depotentize

present singular third person depotentizes · participle present depotentizing · participle past depotentized · past depotentized · alternative depotentise

1. To make less potent.

   This emphasis on the funerary interpretation has served only to depotentize Egyptian religion and to distort our understanding of ancient Egyptian religious sensibility.

   2004, Jeremy Naydler, Shamanic Wisdom in the Pyramid Texts

   3 more examples

   It may act somewhat more decidedly upon this than upon the arterial, or rather it may tend to depotentize the arterial system in strict proportion as it may tend to cause a preponderance of the venous.

   1868, Gottlieb Heinrich Georg Jahr, Frederick Greenwood Snelling, Hull's Jahr: A New Manual of Homoeopathic Practice

   People in a state of heat are not only dangerous to other people since they are contagious, they can also pass darkness or dirt on to cattle, and they can depotentize medicine and food.

   2000, Edward C. Green, Indigenous Theories of Contagious Disease, page 79

   However, the notion that an originally “mythological” figure has been “depotentized”, then variously “repotentized” or further “demythologized” by later, dependent authors, though the “mythological” understanding finally prevailed in later Jewish literature, does not sound entirely convincing.

   2012, Rebecca S. Watson, Chaos Uncreated