The Elfin Diary Archives

Alchemy

The medieval science where the practitioner is involved in the transmutation and transformation of base metals such as lead into gold. It is also the search for the philosopher’s stone, or the elixir of life (which is now considered to be what the ancient Alchemists were searching for) and evolution to a higher level of ability and development. The transmutation of base metal into gold symbolised the transformation of material and natural man into spiritual man. Each person belongs to both the spiritual and material world and contains a spark of the universal spirit imprisoned in matter, which the Alchemist strives to set free.

Amulets & Talismans

Amulets are usually worn as charms and are thought of as lucky and protective. An amulet guards its wearer against evil, misfortune and bad luck and they usually come in the form of a piece of jewellery. A talisman doesn’t need to be worn and it incorporates symbols to represent a force or forces being called upon to gain a particular end. Talismans are made out of many different materials such as parchment, wood, stone or metal. They are charged with power and sometimes buried as part of the ritual or destroyed to release their power into the world. The thing that makes a talisman or amulet work is the belief that is put into the making and charging of them; a connection is made between your inner and outer thoughts and as the energy flows between the two it charges the amulet or talisman to enable it to do what you wish.

Anthrosophy

Rudolf Steiner 1861-1925, founded the Anthroposophical Society in 1912 (anthropos – man, sophia – wisdom, in Greek). He said “Anthroposophy has its roots in the perceptions – already gained – into the spiritual world. Yet these are no more than its roots. The branches, leaves, blossoms and fruits of Anthroposophy grow into all the fields of human life and action.” He developed new forms of medicine, architecture, agriculture and education, and in his early forties wrote four mystery plays about the karmic connections of a group of people in successive incarnations.

Apport

An object or substance materialised from the astral plane by a medium.

Astral Body

At night, when we sleep, our soul transfers from our physical body to our astral body and rests. Our astral body is attached to our physical form by a silver cord which is very fine and supple, stretching to allow us to travel anywhere we wish in the astral regions. The astral body is a replica of our own body, although with practice any physical characteristic except eyes can be altered. The same thing happens when we die. We travel in the astral regions, but this time the transfer is permanent; the cord holding the astral body to the physical body simply dissolves. This dissolving of the cord takes place about three days after death. When it has faded, the astral body is free to go to the level it has reached in its lifetime with the knowledge it has acquired.

Astral Projection

It is said by some that your astral body can travel through the astral regions at will; you can talk to people who have died, or to other people who are also alive and on earth and exploring the astral levels. It is a matter of willpower (as everything else is) and you can will yourself to astrally project by visualisation and imagination. If you can do this, your soul simply leaves your body and floats off into the astral regions, always attached to your physical body by a thin silver cord so that it doesn’t get lost or detached from its other self. The cord only dissolves when there is no life force left in the physical body and it dies.

Atlantis

An island or continent which is supposed to have existed in the North Atlantic Ocean. The only real reference to it was made by Plato around 350 BC, and he had only hearsay evidence from legend (possibly Egyptian). The island of Thera, known today as Santorini, is possibly the inspiration for the legend. At the centre of the Minoan empire, it exploded in a series of violent eruptions around 1600 BC, triggering Minos’ collapse. The existence of at least 200 sunken cities in the coastal waters of the Mediterranean suggests another inspiration. A theory, popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, was that Atlantis was so far advanced technologically that the Atlanteans were able to increase their vibratory rate, so the entire civilisation vanished into a higher frequency level of existence; therefore Atlantis still exists in a parallel universe from which UFOs originate, monitoring man’s progress.

Atomism

Atomism is the concept of tiny indivisible units of matter that form the basis of everything and which exist in a void, as opposed to the philosophy that all matter is contiguous and without voids. It was first proposed by the early philosophers of both Greece and India.

Aura

The aura is said to be an electromagnetic field of psychic energy varying in width and colour depending on the spiritual and physical state of the person or object. In 1911, a physician named Walter J. Kilner put a dilute solution of dye between two glass plates and looked at various objects through them. He claimed that 95% of those who tried (under his supervision) saw the human aura through these plates. He observed that one person could project auric rods from her body, so this could be the way psychokinesis might work. Everything has an aura, including plants, animals and minerals. The aura can allegedly be photographed, but only by using special photography equipment – see the entry for Kirlian photography.

Automatic Writing

Writing done by a medium when in trance, originating from the spirit world and not consciously produced. The handwriting style is invariably totally different from the medium’s own. William Blake, the poet and artist, claimed that most of his poetry was dictated to him by dead poets and his paintings were visions he was guided to produce.

