The Supernatural Glossary: A to Z

Supernatural C:

CAMBION

In medieval legend, a cambion is the half-human offspring of the union between a human male and a Succubus or an Incubus and a human female. The cambion is a still birth that shows no sign of life outside of being alive, meaning that the child has, for example, no pulse and no breath. This continues until the child is about seven years old, where it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate one from a human. A cambion is usually devilishly cunning, and angelically beautiful, able to persuade even the most strong-hearted individual to do his or her bidding. Most cambions have evil tendencies due to their demon parent.

CHARM

The verbal version of a CHARM is a short verse or expression offered to confer protection or a wish. Ex: GESUNDHEIT!(GOOD HEALTH!), is a simple form, often said in repsonse to a sneeze; a moment when a Demon is said to be able to enter one's body through the nose. In ancient Greece, the words; aski, kataski and tetrax were CHARM words, used to ward off enchantments. A more involved, formalized CHARM might be termed a prayer. A CHARM can be any sort of an object; a substance such as herbs or medicines contained in a bottle, bag, medallion or Amulet.

CHIMERA

A mythical beast that the Greek hero, Bellerophon, astride the winged horse Pegasus, is said to have slain. It was a lion up front, a serpent at the rear, and a goat in the middle. It had three heads.

COMPENDIUM MALEFICARUM

A seventeenth-century book by Francesco Maria Guazzo, that goes into tiresome detail on pacts made with Satan.

CONJURETING

The ability to call up Demons and storms.

CROSS

A cross is a geometrical figure consisting of two lines or bars perpendicular to each other , dividing one or two of the lines in half. The lines usually run vertically and horizontally; if they run diagonally, the design is technically termed a saltire. The cross is one of the most ancient human symbols, and is used by many religions, most notably Christianity. It is frequently a representation of the division of the world into four elements (or cardinal points), or alternately as the union of the concepts of divinity, the vertical line, and the world, the horizontal line.

Types of Crosses include:

• Latin Cross
• Pagan Cross
• Cross De Pattee
• Anchor Cross
• Maltese Cross
• Jerusalem Cross
• Sun Cross
• Lorraine Cross
• Papal Cross
• High Cross
• Eastern Cross
• Coptic Cross
• Canterbury Cross
• Ankh or Looped Tau Cross

CRUCIFIX

A Christian Amulet, in the form of a Latin cross. Sometimes with a figure of Jesus Christ.

Supernatural D:

DAEMON

The same as Demon, possibly referring to a Greek secondary divinity between Gods and men.

DAEVA

An evil spirit in Persian mythology that loves to cause harm and destruction. However, some daevas may be benign, actually helping the protagonist. Usually, such a myth contains both benign and evil daevas, the former helping the protagonist overcome the latter. Usually pictured as a being with combined human and animal characteristics; they have two arms and legs like a human, but they may be dark blue, bright red, chalk-white or spotted; they are often hairy, and have a tufted tail like a lion; their faces are bestial, with sharp fangs, horns, and animal-like snouts, or in some cases the beak of a bird; for feet they might have clawed talons or hooves (though ordinary feet are more common); and though they are fond of gold ornaments, they wear very little in the way of clothing, and often display enormous genitalia. Daevas are also known as Divs, Devs and Dews.

DEMON

A malevolent Spirit, often invisible, but can see, usually has wings, can fly and knows the future. DEMONS can propagate(with DEMONS or humans) and can also die. DEMONS can enter and inhabit the bodies of humans and animals. They are inhibited by Charms they fear; fire, water, light, salt and certain herbs can also repel them.

Hierarchy of Demons

One Emperor Seven Kings Twenty-Four Dukes Thirteen Marquis Demons Ten Counts Eleven Presidents

DEVA

A term referring to a sort of Angel or Hindu God.

DEVIL

A figure in religious mysticism, depicted as a man-figure with horns, a tail and cloven feet. He is synonymous with Satan.

DEVIL'S MARK

Used to indentify witches. Said that Satan places his mark upon them. Usually a red or blue spot, believed to be insensitive to pain and not to bleed if pierced.

DJINN

In the Moslem religion, spirits with specific supernatural powers; the "Children of Fire". They are corporeal, often taking the shapes of ostriches, snakes or humans; and can become invisible. In Malayan magic, there are 190 Black DJINN, evil mountain-dwelling spirits. The Islamic version of the DJINN are the Genii.

DOPPELGANGER

A fantasy in that each person has an identical 'twin' somewhere, though they are unrelated. Legend says that if the two should meet, they both will die.

Supernatural E:

ECTOPLASM

A term that designates the amorphous substance said to be extruded from all the orifices of mediums during seances.

