Methodology
To deepen knowledge about the unseen, the first task is not to seek answers but to determine what questions to ask, beginning with why and how.
The why question can be restated as: “For what reasons and with what purpose do we ask questions about the unseen?” Each reader has their own motivating reasons. We do too, and will point you to our About page for more.
The how question can be restated as: “By what testable, repeatable process should we explore questions, claims, sources, and hypotheses about the unseen realm?”
This page addresses the how, our methodology—the analytical approach we apply to every piece of content on this site. We believe the unseen realm can be studied with the same rigor applied to any other domain of inquiry. The challenge is not a lack of source material; it is the absence of a systematic method for reading, cross-referencing, and interpreting that material. That is what we aim to provide.
Our Approach
Whether you are new to this journey or deep into an exploration of the unseen, we’d broadly put forward several key steps that we’ve found helpful to shape a process:
1. Define a question. Why specifically are you intrigued by the unseen? Scope can range from “I want to understand that strange dream I had” to “What happens after I die?” to “Is there a god or gods? If so, what are they like?”
2. Know your biases and assumptions. As best you can, recognize your starting position. What are you predisposed to question or reject? If possible, recognize what assumptions underlie those default positions.
3. Seek insight broadly. Read, listen, and ponder claims from sources to which you might not naturally gravitate, particularly given your own biases and assumptions. Evaluate the credibility of each source: Who wrote it? What was their purpose? What biases might they carry? Distinguish between primary sources—original documents, firsthand accounts, ancient texts—and secondary sources that interpret or summarize them. Seek thoroughness over convenience: a rigorous process reads widely before drawing conclusions, and treats the absence of evidence with as much care as its presence.
4. Rule nothing out a priori. Maintain radical open-mindedness. When confronted with contrarian evidence, be willing to question your own biases and assumptions.
5. Record relevant data. While not strictly necessary, it can be helpful to write, type, journal, or otherwise store your journey. This is especially true if you’ve had otherworldly experiences, as the human mind over time tends to forget and question such things.
6. Apply rigor to your data. Not all claims can be true. How do you discern among competing claims and evidence to establish an overall fact pattern? Consider the full range of evidence at your disposal: primary texts in their original languages, secondary scholarship and commentary, visual and archaeological evidence, firsthand testimony, and the narrative traditions that have carried these accounts across centuries. Are there facts that contradict your original assumptions? Do competing hypotheses better explain the data than your initial framework? We articulate a methodology below that’s been helpful to us; there are others.
7. Explore alternate hypotheses. Returning to your initial question, have you encountered other meta-claims that seem to better fit that fact pattern than others? If so, why?
Intellectual knowledge is not the end unto itself. Rather, intellectual knowledge is a primary means to the broader ends of experiencing deeper meaning. But before you cross the line from exploration to implementation, we suggest you read our Word of Caution.
Start from the Beginning
If we are going to study the unseen realm rigorously, we need to begin with the most influential ancient texts that describe it. Many traditions speak of spiritual beings, hidden realms, and encounters with the divine. While we engage all ancient texts, we often start with the Bible because it is among the most extensively preserved, translated, studied, and debated collection of documents addressing the unseen. It is a natural starting point—not because we dismiss other traditions, but because few other bodies of literature offers the same depth of material, historical continuity, and scholarly infrastructure for analysis.
Those who are spiritual sojourners—curious about the claims of the old religions and seeking to make sense of their own experiences—may be surprised by how much the Bible actually says about the unseen realm. Most modern readers have barely scratched the surface. The ancient texts describe a complex spiritual environment with hierarchies, territories, conflicts, and interactions that most churches and seminaries never address in depth.
So how do we read these texts? How do we extract meaning from documents written thousands of years ago in languages and cultures vastly different from our own? Consider an analogy.
Identifying and Categorizing the Unseen
Let’s imagine Eric, a sports enthusiast from the year 4139, came across a stash of old sports articles describing NBA championship games, FIFA World Cup matches, several programs from college basketball games, and a few youth soccer coaching manuals. Let’s assume that Eric can read the documentation, despite needing to translate it from English into his language, but has minimal prior knowledge of basketball or soccer or the documents themselves. He wants to understand what’s described in the hopes of playing a fourth-millennia re-created version of these ancient games.
Additionally, Eric’s friend Owen told him that she recently began playing basketball. She described filling up an orange ball with air, moving around on a hard flat surface with the ball, and throwing the ball into a metal ring. She’s organized a group of eight people that are now gathering to play basketball with her. Owen mentioned learning the rules from several friends and also figuring out what makes sense by getting on the flat surface and moving around. She extended an open invitation for Eric to join her.