Aztecs

The Aztecs were a nomadic tribe of people who settled in central America (now Mexico) about 500 years ago. Other peoples and civilisations had lived in this region before the Aztecs. The Toltecs had built great cities but these had been destroyed before the Aztecs arrived; the Chichemecs (or barbarians) lived to the north and the Maya in the area that now consists of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, and part of Costa Rica. The Aztecs had an unusual 260-day calendar to calculate the dates of religious festivals; their astronomers had also worked out the 365-day solar calendar as well. Every 52 years, these two calendars coincided, and the Aztecs performed a ceremony to celebrate another 52 years of life. The Aztecs believed that human sacrifice was a fair exchange for the sacrifices that the Gods had made to create the earth and humanity. The Gods were offered these sacrifices so that the sun would rise every day and that mankind would live. These human sacrifices would first be drugged with a sacred drink, then their hearts would be cut out and offered up to the sun god. They also sacrificed dogs and turkeys to their gods. They had very fierce-looking gods and life was harsh for them – they were at the mercy of wild animals, famine and floods. Their capital city, Tenochtitlán, was constructed of mud bricks and stone and took 200 years to build. They were ruled by a king and used canals as trade and travel routes instead of roads. They do not appear to have used money and it is thought they used barter and exchange to obtain goods. They had large markets where food, precious metals, feathers (used for cloaks and as religious symbols), jade, cocoa beans, slaves (captured from wars with neighbouring tribes) and various types of honey were available. When the Spanish explorer Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519, the Aztec king Montezuma welcomed him and his men, thinking that these white men could possibly be one of their gods (who had white skin and red hair and whose return had been prophesied) returning to the land. The Spaniards eventually killed the Aztecs for their gold and land; 100,000 died in battle and many more were killed by chicken pox, venereal disease and other infections bought by the Spanish, thus ending the Aztec empire. Most of the golden ornaments of the Aztecs were melted down; many of the temples were torn down by the Spanish priests, who also destroyed most of the Codices – sacred manuscripts made of deer hide or pounded bark, painted on both sides and folded. Very few of those have survived.

Ba

The Egyptians had a complex idea of what constituted a person’s soul or essence, dividing it into several parts:

Ba – the personality
Ib – the heart
Ka – the double/vital essence
Khet – the physical body
Sah – the spiritual body
Sekhem – the power/form
Shuyet – the shadow
Ren – the name/identity

After the person had completed their transition into afterlife, all the parts integrated into a spirit called the Akh. This spirit included the Khet – the physical body – which is why mummification was so important to the Egyptians .

Caduceus

A Latin word for a herald’s staff. It is a wand with wings at the top and two snakes entwined around it. Hermes, the Greek God carries one. In alchemy it is a symbol representing the uniting of opposites but more generally it is interpreted as an emblem of power (the wand), and wisdom (the snakes). It is also a symbol of healing.

Candlemas

Candlemas is both a Pagan and Christian festival, held around the beginning of February. In the Pagan calendar, the festival (also known as Imbolc) is on February 1st; it marks the midpoint between winter and spring, celebrates the lengthening days, and involves rituals with fire and purification to honour the goddess Brigid. In the Christian calendar it is on the 2nd February, celebrating the occasion when when Jesus was presented at the temple in Jerusalem. In English tradition, lighted candles were carried in procession; the name derives from this. In America, the 2nd of February is Groundhog Day; if a groundhog can see his own shadow on this day, the winter will remain for another six weeks.

Cayce, Edgar

Cayce, Edgar (1877 – 1945) An American psychic. One of the most documented psychics of the 20th century, he left 13,000 to 14,000 of his readings which he gave whilst in a self induced trance state. He was said to have been accurate in diagnosing illnesses whilst in trance. He founded the Association for Research and Enlightenment (A.R.E.) in 1931. Thousands of people now attend the conferences and workshops in Virginia Beach, Virginia, USA. The library there contains one of the largest parapsychological collections in the world – over 70,000 volumes – and an online database of Cayce’s readings – that can be accessed by members on their website.

Chakras

These are energy centres in the body, where the energy from the cosmos can be drawn in giving life to the body and power to the psyche. There are seven main chakras situated the base of the spine, belly, solar plexus, heart, throat, third eye and crown of head.

Chaos Theory

Chaos theory is the study of the behaviour of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions, leading to unpredictable outcomes. It explores how systems that follow deterministic laws can exhibit seemingly random and unpredictable behaviour. A core concept is the “butterfly effect,” which illustrates how a small change in a system’s initial state (i.e. how a butterfly flaps its wings) can have large and disproportionate effects on its future state (i.e. the change in the butterfly’s wingflaps can be the start of a cascading series of atmospheric changes that eventually produce a hurricane). Nowadays, chaos theory has a wide variety of practical applications ; it’s used in meteorology, anthropology, sociology, environmental science, computer science, engineering, economics, ecology, architecture and even city traffic management.

