Histone post-translational modifications are fundamental to genome regulation, yet dissecting the functions of individual histone marks in mammals remains challenging due to the presence of multiple histone gene copies. Here we develop a high-throughput clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) prime editing platform enabling precise, reversible and combinatorial mutagenesis of canonical and noncanonical histone H3 genes within their native genomic context. Using systematic lysine-to-arginine substitutions benchmarked against synonymous controls, we identify key residues, including H3K4, H3K9, H3K14, H3K18 and H3K79, whose mutation compromises fitness in mouse embryonic stem cells. We further show that H3K56, linked to genome stability in yeast and Drosophila, has a conserved role in mammalian cells. Through analysis of selected double mutants, we uncover functional crosstalk across residues, with combinations such as H3K27R + H3K36R impairing stem cell self-re

Athanasius Kircher, the sefirotic tree (“Systema Sephiroticum”), engraving from Oedipus Aegyptiacus , 1652. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. A small alphabetical dictionary of the words that keep coming back on this blog, from Abraxas to…

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**Athanasius Kircher, the sefirotic tree (“Systema Sephiroticum”), engraving from _Oedipus Aegyptiacus_ , 1652.** Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. _A small alphabetical dictionary of the words that keep coming back on this blog, from Abraxas to Zohar. Each entry gives the term, its original script where it has one, the tradition it belongs to and a few lines of history, with no recipes and no rituals, and points to the longer posts where the story is told in full._ > “That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.” > — _The Emerald Tablet_ , in Isaac Newton’s translation Every tradition protects itself with words. Some words are walls: you only cross them once you are inside. Others are doors left half open, for anyone curious enough to push. Most of the vocabulary of the occult is of the second kind. It is public, printed and endlessly repeated, and yet it keeps its secrets, because the same word can mean entirely different things in a medieval Hebrew book, a Renaissance laboratory, a Victorian lodge and a twentieth-century coven. This is why I keep separating traditions on this blog, and why I wanted a small dictionary to sit beside the longer posts. It is not a manual. Nothing here tells you how to do anything. It tells you where a word comes from, who used it, and when it changed hands. Each entry carries its tradition in italics. Where a word has a longer story on this blog, there is a link. And where a word belongs to the private life of Freemasonry, it is simply not here: the Masonic entries are only the terms that are already public. **Words do not just name the hidden; they carry it from one tradition to another, and the first discipline of anyone who studies the occult is to ask, of every word, whose it was before it was ours.** ## A **Abracadabra** — _Western occultism / late antique magic_. A magic word whose origin is unknown. One of its earliest appearances is in the _Liber Medicinalis_ attributed to the Roman physician Serenus Sammonicus, where it is written as a protective amulet against fever. Today it survives mostly on the stage. I wrote about it in Gems of the Occult Cinema. **Abraxas** (Ἀβρασάξ, Ἀβραξάς) — _Gnosticism / Greco-Roman magic_. A name engraved on many Roman-period amulet gems, often beside a figure with a rooster’s head and serpent legs. Church writers connected it with the followers of Basilides and a cosmos of 365 heavens, though its real role in their teaching is uncertain. See Gnosis. **Abramelin** — _Western occultism_. The _Book of Abramelin_ presents itself as the teaching of a sage named Abramelin, passed on by a Jew called Abraham of Worms to his son. It became famous in the occult revival through the English translation by S. L. MacGregor Mathers, published in 1898. I told its story in Abraham de Worms and the Sacred Book. **Adam Kadmon** (אָדָם