Eric now has two paths: Owen’s experiential approach (learn by doing, ask friends, improvise) and the documentary approach (study the original sources methodically). Both have value. But Eric realizes that if he truly wants to understand what basketball was—not just what it feels like to throw a ball at a ring—he needs to go to the documents. Here’s what he’d find.
Specific Names and Titles
Reading through the corpus of documentation, Eric will start to notice certain patterns and structure in the word selections, the sentence structures, and the forms of the documentation. Certain sentences will have words recognizable to him as proper nouns, such as Michael Jordan or Pelé, which he determines are specific people. Based on context he can start a list of individual people, and then associate specific roles and titles with each named person. Sentences will talk about a “center,” “striker,” “defender,” or “coach.” Eric will use context to understand these words to describe the title of a person. Many titles may apply to multiple people, such as coach or defender, and may contain implicit authority, capabilities, and hierarchy. For example, the point guard, after receiving the play call from the coach, directed the offense into motion. He’ll see that a “play” refers to the specific movement of specific titled players in concert.
Specific Roles and Attributes
For the specific names and titles Eric does not recognize, he can draw meaning from the associated contextual adjectives and verbs to understand what each person or title does. Phrases like “the powerful center blocked the shot,” “the quick striker beat two defenders,” or “Smith feared Jordan’s accurate shot” will shed insight. Certain sentences may remain opaque to him, such as “when Smith juked Miller, he broke his ankles, drove to the basket, and dunked the rock.” Nonetheless, Eric can start building out an understanding of what otherwise esoteric terms like “shooting guard” or “sweeper” meant to the original audience. He would now be ready to recruit friends, teach them a play, and “pass the ball to the point guard.”
Specific Groups
Eric will come across proper nouns such as Bulls and Galaxy or common nouns such as forwards or guards. He’ll quickly realize that Bulls do not refer to animals nor Galaxy to outer space, particularly when he reads descriptions of the Galaxy playing against Real Madrid. He may even realize that his original translation of Bulls into his language’s word for the animal confused his ability to understand that a group of people were called Bulls. Eric would learn that the Bulls were a dominant team in their era. He’d see a word like “forward” used in both basketball and soccer, but contextually would realize people in those positions are serving distinct functions.
Specific Places
He will see words like “stadium,” “arena,” “court,” and “pitch” as common across the documents, along with place names like Chicago, Barcelona, and Los Angeles. Words like “court” and “pitch” would provide input indicators of the specific sport—basketball is not played on a pitch. Basketball hoops would be described to him as a metal rim with a net and a backboard. Eric may be able to build one. He could start researching and mapping formal place names. He’d start to see broader associations between words like “Jordan,” “guard,” “star,” “defensive player of the year,” “Chicago,” “Bulls,” and “championship,” and begin modeling his actions on what Jordan is described as doing.
Specific Events
Eric will note the documents describing certain pivotal events in the history of the “Bulls” or “Barcelona.” Events could be discrete, uniquely powerful moments in a game, such as breaking a record or a feat of incredible physical prowess. Events could be a championship game or a historic win or loss. They could be an entire season, lasting multiple months, or even a string of seasons together that lasts years or even decades. Eric will want to know what made the document writers decide to record that specific event, as it will provide meaning on what people during the authors’ time period considered important.
Rebuilding an Ancient Understanding of the Spiritual Environment
By engaging in a similar effort, this site will seek to uncover and discern what ancient spiritual terms meant to the original audience. Eric’s method—reading carefully, noting patterns, building context from proper nouns, titles, roles, groups, places, and events—is precisely how we approach the Biblical text and other ancient documents that describe the unseen realm.
The five categories Eric discovered map directly to how we organize our research: entities (the beings—named individuals and types), places (the realms and locations they inhabit), and events (the actions and encounters recorded in the texts). These three categories form the backbone of this site.
Most of our content is built around a specific word or phrase—in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, or the English translations derived from them. We apply a consistent analytical framework to each word, described below.
Our Word Study Framework
Each entity, place, or concept we study begins with a word. That word carries layers of meaning shaped by its original language, its translation history, its usage in context, and centuries of interpretation.
In short: we trace each word from its original language through its translation history, its usage across ancient texts, its interpretive history, and its associations across traditions. We examine each word through four lenses:
1. The Word or Phrase
We begin with the word or phrase itself. What is the English word or phrase being studied, and why has it been selected for deeper analysis?
The original language. What is the word in its original language—Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, or another ancient tongue? How is it transliterated? What does it look like in the original script?
