Definition
An agalma is a figure, impression, or image appearing on a seal. In legal usage, the term refers specifically to the engraved or embossed device — a symbol, portrait, emblem, or other graphic element — that constitutes the identifying mark of a seal used to authenticate documents.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A cult image or votive offering — an object of religious veneration in ancient Greek practice.
Historical common usage: Webster's 1913 does not record this term, consistent with its rarity in English outside specialized legal and classical contexts.
The gap between common and legal meaning is notable. In its Greek and religious context, an agalma is a sacred object or offering — something pleasing to a deity. In legal usage, the word is stripped of religious connotation entirely and refers solely to the identifying image on a seal. Researchers encountering the term in classical or ecclesiastical sources should not assume the legal meaning carries over.
Why It Matters in Research
Agalma is a highly specialized term of historical legal practice, relevant almost exclusively to research in older English and civil law sources concerning the authentication of instruments, deeds, and official documents. Its practical significance lies in the law of seals: whether a document was properly executed often turned on whether a valid seal — complete with a recognizable agalma — had been affixed. Researchers working in early common law materials, particularly those involving sealed instruments, deeds, corporate seals, or official writs, may encounter the term in treatises or glossaries without recognizing its precise technical scope.
The term drops out of practical legal usage well before the twentieth century. Modern legal dictionaries generally omit it entirely. Researchers who encounter it in historical sources should treat it as a descriptor of the physical or visual component of a seal — the image itself — as distinct from the wax, paper wafer, or other material in which the image is impressed.
Historical Dictionary Support
Both editions of Black's Law Dictionary agree on the core meaning: agalma denotes an image or impression on a seal. The second edition is marginally more precise, specifying "an impression or image of anything on a seal" and attributing the definition to Cowell — that is, John Cowell's legal lexicon, the Interpreter (1607), one of the earliest English legal dictionaries and a primary source for civil-law-influenced terminology in the common law tradition. The first edition's formulation, "anything on a seal," is slightly looser but substantively consistent.
Neither edition provides further doctrinal development, and neither discusses the term in the context of any particular legal rule or case. This reflects the word's status as a term of art borrowed from classical and ecclesiastical Latin rather than a concept with significant common law jurisprudence of its own.