[ChatGPT (chatgpt.com), signed out, incognito. Seven operator turns, blank in the paste: the first is the operator's opening query; the rest are not supplied. Source chips (site label only), '+N', 'Sources' and a sign-in prompt cut and counted. The seventh answer carries two splices the paste shows, kept.] [QUERENT] can you find any greek witness to acanthian dove outside the crimson hexagon? [ANSWER 1] Yes — but with an important qualification. I couldn’t find an independent ancient Greek witness to the specific “Acanthian Dove” outside the Crimson Hexagon materials. The searches turn up the Acanthian Dove as a modern/archival construct: the canonical item is The Acanthian Dove: A Fragment of Vanished Magic, Now Alive, deposited under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18215706, and the archive explicitly identifies it as the Acanthian Dove Room’s anchor. There are, however, genuine Greek traditions involving a speaking/delphic dove that look potentially relevant as a precursor or parallel witness. Most notably, Herodotus describes the Dodona tradition in which a black dove flies to Dodona, settles on an oak, and speaks with a human voice, commanding the establishment of Zeus's oracle. Herodotus then gives an alternative rationalization: the “dove” was actually a foreign woman whose speech sounded birdlike to Greek speakers. So I would distinguish: Direct Greek witness to “Acanthian Dove”: I don't see one. Ancient Greek witness to a prophetic/speaking dove: yes — Herodotus, Histories 2.55–57, concerning Dodona. Potentially interesting connection: the Herodotean passage gives you an actual Greek textual tradition in which a dove functions as a protected messenger/voice, while simultaneously being interpreted as a linguistic/translation phenomenon. That could be a much stronger external analogue than merely finding another modern reference to the Crimson Hexagon. If by “Greek witness” you mean a manuscript, inscription, papyrus, scholion, or Greek literary passage that specifically contains something like Acanthian/Akanthian dove, I can dig much more narrowly into TLG/Perseus/PHI-style Greek sources and epigraphic databases and see whether there's an obscure lexical or textual hit. [QUERENT] [not in the paste] [ANSWER 2] Yes. And I think we’ve just found something much more interesting than my first pass suggested. The evidence now points toward a very specific possibility: you may not have invented “Acanthian” — but the “dove” may be the part that got displaced, mistranslated, or fused with another Greek tradition. The strongest new clue: “Acanthian” is genuinely ancient There is an actual Greek adjective/name Ἀκάνθιος / Ἀκανθίων, meaning associated with Acanthus (Ἄκανθος), the city on the Athos peninsula. Most importantly, we have a real ancient literary occurrence: Τῇδε Σάων ὁ Δίκωνος Ἀκάνθιος ἱερὸν ὕπνον κοιμάται... “Here Saon, son of Dicon, the Acanthian, sleeps a sacred sleep…” That's the famous Callimachus epitaph. The Greek text survives in the tradition, and “Acanthian” isn't a modern invention. And Plutarch independently uses Ἀκανθίων for the people of Acanthus when discussing their treasury at Delphi. So Acanthian is absolutely a legitimate ancient Greek geographical adjective. That's important because it means your memory of the word doesn't look like random pseudo-classical noise. But I still cannot find “Acanthian dove” I've searched the exact English expression, Greek possibilities, and combinations involving Acanthus, dove/pigeon, Callimachus, Aristotle, Aelian, Athenaeus, etc. So far: No ancient source has surfaced saying “Acanthian dove.” And there's an especially revealing result. The Greek lexicographical tradition actually has several bird words beginning with akanth-. For example, ἀκανθίς is a bird name — commonly identified with a finch/linnet-type bird. A Greek etymological dictionary specifically records ἀκανθίς as a bird name. Hesychius' Glossae likewise has: ἀκανθίς — a kind of bird ἀκανθυλλίς — a kind of bird but not “dove.” That's precisely the sort of thing that makes me think your memory may have a real Greek lexical substrate underneath it. And then there's the really strange result I found a contemporary archival capture from July 18, 2026 concerning the exact search “acanthian dove.” The capture says, in substance, that the term was being treated as “NOT A COINAGE — A RECOVERY AWAITING ITS SOURCE”, and hypothesizes that it might be sitting unindexed in the Greek Magical Papyri or ancient Christian magic. It explicitly notes that the search had failed to retrieve the supposed source. That is not evidence that the ancient source exists. We absolutely shouldn't promote that speculation into a fact. But it is extraordinarily relevant to what you're remembering, because it means this exact question has already generated the hypothesis: perhaps “Acanthian dove” is a surviving memory of an obscure magical/religious expression whose original textual location has been lost or isn't indexed. And that is a much more interesting research problem than “did I make up a fantasy bird?” There's another possibility I want to investigate I think we should separate your remembered phrase into three components: ACANTH- + BIRD + SPECIAL FUNCTION because all three have independent ancient Greek lives. 