Occult Terms: M

Mabon is a modern pagan festival named in the 1970s, while the autumn equinox is an astronomical event observed across cultures for thousands of years.

Medieval magic was not a single system but a tense coexistence of ecclesiastical ritual and folk tradition. The Church condemned sorcery yet borrowed its forms, and the village healer prayed to saints while the parish priest whispered charms.

Magical alphabets are writing systems used in ceremonial magic, folk witchcraft and divination to invoke, bind or communicate with spiritual forces.

The stone that changes color as it heals is the stone that tells you it is working.

Malkuth and Lilith are not the same entity, but they occupy the same territory on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

Malphas and Raum are distinct spirits with different offices, different temperaments, and different methods of appearing.

Maman Brigitte is the Vodou lwa of death, cemeteries, and the crossroads between the living and the dead, known as the only white-skinned spirit in the Vodou pantheon, and the one who decides which souls may enter the ancestral realm.

Mami Wata (mah-mee WAH-tah) is a water spirit goddess venerated across West, Central and Southern Africa and throughout the African diaspora.

The book argues that symbols are not decorative: they are the native language of the unconscious, and ignoring them means living half-blind.

Manifesting love, in its simplest form, is the deliberate use of intention, symbol, and focused will to attract romantic partnership into your life.

The Secret Teachings of All Ages.

Mannaz and Ehwaz are two runes from the Elder Futhark that pivot on that same relationship: the individual and the partner who moves as one with him.

Mannaz (ᛗ) is the twentieth rune of the Elder Futhark, representing humanity, the self, and the collective bonds that define us.

A farmer in rural Sicily once made the sign at a neighbor who had cursed his olive trees.

The 12th-century bestiary in Oxford's Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 764, sets the griffin and the manticore on facing pages.

Marax is the 21st spirit of the Goetia, a Great Earl and President who commands thirty legions and teaches astronomy, herbal medicine, and the hidden virtues of stones.

Marbas is a demon of the Ars Goetia, the fifth spirit listed in the Lesser Key of Solomon. He is a president of hell who governs 36 legions of spirits, and his domains include revealing hidden truths, curing and causing diseases, granting knowledge of mechanical crafts, and transforming the shapes of people.

Marchosias and Barbatos are two of the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia, both holding the rank of duke but differing in appearance, jurisdiction, and the nature of their service to the summoner.

A Roman priest once told a Greek colleague that his gods had no myths, only rituals. The Greek laughed. The Roman was not joking.

Choose your side carefully. One of these beings made the world we know. The other was split in half to build it.

The Mares of Diomedes were four man-eating horses owned by the Thracian king Diomedes, captured by Heracles as his eighth labor. Their names vary across sources, but the most consistent list is Podargos (swift-footed), Lampon (shining), Xanthos (yellow), and Deinos (terrible).

In 1955, a banker from New York named R.

Marid (مَارِد, plural maradā).

A priestess of New Orleans and a guardian of the crossroads. They are not the same spirit, but they share a single function: mediation between worlds. Marie Laveau worked with Papa Legba. She did not become him.

Mars, in astrology, is the planet of action, desire, aggression, and the raw will to assert oneself. It rules Aries and Scorpio, governs the first and eighth houses, and carries the energy of the god of war.

Mars retrograde.

Mary K. Greer is an American tarot scholar, author, and teacher whose work shifted tarot study from fortune-telling toward a practice of personal transformation, historical accuracy, and psychological insight.

The relationship between Mary and Jesus is simultaneously biological, theological, and symbolic — she is his mother, the Theotokos (God-bearer), and in esoteric Christianity, the human threshold through which the divine entered matter, making her consent as essential as the incarnation itself.

Masonic symbols are allegorical images used in Freemasonry to convey moral and philosophical teachings through degrees, rituals, and lodge furniture.

Master Numbers (11, 22, 33) carry higher spiritual voltage than standard Life Path Numbers, but they also carry heavier responsibility.

Matrix Energetics.

A scholar once asked a Maya elder to explain the meaning of a Mayan glyph.

A visitor to the Yucatán once watched a h-menoob (traditional Maya priest) calculate the birth sign of a child born at dusk.

Mayan symbolism.

The difference between Mecca and Medina is not simply one of location. It is the difference between the axis of the world and the first society built around that axis.

A Benedictine monk in a southern French monastery keeps a piece of unpolished selenite on his prie-dieu.

Medjugorje is famous for the ongoing apparitions of the Virgin Mary to six visionaries that began in 1981 and reportedly continue to this day. It is the only major Marian apparition site where the seers still receive daily messages, making it a unique phenomenon in Catholic and esoteric circles.

The curse that turned Medusa into a snake-haired monster was an act of divine vengeance by Athena, triggered by the rape of Medusa in Athena’s own temple. The transformation gave Medusa a petrifying gaze, making her one of the most feared and later protective figures in Greek mythology.

A temple worker in ancient Thebes once described the midday heat as "the breath of Sekhmet." Another, on the border of Nubia, wrote of Menhit "who walks before the army." Both are lion-headed goddesses.

