Table of Contents
The Demons of King Solomon
Introduction
Asmodeus
The Floor of the Basement is the Roof of Hell - Stephen Graham Jones
Marchosias
Whimsy - Michelle Belanger
Ephippas
An Angel Passes - Whitley Strieber
Ronove
The Wraith of Sunshine House - Ronald Malfi
Amdusias
Symphony - Philip Fracassi
Hanar
The Red Library - Jonathan Maberry
Ornias
Mischief - Richard Chizmar
Buer
Hunter Hunterson and the President of Hell - Scott Sigler
Agaras
The Old Man Down the Road - R.S. Belcher
Abyzou
Class of 72 - J.D. Horn
Caim
By Promise Preordained - Seanan McGuire
Belial
Dalia of Belial - Michael Griffin
Copyright © 2017 Aaron J. French
Introduction © 2017, Richard Smoley
The Floor of the Basement is the Roof of Hell © 2017, Stephen Graham Jones
Whimsy © 2017, Michelle Belanger
An Angel Passes © 2017, Whitley Strieber
The Wraith of Sunshine House © 2017, Ronald Malfi
Symphony © 2017, Philip Fracassi
The Red Library © 2017, Jonathan Maberry
Mischief © 2017, Richard Chizmar
Hunter Hunterson and the President of Hell © 2017, Scott Sigler
The Old Man Down the Road © 2017, R.S. Belcher
Class of ’72 © 2017, J.D. Horn
By Promise Preordained © 2017, Seanan McGuire
Dalia of Belial © 2017, Michael Griffin
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ISBN: 978-1-947654-08-2 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-947654-14-3 (hc)
ISBN: 978-1-947654-09-9 (ebook)
JournalStone rev. date: December 15, 2017
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963038
Printed in the United States of America
Cover Design: Chuck Killorin
Interior Layout: Jess Landry
Edited by: Aaron J. French
INTRODUCTION
RICHARD SMOLEY
In June 1998, I took an intensive retreat in occult practice. Suitably, it was in a large old English country house somewhere in the midst of Derbyshire. A dozen of us were holed up for a couple of weeks with two instructors, shades drawn at all hours of the day.
At one point when I was at the altar doing a certain practice, outside the window in the night I saw an image of a birdlike creature, with a large beak that constituted its whole face. Its eyes were on tentacles like those of a crustacean. The body was slender, like the legs of a stork, and yellow. It did not seem menacing, but soon it was joined by other creatures of the same kind.
They clattered against the window, trying to get in. (Recently I saw a Neolithic cave drawing that seemed to represent similar creatures, suggesting that they have been with us for a long time.)
Afterward I told one of the instructors what I had seen. He told me to draw a counterclockwise pentagram in the air and to “keep it going.” Which I did.
Later I went up to him and said weakly, “I think I managed to get rid of them.”
To which he replied, “I was trying to get you to invite them IN!”
At which point it became obvious that whatever disposition one needs for the invocation of spirits, I do not have it.
But, of course, many others do. Understandably. Sooner or later one realizes, whether through reason or experience, that the world available to the five senses cannot be the sum total of reality. As soon as we accept this fact, certain questions arise: Are there any life forms that inhabit these unseen worlds? If so, what relation do we have to them? Are they friendly toward us, hostile, neutral? Are they possibly useful?
Attempting to answer or work with these questions comprises a large part of the religious heritage of the human race.
If we think of these unseen worlds through the analogy of the natural world, we can guess that the beings inhabiting these realms are manifold. They are of all shapes and sizes, natures, qualities, characteristics. To pursue the idea still further, we can suppose that, like most of the creatures inhabiting the visible realm, they are neither friendly nor hostile to man. They exist in their own right, and, left on their own, have no truck with us and will do us no harm. After all, in the vast range of living creatures in the physical world, only very few are dangerous. Even fewer are useful: the number of plant and animal species that we make use of for food or for any other purpose is infinitesimal. Appearance is not a reliable guide to anything here: even the ones we find beautiful are rarely useful, and even the most hideous ones are for the most part completely innocuous.
So it may be with the world of spirits. In order to have a somewhat more objective sense of this realm, we must set aside certain deep-seated habits of thought. The most important one comes from Christianity. It is found in the First Epistle of John:
Brothers, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. (1 John 4:1-3)
This may not be quite as helpful as it sounds—after all, “the devils also believe, and tremble” (James 2:19). But this criterion has set the tone for Christian discourse ever since the first century, and it shapes our mindsets to this day, whether or not we have any use for Christianity.