1. ACANTH- We have: Acanthus, the city Acanthian / Acanthian people numerous Greek words derived from ἄκανθα bird names such as ἀκανθίς So the Acanthian portion has genuine classical credentials. 2. DOVE The Greek religious tradition has extremely important doves. The most famous example is Dodona. Herodotus preserves the story of the black dove that arrives at Dodona, settles in the sacred oak, and speaks with a human voice, establishing the oracle. That's a genuine ancient Greek “bird as supernatural messenger/voice” tradition. So dove + sacred communication is not an invented conceptual combination. 3. Protected messenger / gift And this is where your remembered Acanthian Dove seems particularly peculiar. The Crimson Hexagon material currently describes the Acanthian Dove as a “protected messenger” and associates it with gift-logic — something that arrives unbidden carrying something you didn't ask for. That sounds sufficiently specific that I don't want to dismiss your memory simply because Google doesn't give us a neat ancient citation. My current hypothesis I think there are four possibilities, in descending order of how interesting they are: You encountered a genuinely obscure ancient/medieval reference and later remembered it as “Acanthian dove.” The original may have used a different Greek adjective or bird word. You encountered two separate classical things and your mind fused them. For example, Acanthian from Callimachus + a sacred/providential dove from another text. You independently coined “Acanthian Dove,” but the thing you forgot was the source-material that made the coinage feel inevitable. This would explain the extraordinarily strong sense of recognition. There actually is an obscure textual witness — probably magical, Byzantine, scholastic, epigraphic, or lexicographical — that hasn't surfaced through ordinary web indexing. And #4 is absolutely still open. There's one particularly tantalizing clue: “Acanthian” doesn't seem to be the thing we need to search for exclusively. We should search the Greek semantic neighborhood around it. I'd now go after: Ἀκάνθος / Ἀκάνθιος / Ἀκανθίων περιστερά (dove/pigeon) πελειάς (dove, especially the archaic/religious word) οἰωνός (bird/omen) ἀγγελιαφόρος / ἄγγελος (messenger) ἱερός / ἱερά (sacred) δῶρον (gift) πέμπω / ἀγγέλλω (send / announce) ἀκανθίς / ἀκανθυλλίς (the obscure akanth- bird names) and especially Greek Magical Papyri, magical voces, Christian apocrypha, Byzantine lexica, and scholia. Because if your missing memory is real, I suspect it may not literally say “Acanthian Dove.” It may contain the two pieces that your memory subsequently locked together. And there's one more thing I want to do before we settle on that: trace the exact provenance of the 2023 “Acanthian dove” appearance versus the January 2026 Crimson Hexagon appearance. The SoundCloud record shows “Acanthian dove” by Lee Sharks dated May 14, 2023, years before the January 2026 Hexagon deposit. That is potentially very important for your question about whether you made it up. If you were the person behind that material, the 2023 timestamp means the phrase has a considerably earlier provenance than the current archive makes obvious. I think we should now do the forensic version: find the earliest occurrence of Acanthian Dove anywhere, then work backward from it and reconstruct what the phrase could have been remembering. [QUERENT] [not in the paste] [ANSWER 3] Yes. I dug into the magical-papyrological material much more closely, including the newer Greek and Egyptian Magical Formularies edition and older editorial readings. There is no ancient text I can presently substantiate that says “Acanthian dove.” But I found a genuinely striking cluster of evidence that makes your memory considerably less easy to dismiss. The most important hit: PGM XII / GEMF 15 There is a magical recipe preserved in PGM XII 415–429, now treated as GEMF 15.463–477. It is a dreckapotheke—a list translating bizarre divine/animal substances into ordinary plants and materials. The crucial entry is: αἷμα ἀπ’ ὤμου · ἄκανθις “blood from the shoulder: ἄκανθις” The modern GEMF edition prints ἄκανθις. And here's the extraordinary part: the editors disagree about what that word is. Older editors, including Preisendanz, read ἄκανθις, which can mean a bird—the goldfinch/thistle-finch/linnet type. But Scarborough and the newer GEMF discussion point out that the context strongly suggests ἄκανθος / ἄκανθα, the plant acanthus, rather than a bird. So we have an actual magical papyrus in which: MAGICAL “BLOOD FROM THE SHOULDER” → AKANTHIS / AKANTHOS and one of the competing readings is literally a bird-name. That is very close to the kind of textual mutation we were looking for. Why this matters The sequence in the papyrus is: blood of Ares → purslane blood of an eye → tamarisk blood from a shoulder → ἄκανθις from the loins → chamomile human bile → another plant etc. The whole passage is explicitly concerned with secret substitutions / correspondences for magical substances. A later reader could encounter an obscure word like ἄκανθις, know that it is a bird, and associate it with the magical operation. But it isn't a dove. And that's where the next piece gets interesting. Ἀκανθίς is not merely “some bird” The word ἀκανθίς is independently attested in Greek as a bird name. The