קַדְמוֹן) — _Kabbalah_. “Primordial Man”. In Lurianic Kabbalah, the first of the worlds that came into being after the contraction of God’s infinite light, described in human form but understood as pure divine light. It is not the same as Adam of Genesis, the earthly first man. **Aeon** (αἰών) — _Gnosticism_. Greek for an age or an eternity. In Gnostic myths the Aeons are the divine beings of the Pleroma, often arranged in pairs. Crowley later used the word in a completely different sense, for great ages of history. See Gnosis. **Akashic records** — _Western occultism (Theosophy, modern)_. From the Sanskrit _ākāśa_ , “aether” or “sky”. In Theosophy and Anthroposophy, a supposed cosmic record of everything that has ever happened, thought or been felt. It is a modern idea, not an ancient Indian doctrine. **Alchemy** — _Alchemy_. The art, at once practical and philosophical, of transforming matter, from Greco-Egyptian origins through Arabic and Latin traditions to early modern Europe. Its goals included the transmutation of metals, medicine and, for many authors, the perfection of the soul. Chemistry grew partly out of its laboratories. On its images, see Ars Occulta. **Archon** (ἄρχων) — _Gnosticism_. Greek for “ruler”. In many Gnostic texts the archons, often seven and linked to the planets, are the powers who help the Demiurge govern the material world and keep souls inside it. See Gnosis. **Ark of the Covenant** (אֲרוֹן הַבְּרִית) — _Jewish_. The sacred chest described in the Hebrew Bible as holding the tablets of the Law, kept in the innermost sanctuary. Popular culture made it a treasure for adventurers; the texts make it the throne of the divine presence. See The Ark of Covenant. **Athanor** — _Alchemy_. The alchemist’s furnace, designed to give uniform and constant heat over long periods. In alchemical imagery it became a symbol of patience and of the vessel in which transformation slowly happens. **Azoth** — _Alchemy_. An alchemical term for a universal solvent or remedy, often connected with mercury and with the philosopher’s stone. Later writers used it poetically for the principle of transformation itself. ## B **Baphomet** — _Western occultism_. A name that first appears in the Templar trial records of the early fourteenth century, most likely a corruption of “Mahomet”. The goat-headed figure was drawn by Éliphas Lévi in 1856, and its supposed Masonic career was invented by Léo Taxil. See Baphomet, or the Goat That Never Entered the Lodge. **Binah** (בִּינָה) — _Kabbalah_. “Understanding”. The third sefirah of the Tree of Life, at the head of the left side, often described as the supernal mother. Together with Kether and Chokhmah it forms the highest triad of the Tree. **Book of Shadows** — _Wicca_. The book of religious texts and ritual material used in Wicca. The best-known one was compiled by Gerald Gardner in the late 1940s or early 1950s, and was later copied and adapted by other traditions. See The Triumph of the Moon. ## C **Cathars** — _Medieval Christian dualism_. Dualist Christians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, above all in the Languedoc, who saw the material world as the work of an evil principle. They were attacked by the Albigensian Crusade from 1209 and by the Inquisition; Montségur fell in March 1244. They were not ancient Gnostics reborn. See Gnosis. **Chaos magic** — _Western occultism (modern)_. A modern current that emerged in England in the 1970s, drawing heavily on the ideas of the artist Austin Osman Spare. Its founders wanted to strip magic of what they saw as unnecessary religious and symbolic baggage. **Chokhmah** (חָכְמָה) — _Kabbalah_. “Wisdom”. The second sefirah, at the head of the right side of the Tree, standing beside Binah beneath Kether. **Christian Kabbalah** — _Kabbalah / Western occultism_. The Renaissance adaptation of Jewish Kabbalah by Christian scholars, from Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin onward, who read it as a confirmation of Christian truths. It is the bridge through which Kabbalah entered Western occultism. See Christian Kabbalah. **Corpus Hermeticum** — _Hermeticism_. A collection of seventeen Greek treatises attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, written roughly between the second and third centuries CE and later compiled by Byzantine editors. Marsilio Ficino’s fifteenth-century Latin translation made it one of the books of the Renaissance. See Hermes Trismegistus. **Correspondence** — _Hermeticism / Western occultism_. The idea that the levels of reality mirror one another: the heavens and the earth, the cosmos and the body, the planet and the metal. It runs from ancient Hermetic texts to the tables of the occult revival. See The Principle of Correspondence. **Coven** — _Witchcraft history / Wicca_. A group of witches. The word was rare in English until Margaret Murray promoted it in 1921, claiming that witches across Europe met in groups of thirteen. Historians have rejected her theory, but Wicca adopted the word. See Maleficium. ## D **Demiurge** (δημιουργός) — _Gnosticism / Platonism_. Greek for “craftsman”. In Plato’s _Timaeus_ the Demiurge is the good maker of the cosmos; in many Gnostic myths he becomes an ignorant lower creator, often called Yaldabaoth. See Gnosis. ## E **The Emerald Tablet carved into a mountain, from Heinrich Khunrath,_Amphitheatrum sapientiae aeternae_ , 1606 or earlier.** Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. **Egregore** — _Western occultism_. From the French _égrégore_ and the Greek _egrēgoros_ , “wakeful”. In Western esotericism, a non-physical presence thought to arise from the shared thoughts and emotions of a group. The word appears in the Greek versions of the Book of Enoch for the “Watchers”. **Ein Sof** (אֵין סוֹף) — _Kabbalah_. “Without end”. The infinite, unknowable aspect of God in Kabbalah, beyond the sefirot and beyond any description. Kircher places it at the very top of his engraving, above the crown. **Emerald Tablet** (Tabula Smaragdina) — _Hermeticism / Alchemy_. A short, cryptic text attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. Its earliest known versions are Arabic, from between the eighth and tenth centuries, and from the twelfth century Latin translations spread it through Europe, where alchemists treated it as a foundational text. It is the source of “as above, so below”. See Hermes Trismegistus. **Enochian** — _Western occultism_. The angelic language and system recorded by John Dee and Edward Kelley in the 1580s, which Dee said had been delivered to them by angels. It was later taken up by the Golden Dawn and Crowley. See The Golden Dawn. **Esbat** — _Wicca_. In Wicca, a coven meeting held at a time other than one of the seasonal festivals, often near the full moon. The word was borrowed from Margaret Murray’s writings on witchcraft. See The Triumph of the Moon. ## G **G.A.O.T.U.** — _Freemasonry, public term_. The abbreviation for “Great Architect of the Universe”, the public expression Freemasons use to refer to the Supreme Being without imposing any particular religion’s name for God. It is printed in countless Masonic books, letters and buildings. See Freemasonry – Part I and Brothers in the Room. **Gematria** (גימטריא) — _Jewish / Kabbalah_. The practice of reading the letters of a word as numbers, since Hebrew letters also serve as numerals, and comparing words with equal values. The Greek equivalent was called isopsephy. It is one of three classic methods of Kabbalistic interpretation, with notarikon and temurah. **Gnosis** (γνῶσις) — _Gnosticism_. Greek for “knowledge”, especially knowledge by acquaintance. For the groups we call Gnostic, salvation came through knowledge of one’s own divine origin. Whether “Gnosticism” is a valid category at all is now debated. See Gnosis. **Golden Dawn** — _Western occultism_. The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, founded in London in 1888 by William Wynn Westcott, S. L. MacGregor Mathers and William Robert Woodman. It fused Kabbalah, astrology, tarot, alchemy and Enochian material into one initiatory system, and shaped almost all modern ceremonial magic. See The Golden Dawn. **Grimoire** — _Western occultism_. A book of magic, from the French word related to “grammar”. Grimoires circulated in manuscript and print from the Middle Ages on, and