The Dictionary of Demons, page 4
The Jews were not the only people to view demonic names as having talismanic power. Many of the cultures that grew out of the Fertile Crescent approached the names of demons in this fashion. Although those names certainly had the power to attract the demons’ attention, when used in the proper context—and often by specially trained individuals—the names could also bind and banish the evil of these beings.
As far back as ancient Sumer, the names of demons were used in rituals of exorcism. The Sumerians had a rich and colorful demonology, and many aspects of Western demonology can be traced back to this ancient civilization. Lilith, for example, has her roots in the mythology of the Sumerians, where she appears most strikingly as the ardat lili, a maiden ghost who, having died a virgin, perpetually seeks out men at night in order to have sex with them. Her amorous attentions, however, are dangerous, if not fatal, and in this respect the ardat lili was a being greatly feared.6 Numerous protective spells survive that are devoted to keep her at bay. Given the ardat lili’s beautiful appearance and her lustful but dangerous embrace, it’s easy to see how stories of this variety of Lilith demon may have eventually evolved into the succubus of medieval Europe.
Since so much of Western demonology is interconnected (especially once you dig down to its ancient roots), it can be fairly boggling to navigate at the outset. The Sumerians, as well as their cultural inheritors, the Babylonians and Assyrians, believed that demons were responsible for many of the evils in the world. There were demons of earthquakes and demons of storms, and these were frequently depicted as literally grinding the earth to dust beneath the awesome fury of their power.7 There were also demons of disease, and these were the demons that attacked humanity directly, rather than simply sowing disaster all around. Demons of illness were thought to grip hold of people, inhabiting their bodies and thereby causing the symptoms of their ailment. This belief forms the very foundation of the notion of demonic possession, and it gave rise to a fascinating variety of spells, prayers, and rites intended to drive the evil spirits out.8
Mesopotamian demon bowl, written in Mandaic script. Most of these items, intended to protect against demons and the afflictions they bring, date to the late Sassanid period (sixth to seventh centuries CE). Image courtesy of the Wellcome Collection, London.
The Sumerians had a demon for practically every ailment, and for demons, they had a specialized class of priest. Known as an ashipu priest or ašipu priest, these specially trained individuals were responsible for carrying out most of the rites and rituals related to exorcism. The rites of exorcism were part magick and part prayer, and they typically invoked specific deities from the Mesopotamian pantheon who were believed to have a particular skill for driving out demons. Among these were Ea, god of wisdom; Marduk, his mighty son; and Shamash, a solar deity connected to law and judgment.9
Rites of Exorcism
In Sumerian rituals of exorcism, the name of the demon possessing the afflicted individual was believed to be instrumental in driving that demon away. Oftentimes the name was not known, and so Sumerian exorcisms frequently included a litany of demonic names, working on the theory that if all of the demons that could possibly be responsible for the possession were named then at least one of those names would hit its mark. Many of the ancient rites of exorcism included a part where the exorcist demanded to know the name of the demon responsible for the possession. The demon was abjured in the name of various gods to give up the secret of its name so that it could be better controlled and dispelled by the exorcist.10
This technique should seem familiar to anyone who has read the biblical tale of the Gerasene demoniac. In Mark 5 and Luke 8, Jesus comes across a man so afflicted by the demons inside of him that he has abandoned human habitation to wander among the lonely tombs. Covered in rags and filth, he spends his days shrieking, crying, and doing harm to himself. In a famous exchange, Jesus demands to know the name of the demon possessing the man so that he can drive that demon out. The demon—several demons, actually—speak through the mouth of the afflicted man, saying, “My name is legion, for we are many.” 11
The chilling significance of this statement is somewhat dulled if we forget that Jesus was living in a world of Roman occupation, and the main tool of the imperial war machine was the Roman legion. This was a collection of well-armed foot soldiers ranging in number between 5,300 and 6,000 men. In Jesus’s time, Roman legions swept inexorably across the land, conquering whatever countries lay in their path and occupying them in the name of the emperor—who, by that time, was worshipped as a god. Thus, the response of the demon via the Gerasene man is chilling in two respects. For the authors who recorded this story in the gospels, the use of the word legion is inextricably linked with the brutal and unyielding soldiers of Rome. Further, it conjures images of a force so large as to be nearly uncountable in the ancient world. No wonder author William Blatty made such potent use of this biblical quote in The Exorcist and nearly every demon afterward is said to command not a battalion nor a phalanx of lesser devils but very specifically legions.