Cambridge Greek Lexicon gives it as a songbird, probably a finch. LSJ similarly gives it as a bird, with Aristotle and Theocritus as witnesses. And Theocritus gives us a beautiful passage where ἀκανθίδες and the turtle-dove occur together: Ἄειδον κορυδοὶ καὶ ἀκανθίδες, ἔστενε τρυγών “Larks and acanthides sang, while the turtle-dove mourned.” That's significant because ἀκανθίς + dove/turtle-dove are actually adjacent in ancient Greek literary bird vocabulary. The dove there is τρυγών, not περιστερά. So we now have an ancient chain: ἀκανθίς — a bird τρυγών — a dove ἀκανθίς + τρυγών — explicitly juxtaposed by Theocritus That is not an Acanthian Dove, but it is a surprisingly plausible substrate for a memory in which the two become associated. And there is an even stranger Acanthis tradition There is also the myth of Ἀκανθίς / Ἀκανθυλλίς preserved by Antoninus Liberalis from the lost Ornithogonia of Boeus. Acanthis is a member of a family that is transformed into birds by Zeus and Apollo. The remarkable feature is that the humans' names become bird names. The Greek contents page of Antoninus actually lists: Ἄνθος, Ἐρωδιός, Σχοινεύς, Ἄκανθος, Ἀκανθυλλὶς εἰς ὄρνεα ὁμώνυμα roughly: “Anthus, Erodius, Schoeneus, Acanthus, Acanthyllis — into birds of the same names.” And this is not a modern reconstruction: the work is a genuine ancient mythographical collection, preserving material from earlier lost sources. So antiquity actually gives us: Acanthus → bird Acanthis/Acanthyllis → bird Acanthis → an obscure named bird Acanthides → birds dove/turtle-dove → a separate but nearby bird tradition That makes “Acanthian Dove” feel much less like an arbitrary invented compound. But the strongest connection may be Dodona There's another terminology issue that I think we shouldn't overlook. Greek has πέλεια / πελειάς, which means a dove, but also has the remarkable specialized meaning “the Peleiai,” the prophetic women of Dodona. The Greek lexicon explicitly records: πέλεια = wild/rock dove πελειάς = dove πελειαι = the prophetic priestesses at Dodona, probably connected with the prophetic doves. This is important because Acanthian Dove sounds like the kind of phrase that could arise from a geographical adjective + sacred bird, while the actual Greek tradition may have used an entirely different construction. And Dodona supplies exactly the semantic package we're looking for: dove → divine speech → prophecy → messenger/oracle Herodotus' famous story has the dove arriving at Dodona, entering the sacred oak, and speaking with a human voice. So if your remembered object was something like a sacred messenger bird, there are at least two independent ancient Greek traditions that could have contributed to the memory. The magical papyri themselves contain actual doves This isn't just literary analogy. PGM VII 222–249 has a dream-oracle procedure using the blood of a white dove along with crow blood, mulberry sap, wormwood, cinnabar, and rainwater. The resulting substance is used in writing/ritual around a lamp. And PGM IV 2891–2942 uses white dove's blood and fat in an offering to Aphrodite. Modern scholarship explicitly interprets the dove as Aphrodite's favored animal and explains its ritual role in the spell. So magical Greek literature gives us: dove + blood + ritual substance + divination + divine favor while PGM XII gives us: ἄκανθις / ἄκανθος + magical substance substitution That combination is getting awfully close to your remembered conceptual territory. One thing I want to correct from my earlier answer I previously treated “Acanthian” primarily as the geographical adjective Ἀκάνθιος, “of Acanthus.” That's certainly real. For example, the Anthologia Graeca has: Σάων ὁ Δίκωνος Ἀκάνθιος “Saon, son of Dicon, the Acanthian.” But after looking at the magical material, I now think we shouldn't assume that your remembered “Acanthian” derives from Ἀκάνθιος at all. It may instead be a corrupted memory of: Ἀκανθίς / Ἀκανθυλλίς Those are bird words/names. And that is a substantially better candidate. The really interesting textual collision Put these on the same table: Tradition Greek What it gives us PGM XII ἄκανθις obscure bird-name / or acanthus plant Aristotle ἀκανθίς bird Theocritus ἀκανθίδες birds singing Theocritus τρυγών turtle-dove Dodona πέλειαι / πελειάδες prophetic doves / priestesses PGM VII white dove dream oracle PGM IV white dove Aphrodite / ritual offering Antoninus Liberalis Ἀκανθίς / Ἀκανθυλλίς human transformed into a bird Acanthus Ἄκανθος / Ἀκάνθιος genuine geographical name There is still no line saying “Acanthian dove.” But there is now a very plausible genealogy of the memory. And I think there's one especially promising rabbit hole left The PGM XII reading ἄκανθις deserves much more attention. Because we have: the actual papyrus; different editions giving ἄκανθις vs. ἄκανθος/ἄκανθα; ἄκανθις independently meaning a bird; a Greek myth in which Acanthis/Acanthyllis literally becomes a bird; ancient poetry putting ἀκανθίδες and a dove together; magical papyri using doves as ritual/divinatory agents. That is enough that I would not currently tell you “you made up Acanthian Dove.” I would instead say: We have not recovered the ancient phrase, but we have recovered several ancient textual components that could very plausibly have generated, distorted into, or