many claimed false authors such as Solomon. See Maleficium. ## H **Hermes Trismegistus** (Ἑρμῆς Τρισμέγιστος) — _Hermeticism_. “Thrice-great Hermes”, a legendary sage combining the Greek Hermes and the Egyptian Thoth, to whom the Hermetic writings were attributed. The Renaissance believed him to be an ancient contemporary of Moses; Isaac Casaubon dated the texts to the Christian era in 1614. See Hermes Trismegistus. **Hermeticism** — _Hermeticism_. The body of ideas derived from the writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: the unity of all things, correspondence between levels of reality, and the divine potential of the human mind. It merged with alchemy, astrology and Kabbalah in the Renaissance. **Homunculus** — _Alchemy_. Latin for “little man”. The idea of an artificial miniature human, popularized in sixteenth-century alchemical writings and later in nineteenth-century fiction, above all Goethe’s _Faust_. ## K **Kabbalah** (קַבָּלָה) — _Kabbalah_. “Reception” or “tradition”. The Jewish mystical tradition that took shape in Provence and Spain in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with the _Zohar_ as its central text, and was transformed in Safed by Isaac Luria in the sixteenth century. The spelling “Qabalah” usually marks its later Hermetic adaptation. **Kether** (כֶּתֶר) — _Kabbalah_. “Crown”. The first and highest sefirah, at the top of the Tree of Life, the closest to Ein Sof. In Kircher’s engraving it is labelled _Summa Corona_. **Kybalion** — _Hermeticism (modern)_. _The Kybalion_ , published in 1908 by “Three Initiates”, often identified with the New Thought writer William Walker Atkinson. It presents itself as ancient Hermetic teaching, but its ideas owe much more to modern occultism and New Thought than to the ancient texts. ## L **Lilith** (לִילִית) — _Jewish_. A female demon of Jewish tradition, with roots in Mesopotamian demonology, later remembered as Adam’s first wife and given a cosmic role in the _Zohar_. I followed her in four parts: Pill I, Pill II, Pill III and Pill IV. For the androgynous first Adam, see Before Two, There Was One. ## M **Robert Fludd, diagram of the macrocosm, from _Utriusque Cosmi … Historia_ , Frankfurt am Main, 1621.** Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. **Macrocosm and microcosm** — _Hermeticism / Western occultism_. The “great world” and the “little world”: the universe and the human being, understood as reflections of one another. Robert Fludd built whole volumes around the idea in the seventeenth century, and it is the backbone of the doctrine of correspondences. See Christian Kabbalah. **Magnum Opus** — _Alchemy_. The “Great Work”: the process leading from the prima materia to the philosopher’s stone. It is classically described through colour stages, nigredo (blackening), albedo (whitening), citrinitas (yellowing) and rubedo (reddening), and was read both as laboratory work and as spiritual transformation. **Malkuth** (מַלְכוּת) — _Kabbalah_. “Kingdom”. The tenth and lowest sefirah, at the base of the Tree, where the divine flow meets the world. In Kabbalah it is closely associated with the Shekhinah. **Malleus Maleficarum** — _Witchcraft history_. “The Hammer of Witches”, a treatise on witchcraft by the Dominican inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, first printed in the 1480s. It became one of the most notorious books in the history of the European witch trials. **Mani** — _Manichaeism_. The third-century Persian prophet, born in 216, who founded Manichaeism, a universal religion built on the struggle between Light and Darkness. He died in prison under Bahram I. “Manichaean” later became the Church’s label for any dualist heresy. See Gnosis. ## N **Nag Hammadi** — _Gnosticism_. The Upper Egyptian town near which, in December 1945, farmers found a jar holding twelve papyrus codices and leaves from a thirteenth, with fifty-two mostly Gnostic treatises in Coptic. The codices are now in the Coptic Museum in Cairo. See Gnosis. **Notarikon** (נוֹטָרִיקוֹן) — _Jewish / Kabbalah_. A method of interpretation that reads words as acronyms, or builds words from the initials of a phrase. The term