Occult Terms: P

In a La Paz kitchen, a woman pours the first drops of her beer onto the floor.

In 601 CE, Pope Gregory the Great wrote to Abbot Mellitus, who was journeying to join Augustine in Kent.

The Page of Cups and Page of Wands both represent early-stage energy, but from opposite elemental directions. The Page of Cups is emotional openness and intuitive receptivity, while the Page of Wands is creative boldness and impulsive action. One waits for inspiration. The other chases it.

represents emotional openness, intuition, and a message carried on a feeling. The.

The Page of Pentacles upright signifies a moment of focused learning, practical opportunity, and the early material stages of a long-term goal.

The Page of Swords and the Seven of Swords are both cards of the Swords suit, but they represent fundamentally different energies: the Page is the alert messenger, the scout of new ideas and potential conflict, while the Seven is the strategist of deception, the card of stolen victories and hidden agendas.

The Page of Wands intentions are raw, impulsive, and unfocused — the card signals a beginning that has not yet learned its own shape.

Paimon is a Great King of Hell in the Lesser Key of Solomon, ruling two hundred legions of spirits. His symbols are a dromedary (or camel), a trumpet, and a crown — each a fixed point in the language of ceremonial evocation.

Palm reading is not fortune telling, though the two have been confused for centuries.

Palmistry symbols are specific markings on the palm — stars, crosses, triangles, squares, circles, grilles, tridents, and islands — that modify the meaning of the major lines and mounts.

Palo Santo (Bursera graveolens) is a sacred wood used spiritually for cleansing negative energy, preparing spaces for meditation, and connecting to higher states of awareness.

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

Pan is the god of the wild who does not merely accompany the seasons — his waking and sleeping define them.

Papa Legba is the gatekeeper of the spirit world, the lwa who opens the way for all communication between humans and the divine. Baron Samedi is the lord of the dead, the master of the cemetery and the crossroads of the afterlife.

, the grandfather of the Mahabharata war. The instruction becomes the.

Pardes Rimonim is the foundational systematic work of Lurianic Kabbalah, written by Rabbi Moses Cordovero in 1548, synthesizing earlier Kabbalistic traditions into a unified metaphysical system.

past lives are memories carried across death by the same consciousness that animates us now.

Paul Foster Case (1884–1954) was an American occultist who transformed tarot study by grounding it in Qabalistic principles and founding the Builders of the Adytum (B.O.T.A.), a correspondence school that remains active today.

Pazuzu is the god of the southwest wind, specifically the hot, dust-laden wind that brings drought, locusts, and famine.

Pegasus is a divine winged stallion born from the severed Gorgon’s neck, ridden by heroes and later pinned to the night sky as a constellation. The unicorn is a solitary, horned creature of the medieval imagination, hunted for its horn and used in alchemical emblems as a symbol of purification.

The pentagram is a five-pointed star. The pentacle is that star enclosed in a circle.

Kore and Persephone refer to the same goddess but mark two different phases of existence: the maiden above ground and the queen below it.

Persephone in shadow work is the archetype of the voluntary or involuntary descent into the unconscious, the confrontation with the hidden self, and the return with integrated knowledge.

Persian alchemy is the esoteric and practical tradition of transforming matter and spirit, rooted in Zoroastrian cosmology and developed by Persian scholars between the 6th and 13th centuries.

Persian mythology.

Your personal year number is a numerology tool that maps the energy of a given year onto your life path. It is calculated by adding your birth day and month to the current year, then reducing the sum to a single digit between 1 and 9.

Phenex is a fallen angel and great marquis of hell who appears as a phoenix, sings sweetly with a child's voice, and willingly answers any question about the secret arts.

In a 1550 woodcut from the Rosarium Philosophorum, a bird with wings spread stands atop a flaming pyre.

A pink aura is a luminous field of soft rose or blush that appears around people whose dominant emotional state is unconditional love, compassion, or refined artistic sensitivity.

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Definition: Pisces is the twelfth sign of the zodiac, a mutable water sign whose symbol is two fish swimming in opposite directions, tied together by a cord.

Pistis Sophia is a 3rd-century Gnostic gospel that narrates the fall and redemption of the soul, personified as the female figure Pistis Sophia (Faith-Wisdom), through a detailed cosmology of aeons, archons, and ritual mysteries.