Aside from the “we are legion” comment, the story of the Gerasene man is important for another reason. Not only does Jesus demand the name of the demon, but he also then drives the demons out into a herd of swine. The swine go mad and charge to their collective deaths over a cliff, a detail that quite potently links the scene with tried-and-true methods of exorcism practiced in Jesus’s day: the ancient Sumerians would frequently use an animal substitute for the possessed individual, transferring the demon through the power of its name into the animal. The demon was then bound to the animal with the power of its name—and with a little help from the gods whose names were also invoked to control and compel the demon.12 With the demon thus trapped in this substitute flesh, the animal was then killed, an act which was thought to similarly kill the demon.13
While goats were sometimes used as the sacrificial substitutes in this procedure, another common animal used to draw the demon out of a human subject was a pig. Thus, the exorcism performed by Jesus on the Gerasene man conformed to all the familiar conventions that had come to typify exorcism in his day: he demands the demon’s name, and he drives the demon into a substitute animal that is then killed to destroy the demon. The only real difference for those witnessing the act at the time would have been slight. Rather than abjuring the demon in the name of a variety of gods, Jesus invokes only the power of one god, God the Father, who acts through him to drive the demon away.
Not everyone reading this book is going to be comfortable with the idea of comparing Jesus’s techniques of exorcism with those of the decidedly pagan Sumerians. But if we are to really understand the roots of demonology in the Western tradition, we cannot get sidetracked by the theological significance of stories about demons. Instead, we need to take a good, hard look at the socio-historical significance of these beliefs as taken within the context of their own cultural milieu. In simpler terms, there is a story behind Western beliefs about demons, and that story has been shaped by the beliefs and traditions of a variety of people—not just the people who wrote the Bible. A lot of stories went into the development of demons as we know them, and it behooves us to understand them all—and how they changed and influenced one another.
Agents of the Damned
The very use of the word demon conjures images of a Judeo-Christian14 worldview in which the damned are cast into Hell while worthy souls are rewarded with an eternity of bliss in Heaven. This is one of the primary reasons that most Pagans, Wiccans, and practitioners of other alternative faiths tend to shy away from the concept of demons. Modern Paganism acknowledges the existence of spirits, and spirits in the Pagan worldview can be both beneficent and malevolent, with many varying shades in between. And yet you will rarely encounter a Pagan who is willing to refer to a spirit explicitly as a demon. The term is too charged with its Christian associations. For the same reason, many Pagans also have trouble with the concept of angels—even though the angels shared by Christians, Muslims, and Jews are some of the most Pagan remnants of the Abrahamic faiths.15 Angels and demons stretch back to the many polytheistic religions that proliferated throughout the ancient Middle East prior to the establishment of Jewish monotheism, and they are part of the rich cultural and mythological milieu from which the biblical tradition was born.
There is no denying that the word demon has come to possess strong associations with various iterations of the Christian faith, and yet demons as a class of beings are not exclusive to Christianity. Nearly every religion under the sun recognizes some class of being that can be interpreted as demonic. Hinduism has devas and asuras, which have strong comparisons to more familiar Christian ideas of angels and demons. There are demons in the Buddhist faith, and while they are more frequently depicted as conceptual beings representative of ideas and illusions, the shamanic Bön tradition native to Tibet fused with Buddhism to produce a cosmology rich in demons, gods, and hungry ghosts. As we have seen from our brief glimpse of the exorcisms of ancient Sumer, pre-Christian societies certainly had their versions of spirits that are more than ghosts and less than gods, and many of these are specifically malevolent in nature and antagonistic toward humanity. Furthermore, these evil spirits, which can be found in nearly every mythos the world over, are often depicted not only as malevolent entities that jealously attack humanity but also as beings capable of assuming control over their victims, up to and including full bodily possession.
Generally speaking (and certainly for the purposes of this book), demons are agents of disaster and chaos that willfully visit suffering and disease upon mortals. They are not exclusive to Christianity, nor is the concept of demonic possession exclusive to a Christian worldview. Demons are far older than Abrahamic religions, and many of our classic concepts of these antinomian beings have their roots in religious systems that were old before Christianity was even begun.
It is not the purpose of this book to delve into the theological implications of exorcism and demonology, whether these things are true or proper or right. Nor is it the intention of this book to address the question of whether or not demons are real. As far as this work is concerned, reality is secondary to belief. Regardless of their categorical reality, people from the ancient world onward have espoused a belief in demons, and this belief has had a tremendous impact on Western culture, from our literature to our theology to our magick and folk beliefs. Because of this impact, it behooves us to better understand where our ideas about demons originated and how those ideas have developed over the years. This book is my contribution to that process of understanding.
II. The Sources for the
Dictionary of Demons
To place this book in context, we have traveled from the roots of the biblical tradition to ancient fragments of tales involving angels that did not fall from Heaven so much as they sauntered vaguely downward. From there, we found ourselves exploring the curious Testament of Solomon and the later tradition of European magick that merged concepts from the legend of Solomon with occasionally misunderstood techniques from medieval Jewish magick. Throughout all of this, we have seen how the concept of demons and fallen angels has grown and evolved over time, shaping and being shaped in turn by the very development of Western civilization. We have explored how demons have always been with us, from the very start of civilization, and how in at least some instances, they have been approached not as invincible enemies of humanity but as otherworldly tools to be exploited. Now it is time to consider precisely the books and other works that have gone into the collection of demon names gathered in this tome.
