Phylacteries, D&D, and Judaism

For reference, I have some resources about a small controversy indicative of how subtle antisemitism turns up in all kinds of places.

Eric Silver’s article Dungeons & Dragons Has an Antisemitism Problem provides an introduction to the problem of the use of the word “phylactery” in the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons:

For a more explicit example of villainizing Jewish objects and folklore, take the Lich, a powerful being who has cheated death by becoming something unholy. Liches separate their souls from their bodies and put them in special places called a “phylacteries” so they can never die. I don’t know about you, but phylactery is a word I’ve only ever seen used as the English translation of the Jewish ritual object, tefillin. The phylactery is specifically described as “a charm or amulet, or repository used to store small parchments bearing holy scripture or arcane writings.” Sound familiar? Even stranger, the lich was created by Gygax, someone fascinated with historical religious study. He made the choice that an undead wizard king would keep his soul in something that Jews use for daily prayers. Recent editions backtrack from those origins, but Wizards has stuck with “phylactery.” They bury the Jewish coding of the lich, but much like the lich itself, allow it to live on.

It’s worth contextualizing Gygax’s enthusiasm for “historical religious study” as reflecting his complex, vigorous Christianity, which Jon Michaud describes in the article The Tangled Cultural Roots Of Dungeons & Dragons in The New Yorker:

What was largely unknown or omitted from this brouhaha is that Gygax was an intermittently observant Jehovah’s Witness. This startling fact crops up about halfway through Witwer’s biography, when he notes that Gygax’s “controversial” game, along with his smoking and drinking, had led to a parting of the ways with the local congregation. Up until that point, the matter of Gygax’s faith had gone unmentioned in the biography, and it is barely discussed thereafter. (The book’s index does not have an entry for “Jehovah’s Witness” or “Gygax, Gary — religious beliefs.”) Given the furor that D. & D. caused, the absence of a deeper analysis of Gygax’s faith is a glaring omission. In a recent interview with Tobias Carroll, Witwer acknowledged that Gygax “was a practicing Jehovah’s Witness. He would go door-to-door and he would give out pamphlets. He was pretty outspoken about it, as a matter of fact.” The reason for almost completely excluding it from the biography, Witwer says, is that “I couldn’t find it [as] a huge driving force in his life. … I didn’t want to be too heavy-handed with that, because I’m not clear that, especially with his gaming work and even his home life, how big a factor that was on a day-to-day basis. But I do know he was practicing.”

Gygax was enough of a believer in the sect’s dogma to post a note in the International Federation of Wargaming Monthly informing its readers that he did not celebrate Christmas because the Bible commands “that the followers of Jesus refrain from having anything to do with pagan religious celebrations.” This from a man whose company would go on to publish books called Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes and Deities and Demigods, in which beings from numerous pagan religions were codified for inclusion in Dungeons & Dragons.

Brian Cortijo has a Twitter thread exploring the relationship between the D&D thing and the Jewish practice.

Ok, so first it bears understanding what the two words mean and where they come from, and then how the understanding of what tefillin are might have caused the conflation of the words.

lich (n) comes from the Old English, and means “body” or “corpse.” This “lichfield” is just a fancy way of saying graveyard. In fantasy literature, the word was brought in initially to mean an animated corpse of some kind, and later narrowed to reference to a powerful being that has avoided death. More on this later.

phylactery (n) comes from the Greek phulakterion for “amulet,” which is kind of straightforward. Before that, it comes from the verb phulassein (also Greek), related to guardianship.

So, literally, an amulet is something you wear to protect yourself. Which, as people familiar with tefillin know, isn’t what we do with tefillin. They are a reminder of our obligations, not magical talismans. But two of the four Torah passages contained in tefillin are also contained mezuzot, and it is possible that someone looking from outside the faith could conflate the purposes of the items, and — believing that a mezuzah exists to ward off evil — think that tefillin do the same.

At best, though, that gets us to why tefillin are “amulets” and therefore “phylacteries.” So what does this have to do with dead bodies?

In the context that the poster shared with Rabbi Ruttenberg, a “lich” is a powerful being, like a wizard, sorcerer, priest, or king, who as cheated death by becoming something unholy. This comes from the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game, but has since spread. This transformation is accomplished by powerful rituals, one of which removes the soul from the body and protects it in a … phylactery. Once this is accomplished, the body is no longer truly alive, but no amount of decay or misfortune can “kill” the lich. Basically, the destruction of the lich’s body is temporary. Eventually, the body will reform in the location of the phylactery. So the phylactery serves a literal purpose (it “guards” the lich’s soul/spirit/life force), and it’s a wearable talisman that the body will reconstitute wearing.

The notion of the lich as a powerful unliving being went through a number of revisions and transformations, as things do in a game that’s existed for over 40 years, but the phylactery has been around for quite a while. And yes, there are fellow D&D folks that will argue with me that the phylactery doesn’t have to be wearable, but

1. that’s an exception, not the “rule” (such as rules go for imaginary make-believe)
2. it ignores what the word “phylactery” means.

More recent editions of the game (that is, almost 20 years ago … ) have specifically described the lich’s phylactery as “a sealed metal box containing strips of parchment on which arcane phrases were inscribed.” Sound familiar?

