by Dan Clore
From the Anglo-Saxon scīnan, to shine, was derived scīn-lāc — a term for magic, necromancy, and sorcery; a spectral form, a deceptive appearance, a phantom. Scīn-lāeca is the magician or sorcerer who wields such forms, and scīnn-cræft the art by which illusory appearances are produced. The term later settled into the occult literature as the astral double — the luminous shadow, the shining corpse, the body that departs while the flesh remains.
— Dan Clore, compiling sources, January 2004
[A note from the author: further information and citations are eagerly solicited. Some of the characters may appear distorted by older software.]
scin-lāc, scin-lāca, n. [< OE scinnlāc, magic, sorcery; a phantom, spectre, ghost < scinn, phantom, spectre, ghost < scīnan, to shine, + lāc, play (but perhaps associated by some writers with lich, corpse); (cf.: OHG scīnleih, phantom, spectre, ghost; OE scinnlǣca, magician, wizard; scinnlǣce, witch, sorceress).] A ghost, spectre, phantom; the astral body.
[Not in OED.]
"I told thee then, that I could not unriddle the dream by the light of the moment; and that the dead who slept below never appeared to men, save for some portent of doom to the house of Cerdic. The portent is fulfilled; the Heir of Cerdic is no more. To whom appeared the great Scin-laeca, but to him who shall lead a new race of kings to the Saxon throne!"
— Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Harold
"Farther than this the mystery of thy dream escapes from my lore — wouldst thou learn thyself, from the phantom that sent the dream — stand by my side at the grave of the Saxon hero, and I will summon the Scin-laeca to counsel the living. For what to the Vala the dead may deny, the soul of the brave on the brave may bestow!"
— Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Harold
And so waking, I saw, on the wall opposite my bed, the same luminous phantom I had seen in the wizard's study at Derval Court. I have read in Scandinavian legends of an apparition called the Scin-lāca, or shining corpse. It is supposed in the northern superstition, sometimes to haunt sepulchres, sometimes to foretell doom. It is the spectre of a human body seen in a phosphoric light; and so exactly did this phantom correspond to the description of such an apparition in Scandinavian fable that I knew not how to give it a better name than that of Scin-lāca — the shining corpse.
— Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story
I had followed the scene with an intense attention. The mysterious operation, known in the East as the evocation of the scin-lecca, was taking place before my own eyes.
— H.P. Blavatsky, "Can the Double Murder?" in Nightmare Tales
Glanvill gives a wonderful narrative of the apparition of the "Drummer of Tedworth," which happened in 1661; in which the scēn-lāc, or double of the drummer-sorcerer was evidently very much afraid of the sword. Psellus, in his work, gives a long story of his sister-in-law being thrown into a most fearful state by an elementary dæmon taking possession of her. She was finally cured by a conjurer, a foreigner named Anaphalangis, who began by threatening the invisible occupant of her body with a naked sword, until he finally dislodged him.
— H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled
If to that life an individual intelligence, a personality, is wanting, then the operator must either send his scēn-lāc, his own astral spirit, to animate it; or use his power over the region of nature-spirits to force one of them to infuse his entity into the marble, wood or metal; or, again, be helped by human spirits.
— H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled
Who can tell but that the fluidic spectre of the ancient Brahman seen by Jacolliot was the scēn-lāc, the spiritual double, of one of these mysterious sannyas̄ins?
— H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled
But — while it is our firm belief that most of the physical manifestations, i.e., those which neither need nor show intelligence or great discrimination, are produced mechanically by the scēn-lāc (double) of the medium, as a person in sound sleep will when apparently awake do things of which he will retain no remembrance — the purely subjective phenomena are but in a very small proportion of cases due to the action of the personal astral body.
— H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled
Scīn-lāc is an Anglo-Saxon term meaning magic, necromancy and sorcery, as well as a magical appearance, a spectral form, a deceptive appearance or a phantom (phantasma). Scīn-lāeca is a magician or sorcerer, and scīn-lāece, a sorceress. The art by means of which illusory appearances are produced was known as scīnn-cræft. From the Anglo-Saxon scīnan, to shine, was also derived the term scīn-fold, used for the idea of the Elysian Fields.
— Boris de Zirkoff, note to H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled
"Mervyn Clitheroe," by Harrison Ainsworth, and the "Lancashire Witches," by the same writer, are books to make boys quake of dark nights when they pass the black end of the lane, but Bulwer Lytton's "Strange Story" strikes a genuine and original note of terror, and few will forget the appearance of the Scin Lāca, the Luminous Shadow of Icelandic belief.
— Arthur Machen, "The Literature of Occultism"
This body, which is called by various authors the Astral double, body of Light, body of fire, body of desire, fine body, scin-lāca and numberless other names, is naturally fitted to perceive objects of its own class ... in particular, the phantoms of the astral plane.
— Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice (ellipsis in original)
Thus in this section the adept utters articulately so far as words may, what his Angel is to Himself. He says this, with his Scin-lāca wholly withdrawn into his physical body, constraining His Angel to indwell his heart.
— Aleister Crowley, Liber Samekh
Here thou mayst make Communication through others, as it were by Relays; or thou mayst act directly upon his Aura by magical Means, such as the Projection of thy Scin-lāca.
— Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph vel CXI: The Book of Wisdom or Folly
Colophon
Compiled by Dan Clore and posted to the Usenet newsgroup alt.magick on January 16, 2004. Clore was an active contributor to alt.magick and a scholar of occult literature; he is the author of The Unspeakable and Others (Wildside Press, 2004), a collection of Lovecraftian fiction. This essay is a lexicographic compilation — an attempt to gather all significant uses of the Anglo-Saxon term scin-lāca in the English occult tradition and make them available in one place.
The OE diacritics have been restored throughout from the windows-1252 encoding of the original post. The author notes that the post uses several scholarly variant spellings — scin-lāc, scēn-lāc, scin-lāca, scin-lecca — reflecting the unsettled transliteration conventions of the tradition.
Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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