The second thing worth noting is that DuQuette actually describes what the demon looked like and how it appeared to him: as a miniature horse with an oversized head. This phenomenological description is comparatively rare in such narratives. Often we are told that the spirits appeared, but we are not always told how or what they looked like. We can see one example in a famous account of a necromantic evocation in the memoirs of the Renaissance adventurer Benvenuto Cellini. The evocation, which was conducted by a Sicilian priest, took place at the Coliseum in Rome in 1535. Cellini’s account is vivid and detailed. At one point, after an hour and a half of evocation, “there appeared several legions of spirits, to such an extent that the Coliseum was filled with them.” Cellini asks them if he will be reunited with his lover Angelica, but they give no response.
The rite has to be repeated. This time they bring along “a little lad of pure virginity,” a shop boy about twelve years old. Again the priest makes elaborate preparations and “very terrible invocations, calling by name a multitude of demons, the chiefs of the legions of spirits … to such a purpose that in a short space of time they filled the whole Coliseum a hundredfold as many as had appeared that first time.”
That is all Cellini says about the appearance of the spirits. He adds that the lad, “in greatest terror said, there were a million of the fiercest men swarming around and threatening us. He said besides that four enormous giants had appeared, who were striving to force their way into the circle. All the while the necromancer, trembling with fright, endeavoured with mild and gentle persuasions to dismiss them.” Cellini adds, “I thought I was a dead man on seeing the terror of the necromancer himself.” The boy, in equal terror, cried, “The whole Coliseum is in flames, and the fire is coming down upon us.”
The entire account suggests that the boy, and probably the necromancer, saw these figures, but that Cellini himself did not. In any event, Cellini, following the necromancer’s instructions, banishes the spirits by throwing asafetida on lit coals. The spirits apparently did answer his question—they said he would be reunited with Angelica within the month, an unlikely prediction that in fact came true. After this Cellini says no more about the necromancer.7
Many such accounts presuppose that the reader will already know, or assume, what the spirits look like. Such is true of the famous evocation of the dead in Homer’s Odyssey, which is both vivid and vague:
Spirits of the perished dead gathered from Erebus:
Brides, bachelors, and long-suffering old ones,
And tender virgins with their grieving hearts;
And many fighting men, stabbed with bronze spears,
Slain in war, clutching their bloody armor.8
But what did these brides and fighting men look like? Did they look solid, like an ordinary human? Were they transparent, as sometimes seems to be the case with spirits? We do not know.
Often it is implied that the spirit can change shapes at the magus’s bidding, as in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, where Faustus tells Mephistopheles:
I charge thee to return, and change thy shape;
Thou art too ugly to attend on me:
Go, and return an old Franciscan friar;
That holy shape becomes a devil best.9
A similar uncertainty surrounds a more recent magical rite: the Order of the Golden Dawn’s evocation of the spirit of Mercury, Taphthartharath, in 1896. The ritual commands: “Come unto us … O Taphthartharath, Taphthartharath, and appear very visibly before us, in the great Magical triangle without this Circle of Art. I bind and conjure Thee unto very visible appearance.” The invocation continues, indicating the means by which the spirit should materialize: “Behold the magic fire, the mystic lamps, the blinding radiance of the Flashing Tablets! Behold the Magical Liquids of the Material Basis; it is these that have given Thee Form!”10 Nevertheless, there seems to have been some ambiguity about how the spirit would manifest. Nick Farrell, a blogger on magic, writes about this ritual: “Anything which is evoked is not expected to appear in Malkuth [the physical realm] and is supposed to be viewed on the astral nebulous matter which surrounds a magically empowered temple. At the same time it was expected amongst some Golden Dawn magicians that a ‘physical appearance’ meant just that.”11
As for my experience, described at the beginning of this essay, I recall that the entities appeared to me with my eyes closed, although I could see them clearly enough that way. I was awake and alert and seated by the altar dedicated to these proceedings.
