Occult Terms: O

An out-of-body experience (OBE) is the sensation of one's consciousness separating from the physical body.

A master carver once told a visiting ethnographer that the most difficult Adinkra symbol to explain is not the most complex one.

Obon (お盆) is a Japanese Buddhist festival honoring ancestral spirits, observed for three days in mid-July or mid-August, when the dead are believed to return to the living world.

Obsidian is a volcanic glass formed when lava cools so rapidly that crystals cannot form, prized since the Paleolithic era for its razor-sharp edges and metaphysical properties. The stone's black color comes from iron and magnesium, and it has been used for tools, mirrors, and spiritual protection for over 1.5 million years.

Occult history is the documented record of esoteric traditions, secret societies, and magical practices that existed alongside, and often in conflict with, mainstream religion and science.

Occult orders are initiatory organizations that preserve and transmit esoteric knowledge through graded degrees, ritual drama, and sworn secrecy.

Occultism and science share a troubled history because they were never fully separate disciplines, but rather competing methods of asking the same question: how does the invisible world shape the visible one?

Celtic and Norse runes are not the same system, though they share a common ancestor in the older Germanic Futhark.

Diluted wine, wine mixed with water, is a proper ritual offering in many traditions, from ancient Greek libations to Roman state cults and Christian liturgy. The practice is not about thrift or temperance alone; it is a symbolic act of transformation and balance.

Ogham is an early medieval alphabet used to write the Primitive Irish language, composed of twenty letters organized into four groups of five, each named after a tree or plant.

Ogham is the earliest known form of written Irish, a script of straight lines and notches carved into stone and wood, used primarily between the 4th and 9th centuries CE.

The iron blade rests on a bed of white cloth.

The difference between oils and cologne is concentration and carrier: perfume oils are undiluted aromatic extracts in a fixed oil base, while colognes are essential oils dissolved in alcohol and water at roughly 2 to 5 percent concentration.

Old Norse was the North Germanic language spoken across Scandinavia and the Norse settlements from roughly 800 to 1300 CE, preserved in runic inscriptions and later medieval manuscripts.

The difference between an oni and a hannya is that an oni is a demon born from the underworld or from natural calamity, while a hannya is a human woman transformed by jealousy into a demon after death.

, the oldest form of divination that treats a name not as a label but as a numeric and symbolic gateway to a person's destiny.

A farmer in the Carpathian foothills cracks a fresh egg into a clay bowl of spring water.

An orange aura is the color of the second chakra, the sacral chakra, denoting creativity, vitality, and emotional connection. But spiritually, it is a color of extremes: the warmth of creation and the heat of attachment.

orgonite device.

Orias is a fire-breathing demon, a marquis of Hell who appears as a lion ridden by a serpent, offering transformation of reputation and character to those who summon him.

Orion and Sirius differ in mythological identity, astronomical behavior, ritual function, and symbolic weight.

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

Ose is the Yoruba sacred week, a seven-day cycle that governs religious observance, market schedules, and the rhythm of daily life across the Yoruba diaspora.

The Osho Zen Tarot is a 79-card divination system based on the teachings of the Indian mystic Osho (1931–1990), created by artist Deva Padma (Susan Morgan) and published in 1995 by St. Martin’s Press.

Oshun, the Yoruba Orisha of sweet waters, love, fertility, and diplomacy, is defined not by what she holds alone but by how she stands beside every other power in the pantheon.

Osiris and Set are the two most opposed gods in the Egyptian pantheon, but their conflict is not a simple story of good versus evil. It is a myth about order, chaos, death, and the fragile boundary that keeps the world from collapsing into the desert.

Photo : Mohammed Brzan · Pexels (libre d'utilisation) Definition: Ostara is a modern Pagan festival observed at the spring equinox (around March 20-23 in the Northern Hemisphere), named after the conjectured Germanic goddess Ēostre.

A shepherd in Bronze Age Britain cracks a sheep's scapula and reads the pattern of cracks from the fire.

Othala (ᛟ) is the Elder Futhark rune for inheritance, ancestral property, and nobility. Odal is a medieval and modern variant of the same glyph, recycled in the 20th century by Nazi esotericists and later by white supremacist groups.

Ouija and tarot are both divination systems, but they answer fundamentally different questions and demand different relationships with the unseen.

at midnight. Both tools answer questions, but they listen differently.

An out-of-body experience (OBE) is the sensation that one’s consciousness has separated from the physical body, often reported as floating overhead or traveling to distant locations.