World of Warcraft draws heavily from Dungeons & Dragons. Their conception of the lich is pulled directly from the game. However, by the time the term ‘phylactery’ gets to WoW, it’s got nothing to do with tefillin or even amulets anymore. It’s just a house for the lich’s soul.

In a certain sense, some people confuse phylacteries with the idea of canopic jars (from Egyptian mummification practices), but even that’s strange, because canopic jars hold viscera, not souls. The heart (the seat of the soul) doesn’t even get a canopic jar. It stays in the body. But let’s not pretend that most people understand the funerary practices of ancient peoples not of their own faith.

All of this is why you have things called phylacteries in D&D and the games that descend from it that look nothing like tefillin (or amulets), but are using the word to mean “soul-container.”

I suspect the original use of phylactery in D&D was meant to be a cool, arcane-sounding word that most people had little interaction with, but later grew to embrace the tefillin connection. I can’t be sure.

Moral of the story: there’s even more of a reason not to call tefillin “phylacteries.” They are tefillin.

Words are weird and fun.

Cortijo followed up with another thread exploring the history of the usage in D&D:

Getting a little bit tired of the disingenuous argument that the word “phylactery” in D&D wasn’t originally meant to invoke Jewish tefillin. So I’m going to go through this a different way this time.

In the AD&D Monster Manual (1977), we learn:

The lich posses from a state of humanity to a non-human, nonliving existence through force of will. It retains this status by certain conjurations, enchantments, and a phylactery.

What’s a phylactery? Who knows?

Turns out, the 1^st Edition Dungeon Masters Guide knows! From the glossary:

Phylactery — An arm wrapping with a container holding religious writings, thus a form of amulet or charm.

I’ll admit to only having access to the 1979 Revised Edition of the DMG, so there’s a possibility things changed.

But this language is specifically taking tefillin — a Jewish ritual object that consists of two sets of leather straps with which boxes containing important religious texts are affixed to the head and arm — and conflating it with the Greek root for the common (mis)translation.

[⋯]

First: The DMG listing has at least three non-lich phylacteries. The phylacteries of long years, faithfulness, and monster attraction (the last one cursed) are all cleric-only items, reinforcing that these are understood as ritual objects. They’re not just magic items Joe Fighterman can pick up and use.

Second: Prior to AD&D, lich phylacteries didn’t exist at all. Their original appearance as we recognize D&D liches, in the Greyhawk supplement, says liches are “now alive only by means of great spells and will because of being in some way disturbed.” Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry gave them the possibility of psionic powers, but still: no phylactery. No item of any kind that served as the focus of the lich’s undead might.

Third: Lich’s didn’t return via their phylacteries until later. The idea is first proposed in The Dragon #26, “Bazaar of the Bizarre–Blueprint for a Lich” (subtitle redacted because it’s unnecessary here; you can find it). This article was written in 1979 by Len Lakofka. The article describes the process by which a spellcaster becomes a lich, how a lich returns when its physical body is destroyed, and the fact that liches lose power with each return to life. Another interesting point: this article, the word phylactery appears exactly zero times.

That’s right. The idea of the D&D lich returning from destruction comes from an article that never, not once, uses the term we now think applies almost exclusively to that item. Most D&D players have only ever heard the word phylactery in relation to the lich.

In the article, it’s called a jar.

No fancy word. No religious connotation. No poor translations.

It’s a jar.

Down through the Rules Cyclopedia (1991), I can’t find any reference in Basic D&D to a lich’s phylactery at all. It seems an element solely of AD&D.

I’m happy to admit being wrong about it, but for now it means I can stick to the progression of editions fairly linearly.

In AD&D 2nd Edition, the Monstrous Compendium Vol 1 (1989) is where we finally get the repetitively immortal lich its phylactery. Gone, at least for the lich, is any connection between the phylactery and a religious text worn on the arm or forehead.

The same three non-lich items appear in the DMG, though, and now only one of them is specifically worn on the arm, because there’s no glossary in 2^nd Edition to explain what a phylactery “is” in the game’s estimation. For added confusion, the 2E phylacteries are also on the same random item table as amulets.

Throughout 2E, phylacteries continue to appear in Dragon Magazine and in Al-Qadim, and their descriptions specifically invoke the descriptions of Jewish tefillin.

In 3^rd Edition, phylacteries got drawn back closer to their tefillin roots. The phylactery of faithfulness is “a small box containing holy scripture affixed to a leather cord.” (3E DMG). A lich’s phylactery is most commonly “a sealed metal box containing strips of parchment on which magical phrases have been inscribed … [with] a leather strap so that the owner can wear it on the forearm or head.” (3E Monster Manual). In 4E, the language is almost identical.

By 5E, the only phylactery in the game is the lich’s phylactery, and it’s “traditionally an amulet in the shape of a small box.” (5E Monster Manual) Still evoking tefillin, but now without any counterbalance in the form of beneficial magic items of any sort.

There is not a single edition of D&D that uses the word phylactery but doesn’t understand it as a placeholder for “tefillin, except a tiny bit more generic” (i.e. less Jewish).