The Devil does not, as a matter of fact, appear very often in the Bible. One of the few places where he does is in the prologue to Job, which portrays him not as the archrival to the Lord, but a reasonably friendly acquaintance of his—friendly enough to pose a wager about the reliability of the Lord’s servant Job.
This picture reflects a view of the Devil that predates Christianity (Job was probably written in the sixth century BC) and still survives in parts of Judaism, such as the Kabbalah. The Devil is satan—originally a common noun, not a proper name, and meaning adversary. But he is not an adversary of God; he is the adversary of the human race—both the tempter and the prosecuting officer. The Greek version of his name—diabolos, meaning accuser—highlights this role. Even in the New Testament, Christ goes into the wilderness “to be tempted of the devil” (Matthew 4:1; my emphasis). The Devil does not show up unexpected: Christ has gone out in the wilderness precisely in order to be tested by him. It is, shall we sa
y, a matter of quality control.
The matter is complicated further by the fact that in Judaism the angels are not always favorable to man. Indeed, as one scholar points out, there is a “rivalry between angels and men that we find at various places in Talmud and Midrash. True, the angels often come to the aid of men, but they are just as often in competition with man when it comes to currying favour with God. The angels are quite simply jealous of man…”1
This idea, strange as it may sound, penetrated into the New Testament. The apostle Paul never mentions angels in a favorable way, often portraying them as rivals (“we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men”: 1 Corinthians 4:9). Even some interpretations of the parable of the Prodigal Son say that the “elder brother,” who loyally stays home while the younger son runs off and who complains when he is welcomed back, symbolizes the angels, who are jealous of the reception given by God the Father to the Prodigal Son that is the human race (Luke 15:11-33).
The theological line between angels and devils, so sharply drawn by conventional Christianity, is blurrier than we usually think. The angels are not always friendly—might it be the case that the devils are not always hostile?
It is not an assumption that one can safely make. Nevertheless, from a certain point of view the demons offer an advantage: you may be able to get them to do things that an angel will not do—seduce a love interest, put a curse on someone, commit murder. This assumption underlies necromancy as practiced over the centuries. But it does require you to traffic with dubious entities. Richard Kieckhefer of Northwestern University, an expert on medieval magic, deftly summarizes the issue:
Ordinary prayer and official ritual assume that the spirits invoked are in general well disposed toward humankind, and enter readily into a helping relationship. The praying person’s invocation of God or a saint is an appeal to a benevolent being. In this respect the rituals of demonic magic differ from other rites: they invoke fallen spirits taken (by the necromancers as well as by their critics) to be unwilling, uncooperative, inimical and treacherous. The operations of demonic magic, more than other rituals, are thus explicit contests of wills. The necromancer recognizes a need to heap conjuration upon conjuration, and to buttress these formulas with supporting means of power, precisely because the demons are reluctant to come, and if they come will do everything in their power to escape the magician’s control, threaten him, and deceive him.2
(A word on terminology: etymologically, necromancy ought to mean evoking the spirits of the dead, from the Greek nekroi, “the dead,” and manteia, “prophesying, divination,” but in practice it refers to evoking spirits in general. In the late medieval period, nigromantia was a more or less synonymous variant, from the Latin nigrum, “black”: hence black magic.)3
One could cite any number of magical texts to illustrate the dynamic that Kieckhefer is talking about. Here is one from around the tenth century AD, found in Cairo. The text is written, possibly in blood, on two large animal bones:
Chu, Kouchos, Trophos, Kimphas, Psotomis, and Phemos, and Ouliat. These are the names of the six powers of death, these who bring every sickness down upon every person, these who bring every soul out from every body. I adjure you by your names … and your powers and your places and the security of death (itself), that you shall go to Aaron son of Tkouikira, and that you shall bear away his soul.
The curse is backed up by a threat:
I adjure you by the manner in which
The text is implying that if these beings do not carry out the sorcerer’s wishes, they will be subject to the punishments listed.