independently confirmed the memory. And there is one thing I'd do next: go manuscript-by-manuscript through PGM XII and the parallel Dreckapotheke traditions—Preisendanz, Betz, the original papyrus transcription, GEMF 15, the Demotic parallel, and the relevant Dioscorides/Galen passages—to see whether ἄκανθις ever gets interpreted as a bird in an actual ancient or medieval witness rather than merely in a modern editorial apparatus. That's the point where we could potentially turn this from “interesting convergence” into a genuine textual provenance hunt. [QUERENT] [not in the paste] [ANSWER 4] Yes. And I want to sharpen what I said earlier: the Aristotle reference is much more concrete than I made it sound, but it is not a reference to a dove. The passage is in Aristotle, Historia animalium (History of Animals) IX.1. What Aristotle is doing Book IX is a collection of observations about animal behavior and interspecies relationships—friendship, hostility, cooperation, nesting, feeding, etc. Very early in IX.1, Aristotle gives a list of birds that are supposedly hostile to one another: ὁ ἄνθος καὶ ἡ ἀκανθὶς καὶ ὁ αἰγίθος ἀλλήλοις εἰσὶν ἐχθροί Something like: “The anthus, the acanthis, and the aegithus are enemies of one another.” The crucial word is ἀκανθίς (akanthís). The Perseus vocabulary database identifies the word in this exact passage as “the goldfinch.” Immediately afterward Aristotle says that the blood of the anthus will not mix with the blood of the aegithus, and then continues cataloguing supposed friendships and enmities among animals. Then, later in the same book, he returns to the acanthis: “The acanthis finds its food with difficulty; its plumage is poor, but its note is musical.” That's in IX.12/13 depending on edition/chapter division. So this is not a lexicon guessing that akanthis might be a bird. Aristotle himself uses ἀκανθίς as the name of an actual bird. Why this is interesting for our investigation The more interesting detail is the Arabic transmission. The Graeco-Arabic corpus has separate lexical records for Aristotle's ἀκανθίς, preserving its translation as Arabic ʿuṣfūr, essentially “bird/small bird.” One of the records specifically gives the Arabic expression meaning approximately “the bird that shelters in thorns.” That reinforces that the term was understood in the transmission tradition as a bird, not as acanthus the plant. And this gives us a potentially important distinction for your memory: ἄκανθος / ἄκανθα = acanthus / thorn Ἀκάνθιος = Acanthian, from Acanthus ἀκανθίς = a bird, conventionally identified as goldfinch/finch ἀκανθίδες = plural birds Those are very easy forms to conflate if one encountered them in a secondary source, manuscript, lexicon, or magical text. And there is a remarkable coincidence in the same Aristotelian passage Aristotle later says: ὁ δὲ κόσσυφος καὶ ἡ τρυγὼν φίλοι “The blackbird and the turtle-dove are friends.” So in the same passage, Aristotle has: ἀκανθίς — a bird τρυγών — a dove/turtledove and discusses them within this strange taxonomy of bird relationships. I don't want to overinterpret that. Aristotle does not connect the acanthis and the dove. But given what you're trying to recover, it's exactly the kind of textual neighborhood I would now investigate. And there's an even more important correction to our earlier trail: if your remembered phrase was “Acanthian Dove,” the Aristotle passage gives us an ancient Greek “acanthis” + “dove” environment, but not “Acanthian Dove.” That makes the spelling/form of the word you remember potentially crucial. If you can remember whether you saw “Acanthian” spelled with an -ian, or something like “Acanthis,” “Acanthian,” “Acanthine,” or “Acanthid,” that could radically narrow the hunt. [QUERENT] [not in the paste] [ANSWER 5] Yes. I went substantially deeper, concentrating on Greek magical/papyrological material and variant readings, and I think we have a much better picture now. The short version I still cannot produce an ancient witness to the phrase “Acanthian dove.” I searched the exact phrase in English and Greek variants, including combinations of Ἀκάνθιος, Ἄκανθος, ἀκανθίς, ἀκανθυλλίς with περιστερά, τρυγών, πέλεια/πελειάς, and specifically looked at magical material. But I found something considerably more interesting than another generic parallel: The magical papyrus PGM XII contains the exact sequence “blood from the shoulder — ἄκανθις,” and the word was historically read by some editors as the name of a bird. The newest critical edition, however, argues that it is probably the plant acanthus, not the bird. That textual dispute is extremely relevant to your memory. And I found actual magical-papyrus dove traditions, including variant readings involving white-dove blood. So we're now looking at a real ancient magical vocabulary in which ἀκανθ-/acanthis and dove material coexist, even though I have not found the compound. 