Ancient Greeks and Romans had no word for supernatural
Ghosts, gods and omens are as old as storytelling, but the idea of a separate realm above nature is surprisingly young. The word supernatural was coined in the Middle Ages, first in Latin, and many cultures today still draw no line between the natural and the otherworldly at all.
The term joins the Latin super, meaning above or beyond, with natura, nature. Post-classical Latin supernaturalis appears in the 6th century, and English picked it up both from that Latin and from the Middle French supernaturel. Its earliest known English outing is in a Middle English version of Catherine of Siena's Dialogue, dated to around 1425.
Antiquity had plenty to say about nature itself. Augustine used the word and its relatives at least 600 times in City of God. What it lacked was an opposite. Neoplatonist dialogues of the 3rd century AD helped seed that idea, and Christian theology developed it. By the medieval period nature carried ten distinct meanings and natural eleven. The 12th-century scholastic Peter Lombard asked which events could be credited to God alone, describing them as praeter naturam, beyond nature. At first the word supernatural belonged solely to Christian thought; only later did it stretch to cover the magical, ghostly and occult.
Today the label covers non-physical beings such as spirits, angels, demons and deities, plus powers credited to them or through them: magic, levitation, telekinesis, precognition, extrasensory perception. It turns up in secular settings too, in everyday superstition and belief in the paranormal. People often swap it for paranormal or preternatural, the latter usually describing abilities that seem to exceed physical law. Parapsychologists speak of psi, which their journal defined in 1948 as personal processes that transcend accepted laws.
Philosophers find the concept slippery precisely because it depends on its opposite. There is no agreed definition of natural, nor of where naturalism stops. Since David Hume, most have treated the laws of nature as contingent: they could have been otherwise. That distinction between what physics permits and what logic permits is where arguments about miracles and marvels usually begin.
Source: Supernatural