The most obvious source for the demons of this book is the Bible. Despite the influence of earlier sources—notably the mythology of the Sumerians and Babylonians—on early Jewish and Christian demonology, the Bible remains one of the most significant texts in the formation of Western demonology. The stories recorded in the Bible gave rise to a vast and colorful tradition of folklore and extra-biblical writings, not the least of which is the whole Solomonic tradition.16 To this end, I have also included a number of apocryphal sources that feature the names of demons. These lost books of the Bible were typically viewed at some point as genuine scripture but were then cut from the biblical canon in the first few centuries of Christianity. Apocryphal texts sourced in this book include I Enoch, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Ascension of Isaiah. In addition to the biblical apocrypha, I have also sourced a variety of texts from traditions that are nevertheless tied to or inspired by the Bible. This includes Jewish Talmudic lore as well as some of the manuscripts recovered in the desert of Qumran. The Qumran texts, known popularly under the collective title of the Dead Sea Scrolls, include works such as the Book of Giants, the War Rule, and the Testament of Amram (sometimes also called the Dream-Vision of Amram or simply Vision of Amram).
One of my goals when writing this book was to make each entry self-sufficient in terms of bibliographical references, and thus, whenever I source a particular work in the entry for a demon’s name, I name that source directly in the entry. I also frequently cite some of the background information about the source itself, including its suspected author and the time in which it was thought to have been written. This may begin to seem redundant if readers go through the text alphabetically, perusing each entry, but this is a dictionary, and I felt it was far more likely that readers would skip around in the text, referencing names in various locations. With this usage in mind, I’ve made certain to include all the information you will possibly need within each entry so you will not have to flip back and forth between the entries and endnotes.
That being said, let me return to the list of works sourced for this dictionary. In addition to the biblical sources mentioned above, some names have come from miscellaneous scattered sources, such as the writings of clergymen who offered commentary on the beliefs in demons during their day (for example, Franciscan theologian Ludovico Sinistrari and Benedictine Dom Augustin Calmet) to dictionaries and encyclopedias written by demonographers like Collin de Plancy and Lewis Spence. Some of these works had to be sourced in their original language, notably Latin and French. Although translations of de Plancy’s work exist in English, I found it more useful to read his entries in their original French, and when direct translations appear, they have been translated by my own hand. Any errors are strictly my own.
The most significant Latin work to provide a source of demon names for this text is De Praestigiis Daemonum (1564), with its famous appendix, the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. This was written by the sixteenth-century humanist scholar Johannes Wierus (1515–1588). The Pseudomonarchia names a total of seventy-two demons, their ranks and powers, with details that reappear throughout the Goetia. It is sometimes called De Officiorum Spirituum, as it was from a similarly titled work that Wierus drew the names of his demons. It is likely related to, if not identical with, a text referenced by Johannes Trithemius as the De officio spirituum.
Trithemius (1462–1516) was a teacher once removed from Wierus: he had mentored Wierus’s own instructor, Henry Cornelius Agrippa. Best known for his Steganographia, a coded work that contains nearly all of the spirits identified in the Ars Theurgia, Trithemius was an abbot as well as an occultist and avid collector of magickal texts.17 In his Antipalus Maleficiorum,18 a catalogue of the known books dedicated to the summoning of spirits, Trithemius includes a reference to De officio spirituum.19 In his entry on this book, he records, In hoc libro sunt secreto omnium artium: “in this book are all secrets of the art.” This statement has been echoed in several grimoires thereafter, and a number of subsequent texts have been given titles based on the Book of the Offices of the Spirits. Whether or not any of these are direct copies of the book itself or merely derivative of the material passed along through Wierus and others is unclear. At this point in time, no copies of the works initially referenced by Wierus or Trithemius are known to have survived.
Wierus’s teacher, Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1545), is most famous for his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1509–1510). Although it does not add directly to this book, Agrippa’s massive work influenced a great many of the subsequent texts in the grimoiric tradition, particularly with regard to magickal languages.20
Writing not long after Agrippa and Wierus, Englishman Reginald Scot echoed the list of seventy-two names in his 1584 work, On the Discoverie of Witchcraft. This work is ostensibly written in English, but given Scot’s spelling and dated idiom, it very nearly needed its own translator. Scot’s seventy-two Goetic demons will be familiar from Wierus and related works, with one or two minor exceptions that may be attributed to scribal error.
After these sources, the bulk of the names recorded in this volume are derived from the rich and extensive grimoiric tradition of Renaissance Europe.21 The grimoires sourced in this book generally date between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, although some are thought to be older and a few were written as recently as the mid-1800s. The first series of names added from the grimoiric tradition came from the famous Goetia, and this, in fact, was the kernel around which my initial collection of demon names had coalesced. The Goetia is the first and probably oldest book of the Lesser Key of Solomon, and thanks largely to occultist Aleister Crowley, it is also the most well-known book in this grimoire.22