Mentalism is a performing art that simulates psychic abilities through psychological techniques, suggestion, and misdirection, while magic is the art of creating illusions that appear to violate natural laws. The key difference: mentalism claims to read minds, predict events, or influence thoughts; magic claims to bend physical reality.

Mercury sign compatibility is the branch of synastry that compares each person’s Mercury placement to see how their minds meet.

A birth occurred during Mercury retrograde if the planet Mercury was in apparent backward motion at the exact moment and location of that birth.

The Mercury magic square is an 8x8 grid of numbers arranged so that every row, column, and diagonal sums to 260. In ritual magic, it is a focal point for invoking the planetary energies of Mercury: speed, communication, and mental agility.

A Roman astrologer in the second century CE watched Mercury pause in the sky and called it “the thief’s star.” He was not wrong, but he was not entirely right either.

Merkavah mysticism.

Mermaid symbolism is not a single meaning but a conversation between cultures that has run for at least three thousand years.

Mermaids and sirens are not the same mythological being: mermaids are half-human, half-fish water spirits, while sirens were originally half-bird creatures whose song lured sailors to ruin.

The coast of County Kerry, 1830.

Mictlantecuhtli is the Aztec god of death and ruler of Mictlan, the underworld where all souls go regardless of their earthly deeds.

The Middle Pillar is a Golden Dawn ritual that balances the practitioner's energy by tracing the central column of the Tree of Life (Kether, Tiphareth, Yesod, Malkuth). Unlike the left and right pillars of Severity and Mercy, the Middle Pillar is not about opposing forces but about equilibrium and direct connection to the divine.

Midsummer is the solar zenith of the Northern Hemisphere, the longest day and shortest night, marked for thousands of years as a threshold when the boundary between worlds grows thin.

Midsummer magic is the cluster of rituals, taboos, and folk beliefs attached to the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, observed across Europe for thousands of years.

Swedish Midsummer (Midsommar) is the country's most important holiday, rooted in pre-Christian solstice celebrations, marked by maypole dancing, herring and new potatoes, and the belief that nature's magic is strongest on this shortest of nights.

The Minotaur, centaur, and satyr are three distinct beings with separate origins, natures, and symbolic roles in Greek mythology and occult tradition.

A Venetian glassmaker in the fifteenth century watched his apprentice drop a sheet of blown glass onto a slab of polished bronze.

Mithraism was a Roman mystery cult built around the tauroctony (bull-slaying), where the bull represented earthly life and the torch symbolized the soul's passage through darkness and rebirth.

The Moirai (Μοῖραι) are the three sisters of Greek mythology who personify destiny: Clotho the Spinner, Lachesis the Measurer, and Atropos the Inevitable.

A woman in 1930s New Orleans ties a flannel bag closed with a red string, whispering a name into the cloth.

The difference between Moloch and God is not a matter of one being false and the other true. It is a difference in what each name demands from the people who use it.

The main gods in Mongolian mythology are Tengri (the Eternal Blue Sky), Etugen Ekh (the Earth Mother), and a shifting pantheon of tutelary spirits, war gods, and ancestral guardians that together form a sky-and-earth system with no fixed hierarchy.

A Roman astrologer once refused to cast a marriage chart unless the couple brought him both their birth times. He did not ask for their Sun signs. He asked for their Moon signs. The client was confused. The astrologer was not being difficult.

A woman in Berlin once told us she moved to a city on her Moon line and stopped sleeping.

A moon witch is a practitioner of lunar magic, a tradition centered on the moon's phases, tides, and cycles as sources of power, timing, and spiritual alignment.

Moonlight cleansing is the practice of exposing objects to moonlight to remove accumulated energetic residue and recharge them with lunar energy.

Moonstone is a feldspar with a floating blue sheen from light scattering between internal layers (adularescence).

On the first day of spring, somewhere along the Vistula or the Dnieper, a straw effigy dressed in old skirts is carried to the river.

The Morrigan and Hecate share dominion over death, prophecy, and the liminal spaces between worlds, but they emerged from radically different cultures with distinct demands on those who seek them.

No.

Mount Athos is a mountainous peninsula and an autonomous Eastern Orthodox monastic state under Greek sovereignty, closed to women since 1045, and one of the most influential living archives of Christian mysticism, hesychast prayer, and Byzantine manuscript culture in the world.

A Roman priest once told a Greek colleague that his gods had no myths, only rituals. The Greek laughed. The Roman was not joking.

Gyan Mudra and Shambhavi Mudra are two distinct seals from the yogic and tantric traditions: one uses the fingers to channel knowledge, the other uses the eyes to redirect perception inward.

Mundane astrology is the branch of astrology that interprets celestial patterns for nations, cities, historical events, and collective human experience rather than individual lives.

Murmur, in occult practice, refers to both a specific demon of the Ars Goetia and a technique of low, continuous vocalization used to summon, bind, or attune the practitioner’s voice to the spirit world.