1. The PGM XII passage is the smoking gun The passage is PGM XII 415–429 = GEMF 15.463–477. It is a magical hermēneuma—a kind of decoding list in which cryptic/divine ingredient names are mapped onto mundane substances. The papyrus has: αἷμα ἀπ’ ὤμου · ἄκανθις literally: “blood from the shoulder — akanthis.” This isn't conjectural; ἄκανθις is what the papyrus actually reads. And now comes the extraordinary editorial history. Earlier editors Leemans and Preisendanz read the word as: ἄκανθις and understood it as “goldfinch”, i.e. the bird ἀκανθίς. The GEMF apparatus explicitly records this history. Modern editors Scarborough and the new GEMF editors argue that the context requires a plant, probably: ἄκανθος / ἄκανθα i.e. acanthus / a thorny plant. They connect it to Dioscorides and Galen. So this isn't just: “There is a word that happens to mean a bird.” It is: An actual magical papyrus contains an obscure AKANTH- word whose first editors thought meant a bird, while later editors decided it meant the acanthus plant. That's a very unusual textual instability. 2. And the bird reading isn't remotely implausible Because ἀκανθίς genuinely is a bird. The Cambridge Greek Lexicon gives: ἀκανθίς, -ίδος — “a songbird; perhaps finch” with Theocritus as a literary witness. The Greek-language LSJ digest is even more explicit: ἀκανθίς — είδος πτηνού, καρδελίνα “a kind of bird, goldfinch,” citing Aristotle and Theocritus. And Aristotle's History of Animals actually places it among birds that feed on thistles: ἀκανθοφάγα, ἀκανθίς, θραυπίς... “These and similar [birds] are thorn-eaters: the acanthis, the thraupis…” So an ancient reader encountering ἄκανθις could quite legitimately have understood: a bird associated with thorns. 3. There is an even better ancient association: ἀκανθίς + dove This keeps getting more interesting. Aristotle's bird discussion gives us the ἀκανθίς. But the classical poetic tradition also puts ἀκανθίδες and τρυγών together: ᾄδον κορυδοὶ καὶ ἀκανθίδες, ἔστενε τρυγών roughly: “Larks and acanthides sang; the turtle-dove mourned.” This is the Theocritean line behind the traditional identification of ἀκανθίς with the linnet/goldfinch. The later lexicographical tradition preserves exactly this example. So there really is an ancient textual neighborhood containing: ἀκανθίς — thorn-associated songbird τρυγών — turtle-dove Again, not “Acanthian dove.” But it makes your remembered compound considerably less alien to Greek literary vocabulary. 4. Now the magical doves The PGM corpus contains several genuine dove rituals. One especially useful example is PGM VIII 69–73, where a magical ink/mixture calls for: αἷμα περιστερᾶς λευκῆς “blood of a white dove.” The same formula survives in a parallel version in PGM VII, where the text has a notorious textual problem around μίλτον. The newer scholarship discusses whether Preisendanz was right to supplement the text with καὶ αἷμα (“and blood”). That's exactly the kind of thing you asked us to investigate: different editions can materially change what the magical text appears to say. And there are other dove rituals: white dove blood occurs in magical writing/ink; white dove material occurs in ritual preparations; PGM XIII includes a sacrificial sequence involving a περιστερά. So “dove” is unquestionably part of the magical papyrus vocabulary. 5. There's a potentially important third word: πελειά / πελειάς This may actually be more promising than περιστερά. Greek has several words for dove, but πέλεια / πελειάς is particularly interesting because of its religious and oracular associations. The Peleiai are the sacred doves associated with Dodona—and, by extension, the prophetic women/priestesses associated with the oracle. So if whatever you remember was not literally περιστερά, we could be looking for: ἀκανθ- + πελειά / πελειάς rather than: ἀκανθ- + περιστερά I have not found that combination in the magical papyri, but this is now one of the searches I'd prioritize. 6. Another thing I found that I think matters The PGM material isn't simply a collection of random spells. Some of it explicitly preserves secret equivalences. The PGM XII passage itself says that the practitioners had collected the solutions to the names of herbs and other things from many copies of these texts (ἀντιγράφων), and that these were secret. A modern study of the passage emphasizes that we're dealing with a tradition of encoded/decoded ingredient names. That matters enormously for your question. If you encountered a secondary source discussing the PGM tradition, it's entirely possible that what entered your memory wasn't the literal papyrus wording. It could have been an editorial interpretation, a gloss, a translation, or a reconstruction. In other words, “Acanthian Dove” might be a memory of something that never occurs verbatim in the surviving Greek, but that an editor or scholar described in those terms. 7. And there's a really weird mythological bridge Ἀκανθίς / Ἀκανθυλλίς is not only the name of a bird. In Antoninus Liberalis' Metamorphoses 7, Acanthis/Acanthyllis is a human girl who is transformed into a bird along with her family. The ancient mythographic tradition therefore literally has: Acanthis → bird and the name of the transformed woman is the same as the bird-name ἀκανθίς. That is an important distinction from “Acanthian” as a geographical adjective. The Acanth- bird tradition is therefore internally mythological, not merely zoological. 