Chinese Coins

In ancient China the name for money, Qian, was once the name of a farming tool which was used for exchange. Thus the earliest coins were made to look like farming implements (shovels, knives etc.) with decorative words carved on them. It is believed that ancient coins can banish evil spirits.

Chinese Elements

There are five elements or perpetually active principles of nature, upon which the whole scheme of Chinese philosophy is based.
Water – produces Wood but destroys Fire
Fire – produces Earth but destroys Metal
Metal – produces Water but destroys Wood
Wood – produces Fire but destroys Earth
Earth – produces Metal but destroys Water

Chinese Imperial Encyclopaedia

Also known as the Gujin Tushu Jicheng (Complete Classics Collection of Ancient China). Written in China during the reigns of the Qing dynasty emperors Kangxi and Yongzheng and covering most of what was known then in China about literature, natural phenomena, geography and history, it was begun in 1700 and completed in 1725. Spanning some 10,000 rolls (volumes), 64 copies of it were printed out, using copper type. There are now only three extant full copies left, one of which is kept in the UK’s Cambridge University Library.

Chinese New Year

Also known as the Spring Festival, this is the main Festival of the Chinese calendar; it occurs on the second new moon after the winter solstice. It is considered unlucky to use scissors or knives on New Year’s day. People clean the”old year” out of their houses and give each other wine and dumplings, along with red packets containing money. As part of the celebrations, firecrackers are lit to ward off evil spirits.

Chinese Zodiac, the

The Chinese calendar has a 12-year cycle where every year is assigned one of twelve animals and one of five elements. The animals are (in order) Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig; the elements are (in order) Water, Earth, Wood, Wood Earth, Fire, Fire, Earth, Metal, Metal, Earth. Water. In 2026, the Chinese New Year starts on February 17th and is the Year of the Fire Horse.

Church of All Worlds, the

The Church of All Worlds was the first Pagan Church to be officially recognised in the United States, in March 1968. It was founded by Oberon Zell, who had been inspired by reading about the concept of Nests – communities that worked and lived together for the purpose of spiritual development – in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land. CAW members practice a wide range of magikal, occult and Earth-based beliefs; the only rule is to commit to “a way of life that is ethical, benevolent, humanistic, life-affirming, ecstatic and ecologically sane.” Their website can be found at caw.org.

Church of the Sub-Genius, the

The Church of the Sub-Genius is a ‘parody religion’, founded in the 1970s in the US. Purportedly based on the teachings and life of a salesman named JR “Bob” Dobbs, their supreme deity is named Jehovah1; followers also worship a number of lesser deities drawn from all the world’s religions; they practice “slack”, which is basically the avoidance of hard work. Essentially, the Church’s underlying purpose is to satirise established religion; it has been compared to Discordianism.

Clairaudience

This is the ability to hear things said to you in your mind by dwellers on the astral planes. We all have the ability to listen and hear and ask for guidance or answers; the trick is to learn to listen to what is being said to you, by stilling your mind and concentrating.

Clairvoyance

Clairvoyance means ‘clear sight’. It’s claimed that we all have powers inside us that can be called clairvoyance or ESP. As the ability to use these comes from deep inside us, its strength depends upon our spiritual development. Clairvoyance is used for seeing spirit guides and spirit forms of people who have died, and for communicating with them. To be clairvoyant, one has to learn to open the third eye. This is between the eyebrows and is in some way connected to the pineal gland in the middle of the brain. As we become more psychically developed, the veils covering the third eye dissolve until it is fully open. Clairvoyants can open and shut this eye as they need, to perceive. Clairvoyance means you see into the past or future in your mind’s eye or imagination. There are many ways of looking into the future and the past – tarot cards, tea leaves, crystal balls, palmistry, but all of these are merely an aid to the clairvoyant’s ability.

Colour Meanings

There’s a diverse range of colour meanings, depending on the culture and the context. This is probably the most common list, but you can find several other lists here.

White – unity; Grey – privacy; Brown – practicality; Pink – frustration; Violet – leadership; Blue – inspiration; Green- individualism; Yellow – spirituality; Red – risk; Black – denial.

