Concepts

Amulets are objects worn or carried for protection, healing, or influence, frequently combining inscriptions, images, materials, and ritual timing in ways that cross medical, devotional, and magical classifications.

Angelic invocation names ritual address to angels in medieval texts; it may function as an actor practice in prayer-based ritual books and as an analyst category for the study of theurgic or devotional magic.

Ars Notoria is an Actor Term for a medieval ritual art of learning that joined prayers, notae, angelic invocation, and claims of accelerated intellectual acquisition.

Astral image magic is an Analyst Term for learned practices that connect images, planetary timing, materials, and celestial influence in Arabic and Latin scholastic settings.

Celestial influence names medieval theories of astral causation that support astrology, image magic, medicine, and debates over determinism.

Characters and seals are graphic signs used in ritual, talismanic, and angelic materials; they matter as manuscript phenomena because their transmission depends on visual copying as much as verbal text.

Charms is an Analyst Term for spoken, written, or performed formulae used for healing, protection, coercion, or divination; the category requires care because medieval sources may frame the same materials as prayer, medicine, superstition, or magic.

Chiromancy is an Actor Term for palmistry or hand-reading, a divinatory practice treated in medieval manuals and often debated within broader classifications of natural signs and illicit prediction.

Clerical underworld is an Analyst Term associated especially with Richard Kieckhefer's account of literate clerics who copied, adapted, and used illicit ritual texts while remaining within ecclesiastical culture.

Condemned arts is a hybrid category for practices classified as illicit by theologians, jurists, pastoral writers, or university authorities, including divination, demonic invocation, image magic, and suspect ritual learning.

Confession is a sacramental and pastoral context in which medieval clergy identified charms, divination, superstition, and illicit ritual practices as matters of correction.

Demonic pact is a theological and legal category used to explain illicit magic as explicit or implicit agreement with demons, while modern historians analyze it as a polemical and juridical tool rather than a transparent description of practice.

Demonology is an Analyst Term for systematic learned discussion of demons, their powers, limitations, deception, and relation to divination, magic, superstition, and witchcraft.

Divination covers practices for obtaining hidden knowledge, from geomancy and sortilege to astrological judgment; medieval sources classify it variously as natural, superstitious, demonic, or licit depending on method and authority.

Exorcism names authorized Christian rites and adjacent ritual practices for expelling or commanding spirits, making it a boundary category between liturgy, pastoral care, and ritual magic.

Experimenta is an Actor Term for trials, recipes, or procedures transmitted as experiential knowledge; in medieval magic studies it marks the overlap between practical experiment, secrets literature, medicine, and ritual operation.

Experimental science is an Analyst Term especially associated with older histories such as Thorndike's, where magic and experiment are studied as intertwined medieval attempts to test, command, or explain nature.

Familiar spirit is an Actor Term in many late medieval and early modern contexts for a spirit bound to, assisting, or repeatedly contacted by a practitioner; modern scholars use the category cautiously because legal, literary, and ritual sources describe such spirits in different registers.

Geomancy is an Actor Term for a learned divinatory art based on figures generated by points or marks and interpreted through structured houses, often circulating with astrology and other clerical arts.

Grimoire is primarily an Analyst Term for manuscript or printed collections of ritual instructions, spirit lists, conjurations, prayers, and experiments.

Grimoire corpus is an Analyst Term for the unstable family of manuscript and printed ritual books attributed to Solomon, Honorius, Raziel, angels, or ancient sages; the portal must track each text individually rather than treating grimoires as interchangeable.

Hydromancy is an Actor Term for divination by water, frequently named in medieval taxonomies of forbidden divination and often treated as suspect because of its association with spirit mediation.

Learned magic is an Analyst Term for textually transmitted practices cultivated by literate clerical, university, monastic, or courtly actors.

Licit and illicit knowledge is an Analyst Term for medieval debates over what could be known through nature, revelation, experiment, stars, demons, or ritual practice.

Magic and cognition is an Analyst Term for scholarship that studies medieval magical practice through memory, perception, learning, ritual attention, and the mental operations implied by diagrams, prayers, images, and repeated procedures.

Magical alphabets are nonordinary scripts and character systems used in ritual texts, amulets, and seals; they are visual technologies of secrecy, authority, and transmission.

