From britannica.com
"Dybbuk, also spelled dibbuk, plural dybbukim, in Jewish folklore, a disembodied human spirit that, because of former sins, wanders restlessly until it finds a haven in the body of a living person. Belief in such spirits was especially prevalent in 16th–17th-century eastern Europe. Often individuals suffering from nervous or mental disorders were taken to a miracle-working rabbi (baʿal shem), who alone, it was believed, could expel the harmful dybbuk through a religious rite of exorcism.
"Isaac Luria (1534–72), a mystic, laid the grounds for Jewish belief in a dybbuk with his doctrine of transmigration of souls (gilgul*), which he saw as a means whereby souls could continue their task of self-perfection. His disciples went one step further with the notion of possession by a dybbuk."
*gilgul (Hebrew: גלגול הנשמות, literally 'rolling') puts forth the idea that a soul must live through many lives before it gains the wisdom to rejoin with God. - Wikipedia
From tor.com article Dybbuk or Demon: Knowing Your Jewish Ghosts and Ghouls
"A dybbuk is actually a ghost that sticks around after death to possess the body of the living for malevolent purposes. The stories state that it is either a malevolent spirit out to harm an innocent person, or a more neutral spirit out to punish a wicked person for their transgressions. Either way, the defining factor that represent a dybbuk is that they are out to cause harm to their host."
From Jewishvirtuallibrary.org
"In Jewish folklore and popular belief an evil spirit which enters into a living person, cleaves to his soul, causes mental illness, talks through his mouth, and represents a separate and alien personality is called a dibbuk. The term appears neither in talmudic literature nor in the Kabbalah, where this phenomenon is always called 'evil spirit.' (In the New Testament it is sometimes called 'unclean spirit.') The term was introduced into literature only in the 17th century from the spoken language of German and Polish Jews.
"At first, the dibbuk was considered to be a devil or a demon which entered the body of a sick person. Later, an explanation common among other peoples was added, namely that some of the dibbukim are the spirits of dead persons who were not laid to rest and thus became demons. This idea (also common in medieval Christianity) combined with the doctrine of gilgul ('transmigration of the soul') in the 16th century and became widespread and accepted by large segments of the Jewish population, together with the belief in dibbukim. They were generally considered to be souls which, on account of the enormity of their sins, were not even allowed to transmigrate and as 'denuded spirits' they sought refuge in the bodies of living persons. The entry of a dibbuk into a person was a sign of his having committed a secret sin which opened a door for the dibbuk. The power to exorcise dibbukim was given to ba'alei shem or accomplished Ḥasidim. They exorcised the dibbuk from the body which was bound by it and simultaneously redeemed the soul by providing a tikkun ('restoration') for him, either by transmigration or by causing the dibbuk to enter hell. Moses Cordovero defined the dibbuk as an 'evil pregnancy.'"
From Wikipedia:
"The term first appears in a number of 16th century writings, though it was ignored by mainstream scholarship until S. Ansky's play The Dybbuk popularised the concept in literary circles. In the play, a young bride is possessed by the ghost of the man she was meant to marry had her father not broken a marriage agreement. Earlier accounts of possession (such as that given by Josephus) were of demonic possession rather than that by ghosts. These accounts advocated orthodoxy among the populace as a preventative measure. For example, it was suggested that a sloppily made mezuzah or entertaining doubt about Moses' crossing of the Red Sea opened one's household to dybbuk possession."
From Oxford Dictionary:
"In a direction contrary to the sun's course, considered as unlucky; anticlockwise."
From Wikipedia:
"Literally, it means to take a course opposite the apparent motion of the sun viewed from the Northern Hemisphere, (the centre of this imaginary clock is the ground the viewer stands upon).
"Because the sun played a highly important role in older religions, to go against it was considered bad luck for sun-worshiping traditions. It was considered unlucky in Britain to travel in an anticlockwise (not sunwise) direction around a church, and a number of folk myths make reference to this superstition, e.g. Childe Rowland, where the protagonist and his sister are transported to Elfland after his sister runs widdershins round a church. There is also a reference to this in Dorothy Sayers's novels The Nine Tailors (chapter entitled The Second Course; 'He turned to his right, knowing that it is unlucky to walk about a church widdershins...') and Clouds of Witness ('True, O King, and as this isn't a church, there's no harm in going round it widdershins'). In Robert Louis Stevenson's tale 'The Song of the Morrow,' an old crone on the beach dances 'widdershins'.
"Many individuals prefer the word 'widdershins' over its alternatives, chiefly 'counter-clockwise', as not only is the abbreviation for 'counter-clockwise' 'c', the same letter as the abbreviation of its primary antonym, 'clockwise', it has also been noted that the word 'widdershins' is fun to say. (emphasis is my own -ed.)
"The opposite of widdershins is deisul meaning clockwise."
From Wikipedia:
"Anathema, in common usage, is something or someone that is detested or shunned. In its other main usage, it is a formal excommunication. The latter meaning, its ecclesiastical sense, is based on New Testament usage. In the Old Testament, anathema referred either to something (living or inanimate) that was consecrated or something denounced as evil or accursed and set aside for sacrificial offering.
"Anathema derives from Ancient Greek: anáthema, meaning 'an offering' or 'anything dedicated', itself derived from the verb, anatíthēmi, meaning 'to offer up'. In the Old Testament, it referred to both objects consecrated to divine use and those dedicated to destruction in the Lord's name, such as enemies and their weapons during religious wars. Since weapons of the enemy were considered unholy, the meaning became 'anything dedicated to evil' or 'a curse'.
