Adam
In the story, the same person as Mr. Raven—the first man, now keeper of the dead. (Theologically, Adam is also the first human and head of the race, Romans 5:12.)
Bad Giants
Little Ones who have grown selfish and so grown big—dull, greedy, and blind. Growth without love makes a monster, not a man.
Bulika
BOO-lee-kah
The walled city ruled by Lilith—built on fear and greed, and so terrified of a prophesied child that it drives out its own little ones.
Eve
The first woman, ‘Mother of all living,’ who tends the House of Death where the sleepers lie until they wake to the new morning.
the House of Death
The great chamber, kept by Adam and Eve, where the dead lie on couches and sleep until they wake to resurrection-morning. The story’s central image of dying-to-self.
Read it with discernment: Scripture frames death and judgment as real and final (Hebrews 9:27), not a sleep everyone alike wakes from saved.
Lilith
In MacDonald’s myth (drawn from old Jewish legend), Adam’s demonic first wife. In the story she is the Princess of Bulika, the white leopardess, and a life-draining vampire whose besetting sin is a hand she clenches shut and will not open.
She is the book’s great figure of self-will—the creature who must be brought to repentance and to ‘sleep’ in the House of Death.
the Little Ones
Children who never grow up; tender and good, they live in the forest. The selfish among them swell into stupid ‘bad giants.’ They embody the childlikeness Jesus requires (Matthew 18:3).
Lona
LOH-nah
The gentle leader of the Little Ones and Vane’s beloved. She is Lilith’s own daughter, and is killed by her mother in Bulika.
Mara
MAH-rah
‘The Lady of Sorrow,’ the ‘Mother of Bitterness’—daughter of Adam and Eve. She is redemptive suffering personified: mercy that wounds in order to heal. Her name is the Hebrew for ‘bitter’ (Ruth 1:20).
It is Mara’s house, the House of Bitterness, that finally breaks Lilith’s pride.
Mr. Raven
The ghostly librarian who is secretly Adam, the first man, and also a sexton who buries the dead. He is Vane’s guide, forever urging him to ‘go home’ and lie down in the House of Death.
His raven-form and man-form are the same being seen at two depths of reality.
Mr. Vane
The narrator—a young Oxford-trained Englishman who inherits the old library and crosses through a mirror into the other world. His name hints at both ‘weather-vane’ (unfixed) and ‘vain.’
the region of seven dimensions
MacDonald’s name for the other world, entered through the mirror—a realm whose ‘dimensions’ (relations) exceed the three of ordinary space, where the laws of here do not simply apply.
the Shadow
The dark spirit to whom Lilith is wedded—evil not as a thing in itself but as a clinging absence, the self turned from the Light.
Sir Upward
Vane’s bookish ancestor whose lone portrait hangs among the shelves; the master of the library whom Mr. Raven once served.
the white leech
Lilith in her parasitic form—a creature that fastens on the living and drains their life. Appetite that consumes the other to feed the self.
the white leopardess
One of Lilith’s shapes; she opposes Mara’s spotted leopardess (Astarte). The doubled, hidden nature of the self that will not be one thing.
Boyle
Robert Boyle · 1627–1691
The Anglo-Irish natural philosopher remembered as a father of modern chemistry (Boyle’s Law) and a founder of the Royal Society—and a devout Christian who studied nature as a second book of God’s revelation.
His union of rigorous science and faith is the very theme of the chapter’s lesson.
Dante
Dante Alighieri · 1265–1321
The supreme medieval Italian poet, author of The Divine Comedy—the vast vision-journey of a living man led down through Hell, up the mountain of Purgatory, and into the light of Paradise.
Lilith stands in Dante’s line: a guided pilgrimage through death toward waking.
Darwin
Charles Darwin · 1809–1882
The English naturalist whose On the Origin of Species (1859) proposed evolution by natural selection. MacDonald lists him among the newer men of science, set against the older Ptolemy, Bacon, and Boyle.
Maxwell
James Clerk Maxwell · 1831–1879
The Scottish physicist who united electricity, magnetism, and light in his electromagnetic theory (Maxwell’s equations)—one of the towering achievements of science, and, like MacDonald, a devout Scottish Christian.
Ptolemy
Claudius Ptolemy · c. AD 100–170
The great Greco-Roman astronomer and geographer of Alexandria. His Almagest fixed the geocentric (Earth-centered) picture of the heavens that ruled science for some fourteen centuries, until Copernicus and Galileo.
Vane prizes such old thinkers as ‘nearer the vanished van’—at the frontier, first breaking into the dark of ignorance.