In my thread a couple of years ago, I suggested that perhaps “phylactery” was used as a cool-sounding word, in lieu of amulet, that then grew to encompass multiple items. I no longer believe that. It’s now clear that Gygax specifically used the word to connect what Jews call tefillin with magical amulets and protective wards. Which they categorically are not.

Tefillin are signs and reminders of obligations. In that sense, only the phylactery of faithfulness is “correct.”

Just to make a couple of things clear:

• I am not saying that the use of the word phylactery is antisemitic. As a Jew, I have always disliked the term phylactery to describe tefillin, but it isn’t hateful. It is inaccurate, or at best, incomplete. Tefillin are not amulets.
• I would prefer that the game not use the word phylactery, because outside of D&D, the word is generally associated solely with tefillin, so most people doing a search will make a one-to-one correlation between a lich’s phylactery and Jewish tefillin. Which is not comfortable.
• The use of the term phylactery specifically for the lich’s soul repository is a holdover from previous editions and probably should go. Because, well, all this. At minimum, a lich’s phylactery (whether tefillin-style or not) should have to be worn, and that’s not the case.

If you’ve genuinely never seen tefillin before, here is what they look like. One is worn on the forehead, the other on the nondominant arm (from bicep to fingers). This is the “arm wrapping with religious writings” that D&D originally understood a phylactery to be.

Little Light adds a common observation:

All this and adding that probably the lich-phylactery thing comes from Slavic folklore and Koschei the Deathless. So … yeah.

As Wikipedia notes:

The most common feature of tales involving Koschei is a spell which prevents him from being killed. He hides "his death" inside nested objects to protect it. For example, his death may be hidden in a needle that is hidden inside an egg, the egg is in a duck, the duck is in a hare, the hare is in a chest, the chest is buried or chained up on a far island

Buzz has a Stack Exchange post (!) with more background on the evolution of the idea in D&D:

This is an old question, but it’s gotten bumped, so I am sharing some old research that I was a part of about twenty-five years ago. There are not (to my knowledge) any archives of the bulletin board where this was discussed, but I remember the rough conclusions that we came to. We were coming to the question from the point of view of Dungeons & Dragons players, and we came to a D&D-related conclusion; however, we were not looking for evidence that had to come specifically from the game.

The word phylactery was based on a previous Greek word meaning, roughly, amulet, indicating a magical protective charm of a size to be carried on one’s person. Phylactery was used both in this generalized meaning and in the specific meaning of tefillah, for essentially the entire history of the word. However, there were probably no instances of the soul jar meaning until 1979.

In the AD&D Monster Manual (1977), the lich was described as needing phylactery to maintain its state as a free-willed, thinking undead monster. At that point, the mention of the phylactery was just a bit flavor text, like that found in many of the Monster Manual entries. It is not clear which meaning of phylactery E. Gary Gygax had in mind, although he was extremely erudite and referenced all sorts of miscellaneous trivia in the AD&D game rules, so I suspect that he probably knew of the Jewish meaning. The accompanying artwork by David A. Trampier showed the monster wearing a crown, with a protruding block on the front that could be either a jewel or a tefillah.

Monster Manual “Lich”

While Gygax and Trampier may have known the religious meaning of phylactery, it appears that Len Lakofka may not have. In his article “Blueprint for Lich” (Dragon Magazine #26, page 36; later reprinted in one of the Best of Dragon anthologies), the process he describes (via which a wizard may become a lich) focuses on a soul object that the mage’s life energy must be stored in as part of the process. Lakofka never used the word “phylactery” in the article, but it certainly appears that the Monster Manual phylactery and Lakofka’s soul jar are meant to be one and the same. The connection was made explicit in the Endless Quest (like Choose Your Own Adventure) book Lair of the Lich in 1985.

Jewish-themed’d TTRPGs

It seems sensible to plug these here:

• If I Were A Lich, Man is “a trilogy of funny Jewish roleplaying games about creative resistance against authoritarianism. The villains in the stories of our oppressors become the heroes in our play. Written and illustrated by a team of avant-garde Jewish designers.”
• Doikayt: A Jewish TTRPG Anthology “of short tabletop roleplaying games about Judaism or Jewish themes, written and illustrated by Jews. It was organized by JR Goldberg and Riley Rethal, featuring 10+ Jewish tabletop games by incredible Jewish designers. In Yiddish, the word doikayt translates to ‘hereness’. While hereness can be interpreted in many ways, we take it to mean that a Jewish person’s ideology, practices and traditions are a product of their environment, and it is these differences in background and knowledge from sources around the world that make the Jewish people so stalwart.
• Dream Askew / Dream Apart “contains two games of belonging outside belonging. Dream Askew explores the story of a queer enclave amid the collapse of civilization. Dream Apart explores the story of a Jewish shtetl in a fantastical version of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe. Dream Apart gives us demons and wedding jesters; betrothals and pogroms; mystical ascensions and accusations of murder; the sounds of the shofar ringing through cramped and muddy streets, of cannon fire, of the wolf’s footfalls in the snowy pine forest; asking ‘What do you do next?’”