"The Old Testament applied the word to anything set aside for sacrifice, and thus banned from profane use and dedicated to destruction—as, in the case of religious wars, the enemy and their cities and possessions. The New Testament uses the word to mean a curse and forced expulsion of someone from the Christian community.
"Although in the canons of ecumenical councils the word 'anathema' continued to be used to mean exclusion for heresy from the society of the faithful, the word was also used to signify a major excommunication inflicted with particular solemnity. Anathema in this sense was a major excommunication pronounced with the ceremonies described in the article 'bell, book, and candle', which were reserved for the gravest crimes
"The ceremony traditionally involved a bishop, with 12 priests with candles, and is solemnly pronounced in some suitably conspicuous place. The bishop would then pronounce the formula of the anathema. After this recitation the priests would respond: Fiat, fiat, fiat ('So be it! So be it! So be it!') The bishop would then ring a bell, close a holy book, and he and the assisting priests would snuff out their candles by dashing them to the ground."
From Wikipedia:
"Petrichor is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil. The word is constructed from Greek petra, meaning 'stone', and īchōr, the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology.
"The term was coined in 1964 by two Australian CSIRO researchers, Isabel Joy Bear and Richard G. Thomas, for an article in the journal Nature. In the article, the authors describe how the smell derives from an oil exuded by certain plants during dry periods, whereupon it is absorbed by clay-based soils and rocks. During rain, the oil is released into the air along with another compound, geosmin, a metabolic by-product of certain actinobacteria, which is emitted by wet soil, producing the distinctive scent; ozone may also be present if there is lightning.
"When a raindrop lands on a porous surface, air from the pores forms small bubbles, which float to the surface and release aerosols. Such aerosols carry the scent, as well as bacteria and viruses from the soil. Raindrops that move at a slower rate tend to produce more aerosols; this serves as an explanation for why the petrichor is more common after light rains."
From Wikipedia:
"Thaumaturgy is the capability of a magician or a saint to work magic or miracles. Isaac Bonewits defined thaumaturgy as 'the use of magic for nonreligious purposes; the art and science of "wonder working;" using magic to actually change things in the physical world.'
"Kings of France and England were also called thaumaturges, as they were traditionally considered able to heal scrofula.
"The word was first anglicized and used in the magical sense in John Dee's book Mathematicall Praeface to Euclid's Elements (1570). He mentions an 'art mathematical' called 'thaumaturgy... which giveth certain order to make strange works, of the sense to be perceived and of men greatly to be wondered at.'
"In Dee's time, 'the Mathematicks' referred not merely to the abstract computations associated with the term today, but to physical mechanical devices which employed mathematical principles in their design. These devices, operated by means of compressed air, springs, strings, pulleys or levers, were seen by unsophisticated people (who did not understand their working principles) as magical devices which could only have been made with the aid of demons and devils.
"By building such mechanical devices, Dee earned a reputation as a conjurer 'dreaded' by neighborhood children. He complained of this assessment in his 'Mathematicall Praeface': 'And for these, and such like marvellous Actes and Feates, Naturally, and Mechanically, wrought and contrived: ought any honest Student and Modest Christian Philosopher, be counted, & called a Conjurer? Shall the folly of Idiotes, and the Malice of the Scornfull, so much prevaille ... Shall that man, be (in hugger mugger) condemned, as a Companion of the hellhoundes, and a Caller, and Conjurer of wicked and damned Spirites?'"
From Wiktionary:
"(Brit, slang) without money. Variant of skinned, past participle of skin (v.)
From Cambridge Dictionary:
"not having any money, especially temporarily"
From Collins Dictionary:
From Wikipedia:
"According to ancient and medieval science, aether, also spelled ether and also called quintessence, is the material that fills the region of the universe above the terrestrial sphere. The concept of aether was used in several theories to explain several natural phenomena, such as the traveling of light and gravity. In the late 19th century, physicists postulated that aether permeated all throughout space, providing a medium through which light could travel in a vacuum.
" The word αἰθήρ (aithēr) in Homeric Greek means 'pure, fresh air' or 'clear sky'. In Greek mythology, it was thought to be the pure essence that the gods breathed, filling the space where they lived, analogous to the air breathed by mortals. It is also personified as a deity, Aether, the son of Erebus and Nyx in traditional Greek mythology. Aether is related to αἴθω 'to incinerate', and intransitive 'to burn, to shine' (related is the name Aithiopes (Ethiopians; see Aethiopia), meaning 'people with a burnt (black) visage').
"The use of quintessence became popular within medieval alchemy. Quintessence stemmed from the medieval elemental system, which consisted of the four classical elements, and aether, or quintessence, in addition to two chemical elements representing metals: sulphur, "the stone which burns", which characterized the principle of combustibility, and mercury, which contained the idealized principle of metallic properties.
"This elemental system spread rapidly throughout all of Europe and became popular with alchemists, especially in medicinal alchemy. Medicinal alchemy then sought to isolate quintessence and incorporate it within medicine and elixirs. Due to quintessence's pure and heavenly quality, it was thought that through consumption one may rid oneself of any impurities or illnesses. In The book of Quintessence, a 15th-century English translation of a continental text, quintessence was used as a medicine for many of man's illnesses. A process given for the creation of quintessence is distillation of alcohol seven times. Over the years, the term quintessence has become synonymous with elixirs, medicinal alchemy, and the philosopher's stone itself."