comes through Greek from the Latin _notarius_ , a shorthand writer. ## O **Ouroboros** (οὐροβόρος) — _Alchemy / Hermeticism_. The serpent that eats its own tail. One of its most famous early drawings appears in the _Chrysopoeia_ of Cleopatra, in a Byzantine manuscript, enclosing the Greek words “the All is One”. It became the emblem of cycles, eternity and the unity of matter. ## P **Palladism** — _Western occultism (hoax)_. The imaginary Luciferian order supposedly hidden inside Freemasonry, invented by Léo Taxil and his collaborators in the 1890s. Taxil confessed the hoax in Paris on 19 April 1897, but its forged documents still circulate. See Baphomet; for another word bent out of shape by anti-Masonic literature, see Jahbulon. **Pentagram** — _Western occultism_. The five-pointed star, used since antiquity in many cultures. In Western occultism it became associated with the human being and the elements; Lévi contrasted the upright star with an inverted one, and modern Paganism adopted it as a religious symbol. **Philosopher’s stone** (lapis philosophorum) — _Alchemy_. The goal of the Great Work: a substance said to transmute base metals into gold and, in many texts, to heal and prolong life. For spiritual alchemists it was also a symbol of the perfected self. **Pleroma** (πλήρωμα) — _Gnosticism_. Greek for “fullness”. In Gnostic myths, the totality of the divine world and its Aeons, complete and lacking nothing, in contrast with the deficient world below. See Gnosis. **Prima materia** — _Alchemy_. “First matter”: the formless starting point of the Great Work, often compared with chaos. Alchemists famously described it in riddles, as something everywhere and despised by everyone. ## Q **Qliphoth** (קְלִיפּוֹת) — _Kabbalah_. “Shells” or “husks”. In the _Zohar_ and Lurianic Kabbalah, the impure forces that surround and imprison holiness, the opposite of the sefirot. Their realm is called the _Sitra Achra_ , “the Other Side”. ## R **“Multiplicatio”, emblem 16 from Johann Daniel Mylius,_Philosophia Reformata_ , engraved by Balthazar Schwan, 1622.** Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. **Rosicrucianism** — _Western occultism_. The movement born from three anonymous manifestos of the early seventeenth century, beginning with the _Fama Fraternitatis_ , which circulated in manuscript before being printed in Kassel in 1614. They announced a secret brotherhood founded by one Christian Rosenkreutz. Whether such a brotherhood ever existed is doubtful; the orders that claimed its name afterwards certainly did. ## S **Sabbat** — _Witchcraft history / Wicca_. In early modern demonology, the imagined nocturnal gathering of witches with the Devil, described in trial records and treatises. In Wicca the word was reused for the eight seasonal festivals of the Wheel of the Year. See Maleficium. **Samhain** — _Witchcraft history / Wicca_. The Gaelic festival at the beginning of November, later taken up as a sabbat in Wicca. Its connection with modern Halloween is more complicated than popular books suggest. See All Hallows, or the Invention of an Ancient Night. **Sefirot** (סְפִירוֹת) — _Kabbalah_. The ten emanations or attributes through which the hidden God manifests, arranged in the diagram called the Tree of Life: from Kether at the top to Malkuth at the base. **Shekhinah** (שְׁכִינָה) — _Jewish / Kabbalah_. “Dwelling”. The manifest presence of God in the world, discussed in the Talmud and Midrash. In Kabbalah it becomes the feminine aspect of the divine, identified with Malkuth. **Sigil** — _Western occultism_. A symbol used in magic, traditionally the drawn “signature” of a spirit in the grimoires. In twentieth-century chaos magic the word took on a new meaning, as a symbol for an intention. **Solve et coagula** — _Alchemy_. “Dissolve and coagulate”, a Latin formula summarizing the alchemical rhythm of breaking down and binding together. Éliphas Lévi wrote the two words on the arms of his Baphomet. See Baphomet. **Sophia** (σοφία) — _Gnosticism_. Greek for “Wisdom”. In Gnostic myths the youngest Aeon, whose fall outside the Pleroma produces the Demiurge. See Gnosis. ## T **Tarot** — _Western occultism_. Playing