ELEMENTAL/ELEMENTARY SPIRITS

Entities said to inhabit the four medieval elements. Salamanders inhabited fire, Sylphs the air, Gnomes the earth and Nymphs the water.

ENOCHIAN

A language and alphabet of Angels.

EMF

The electromagnetic field is a physical field produced by electrically charged objects. It affects the behaviour of charged objects in the vicinity of the field.

The electromagnetic field extends indefinitely throughout space and describes the electromagnetic interaction. It is one of the four fundamental forces of nature (the others are gravitation, the weak interaction, and the strong interaction).

The field can be viewed as the combination of an electric field and a magnetic field. The electric field is produced by stationary charges, and the magnetic field by moving charges (currents); these two are often described as the sources of the field. The way in which charges and currents interact with the electromagnetic field is described by Maxwell's equations and the Lorentz Force Law.

From a classical point of view, the electromagnetic field can be regarded as a smooth, continuous field, propagated in a wavelike manner, whereas from a quantum mechanical point of view, the field can be viewed as being composed of photons.

Structure of the electromagnetic field The electromagnetic field may be viewed in two distinct ways.

Continuous structure Classically, electric and magnetic fields are thought of as being produced by smooth motions of charged objects. For example, oscillating charges produce electric and magnetic fields that may be viewed in a 'smooth', continuous, wavelike manner. In this case, energy is viewed as being transferred continuously through the electromagnetic field between any two locations. For instance, the metal atoms in a radio transmitter appear to transfer energy continuously. This view is useful to a certain extent (radiation of low frequency), but problems are found at high frequencies (see ultraviolet catastrophe). This problem leads to another view.

Discrete structure The electromagnetic field may be thought of in a more 'coarse' way. Experiments reveal that electromagnetic energy transfer is better described as being carried away in 'packets' or 'chunks' called photons with a fixed frequency. Planck's relation links the energy E of a photon to its frequency ¦Í through the equation:

where h is Planck's constant, named in honour of Max Planck, and ¦Í is the frequency of the photon . For example, in the photoelectric effect ¡ªthe emission of electrons from metallic surfaces by electromagnetic radiation¡ª it is found that increasing the intensity of the incident radiation has no effect, and that only the frequency of the radiation is relevant in ejecting electrons.

This quantum picture of the electromagnetic field has proved very successful, giving rise to quantum electrodynamics, a quantum field theory describing the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with charged matter.

Dynamics of the electromagnetic field In the past, electrically charged objects were thought to produce two types of field associated with their charge property. An electric field is produced when the charge is stationary with respect to an observer measuring the properties of the charge and a magnetic field (as well as an electric field) is produced when the charge moves (creating an electric current) with respect to this observer. Over time, it was realized that the electric and magnetic fields are better thought of as two parts of a greater whole ¡ªthe electromagnetic field.

Once this electromagnetic field has been produced from a given charge distribution, other charged objects in this field will experience a force (in a similar way that planets experience a force in the gravitational field of the Sun). If these other charges and currents are comparable in size to the sources producing the above electromagnetic field, then a new net electromagnetic field will be produced. Thus, the electromagnetic field may be viewed as a dynamic entity that causes other charges and currents to move, and which is also affected by them. These interactions are described by Maxwell's equations and the Lorentz force law.

The electromagnetic field as a feedback loop The behavior of the electromagnetic field can be resolved into four different parts of a loop: the electric and magnetic fields are generated by electric charges, the electric and magnetic fields interact only with each other, the electric and magnetic fields produce forces on electric charges, the electric charges move in space.

The feedback loop can be summarized in a list, including phenomena belonging to each part of the loop:

charges generate fields Gauss's law Coulomb's law: charges generate electric fields Amp¨¨re's law: currents generate magnetic fields () the fields interact with each other displacement current: changing electric field acts like a current, generating 'vortex' (curl) of magnetic field Faraday induction: changing magnetic field induces (negative) vortex of electric field Lenz's law: negative feedback loop between electric and magnetic fields Maxwell-Hertz equations: simplified version of Maxwell's equations electromagnetic wave equation fields act upon charges Lorentz force: force due to electromagnetic field electric force: same direction as electric field magnetic force: perpendicular both to magnetic field and to velocity of charge () charges move continuity equation: current is movement of charges Phenomena in the list are marked with a star () if they consist of magnetic fields and moving charges which can be reduced by suitable Lorentz transformations to electric fields and static charges. This means that the magnetic field ends up being (conceptually) reduced to an appendage of the electric field, i.e. something which interacts with reality only indirectly through the electric field.

Mathematical description Main article: Mathematical descriptions of the electromagnetic field There are different mathematical ways of representing the electromagnetic field. The first one views the electric and magnetic fields as three-dimensional vector fields. These vector fields each have a value defined at every point of space and time and are thus often regarded as functions of the space and time coordinates. As such, they are often written as (electric field) and (magnetic field).