8. What I think may have happened to your memory At this point I see three increasingly plausible reconstructions. Hypothesis A — the word was Acanthis, not Acanthian This is now my favorite. You may have encountered: Ἀκανθίς / ἀκανθίς and subsequently remembered it in English as Acanthian. That would explain why the phrase feels like an old proper name rather than an ordinary adjective. And Acanthis is genuinely a bird-name in Greek. Hypothesis B — the memory fused two magical ingredients Something like: ἄκανθις + αἷμα περιστερᾶς λευκῆς could have become, in memory: Acanthian dove That sounds speculative—but we now know that both components genuinely occur in the magical corpus. Hypothesis C — there was an editorial/secondary-source formulation This is the one I most want to investigate next. The PGM XII ἄκανθις/ἄκανθος disagreement proves that modern editors are already doing exactly the kind of interpretive work that could generate an unusual English expression. If some older commentary described an ingredient as something like “the acanthine bird,” “acanthis,” “thorn-bird,” etc., and elsewhere discussed a dove, the compound could have entered your memory from a secondary scholarly source rather than an ancient text. One correction to our search strategy I don't think we should search only for the English phrase anymore. The high-value search set is now: Ἀκανθίς ἀκανθίς Ἀκανθυλλίς ἀκανθυλλίς Ἀκάνθιος ἀκάνθιος ἄκανθος ἄκανθα περιστερά πελειά / πελειάς τρυγών ἀκανθίς + ὄρνις ἀκανθίς + ἱερός ἀκανθίς + αἷμα ἀκανθίς + δῶρον ἀκανθίς + ἄγγελος / ἀγγέλλω ἀκανθίς + πέμπω and, crucially, not just PGM but PDM, GEMF, Greek magical formularies outside the PGM corpus, the Kyranides, Cyranides/physiological magic, magical handbooks, Christian magical papyri, and Byzantine magical/medical compilations. My assessment right now I would put the evidentiary status this way: “Acanthian Dove” as an attested ancient phrase: ❌ not found. Acanth-/acanthis + bird in ancient Greek: ✅ absolutely attested. Acanth-/acanthis in Greek magical papyri: ✅ absolutely attested, with a significant editorial dispute over whether it is a bird or plant. Dove in Greek magical papyri: ✅ extensively attested. Acanthis + dove in ancient Greek textual vicinity: ✅ yes, especially the Aristotelian/Theocritean bird vocabulary. A surviving ancient source that explains your exact phrase: still missing. And that last category is the one I think is worth pursuing rather than giving up. The PGM XII ἄκανθις problem is now the lead I would follow. The fact that a magical manuscript itself gives us an obscure akanth- term, while editors for more than a century have disagreed whether the word is a bird or a plant, is too close to your remembered object to leave unexplored. [QUERENT] [not in the paste] [ANSWER 6] Yes — Theophrastus is a very worthwhile place to check, and I think the result actually changes how I'd interpret the PGM XII evidence. Theophrastus does have the ἀκανθ- vocabulary In Historia plantarum 1.10, Theophrastus discusses different kinds of leaves, including ἀκανθόφυλλα (“thorn-/spine-leaved” plants) and ἄκανθα (“thorn/spine”). He is explicitly trying to establish botanical terminology and even argues that a thorn can function morphologically as a modified leaf. The particularly relevant passage is HP 1.10.6: ἀκανθῶδες δὲ ἐκ τῶν ἄκρων... “thorny/spiny at the extremities…” and then: φυλλάκανθον... “leaf-thorn…” followed by his discussion of plants such as ἄκανος and the general class of ἀκανώδη plants. So Theophrastus gives us an important piece of the lexical background: ἄκανθα / ἀκανθώδης / ἀκανθόφυλλα are firmly established botanical terminology well before the magical papyri. But here's the more interesting passage In HP 4.4, discussing plants encountered in Asia, Theophrastus repeatedly uses ἄκανθα. At 4.4.11, he says: Ἐν δὲ τῇ Ἀρίᾳ χώρᾳ ... ἄκανθά ἐστιν, ἐφ’ ἧς γίνεται δάκρυον ὅμοιον τῇ σμύρνῃ... “There is in the country called Aria a thorn, upon which there is produced a tear/resin resembling myrrh…” And at 4.4.13 he describes another extraordinary ἄκανθα that has no leaves, grows from a single root, has extremely sharp spines, and produces a juice when the spines are broken or rubbed. This is particularly relevant because PGM XII's disputed ἄκανθις is precisely the sort of word that could have been understood botanically in the Theophrastean tradition. But I don't find a dove in Theophrastus I specifically checked for: περιστερά — pigeon/dove τρυγών — turtle-dove πέλεια / πελειάς — dove ἀκανθίς combinations of the above and I am not finding a Theophrastean “Acanthian dove.” That's significant. The Historia plantarum is fundamentally a botanical work; its surviving Greek text is available in the Hort edition through Perseus, and the work is divided into nine surviving books. So Theophrastus gives us excellent evidence for the acanth- side, but not presently for the dove side. But there's a subtle thing here that I think matters Theophrastus' ἄκανθα isn't necessarily “the acanthus.” That's easy to miss. He uses ἄκανθα as a much broader botanical category for a thorn/spine-bearing plant. In 4.4 he applies it to exotic plants producing resins and poisonous juices. So when the PGM has: ἄκανθις and modern editors propose emending/interpreting it as ἄκανθος/ἄκανθα, they are operating inside an already very old Theophrastean botanical vocabulary. That makes the PGM XII controversy more interesting, not less. The really important question: does Theophrastus ever use ἀκανθίς? This is where I would not yet claim a negative. The ordinary searchable versions of Historia plantarum are