cards that appeared in fifteenth-century Italy for a game. Only in the late eighteenth century did French writers begin to claim an ancient Egyptian origin for them, and the occult revival, from Lévi to the Golden Dawn, turned them into a symbolic system. The Rider–Waite deck of 1909 is the best known. See also Ars Occulta. **Temurah** (תְּמוּרָה) — _Jewish / Kabbalah_. A method of interpretation that rearranges or substitutes the letters of a word to reveal hidden meanings. With gematria and notarikon, it is one of the three classic Kabbalistic methods. **Tetragrammaton** (יהוה) — _Jewish_. The four-letter Name of God in the Hebrew Bible. In Jewish practice it is not pronounced; its later history runs through amulets, Kabbalah and the whole Western occult tradition. See Tetragrammaton. **Thelema** (θέλημα) — _Western occultism_. Greek for “will”. The religious philosophy founded by Aleister Crowley in the early twentieth century, based on _The Book of the Law_ , which Crowley said was dictated to him by an entity called Aiwass. Its central idea is the discovery and fulfilment of one’s True Will. **Theosophy** — _Western occultism (modern)_. The esoteric movement organized in the Theosophical Society, founded in New York in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky, Henry Steel Olcott and others. It blended Western occultism with Hindu and Buddhist ideas and deeply influenced later esotericism. **Theurgy** (θεουργία) — _Neoplatonism / Western occultism_. “Divine work”. In late antique Neoplatonism, the ritual practice aimed at union with the divine, defended by Iamblichus. The word was later used for any “high” magic directed at the gods or angels, in contrast with practical magic. **Tree of Life** (עֵץ חַיִּים) — _Kabbalah_. The diagram of the ten sefirot and the paths that join them. The arrangement shown in Kircher’s engraving of 1652 became the most common one in later Hermetic Qabalah. ## V **VITRIOL** — _Alchemy_. An alchemical acronym usually expanded as _Visita Interiora Terrae Rectificando Invenies Occultum Lapidem_ , “Visit the interior of the earth, and by rectifying you will find the hidden stone”. It also played on vitriol, a real chemical substance, and was often read as an invitation to look inward. ## W **Wheel of the Year** — _Wicca_. The cycle of eight seasonal festivals, the solstices, the equinoxes and the four days between them, popularized by British neopagans in the mid-twentieth century. It combines festivals from different European traditions into a single modern calendar. See The Triumph of the Moon. **Wicca** — _Wicca_. The modern Pagan religion of witchcraft made public by Gerald Gardner in England from the 1950s. It is a twentieth-century religion with older sources, not the unbroken survival of a prehistoric faith, and is best studied with that distinction in mind. **Witches’ Sabbath** — _Witchcraft history_. The gathering of witches imagined by demonologists and inquisitors, a central element in the European witch trials. It tells us much more about the fears of the accusers than about any real meeting. See Sabbat. ## Z **Zohar** (זֹהַר) — _Kabbalah_. “Radiance”. The central work of Kabbalah, written mostly in Aramaic as a mystical commentary on the Torah and attributed to the second-century sage Simeon bar Yochai. Scholarship connects its composition with Moses de León and his circle in late thirteenth-century Castile. See Pill III: Lilith in the Zohar. ## A last word A dictionary is a strange kind of book for the occult. It promises to fix meanings, and the whole history of these words is that their meanings would not stay fixed. Sophia moved from Proverbs to the Gnostics to the Theosophists. Baphomet moved from a trial record to a drawing to a hoax. The Tree of Life moved from the Hebrew of Safed to the Latin of a Jesuit to the lodges of London. That is why every entry here ends, explicitly or not, with the same question I keep asking on this blog: whose word was this, before it was ours? **Words do carry the hidden from one tradition to another.** The task is not to stop them travelling, but to remember where each of them has been. * * * Reply by email