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare · 1564–1616
The English playwright and poet—Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest—widely held the greatest writer in the English language, and a deep well of the moral imagination within which MacDonald writes.
the two Bacons
Roger Bacon (c. 1214–1292) & Francis Bacon (1561–1626)
Two Englishmen named Bacon, centuries apart, both pioneers of looking at the world for oneself: Roger Bacon, the medieval friar who urged experiment over mere authority, and Francis Bacon, who set out the modern scientific method of careful observation and induction.
eschatology
es-kuh-TOL-uh-jee
The doctrine of ‘last things’ (Greek eschata)—death, resurrection, judgment, and the renewal of all things. Lilith is, at heart, an eschatological dream.
ESV
The English Standard Version—the English translation shown beside the Greek throughout this series.
eternal security
The teaching that those whom God truly saves He keeps to the end—they cannot finally fall away (John 10:28–29). The opposite error from universalism: not ‘all are saved,’ but ‘the saved are kept.’
Gehenna
geh-HEN-nah
A New Testament word for hell, from the Valley of Hinnom outside Jerusalem—a place of former idolatry and burning rubbish that became an image of final judgment (Matthew 10:28).
imago Dei
ih-MAH-go DAY-ee
‘Image of God’ (Genesis 1:27)—the dignity, rationality, and moral capacity that make a human a person and not a thing.
Logos
LOG-os (Greek λόγος)
‘Word, reason, account.’ In John 1:1 the eternal Word who was with God and was God, through whom all things were made—Christ. Our word logic is its child; reason has a Person behind it.
This is the fixed point of reference for the whole series.
middle knowledge
scientia media
God’s knowledge of counterfactuals of freedom—what any free agent would do under any possible circumstance—‘between’ His knowledge of the merely possible and His knowledge of what He decrees. The engine of Molinism.
Molinism
moh-LEE-nism
The view (after Luis de Molina, 1535–1600) that God possesses middle knowledge—knowledge of what every free creature would freely do in any circumstance—and so providentially orders the world without overriding real freedom.
Pleasant Springs holds a Molinist account of sovereignty and free will. See the Statement of Beliefs.
providence
God’s wise and sovereign governance of all that comes to pass—upholding, directing, and weaving even evil toward His good ends (Genesis 50:20).
repentance
Greek metanoia
A change of mind that turns the whole person from sin to God (Greek metanoia). In Lilith, dramatized as Lilith’s long refusal—and the opening—of her clenched hand.
ROSES
A five-point soteriology summarizing the Pleasant Springs position: Radical depravity, Overcoming grace, Sovereign election, Eternal life, Singular redemption—a Molinist-friendly alternative to the older TULIP.
The ‘E’ (eternal life) is the doctrine of eternal security: the truly redeemed are kept and cannot finally be lost.
Septuagint
sep-TOO-a-jint
The ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament (begun 3rd c. BC), abbreviated LXX (‘the Seventy’). The Old Testament most often quoted by the New Testament writers, and the one this series reads.
soteriology
so-teer-ee-OL-uh-jee
The doctrine of salvation (Greek soteria)—how God rescues sinners through Christ.
typology
Reading earlier persons, things, or events of Scripture as God-intended foreshadowings (‘types’) of Christ and His work—e.g., the sleep of death as a type of resurrection rest.
universalism
The belief that in the end all souls will be saved. MacDonald hoped for it; Lilith leans toward it. Pleasant Springs does not hold it—Scripture teaches a real and final judgment (Matthew 25:31–46; Revelation 20:11–15) and saving repentance in this life.
Greek apokatastasis, ‘restoration of all things’ (cf. Acts 3:21, which speaks of cosmic renewal, not the salvation of every person).
actus purus
AHK-toos POOR-oos
‘Pure act’ (Aquinas): God as fully actual, with no unrealized potential—He does not change or become, because there is nothing in Him left to fulfill.
contingent being
That which exists but could have not existed—dependent, caused, passing. The whole created world is contingent (2 Corinthians 4:18, ‘the things that are seen are transient’).
dualism
The view that reality has two irreducible kinds—classically mind and matter (or soul and body), seen and unseen.
empiricism
The view that knowledge comes through the senses—experience and observation. Its overreach is to claim that only the empirically detectable is real, a claim the senses can never verify.
epistemology
eh-pis-teh-MOL-uh-jee
The branch of philosophy that asks how we know—the sources, limits, and reliability of knowledge.
idealism
The view that reality is fundamentally mind or idea rather than matter—that the mental is more basic than the physical.
the Law of Identity
The first law of classical logic: A is A—a thing is what it is. To deny it is to deny that anything is anything.