Translation. How is this word translated across a range of reputable translations, Bible or otherwise? For the Bible, we compare both modern translations (ESV, NET, NASB, NRSV, and others) and ancient translations (the Septuagint, the Vulgate, the Masoretic Text). For other ancient texts, we’ll spell out what translations we’re using. Different translation choices reveal different interpretive traditions and assumptions.
Etymological roots. Where else is this word concept found in parallel or more ancient languages—Ugaritic, Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, etc? What is the language of the word being studied? What other languages have a similar form of the word? Can we trace the word back to its deepest roots—Proto-Semitic, Proto-Indo-European, or earlier? Where possible, we provide a visual representation of the word’s etymological tree, showing how the concept branched across languages and cultures.
2. The Immediate Context
Context is king in understanding what an author might mean in their use of a word unfamiliar to a modern reader. The more times a word or phrase is used, the more context is available.
Biblical usage. How is the word used in the specific passages of the Bible where it appears? Who uses it, in what genre (narrative, prophecy, poetry, epistle), and to what end? How do we extract meaning from the immediate textual environment? Many of our studies chart word frequency, usage patterns, and cross-references to provide the reader maximal ability to explore and draw their own conclusions.
Extra-biblical texts. How is the word used in Jewish, Christian, and other texts outside the Bible—the Book of Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and others? These texts often preserve traditions and usages that illuminate the assumptions of Biblical and other authors.
Non-biblical ancient texts. Authors did not write, and hearers of the ancient Biblical texts did not live, in a vacuum. Their concepts draw from, comment on, and react to their broader historical moment. How did Greek mythology, Ugaritic tradition, Egyptian religion, Mesopotamian literature, or other ancient traditions use the same or cognate words? How non-Biblical texts used similar words or phrases is essential to understanding Biblical authors’ meanings, particularly for those words unfamiliar to modern ears.
3. Interpretations
Texts do not interpret themselves. Understanding what a word meant requires asking who was reading it, when, and what they brought to their reading.
The original audience. How did people at the time the document was written understand the word? What prior context—cultural, religious, linguistic—shaped how they interpreted it? Was there debate among the original readers or hearers?
The early church. Documents written near in time—decades to a few centuries—after the original text can present useful interpretive insight. How did the Church Fathers understand the word? How did the meaning evolve as Christianity spread across different cultures and languages?
Later and modern interpreters. How did non-church authors, both ancient and modern, understand the word or phrase? How has the meaning evolved over time in scholarly, philosophical, and popular usage? Where do current interpretations diverge, and why?
4. Associations
Did the ancient, medieval, or modern world associate the specific word with other concepts? If so, what? This is often where the most surprising connections emerge—a Greek term for a spiritual power linked to planetary spirits in medieval demonology, which resurfaces in modern ceremonial magic, which maps to entity encounters reported in contemporary psychedelic research. These association chains are not speculation; they are traceable threads across centuries of human engagement with the unseen, including through today. We follow them wherever the sources lead.
Beyond Word Studies
Not all of our content centers on a single word or phrase. Some posts address broader themes—the nature of a divine council, the geography of the afterlife, why people across cultures report encounters with similar entities during altered states of consciousness. These thematic pieces draw on the same analytical rigor and source standards described above, adapted to the subject at hand.
For entities and traditions that do not have a direct Biblical referent—the Hat Man, Thor, jinn, machine elves—we apply the same framework with appropriate modifications. We begin with the English word, acknowledge the absence of a direct Biblical reference where that is accurate, and proceed with the etymological, contextual, interpretive, and associative analysis described above.
Our Sourcing Standards
Every factual claim on this site is sourced. When we cite a scholar, we cite the specific page of a specific edition. When we quote an ancient text, we quote it directly and provide the standard reference notation. We do not paraphrase and call it a citation. We do not summarize and call it evidence.
Our source library includes academic texts, ancient manuscripts and translations, peer-reviewed research, and primary source collections. We draw from biblical scholarship, ancient Near Eastern studies, Greco-Roman literature, patristic writings, and—for our cross-cultural analysis—peer-reviewed phenomenological research, ethnographic studies, and primary accounts from living spiritual traditions.
Readers are invited to verify every source we cite. That is by design.
Our Use of Artificial Intelligence
We use artificial intelligence as a research tool in our analytical process. For a detailed description of how AI is and is not used in the production of this site—including written content, images, and our verification practices—please see our AI Transparency page.
Explore
Now that you understand how we work, we invite you to explore. Our Entities section catalogs the beings described in the ancient texts—and encountered across human experience. Our Places section maps the realms they inhabit. Our Events section traces the pivotal moments where the seen and unseen worlds intersect.
Start wherever your question leads you.