A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Ä Ö
A
The Aghoris are a Shaivite ascetic order in India, especially associated with Varanasi and with radical forms of renunciation linked in modern scholarship to the older Kāpālika tradition. They are known for transgressive ritual practices meant to dissolve conventional distinctions between pure and impure, affirming a non-dual vision in which even what society regards as polluting is understood as part of the divine totality.
AFFECT
In Jungian psychology, affect is an emotionally charged feeling-state, especially one intense enough to signal the activation of an unconscious complex. Strong or disproportionate affect is therefore treated not merely as passing emotion, but as evidence that deeper psychic contents have been constellated and are seeking expression.
ANTIFRAGILE
A term popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb for systems, persons, or structures that gain from stress, volatility, or disruption rather than merely enduring them. The antifragile differs from the resilient in that resilience resists shock and stays the same, whereas antifragility improves through challenge.
From Greek anti (“against”) and nomos (“law”), antinomianism denotes the view that the believer is released from the binding authority of religious law. In Christian theological history the term is chiefly applied to positions holding that salvation by grace frees Christians from observance of the Mosaic Law or from legalistic moral obligation, though it has also been used more broadly for doctrines seen as rejecting established moral or religious norms.
In Greek myth, Akhlys (also Achlys) is the personification of the death-mist, the dimming or clouding that comes over the eyes before death. In later mythographic tradition she is also associated with misery, poison, and the darker margins of the underworld imagination, sometimes treated as a daimonic figure akin to the Keres rather than as a major Olympian deity.
An American occult black metal project founded by Naas Alcameth in 2009.
B
Swedish-born philosopher best known for work on existential risk, superintelligence, the anthropic principle, and the simulation argument. He founded Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute and became one of the most visible theorists of long-term future-oriented philosophy, especially through Superintelligence (2014), which helped shape contemporary debate on advanced AI risk.
E
ENANTIODROMIA (Greek: ἐναντιοδρομία, “running toward the opposite”)
From Greek enantios (“opposite”) and dromos (“running”), the term denotes a movement into or toward the contrary. Associated in antiquity with Heraclitean thinking and later emphasized by C. G. Jung, it describes the tendency of an extreme one-sided condition to generate its own opposite; in Jungian psychology, a dominant conscious attitude eventually provokes a compensatory emergence from the unconscious.
D
DAIMONIC
In Rollo May’s existential psychology, the daimonic is any natural human power or function that can take over the whole personality. It is not inherently evil: sexuality, anger, ambition, creativity, and eros can all be daimonic. The term names intensity and psychic force, which become destructive only when repressed, dissociated, or inadequately integrated into conscious life.
H
HAMARTIA
From Greek hamartia, “error” or “missing the mark,” the term in Aristotle’s Poetics denotes the mistake or misjudgment through which a tragic figure falls into misfortune. Although often rendered in later criticism as “tragic flaw,” its older sense is usually broader and points less to fixed moral defect than to blindness, error, or fatal miscalculation.The unifying thread across all three: a missing of the mark with catastrophic, often irreversible consequences.
T
THUMOS — Greek thumos names the spirited dimension of the soul: the seat of courage, indignation, anger, ambition, and the drive for honor or recognition. In Platonic psychology it occupies a middle position between reason and appetite, supplying force and assertiveness that may either serve rational order or break from it.
K
KASTRUP, BERNARDO (b. 1974)
Dutch philosopher, computer scientist, and author associated with contemporary idealist metaphysics. He is best known for articulating analytic idealism, the view that mind or consciousness is fundamental and that the physical world is the outward appearance of underlying mental processes.
S
SACRED AND PROFANE TIME
In Mircea Eliade’s phenomenology of religion, profane time is ordinary, linear, historical time, the time of everyday life. Sacred time, by contrast, is primordial and ritually recoverable: through myth and rite, religious participants re-enter the archetypal time of origins, making foundational events present again.
V
VITRIOL — In alchemical usage, VITRIOL is commonly interpreted as the acronym of the Latin phrase Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem (“Visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying you will find the hidden stone”). It signifies the inward descent and purification through which the hidden stone or transformative principle is discovered; materially, “vitriol” also referred to sulfate compounds central to alchemical operations.