If only the electric field () is non-zero, and is constant in time, the field is said to be an electrostatic field. Similarly, if only the magnetic field () is non-zero and is constant in time, the field is said to be a magnetostatic field. However, if either the electric or magnetic field has a time-dependence, then both fields must be considered together as a coupled electromagnetic field using Maxwell's equations.

With the advent of special relativity, physical laws became susceptible to the formalism of tensors. Maxwell's equations can be written in tensor form, generally viewed by physicists as a more elegant means of expressing physical laws.

The behaviour of electric and magnetic fields, whether in cases of electrostatics, magnetostatics, or electrodynamics (electromagnetic fields), is governed in a vacuum by Maxwell's equations. In the vector field formalism, these are:

(Gauss' law - electrostatics) (Gauss' law - magnetostatics) (Faraday's law) (Amp¨¨re-Maxwell law) where ¦Ñ is the charge density, which can (and often does) depend on time and position, ¦Å0 is the permittivity of free space, ¦Ì0 is the permeability of free space, and is the current density vector, also a function of time and position. The units used above are the standard SI units. Inside a linear material, Maxwell's equations change by switching the permeability and permitivity of free space with the permeability and permitivity of the linear material in question. Inside other materials which possess more complex responses to electromagnetic fields, these terms are often represented by complex numbers, or tensors.

The Lorentz force law governs the interaction of the electromagnetic field with charged matter.

Properties of the field

Reciprocal behaviour of electric and magnetic fields The two Maxwell equations, Faraday's Law and the Amp¨¨re-Maxwell Law, illustrate a very practical feature of the electromagnetic field. Faraday's Law may be stated roughly as 'a changing magnetic field creates an electric field'. This is the principle behind the electric generator.

The Amp¨¨re-Maxwell Law roughly states that 'a changing electric field creates a magnetic field'. Thus, this law can be applied to generate a magnetic field and run an electric motor.

Light as an electromagnetic disturbance Maxwell's equations take the following, free space, form in an area that is very far away from any charges or currents - that is where ¦Ñ and are zero.

In the above, the substitution has been made, where c is the speed of light. Taking the curl of the last two equations, the result is as follows.

In this last form, the is the d'Alembertian, which is , so the last two forms are the same thing written in two different ways. These can be identified as wave equations, that is, valid electric fields and magnetic fields have an oscillatory form, such as a sinusoid, which result in wave behaviors. Moreover, the first two of the free space Maxwell's equations imply that the waves are transverse waves. The last two of the free space Maxwell's equations imply that the wave of the electric field is in phase with and perpendicular to the magnetic field wave. Moreover, the c2 term represents the speed of the wave. So these electromagnetic waves travel at the speed of light. James Clerk Maxwell, after whom Maxwell's equations are named, suggested when he made these calculations that as these waves travel at the same speed as light, that light would actually be such a wave. His suggestion proved correct, and light is indeed an electromagnetic wave.

Relation to and comparison with other physical fields Main article: Fundamental forces This short section requires expansion.

Being one of the four fundamental forces of nature, it is useful to compare the electromagnetic field with the gravitational, strong and weak fields. The word 'force' is sometimes replaced by 'interaction'.

Electromagnetic and gravitational fields Sources of electromagnetic fields consist of two types of charge - positive and negative. This contrasts with the sources of the gravitational field, which are masses. Masses are sometimes described as gravitational charges, the important feature of them being that there is only one type (no negative masses), or, in more colloquial terms, 'gravity is always attractive'.

The relative strengths and ranges of the four interactions and other information are tabulated below:

Theory Interaction mediator Relative Magnitude Behavior Range Chromodynamics Strong interaction gluon 1038 1 10-15 m Electrodynamics Electromagnetic interaction photon 1036 1/r2 infinite Flavordynamics Weak interaction W and Z bosons 1025 1/r5 to 1/r7 10-16 m Geometrodynamics Gravitation graviton 100 1/r2 infinite

Health and safety One of the most common places EMFs can be found is near power lines which have both voltage and current running through them. Power = voltage times current, or, P = VI. Therefore if power needs to be increased, in order to ensure proper health and safety, the current should be changed accordingly rather than the voltage in order to decrease the danger of EMF caused by increased voltage.

In regards to paranormal activity it has been suggested that a fluxuation in the EMF can lend creedence to a haunting.

The above was cited from Wikipedia

EVP

Standing for Electronic Voice Phenomenon, these are supposed, disembodied voices captured on audio recorders. EVPs are a type of ITC.

EXORCISM

The expulsion of the Devil, spirits and demons from people; animals or places by occult or religious rites.