Concepts

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• Abandonment

  A single word carrying two opposed religious and philosophical histories — the soul's willed surrender to divine providence, and the human condition of being left alone in a universe with no God to vouch for it.

• Absolution

  In Christian practice, the formal remission of sin pronounced over a penitent — the church's act of declaring, or effecting, the forgiveness held to come from God.

• Abyss

  The fathomless depth at or before the beginning of things — formless water, sealed pit, or groundless dark — carrying origin and oblivion at once across the Hebrew tehom, Christian abyssos, Kabbalah, and Boehme's Ungrund.

• Aeon

  In Gnostic thought, a divine emanation of the unknowable God and one of a ranked company of such beings; in Greek more broadly, the word for an age or for eternity itself.

• Agape

  The Greek word for self-giving love that early Christianity took as the name of God's regard for the world — love given without merit, later set against eros, the love of desire.

• Agnosticism

  The position that whether the divine exists cannot be known — coined by T. H. Huxley in 1869 as a deliberate inversion of the ancient claim to saving knowledge.

• Alchemy

  The art of transmutation — the attempt to perfect metals and matter, and on many accounts the practitioner, by working substances through stages toward a purified end.

• Apocalypse

  From the Greek for uncovering — a revealed disclosure of the hidden order of things and the end toward which they move, and the body of literature that carries such disclosures.

• Apocrypha

  The category of religious writings set outside an accepted canon — from the Greek for "hidden away" — and the long appeal of the books that were left out.

• Apologetics

  The reasoned defence of a religious position against objection — the discipline of giving an account of belief in terms an outsider might weigh, from the early Christian apologists onward.

• Apophatic Theology

  The way of approaching God by negation — saying only what God is not — on the premise, held by several traditions, that the divine lies past the reach of any name or concept.

• Apotheosis

  The raising of a human being to divine status — from the Roman state's deification of its emperors to the inward deification of the soul taught in Platonist, Hermetic, and Christian thought.

• As Above, So Below

  The maxim of the Emerald Tablet — the claim that the higher and lower orders of reality mirror one another, from a short Hermetic text that became the motto of Western esotericism.

• Ascetical Theology

  The branch of Catholic theology concerned with the disciplines of the spiritual life and the ordinary pursuit of Christian perfection, classically charted as the purgative, illuminative, and unitive ways.

• Assumption of Mary

  The Christian belief that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was taken up bodily into heaven at the end of her earthly life rather than left to ordinary decay.

• Astrology

  The practice of reading meaning in the positions of the sun, moon, planets, and stars — held, across many cultures, to bear on events on earth and on the lives of individuals.

• atheism

  The position that no god or gods exist, or more broadly the absence of belief in any deity — held across history as conviction, method, and stance rather than as a single creed.

• Avatar

  In Hindu theology, the descent of a deity — above all Vishnu — into the world in a born, embodied form, undertaken to restore order when it has collapsed.

• Best of All Possible Worlds

  Leibniz's claim that a perfectly good and all-powerful God, choosing among infinitely many possible worlds, necessarily created this one — the best available — so that its evils serve a greater whole.

• Brahman

  In the Upanishads and the Vedanta that grew from them, the single ultimate reality underlying all things — held to be infinite, unconditioned, and identical with the innermost self.

• Bride of Christ

  A Christian image in which the Church, or the individual soul, is figured as the bride wedded to Christ — the seedbed of an entire tradition of bridal mysticism.

• Buddha

  Not a name but a title — "one who has awakened" — and the claim underneath it: that the deepest ignorance can end, and that a human being ended it.

• Coincidentia Oppositorum

  The doctrine that in the infinite or divine the oppositions which divide finite things — greatest and least, here and everywhere — coincide rather than contradict.

• Cult

  In the religious-studies sense, the organized worship of a deity, saint, or sacred object — the rites, images, and tending by which a community keeps a relationship with the divine.

• Deity

  A god or divine being — and the concept of what it means to call something divine, framed very differently where the gods are many and where there is held to be only one.

