Psychic, Occult and Mystical Definitions

Letter: Q

From Argentum vivum ('living silver'), silver that moves about like a living thing.

Quicksilver

Quetzalcoatl

An Aztec deity whose name means 'feathered serpent', a god of the air or a sun-god and a benefactor of their race who instructed them in the use of agriculture, metals and the like. According to one account, Quetzalcoatl was driven from the country by a superior god and on reaching the shores of the Mexican Gulf promised his followers that he would return. He then embarked on his magic skiff for the land of Tlapallan. The Great Bird-Serpent is the most powerful figure in Mexican mythology, and it was known and accepted as a god in ancient Mexico and Central America. Accordingly, he dominated the great early American civilizations, from the land of the Incas in South America, to the Pueblo Indians of the our southwestern desert; from Teotihuacan (Mexico City) on the high plateau to Chichen Itza in Yucatan, he is a prevailing motif on ancient monuments. Sometimes with his jaws open, bifid tongue, and articulated spinal column, he is easily recognizable. At others, he seems to have been coded in an almost infinite variety of formalized patterns derived from his famous scales, or feathers. To the ancients, Quetzalcoatl became the force for understanding the universe, as it was known before the introduction of modern religion by the Conquistadors of Spain. The god Quetzalcoatl represented, to the ancient peoples of Central and South America, the very essence of life.

Also called the 'new physics', quantum mechanics states that, side by side with this world, another world exists; a parallel universe, a duplicate copy that is somehow slightly different and yet the same. As fantastic as it may sound, it states that not just two parallel worlds, but three, four, and even more exist simultaneously. In fact, that an infinite number of them exists, and in each of these universes, you, I, and all the others who live, have lived, will live, will have ever lived, are alive. For each infinite number of possible realities, based on every possible variant on any possible happening at any possible time and place in the universe, a different — and yet similar — world exists…

Quantum Mechanics

Quaker

A familiar name for a member of the Society of Friends, a religious body having no definite creed and no regular ministry, founded by George Fox (1624-91), who began his preaching in 1647. His followers created an organized society during the 1650s and 1660s. It appears from the founders Journal that they first obtained the appellation (1650) from the following circumstances: 'Justice Bennet, of Derby,' says Fox, 'was the first to call us Quakers, because I bid them Tremble at the Word of the Lord'. The name was previously applied to a sect whose adherents shook and trembled with religious emotion, and it was generally applied in the commonwealth period as an abusive term to religious and political radicals.

The collective name given by the schoolmen of the Middle Ages to the four liberal arts, arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. The Quadrivium was the 'fourfold way' to knowledge, while the Trivium was the 'threefold way' to eloquence. Together they were regarded as the seven liberal arts.

Quadrivium