A planchette is a small, usually heart-shaped board on casters or felt pads, used as a pointing device for spirit communication through automatic writing or letter boards.

Planes are layers of existence that define the density or vibration of reality, while realms are specific inhabited domains that exist within or across those layers.

Planetary glyphs are the symbolic shorthand for the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets, each built from combinations of circle, crescent, cross, and arrow.

Planetary seals are symbolic diagrams associated with the seven classical planets, used in ceremonial magic to invoke the influence of a celestial body.

Planting rituals are the formalized gestures, prayers, and offerings that agricultural societies performed to ensure a successful growing season.

Pleroma (πλήρωμα) is the Gnostic term for the totality of divine reality: the eternal realm of aeons, light, and perfect being that exists outside the material universe.

Polarity describes complementary forces within a single whole, like two ends of a magnet. Duality treats opposites as separate substances in conflict, like spirit versus matter. The essential difference: polarity reconciles opposites into unity; duality demands a choice between irreconcilable principles.

A Quiché priest once told a Spanish chronicler that his book was made of skin and bone, not paper. The book he meant was the Popol Vuh, and he was not speaking metaphorically. The Popol Vuh symbols are not decorative. They are the visible skeleton of a cosmology that survived conquest by hiding inside its own language.

A poppet is a magical doll made to represent a specific person, used in sympathetic magic to affect that person from a distance.

A portable altar kit is a compact set of ritual tools that allows a practitioner to establish a sacred workspace anywhere, a tradition that stretches from Roman military camps to modern witchcraft.

Poseidon and Zeus are brothers, sons of Kronos and Rhea, but they governed entirely different domains with different temperaments, different symbols, and different relationships with mortals.

Magical powders are finely ground mixtures of herbs, minerals, and other natural substances used in folk magic for protection, cursing, blessing, and healing. Examples include goofer dust (graveyard dirt and herbs), cascarilla (crushed eggshell), and dragon's blood powder.

A power animal is a non-human spirit that acts as a shaman's ally, guardian, and source of specialized ability — not a symbol or pet, but an independent intelligence obtained through formal initiatory experience.

Practical Kabbalah is the branch of Jewish esoteric tradition that uses divine names, angelic invocations, and symbolic formulas to produce tangible effects in the material world, historically distinguished from the purely contemplative study of the Sefirot.

prarabdha karma, the portion of past actions that has already begun to ripen and must be experienced in this lifetime.

Pre-Raphaelite symbolism is a visual language drawn from medieval allegory, Arthurian legend, botanical folklore, and occult revivalism, where a single flower could signal chastity or seduction and a woman's unbound hair marked her as either a virgin or a witch.

Premonition is a specific, often sensory foreknowledge of a future event, while intuition is a broader, less specific sense of a truth or pattern that does not announce itself as a glimpse of what is coming.

A naked titan kneels on a rock shelf, his torso twisted toward a giant eagle that tears at his liver.

An amulet is an object worn or carried for passive protection; a talisman is the same object purpose-made and consecrated to achieve a specific outcome.

A protection ritual for empaths is a structured practice of energetic warding that filters rather than blocks.

A psychic reading delivers information about the past, present, or future using extrasensory perception. A spiritual reading guides the soul’s journey by connecting with higher realms, guides, or the client’s own higher self.

The púca (POO-ka) is a shapeshifting spirit from Irish and Celtic folklore, a solitary trickster that appears as a horse, goat, rabbit, or human, and that actively tests the boundaries between the human world and the wild.

Punk and metal are not merely genres. They are opposing worldviews of rebellion, transcendence, and the self.

The scribe who copied the Lemegeton in the late 1640s had a steady hand.

Pyramid symbolism in sacred geometry represents the ascent of the soul from the material to the divine, the four elements converging at a single point.

The Pyramids of Giza represent the ancient Egyptian concept of resurrection and the king's transformation into a god. They are cosmic mountains, stairways to the sky, and expressions of royal power designed to ensure the pharaoh's eternal life.

Pyromancy is the practice of divination through fire, reading omens in flames, smoke, ash, and embers. Pyrokinesis is the purported psychic ability to control or extinguish fire using only the mind.