Manuscript miscellany is an Analyst Term for codices that collect heterogeneous texts; in medieval magic scholarship it matters because ritual, medical, devotional, astrological, and divinatory materials often survive together rather than in isolated genre books.

Mathematical arts refers to quadrivial and astral disciplines, especially astrology, whose learned status made their relation to divination and magic especially contested.

Medieval magic is an Analyst Term for practices, accusations, texts, and learned theories that modern scholars group under magic while medieval actors used more specific categories such as nigromantia, superstitio, experimentum, and scientia imaginum.

Natural powers names medieval attempts to explain unusual effects through created nature rather than demonic pact, a key boundary zone between natural philosophy and magic.

Necromancy is an Analyst Term in much modern scholarship for learned spirit-conjuring practices, although medieval Latin nigromantia often carried broader associations with illicit demonic magic rather than the literal raising of the dead.

Nigromantia is a medieval Latin Actor Term often used for illicit ritual operations involving spirits, frequently blurred by clerical writers with necromancy and demonic magic.

Notae are the visual signs or figures central to Ars Notoria traditions of ritual learning, requiring attention to diagrammatic transmission as well as verbal prayer.

Occult properties are hidden natural powers invoked in scholastic natural philosophy to explain effects not reducible to manifest qualities, creating a crucial boundary zone with natural magic.

Pastoral care and magic names the confessional, preaching, and catechetical settings in which clergy identified charms, divination, and superstition as problems of Christian discipline.

The Picatrix tradition denotes the Arabic-to-Latin transmission of the Ghayat al-hakim and its reception as a major source for medieval and Renaissance astral magic.

Planetary spirits are named intelligences, angels, or demons associated with planets in ritual and astral texts, linking astrology to invocation and image practice.

Prohibited arts is a hybrid category for practices forbidden by theological, legal, university, or pastoral authorities, including forms of divination, image magic, spirit invocation, and suspect astrology.

Pseudepigraphy is an Analyst Term for attribution to authoritative figures such as Solomon, Honorius, Raziel, Aristotle, or Hermes; in grimoire studies it is a central mechanism of textual authority.

Pyromancy is an Actor Term for divination by fire, appearing in medieval lists of mantic arts and classifications of illicit knowledge.

Ritual diagrams are visual structures such as circles, notae, seals, tables, and figures that organize ritual knowledge and require attention to manuscript layout and copying.

Ritual purity names requirements of confession, fasting, abstinence, cleanliness, prayer, or moral preparation that structure many medieval ritual magic texts and blur devotional and magical categories.

Scholastic classification of magic denotes the theological and philosophical sorting of practices into natural, demonic, superstitious, divinatory, or licit forms by medieval intellectuals.

Secret names are divine, angelic, demonic, or voces magicae names whose ritual force is tied to secrecy, antiquity, revelation, or exact textual transmission.

Secret of Secrets refers to the Secretum Secretorum tradition and its reception as a pseudo-Aristotelian vehicle for princely counsel, occult knowledge, physiognomy, astrology, and medicine.

Solomonic magic names traditions that invoke Solomon's authority for spirit command, seals, ritual purity, and secret knowledge; it is both an actor strategy of attribution and a modern scholarly category.

Sortilege is an Actor Term for divination by lots, books, or chance procedures, treated variously as superstition, clerical misuse, or illicit inquiry into hidden things.

Suffumigation is an Actor Term for ritual fumigation with incense, herbs, or other substances, often coordinated with planetary timing, spirit address, purification, or image consecration.

Superstitio is a Latin Actor Term used by theologians and pastoral writers to classify improper religious practice, divination, charms, and illicit ritual dependence.

Talismans are crafted objects intended to mediate celestial, spiritual, or symbolic power; in medieval scholarship the term often overlaps with image magic, astral magic, and Arabic-Latin theories of celestial influence.

University condemnation is an Analyst Term for institutional acts that classified, restricted, or prohibited suspect doctrines and practices, including astrology, image magic, and demonic arts.

Voces magicae is an Analyst Term for nonordinary ritual words, names, and syllables whose efficacy is attached to sound, secrecy, antiquity, or divine and angelic names.

Witchcraft is an Analyst Term for accusations, learned demonological categories, and late medieval constructions of harmful magic; it must be distinguished from ritual manuscripts and from broader categories of learned magic.