the Law of Non-Contradiction
The second law: not both A and not-A in the same respect at the same time. A claim that must break this law to be stated (e.g. ‘only the visible is real’) refutes itself.
the Law of the Excluded Middle
The third law: either A or not-A—there is no third option. It forbids permanent neutrality where a real question has been put.
materialism
The metaphysical claim that only matter exists—that mind, value, and God reduce to physical stuff. The creed of old Sir Ralph: ‘nothing is real but what I can see or lay hold of.’
metaphysics
met-uh-FIZ-iks
The study of being as such—what is real, what kinds of things exist, and what is most fundamental. Literally ‘after/beyond the physics.’
naturalism
The view that nature is all there is—no supernatural, no transcendent cause. Close cousin to materialism.
necessary being
That which cannot not exist—self-existent, uncaused, the ground of everything else. In classical theism, God alone (Exodus 3:14, ‘I AM’).
ontology
on-TOL-uh-jee
The part of metaphysics that studies existence and the categories of being—what it means for a thing to be at all.
phenomenon and noumenon
NOO-meh-non
Kant’s distinction between the phenomenon (a thing as it appears to us) and the noumenon (the thing-in-itself, as it is apart from our perceiving). MacDonald’s mirror plays on exactly this gap.
point of reference
The fixed standard that all reasoning presupposes—something that stays itself while we think about it. This series fixes it on the unchanging God, the Logos (John 1:1; Exodus 3:14), the ground of the laws of logic.
a priori
ah pree-OR-ee
A priori knowledge is known independent of experience (e.g. the laws of logic); a posteriori knowledge is known through experience (e.g. that it rained).
solipsism
SOL-ip-sism
The extreme claim that only one’s own mind is sure to exist—the dead end of a knowledge that trusts nothing it cannot privately verify.
teleology
tel-ee-OL-uh-jee
Explanation by purpose or end (Greek telos)—asking not only what a thing is made of, but what it is for.
דָבָר (dabar)
dah-VAR
Hebrew: ‘word,’ but also ‘thing’ or ‘deed’—for in Hebrew, God’s speaking and His doing are one. The word by which the worlds were made (Psalm 33:6).
ἀόρατα (aorata)
ah-OR-ah-tah
Greek: ‘the invisible things’ (Colossians 1:16)—the unseen realities created in and held together by Christ.
ὁ ὤν (ho ōn)
ho OWN
‘The One who is’—the Septuagint’s rendering of the divine name at the burning bush (Exodus 3:14, Hebrew ehyeh asher ehyeh, ‘I AM WHO I AM’). God as Being itself.
καιρός / χρόνος (kairos / chronos)
kai-ROSS / KHRON-os
Two Greek words for time: chronos is clock-time, mere succession; kairos is the appointed, decisive moment—the right time to act or to wake.
κοιμάομαι (koimaomai)
koy-MAH-oh-my
Greek: ‘to fall asleep’—the New Testament’s gentle word for the death of believers (John 11:11; 1 Thessalonians 4:14), the very image of MacDonald’s House of Death.
It gives us cemetery, from koimētērion, ‘a sleeping-place.’
λόγος (logos)
LOG-os
Greek: word, reason, account, the rational ordering principle. The title of Christ in John 1:1 and the root of logic.
μετάνοια (metanoia)
met-AH-noy-ah
Greek: ‘repentance’—literally a change of mind, a turning of the whole self. The hinge between the old life and the new.
ψυχή / πνεῦμα (psyche / pneuma)
psoo-KHAY / PNYOO-mah
Greek words for the inner person: psyche, soul or life; pneuma, spirit or breath; nous, mind. The unseen self the story keeps probing.
Sheol / Hades
SHEE-ohl / HAY-deez
Hebrew Sheol and Greek Hades: the realm of the dead, the grave-world—not yet the final judgment, but the place of the departed awaiting it.
cosmology
The science of the universe’s origin and structure. Modern cosmology holds that space, time, and matter had a beginning—an echo of Genesis 1:1 and Hebrews 11:3.
dark matter and dark energy
The roughly 95% of the universe’s contents that is unseen and undetected by light—known only by its gravitational effects. Most of reality is, quite literally, invisible.
entropy
The measure of disorder in a system; the Second Law of Thermodynamics says it always increases in the universe as a whole. Time has a direction—things run down—which is why the cosmos cannot be eternal and unchanging.
information
In modern physics, an immaterial yet fundamental quantity—arrangement and code, not stuff. That reality is, at bottom, word-like resonates with John 1:1.
quantum
The physics of the very small, where matter behaves as both wave and particle, exists in superposition until observed, and dissolves into fields and probabilities rather than little solid balls.
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