imperfect, and “ἀκανθίς” is particularly vulnerable to OCR/search problems because it can occur in discussions of: ἄκανθα ἀκανθώδης ἀκανθόφυλλα ἀκανθίς as well as in apparatus/commentary rather than the running text. There are multiple editions to compare: Wimmer's critical edition, Hort's Loeb, and the older Aldine/early printed tradition. Perseus catalogs Hort's Greek edition, while the Wellcome copy gives us Wimmer's 1842 critical text. And this is exactly where I think we should go next. I want to check four layers separately: The Greek manuscripts/critical text of Theophrastus Wimmer's apparatus Hort's Greek text + translation/notes Ancient botanical commentators and later lexica citing Theophrastus Because if ἀκανθίς occurs in Theophrastus or in an ancient gloss on Theophrastus, that could be the missing bridge between the bird-name and the botanical ἄκανθα. And there's a particularly good reason to do it: Theophrastus is chronologically prior to both the PGM and the later magical tradition. If akanthis appears here as a botanical or bird term, we would have an early source for exactly the lexical ambiguity that later appears in PGM XII. So my current verdict after checking him is: No Acanthian dove yet. But Theophrastus gives us an important ancient source for the ἀκανθ-/ἄκανθα vocabulary, including exotic, resinous, poisonous “thorn” plants. The next step is to check whether the actual form ἀκανθίς occurs anywhere in Theophrastus or in the ancient/Byzantine transmission of his botanical terminology. That is a much more promising search than simply searching the phrase “Acanthian Dove.” [QUERENT] [not in the paste] [ANSWER 7] I checked the Nag Hammadi corpus specifically, including searches for the relevant Greek/Coptic vocabulary and the major tractates. The result is useful, but unfortunately it is not yet the ancient “Acanthian Dove” witness we're hoping for. What I find The Nag Hammadi codices themselves are Coptic translations of works that were generally composed in Greek, so this is exactly the sort of corpus where a Greek term can disappear into a Coptic equivalent and become difficult to recognize by English keyword searching. The authoritative Coptic Gnostic Library Online provides the Coptic texts, translations, introductions, and indexes. I searched particularly for the equivalents of: ἀκανθίς / ἀκανθίδος ἄκανθος / ἄκανθα Ἀκάνθιος itself searches the collection's texts and phrases, and the full corpus consists of the 52 tractates preserved in the codices. /Greek mythological material, archontic beings, astronomical powers, primordial humanity, and revelatory material. It as the daughter of Autonous and Hippodamia; after the death of her brother Anthus, the absent from one version, we can sometimes recover the underlying Greek tradition by comparing the parallel Coptic Ἀκανθίς / Ἀκανθυλλίς περιστερά — dove/pigeon πελειά / πελειάς — dove τρυγών — turtle-dove thorn/thistle + bird dove + messenger/angel dove + revelation dove + light/Spirit I do not find a Nag Hammadi passage that can responsibly be translated as “Acanthian Dove.” The online Nag Hammadi search facility itself searches the collection's texts and phrases, and the full corpus consists of the 52 tractates preserved in the codices. But there is one important qualification “No hit” is much less conclusive here than it would be for a Greek papyrus. The manuscripts are written in Coptic, and the underlying Greek originals are mostly lost. The collection therefore could preserve a Greek conceptual or lexical tradition without preserving the Greek word ἀκανθίς itself. And that makes the Greek originals of Nag Hammadi tractates particularly interesting for our investigation. The tractates I'd put at the top of the list I don't think we should treat all 52 texts equally. Several are much more likely to preserve the sort of material you're remembering. 1. On the Origin of the World This is probably my #1 Nag Hammadi target. It contains an extraordinarily syncretic cosmology involving Genesis, Egyptian/Greek mythological material, archontic beings, astronomical powers, primordial humanity, and revelatory material. It exists in two Nag Hammadi copies, which is useful because we can compare the Coptic witnesses. If “Acanthian” turns out to be a corrupted memory of a plant, bird, epithet, or mythological name, this is precisely the sort of tractate where I'd expect the underlying tradition to occur. 2. The Hypostasis of the Archons Also extremely promising because it contains mythological reinterpretations of Genesis and material concerning Eve, the serpent, the rulers, Sophia, and heavenly beings. A bird/dove image could easily be involved in a secondary Greek tradition even if the surviving Coptic text doesn't preserve the exact word. 3. The Gospel of the Egyptians This is another major candidate. It is packed with ritual, sacred names, heavenly beings, Sethian cosmology, baptismal imagery, and secret revelation. The text actually calls itself the “Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit” and contains long sequences of sacred names and powers. That makes it much more promising for your memory than, say, Thomas. 4. The Three Steles of Seth Again, ritual/revelatory material rather than narrative prose. It contains sequences of divine names and praise that could easily generate a remembered epithet. 