Comets

These are celestial bodies composed of dust and ice, orbiting in and around the Solar System. They should not be confused with asteroids, which are solid rocky bodies and don’t have the spectacular tail that all comets develops when they enter the inner Solar System; this tail is formed by ice blasted off the comet’s body by the Solar wind emanating from the Sun. Comets mainly form in the outer reaches of our Solar System beyond Neptune, in a zone known as the Kuiper Belt, but some (called exocomets) come from other star systems millions of lightyears away. Although some Kuiper Belt comets have orbital periods of hundreds of thousands of years, most are relatively short-lived, sometimes lasting only a few centuries before they break up.

Confucius

Confucius lived from c. 551 – c. 479 BCE, reaching the age of 72. He was one of China’s greatest sages and taught that the nature of man is pure at birth and becomes stained only by the impurity of its surroundings. There were Confucian temples in every Chinese towns until Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. Official worship of Confucius was carried out at the Spring and Autumn equinoxes. He is addressed as ‘Honoured of Heaven who causes literature to flourish and the world to prosper’. The ethics of Confucianism are based on the following concepts:
1) The Universe is regulated by an order which is moral in its essence.
2) Man is morally good by nature and it is up to him to remain so.
3) The individual must rectify himself before he can rectify others. He must study the teachings of the Ancients.
4) Above all, it is essential to cultivate the five Virtues: Benevolence, Justice, Propriety, Wisdom and Sincerity.

Cosmology

The study of the whole universe, its’ tructure, origin and its final state.

Crystals

Crystals are formed in cavities or hollows in the earth’s surface and grow from natural solutions in a fixed pattern which varies with crystal type. Quartz is one of the more commonly found minerals. 12.5% of the Earth’s crust consists of silicic acid. The Earth’s crust is a web of quartz, but only a very small percentage of this is crystalline, where perfect conditions prevail. The word crystal (in Greek krystallos) means frozen in suspension. Scientists looking into the atomic structure of crystals find, as well as the perfect order, a lively exchange of electrons and electromagnetic energies among grid positions. Rock crystal contains a fine network of double helix spirals of silicon-oxygen tetrahedrons. These spirals possess a fine elasticity, which, when compressed, produce a flow of electricity. The energy field or aura produced by a person interacts with the pattern of the crystal and causes it to respond to human energy. All crystals must be cleansed before use. Wash carefully in running water, then place the crystal in a bowl containing one teaspoon of sea salt dissolved in one pint of water and leave for 24 hours, remove from salt water, rinse with running water and allow to dry naturally in sunlight.

Curses

A curse is the intention of a very strongly formed thought to do evil. It is projected out of the mind of a person towards the person it is intended to harm. People can be put under a great deal of emotional pressure if they know they have been cursed; this may cause their disease-fighting immune system to collapse, making them ill, in the same way that a positive mental outlook can aid recovery from diseases.

Cycle of Sixty, The

Also known as the Sexagenary cycle, this is a Chinese calendrical system of signs or characters (known as the Ten Celestial Stems with Twelve Celestial Branches) organised into a 60-year cycle. It has been found in the earliest written records in China – 1250BC – and almost certainly predates them. A method of recording days and lunar months, it was only sometime around 350BC that it was adapted to record years also. Because it quite neatly resolves the difficulties of aligning Lunar and Solar calendars, a number of other cultures have used the same system – Mayans, Aztecs and Celts especially (see the Coligny Calender).

Death

In death, the soul simply floats away when the energy inside the physical body dies, either through natural ageing, malfunction or accident. Then the thin cord holding our physical body to our astral body shrivels up and disappears, leaving our astral body free to travel on without any more physical pain or suffering. Heaven and Hell are here on Earth, we make our own Heaven and Hell by the way we live our lives.

Daimon

In ancient Geek philosophy, a daimon was an individual’s guiding spirit that stood between mortals and the gods.

Déjà Vu

Déjà vu (French for “already seen”) is the feeling of “This has happened before, I remember it!” There are a number of causes for this, most often a memory ‘glitch’ in which the current memory is mixed up with an older, similar memory. Stress, fatigue and illness can also play a part. Its a perfectly normal experience; unless it occurs frequently there is no cause for concern.

Dervishes

A Dervish (or Darvīsh), is a member of the Muslim Sufi sect. Sufis are ascetics who seek salvation through good works and personal spiritual experiences. Sufism developed in Persia in the 10th and 11th centuries, and it’s been suggested that the first Sufis were Muslims influenced by wandering Turkish Buddhists. The twirling dance they ‘re associated with is part of a ceremony known as the Sama; the dancers are striving to achieve wajd – an altered state of consciousness.