• demon

  The English word descends from the Greek daimon, a neutral spirit standing between gods and humans; in Christian usage it narrowed to mean an evil spirit alone.

• Demonology

  The systematic study and classification of demons — their names, ranks, and powers — as developed across ancient, medieval, and early-modern religious thought.

• Deva

  The Sanskrit class of "shining" celestial beings — the gods of Vedic and Hindu religion, named from a root meaning brightness and set against the asuras as their counterpart.

• Divine Illumination

  The Augustinian doctrine that the human mind grasps eternal, necessary truths not by its own power but by a divine light that illumines the intellect from above.

• Divine Providence

  The doctrine that the world is governed by a foreseeing divine care rather than by chance — held across Stoic, Hermetic, Platonist, and Christian thought, each in its own terms.

• Dualism

  Any doctrine that explains reality by two irreducible principles — spirit and matter, good and evil, mind and body — neither derivable from the other.

• Eclecticism

  The practice of selecting doctrines from several schools rather than holding to one — named in antiquity, and long entangled with the question of how traditions blend.

• Emanation

  The doctrine that reality was not made but radiated — pouring forth from its source in graded stages, each less unified than the last, without the source ever being diminished.

• Enoch and Idris

  The tradition that fuses three figures into one — the biblical Enoch who walked with God, the Quranic prophet Idris, and Hermes Trismegistus — as the ascended sage who carried wisdom across the Flood.

• Eschatology

  The branch of religious thought concerned with last things — death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and the world — and the doctrines traditions have built around the end.

• Fate

  The idea that events are fixed in advance by an order beyond human control — named by the Greeks as the Moirai, by the Stoics as heimarmene, and read off the sky by astrology.

• Fetishism

  A contested category in the study of religion — the attribution of power to a material object — coined by European observers and long criticized as a product of the colonial encounter rather than a thing in the world.

• free will

  The capacity for genuinely self-determined choice — and the long argument over whether such choice can survive divine foreknowledge, fate, or grace.

• Garden of Eden

  The garden of Genesis where the first humans lived and from which they were expelled — read across traditions as a lost original state and, esoterically, as a map of the soul.

• Gnosis

  The Greek word for a knowing meant to change the one who knows — a direct acquaintance with the divine, with oneself, and with the real order of things, held to lie beyond reason and belief alike.

• Gnosticism

  The modern scholarly name for a family of second- and third-century movements that held the world a flawed creation and salvation a matter of inner knowing rather than belief.

• Golden Calf

  The idol cast at Sinai in the book of Exodus, and the recurring type-image of idolatry in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thought.

• Grace

  In Christian theology, the unearned favour and aid of God toward human beings — given freely rather than owed, and held to be what makes salvation possible at all.

• Guardian Angel

  The belief that each person is assigned a particular angel to watch over them — a protector and guide attached to the individual rather than to a nation or a place.

• Guru

  In the Indian traditions, the spiritual teacher through whom liberating knowledge is held to pass — by personal transmission from teacher to disciple, not by text or argument alone.

• hell

  The name, across several religions, for a posthumous condition of suffering or punishment for the dead — distinct, in most traditions, from the neutral realm of the dead it grew out of.

• Hellenistic Astrology

  The horoscopic astrology developed in Greco-Roman Egypt from the second century BCE — the ascendant, the twelve houses, the aspects — and the root of the later Western tradition.

• Heresy

  A belief judged to deviate from established orthodoxy — and, on the historian's reading, a category largely built by the orthodox party in the act of condemning its rivals.

• Hexameron

  The patristic and medieval genre of commentary on the six days of creation in Genesis — a tradition of reading the opening of scripture as an account of the world's making.

• Hypostasis

  A Greek term for that which underlies and stands real beneath appearance — used by the Neoplatonists for the three levels of being and by Christian theology for the persons of the Trinity.

