World (1986). Authoritative treatment of Christian demonology.

Annemarie Schimmel (1922, 2003). German Islamic scholar. Main work: Mystical Dimensions of Islam (1975, German translation Diederichs, 1985). Leading Sufi researcher in the German-speaking world, with long teaching activity in Bonn and at Harvard.

Yanagita Kunio (1875, 1962). Japanese folklorist, founder of modern Japanese folklore studies (minzokugaku). Main work: Tono Monogatari (1910), collection of folk tales from the Tono region. Classifier of the Yokai tradition with standard works on the regional distribution of Kappa, Tengu, Yuurei and other beings.

Lafcadio Hearn (1850, 1904). Irish-American writer, resident in Japan from 1890. Collected and turned into literature Japanese ghost stories in Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things (1904). Shaped the Western perception of Yuki-Onna, Yuurei and Japanese ghost aesthetics lastingly.

Esoteric schools and currents

Theosophical Society. Founded in 1875 in New York by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and William Quan Judge. Three declared aims: forming a nucleus of universal brotherhood, study of comparative religion and philosophy, investigation of the unexplained laws of nature and of latent human powers.

Active to this day with sections worldwide, largest seat in Adyar (India). Decisive in religious history for the transmission of Eastern wisdom traditions to the West.

Golden Dawn (Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn). Secret order founded in 1887/88 in London with Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers, William Wynn Westcott and William Robert Woodman. Integrated Kabbalah, the Enochian magic of John Dee, Tarot, Egyptian mysteries and alchemy into a complex system of initiation.

Members included William Butler Yeats, Arthur Machen, Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune. Despite early schisms (1900) the Golden Dawn remains the most influential ritual-magical school of the 20th century.

Chaos magic. British current of the late 1970s, founded by Peter Carroll and Ray Sherwin. Central texts: Carroll, Liber Null (1978) and Psychonaut (1982).

Methodically radical-pluralist: practitioners switch deliberately between paradigms and work with sigils, servitors, invocation and belief shifting. Forerunner is the sigil magic of Austin Osman Spare (1886, 1956). Organisation: Illuminates of Thanateros (IOT, 1978).

Vajrayana and Mahayana. Two of the three main branches of Buddhism. Mahayana (Great Vehicle) arose from the 1st century BC with the bodhisattva ideal and elaborated philosophical reflection (Madhyamaka, Yogacara).

Vajrayana (Diamond Vehicle) is the tantric form, primarily at home in Tibet, with yidam practice, mantra technique and the teaching of the four tantra classes. Padmasambhava (8th century) is regarded as the transmitter of Vajrayana to Tibet.

Bon. Pre-Buddhist religious tradition of Tibet. Works with the classification Tsen, Nyen, Lu, Du as a hierarchy of beings of the non-human world. In the 7th to 11th century partly overlaid by Buddhism, but partly continued as an independent tradition. Today institutionally recognised as “Yungdrung Bon” and with its own monastery structures.

Sufism. Mystical current of Islam. Works with Dhikr (remembrance of God), Sama (listening to music) and the teaching of the path of the pupil under a sheikh.

Main works: Rumi (Mathnawi, 13th century), Ibn Arabi (Al-Futuhat al-Makkiyya, 13th century), al-Hallaj. Annemarie Schimmel opened up the tradition authoritatively for the German-speaking world.

Gnosis and Neoplatonism. Two late antique philosophical-religious currents that existed alongside one another in the 2nd and 3rd century AD and influenced each other.

Gnosis (above all in the Sethian and Valentinian school) teaches a dualistic cosmology with lower archons and a liberating knowledge (gnosis). Neoplatonism (Plotinus, Iamblichus, Proclus) teaches a graded emanation from the One and integrates the theurgic practice as a method of ascent.

Further standard works in the literature index.