Discordianism

Discordianism is a philosophy based on worship of the Greek-Roman deity Eris, the goddess of Chaos. Its ‘holy book’ is the Principia Discordia; its principal belief is that both Order and Disorder are illusions; Discordian practice consists of treating everything with humour and absurdity. It has been compared to both Zen Buddhism and the Church of the SubGenius.

Divination

This works by regarding synchronicity or meaningful coincidence as the rule of reality, as opposed to the exception. By learning to read the meaningful connections, one can make all events and things reflect all other events and things in the past, present and future. Some methods of divination are: Augury – by the behaviour of birds; Bletonism – by currents of water; Capnomancy – by smoke; Ceromancy – by hot wax dropped in water; Lithomancy – by stones; Pyromancy – by looking into a fire.

Dord

A nonsense word that was accidentally added to the 1934 edition of Websters International Dictionary. An editor’s note reading “D or d, cont./Density” – meaning that ‘density’ should be added to the existing list of words that the letter “D” can abbreviate – was misinterpreted by the printer as a synonym and inserted an entry reading: dord (dôrd), n. Physics & Chem. Density. The mistake went unnoticed for fifteen years. (‘Dord’ is also the name for a Bronze Age horn native to Ireland).

Dowsing

This is the use of a forked hazel or willow branch, or a pendulum, to find things or answer questions. The hazel branch is used to find water or lines of power (ley lines), and the pendulum to answer questions. A pendulum can be used to find things using a map.

Dreams & Dreaming

Dreaming is an altered state of consciousness where we can wander freely in our subconscious and imagine what we will. Here we can work out our problems and are given answers, which in many cases are symbolic. The best ways of understanding them is to think what they suggest and mean to you rather than reading interpretation books which often have conflicting meanings for the same thing. We each have an average of about 1000 dreams a year. Lucid dreaming is when we can control what happens in our dreams, rather like astral travelling.

Dragon

To the Chinese, the Dragon is the genius of strength and goodness. He is the spirit of change and therefore of Life itself. In the spring he goes into the sky; in the autumn he buries himself in the watery depths. He covers himself with mud at the autumn equinox and emerges in the spring – announcing his awakening by the renewal of nature’s energies. There are three main species of Dragon: the Lung which is the most powerful and inhabits the sky; The Li which is hornless and lives in the sea; the Chiao which is scaly and lives in marshes and dens in the mountains.

Druid

The earliest mention of druids were in two Greek texts of c. 300 BCE. They were Celtic priests who were also judges, lorekeepers, magicians, philosophers, astronomers/astrologers, healers and advisors to kings. The ancient Greek historian and geographer Strabo, writing around 20CE, said that druids were divided into three orders – Bards (poets and singers), Ovates (diviners and those who studied the natural world) and Druids (who studied ‘moral philosophy’ – ethical principles and how people should live). They left no writings; everything they were taught was committed to memory. So all that we know about them is from Roman and Greek writers, who were almost wholly ignorant about Celtic beliefs and practices.

Ectoplasm

The term comes from the Ancient Greek words ἐκτός ektos, “outside” and πλάσμα plasma, “something formed”. Ectoplasm is said to be formed by physical mediums when in a trance state. It’s excreted as a gauze-like substance from orifices on the medium’s body and spiritual entities are said to drape this substance over their nonphysical body, enabling them to interact in the physical and real universe. Mediums say that ectoplasm proves that “spiritual energy” exists and that conciousness continues after death. However, ectoplasm has never been proven to exist and many mediums have been caught faking it with muslin, eggwhite, paper and similar materials.

El

El was the ancient Semitic word for god, and it was applied to many dieties in the region stretching from southern Turkey to North Africa . He was a particularly important god for the Canaanites (the major tribe of the Middle East in the 3rd millennium BC) who worshipped him as the Father God who presided over a pantheon of lesser gods with his wife Asherah; their many offspring included Baal, Ashtar, and Yahweh .

Electromagnetism

Electromagnetism is the interaction between electrically charged particles and magnetic fields. The electromagnetic force is one of the four fundamental forces of the universe, alongside the strong force, the weak force and gravity, and we most certainly wouldn’t exist without it!

Elementals

Elementals are non-human nature spirits which care for animal life and vegetation and are linked with the four elements. Definitons vary, but according to Paracelsus the four categories of elementals are gnomes (Earth), undines (Water), sylphs (Air) and salamanders (Fire)

Ennead, The

The Ennead were a group of nine deities worshipped by the Egyptians at Heliopolis. The group usually consisted of the sun god Atum, his children Shu and Tefnut, their children Geb and Nut, and their children Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys. Sometimes Horus (the son of Isis and Osiris) was included. The Ogdoad were a similar group of Egyptian gods and goddesses.