Anathema — From Ancient Greek to English | etymologist.ai
anathema
/əˈnæθ.ə.mə/·noun·1526·Established
Origin
Greek anathema, literally 'something placed up' as a temple offering to the gods, underwent a dramatic semantic inversion through the Septuagint's translation of Hebrew herem — devotion-through-destruction — transforming a word for sacred dedication into the Church's most severe formula of curse and excommunication.
Definition
A formal ecclesiastical curse of excommunication, or more broadly anything intensely detested, derived from Greek anáthema ('thing devoted to evil'), itself from anatithénai ('to set up, dedicate'), combining aná ('up') with the PIE root *dheh₁- ('to put, place, set').
The Full Story
Ancient Greekc. 500 BCEwell-attested
From Greek anathema (ἀνάθεμα), originally meaning 'something set up' or 'a thing dedicated to a god' — a votive offeringplaced in a temple. Theword is composed of ana- (ἀνά, 'up, upon') and tithenai (τιθέναι, 'to place, to set'), so literally 'a thing set up' or 'placed upward' as an offering. In classical Greek usage, an anathēma (ἀνάθημα, with eta) was a neutral or positive term for any dedicatory gift
Did you know?
Thewords 'anathema' and 'fact' share the same Proto-Indo-European root, *dheh₁- ('to place'). Greek tithénai ('to place') gave us anathema (something placed up for the gods), while the same root became Latin facere ('to make'), producing 'fact,' 'factory,' and 'fashion.' A sacred temple offering and a mundanefactory
a powerful negative charge: that which is set apart became that which is accursed. Early Church councils crystallized this into a juridical formula — 'anathema sit' ('let him be anathema') — pronounced as the most severe form of excommunication, casting a person entirely outside the community of the faithful. The Council of Nicaea (325 CE) and subsequent councils used it extensively. By the time the word entered English via ecclesiastical Latin in the 16th century, the original sense of 'sacred offering' had been almost entirely eclipsed by 'a thing or person cursed, detested, or shunned.' The underlying PIE root is *dheh₁- ('to put, place, set'), one of the most productive roots in the family, which also gave rise to English do and deed (via Germanic), fact and faculty (via Latin facere), thesis and theme (via Greek), and the suffix -dom (originally 'that which is set/established'). Key roots: *dheh₁- (Proto-Indo-European: "to put, place, set"), τιθέναι (tithenai) (Ancient Greek: "to place, to set, to put"), ἀνά (ana) (Ancient Greek: "up, upon, back").