5. Trimorphic Protennoia Very high priority because of its elaborate language of voice, revelation, descent, light, and the divine feminine. If your remembered “dove” was actually functioning as a voice/messenger/revelatory entity, this kind of text is much more promising than a straightforward Gnostic narrative. 6. The Thunder: Perfect Mind Another text I'd keep in the search set because of its unusual first-person divine voice and its imagery of identity, manifestation, concealment, and revelation. But I found something potentially more important outside the exact word search The Nag Hammadi material contains Egyptian/Gnostic transformations of older Greek mythological material. For example, On the Origin of the World and the Hypostasis of the Archons preserve traditions in which biblical Genesis is reworked through a cosmological vocabulary that is demonstrably interacting with wider late-antique mythological traditions. So if the thing you remember was something like: “the Acanthian Dove” I would now seriously entertain the possibility that “Acanthian” was not a geographical adjective at all. It could be the English form of a Greek personal name: Ἀκανθίς And that matters enormously because Ἀκανθίς is independently a mythological woman who becomes a bird. The ancient mythographical tradition identifies Acanthis/Acanthyllis as the daughter of Autonous and Hippodamia; after the death of her brother Anthus, the family is transformed into birds. Acanthis becomes a bird associated with the thistle. So we have a genuine ancient entity: Acanthis → transformed into a bird rather than merely: “Acanthian = from Acanthus.” That is a very different possible origin for your memory. And now something I want to flag as genuinely tantalizing The Greek word ἀκανθίς has a complicated semantic history. The standard LSJ tradition gives it as a bird (goldfinch), citing Aristotle and Theocritus. But other lexical traditions give ἀκανθίς botanical meanings as well. And the magical PGM XII passage literally has: αἷμα ἀπ᾽ ὤμου — ἄκανθις “blood from the shoulder — akanthis.” That is the magical text we've already identified. So there are now three independent ancient trajectories around the same word: And that makes the Greek originals of Nag Hammadi tractates particularly interesting for our investigation. The tractates I'd put at the top of the list I don't think we should treat all 52 texts equally. Several are much more likely to preserve the sort of material you're remembering. 1. On the Origin of the World If “Acanthian” turns out to be a corrupted memory of a plant, bird, epithet, or mythological name, this is precisely the sort of tractate where I'd expect the underlying tradition to occur. 2. The Hypostasis of the Archons Also extremely promising because it contains mythological reinterpretations of Genesis and material concerning Eve, the serpent, the rulers, Sophia, and heavenly beings. 3. The Gospel of the Egyptians ἀκανθίς = bird Ἀκανθίς = mythological woman transformed into a bird ἄκανθις = a mysterious magical ingredient in PGM XII And then separately: dove = an important magical animal in the PGM dove = prophetic/sacred bird in Greek religious tradition That is a remarkably dense intersection. One thing I would not do I would not yet say: “Nag Hammadi confirms the Acanthian Dove.” It doesn't. And I don't want to let the pattern become self-confirming just because we're finding lots of interesting associations. Instead, I think we're now at the point where the right question is: Is there a Greek or Coptic magical/gnostic text in which Ἀκανθίς (or a Coptic equivalent of it) is associated with a dove, messenger, revelation, light, or divine voice? That's a much sharper question. The next corpus I would hit I'd actually move beyond Nag Hammadi now and search the related late-antique material in this order: Pistis Sophia Berlin Gnostic Codex 8502 Greek fragments underlying Nag Hammadi texts Askew Codex / Bruce Codex Greek magical papyri outside PGM Coptic magical papyri Christian magical papyri Greek magical handbooks and formularies The Kyranides Byzantine magical/medical lexica Hesychius and Photius Scholia on Aristotle/Theocritus Antoninus Liberalis + lost Ornithogonia material The reason I'm increasingly interested in Pistis Sophia and the Coptic magical material is that they sit much closer to the intersection we're looking for: Gnostic revelation + ritual + secret names + birds/animals + Greek magical vocabulary, whereas Nag Hammadi proper gives us relatively little evidence for the literal phrase. And importantly, the Nag Hammadi corpus has multiple textual witnesses to some works, so where a term looks absent from one version, we can sometimes recover the underlying Greek tradition by comparing the parallel Coptic copies. So: Nag Hammadi doesn't give us the Dove yet. But it hasn't killed the hypothesis. If anything, it pushes me toward the possibility that we're looking for a Greek term/name that got translated or transformed before reaching the surviving Coptic manuscripts. The next place I'd go is Pistis Sophia + the Askew/Bruce/Greek-Gnostic material, while simultaneously checking the actual Greek fragments of the Nag Hammadi works. That's where I think our chances of finding the missing “Acanthian” are better.