• Idolatry

  The worship of images or objects as gods — the charge that monotheism levels against rival cults, and the long quarrel within monotheism over whether any image may stand in worship at all.

• Immanence

  The view that the divine dwells within the world rather than standing wholly apart from it — the standing counterpart, in most systems, to transcendence.

• Immortality

  The claim that something in the human being — soul, spirit, or self — does not perish at death; held across traditions in sharply different senses.

• Kama

  In Indian thought, desire and pleasure — sensual, aesthetic, erotic — counted one of the four legitimate aims of human life, and personified as the god of love.

• Karma

  The Indian principle that deeds carry moral consequence across lifetimes — every action sowing a result that ripens, in this life or a later one, for the one who acted.

• Kingdom of God

  The reign of God at the center of Jesus's preaching — read by turns as a coming cosmic upheaval, a present reality breaking in, and an inward state.

• knowledge

  The condition of having grasped what is true — a notion philosophy has tried to define and religious traditions have tried to deepen, often pulling in different directions.

• Latria

  In Christian theology, the worship owed to God alone — set apart by name from the lesser honour paid to saints and angels, and from the reverence shown to their images.

• Logos

  Word, account, reason — the Greek term for a rational order held to run through the world, and in Hellenistic theology, the divine utterance through which it was made.

• Magic

  The claimed art of producing effects by hidden means — names, rites, sympathies, or spirits — and the long argument over whether it is natural, demonic, religion, or error.

• Magic Square

  A grid of distinct numbers whose every row, column, and main diagonal sums to the same constant — a mathematical curiosity that Renaissance magic read as a planetary seal.

• Mammon

  An Aramaic word for wealth that the Gospels set against God as a rival master — later hardened, in Christian tradition, into a named demon of greed.

• Metaphysics

  The inquiry into what it is to be anything at all — being, reality, and first principles — named from the place ancient editors gave Aristotle's treatise, and long the bridge between philosophy and the esoteric.

• Miracle

  An event held to be worked by divine power and to stand outside the ordinary course of nature — read by believers as a sign, and contested by philosophers as a claim about evidence.

• monism

  The metaphysical position that reality is at bottom one — one substance, one principle, or one kind of thing — against the claim that it divides into two or many.

• Mysticism

  The pursuit of direct union with, or immediate knowledge of, ultimate reality — and the modern category that gathers such claims across otherwise unrelated traditions.

• Mythology

  The body of a culture's traditional sacred narratives, and the long argument over what such stories are — history, error, allegory, or a mode of thought in its own right.

• Necessity

  That which cannot be otherwise — in Greek thought both Ananke, the goddess of compulsion who binds gods and men, and the philosophical contrast to whatever merely happens to be.

• Noumenon

  In Kant's critical philosophy, the thing-in-itself — the object as it is apart from how it appears to a perceiving mind, set against the phenomenon, the object as it is given in experience.

• Nous

  The Greek word for mind raised to a principle — the faculty that knows directly, and in Platonist and Hermetic thought, the divine intelligence that orders the world.

• Occultation

  In Twelver Shia Islam, the doctrine that the Twelfth Imam did not die but was withdrawn from the visible world, and will return at the end of time as the Mahdi.

• Oikeiosis

  The Stoic term for the natural recognition of what belongs to a creature — beginning with its own constitution and widening, on the Stoic account, to embrace others.

• Ontologism

  The nineteenth-century doctrine, mainly Catholic, that the mind's first and immediate object of knowledge is God — or being itself — so that all other knowing rests upon that ground.

• Pantheism

  The view that God and the cosmos are one and the same — that the divine is not a being above the world but the world's own deepest reality, identical with the totality of what exists.

• Personhood

  The question of what makes an entity a person — a status that carries rational nature, dignity, and standing — and the long dispute over which beings qualify.

• Pessimism

  The philosophical position that existence is, on balance, not worth having — that suffering outweighs satisfaction and non-being would have been the better lot.

