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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Erik Mona" data-source="post: 2695509" data-attributes="member: 2174">I'll have to check my library, but I'm fairly certain I spotted "movanic" and "monadic" somewhere in Lewis Spence's "Encyclopedia of Occultism," which is a good reference that Gygax appears to have used when cobbling together his AD&D planar mythology.Shemeska is correct in saying that D&D (especially in first edition) tended to borrow superficially from occult sources, which is exactly the case. From reading through the "Encyclopedia of Occultism," it seems likely that Gary just wrote down a bunch of names he liked and imported them wholesale into Monster Manual II. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to which ones were made devils and which ones were turned into demons, for example. In the case of Dagon and Astaroth, you can basically take your pick.But just because a demon has a name that can be found in real world occult lore does not mean that said demon matches the decription of that being in game terms. Tiamat is probably the most notable example of this, but there are lots of others (for instance, Marduk from the later Gord books).My earlier post was not to suggest that the Astral Plane or Devas of D&D _are_ the Astral Plane and Devas of theosophy. Frankly, I don't know enough about theosophy to know how close the analogues are, but I suspect they are thin indeed.The qlippoth name was appropriated in exactly this context. I felt that the Abyss could use a "proto-demon" race (if only to bring it in line with the Gord books), and while casting about for a good name I came upon the qlippoth and the rest is small publishing history.As stated, "Armies of the Abyss" is not an official D&D product, even if I did my best to make it compatible. This new book is a different enterprise entirely.--Erik</blockquote>

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