The spirits, however, are not so easily managed. Often they evade the bonds and seals put on them. The most famous example is in Goethe’s Faust. In one scene Faust has the devil Mephistopheles in his study, and Mephistopheles cannot leave because Faust has the sacred seal of the pentagram engraved at the door. Mephistopheles asks if he can be released, but Faust refuses, thinking he has a great advantage in having the devil trapped. But Mephistopheles sends Faust into a dreamlike reverie and then summons a rat to gnaw an opening in the pentagram, whereby he makes his escape.5
Another hazard in the evocation of spirits is unintended and undesired consequences. The magus Lon Milo DuQuette provides a useful example in his autobiography, My Life with the Spirits. As a young man, he decided to evoke one of the “fallen angels” of the famous grimoire known as The Lesser Key of Solomon the King. The spirit he chose was Orobas, described thus:
He is a Great and Mighty Prince appearing at first like a Horse; but after the command of the Exorcist he putteth on the image of a Man. His Office is to discover all things Past, Present, and to Come; also to give Dignities, and Prelacies, and the Favour of Friends and of Foes. He giveth true answers of Divinity, and of the Creation of the World. He is very faithful unto the Exorcist, and will not suffer him to be tempted of any Spirit. He governeth 20 Legions of Spirits.6
DuQuette’s evocation of Orobas came at a point of financial extremity in his life, when he was completely out of money and had nothing with which even to buy groceries for his wife and child. He made the sigil of Orobas, anointed it with the Oil of Abramelin the Mage, and poured his invocation to the seal with all the fury of a lifetime of pent-up frustration and self-hatred.
At length, he writes, “I blinked and squinted through the tears and sweat and strained to see what was happening in the triangle [sigil]. I didn’t ‘see’ anything, but something most definitely was happening. The feeling was unmistakable. I was no longer alone in the room. It was like waking up from a dream to discover that your dog is just inches from your face staring at you.”
But things went awry. A drop of sweat dripped into his eye, and he unthinkingly wiped it off. “The powerful smell of cinnamon triggered a terrifying alarm. My hand and fingers were still covered with Oil of Abramelin!”
DuQuette did not want to leave the magical circle, which would violate the rules of Solomonic magic, but he was terrified of losing his eyesight and, blinded, stumbled toward the bathroom. But then, he writes, “I could see! I could see the whole scene as if I was perched somewhere over the ceiling. I saw myself moving toward the bathroom door. I saw the circle and the divine names. I saw the carpet, the windows, and the bed. I saw the triangle and inside the triangle, I saw the demon Orobas—a miniature black horse waiting patiently. It had an almost comic oversized head with huge round eyes. It looked bored.”
Commanding the demon to stay, DuQuette went to the bathroom and washed his eyes and his fingers. Returning, he commanded the demon to do something to turn around his life—within one hour.
Within that time, a long-absent friend, Mad Bob, showed up at DuQuette’s door in a rusted Chevrolet. He threw the keys to DuQuette and told him the car was his.
With the car, whose floorboard was missing in places, as were its knobs and door handles, DuQuette managed to get a job the next day with a medical device manufacturer. Within two months he was promoted into the engineering department. “Mad Bob’s gift of a car within the prescribed one hour was the unambiguous catalyst that triggered a chain-reaction of events that manifested everything that I demanded,” DuQuette writes. He pronounced the operation a success.
But the story does not end there. DuQuette needed to put the Orobas parchment sigil in a safe place, because any unprotected person who came into contact with it would fall prey to the demon’s influence. He taped the sigil to the inside of his guitar and forgot about it.
Several weeks later, a music student of DuQuette’s offered to inlay the guitar with a mother-of-pearl Egyptian solar disk. So the student, Kurt, had the guitar in his possession for a week. He found the sigil and returned it to DuQuette with the finished guitar, but D
uQuette did not tell him what it was. Kurt told DuQuette that he was going to the race track. The previous day, he said, “‘My dad and I spent the whole day at Santa Anita [racetrack]. I just fell in love with the horses. We went down to the paddock before each race to get a close look. They’re so beautiful. They’re like gods. When they look at me I feel like a horse!’ He then whinnied like a horse.”
Kurt stayed a part of DuQuette’s magical scene for the next fifteen years, but “sadly, his addiction to horseracing and other forms of gambling escalated year by year into self-destructive behavior that eventually rendered him a social cripple.” During that time DuQuette performed numerous invocations of the equine Orobas, charging him to leave the man in peace. But to no avail.
Two things are worth noting in this story. In the first place, something goes wrong. DuQuette accidentally puts the stinging oil in his eyes, blinding himself. But it is this very oil that gives him vision out of his body, in which he can see the demon.
This points to a salient feature of occult ritual: one way or another, things go wrong. These evocations are long, complex, and fraught with details. Failure to follow the instructions puts the whole evocation in jeopardy, but they are so complex—and the situation is so intense to begin with—that errors are bound to slip in. Even apart from this obvious fact, as Kieckhefer says above, the demons are uncooperative: they do not want to be controlled and will get out of it if they possibly can, so they have every incentive to get the operator to make a mistake. In this instance, the mistake—accidentally rubbing his eyes with oil—actually precipitates the vision, but it could well have turned out otherwise. Incidentally, DuQuette was hurt and temporarily blinded by this error.
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