• Priest

  The office of ritual mediator between the human and the divine — the person authorized to perform the rites a community holds necessary, especially sacrifice, and to stand for it before its gods.

• Prisca Theologia

  The idea of a single "ancient theology" running from Hermes, Zoroaster and Orpheus through Pythagoras to Plato — a stream of divine wisdom held to anticipate Christian truth.

• Psyche

  The Greek word psychē — breath, life, mind — and its long passage from the faint shade of Homer to the immortal, graded soul of the Platonists.

• Purgatory

  In Catholic teaching, a state of purification after death in which the saved, not yet wholly cleansed, are made ready for heaven.

• Quietism

  A doctrine of the spiritual life that prizes passive contemplation and the surrender of one's own effort and will, so that the soul rests still before God and lets him act.

• Reason

  The mind's capacity to move from one thing known to another by inference — long held to be what is highest in the human being, and long argued over as to its reach.

• reincarnation

  The doctrine that the soul survives death and returns to live again in a new body — held, in varied forms, across Greek, Indian, and later esoteric thought.

• Religion

  The category by which a vast range of beliefs, practices, and institutions is grouped as one kind of thing — a grouping whose coherence scholarship has come to treat as a question rather than a given.

• Revelation

  The disclosure of divine truth by the divine itself — knowledge held to be given rather than reasoned to, and so distinguished from both argument and inner gnosis.

• Sabaoth

  A Hebrew divine title, "Lord of Hosts," preserved untranslated in Greek and Latin worship — and, separately, the name of a repentant archon in Gnostic myth.

• sin

  The category of transgression against divine law or order — the broken relation a religion holds must be set right, and which some currents recast not as crime but as ignorance.

• Soul

  The name, in many traditions, for the animating or immaterial aspect of a living being — what is held to think, feel, and in some accounts survive the body's death.

• Spirit

  The animating breath or principle by which a body lives — named pneuma, ruach, and spiritus, and held across traditions to be the difference between the living and the dead.

• Substance

  The underlying reality held to persist through change — Aristotle's ousia, what a thing fundamentally is beneath its shifting properties, later carried into Christian theology.

• Syncretism

  The blending of distinct religious or philosophical traditions into a single fused form — the process that gave the Hellenistic world its mixed gods and composite wisdom.

• The Absolute

  A name for unconditioned ultimate reality — that which depends on nothing outside itself — given its sharpest formulation in German Idealism and often compared with Brahman and the One.

• The Flood Myth

  The recurring story of a world-destroying deluge and a saved remnant — found across Mesopotamian, biblical, Greek, and Indian sources — and the disputed question of why so many cultures tell it.

• The Mahdi

  In Islamic eschatology, the awaited "rightly-guided one" who is held to appear before the end of the world and fill the earth with justice as it had been filled with oppression.

• The One

  The Neoplatonist name for the first principle — the source of everything that exists, itself beyond being, beyond thought, and beyond every name, including this one.

• The Pleiades

  The bright star-cluster in Taurus, the "Seven Sisters," whose seasonal rising and setting carried calendar, ritual, and myth across an unusually wide range of cultures.

• The Second Coming

  The Christian expectation that Christ will return in glory to judge the living and the dead and complete the world — the Parousia, awaited as imminent and repeatedly recalculated.

• Theology

  Reasoned discourse about God or the divine — the attempt to give an ordered account of what most traditions hold to lie beyond ordinary speech.

• Universals

  The metaphysical problem of what general terms refer to — whether properties shared by many things, such as redness or humanity, exist in their own right or are only names.

• Witchcraft

  The alleged practice of harmful or supernatural magic — at once the charge that fuelled the early-modern witch trials and a term reclaimed by modern practitioners as a name for their own craft.

• Yang

  In Chinese cosmology, the active, bright, warming principle — paired with yin as one of two complementary aspects through which a single underlying process unfolds.

• Yggdrasil

  The immense ash tree at the center of Norse cosmology — the axis along which the worlds are arranged, where the gods hold their court and the fates are named.