In another famous invocation from the Western occult tradition, Éliphas Lévi, in July 1854, performed a ritual to bring forth the ghost of Apollonius of Tyana, a magus of the first century AD. Lévi writes: “I distinctly saw, in front of the altar, the larger-than-life figure of a man, which then dissipated and faded away … then … I saw appear within the mirror in front of me, behind the altar, a white form, getting larger and appearing to draw nearer. I closed my eyes and called out to Apollonius three times; and when I opened them again, a man stood before me, entirely covered in some kind of shroud, who seemed to me to be more gray than white; his form was thin, sad, and beardless, which was not exactly the image I had of Apollonius beforehand.”12 (Indeed in ancient times philosophers were generally identified by the fact that they had beards.)
All of this leads us to wonder what kind of physicality—if that is the right word—it is that spirits and demons have. Hans Naegeli-Osjord, a Swiss psychiatrist specializing in possession and exorcism, notes that one physicist succeeded in demonstrating a six-dimensional space (current string theory posits ten dimensions); “therefore, it may be expected that the multiple-dimensional space of the parapsychologists can be integrated into the natural scientific perspective of the world and that eventually, the disciplines of parapsychology and natural sciences will no longer remain incompatible opposites.”13
In any event, demons seem to possess an embodiment of a kind—even if we are forced to resort to elastic and ambiguous terms such as etheric or astral to describe it. Another experience of mine, this one from around 1985, leads me to conclude that there is such a thing as demonic embodiment, even if I do not know what that is. One night I was sleeping in bed and dreaming, when suddenly, a demon—or something I identified as such; it was a creature that was swamp-green and slimy—inserted itself into the dream and collided with me. This demon was not part of the dream, which had been about something completely different; rather it intruded into the dream, and I felt it almost as a physical collision, which sent me back into my physical body and into the waking state. No other human was present: I was alone in my bed and in my apartment. Rattled, I could not go back to sleep for a long time, although I noticed no particular aftereffects from the experience.
This encounter, unpleasant as it was, was instructive in more than one way. In the first place, it seemed to confirm that in the customary dream state, one is in a sense out of one’s body: when the demon collided into me, I plunged immediately back into my body as an instinctive response. Furthermore, it suggests that a normal, healthy human constitution can fight off demonic attacks, just as it can fight off pathogens and parasites. Possession, then, happens to people who are weak or vulnerable in some way—usually psychically.
All of these things lead us to ask what demons are. The stock answer is to say that they are all just imagination—but that is little more than an instance of the naming fallacy. Really? Just imagination? What is imagination, then? Something illusory? What does that tell us? Less than one might suppose. After all, Hitler’s race theory—to take an example almost at random—was completely illusory and imaginary; there was no science in it at all. That does not mean that it did not have very real—and palpable and widespread—effects. Sometimes, indeed, people make up things in their imaginations and cling to these imaginings even more avidly than they do with ordinary verifiable facts.
Setting aside the customary nonanswer of imagination, there seem to be three possibilities about the nature of demons.
&nb
sp; 1. They are, as suggested at the beginning of this essay, self-existent entities who inhabit dimensions of reality that do not entirely coincide with our physical reality. As I have already said, it is probably not wise to hastily sort them all into categories of good and bad. Many of them—like the demons described in this book—are said to be capable of granting valuable knowledge and skills. If they cannot be trusted, this could simply mean that they do not want to be captured and compelled to do things against their will—just as any ordinary human would fight violently and viciously to avoid being imprisoned.
2. They are creatures of the imagination, but in a somewhat more palpable way than is usually believed. Although they are created by the classic magical combination of imagination and will, if infused with enough vital force, they can assume a quasi-independent existence—and under certain circumstances can be encountered by people who did not create them. Sometimes the word egregore is applied to such entities.
3. They represent fragmented parts of the human psyche—aspects of the self that are hated and denied and that have therefore turned malevolent. This is the explanation favored by many psychoanalysts—particularly Jungian ones—but, like the other two possibilities, it explains certain cases but by no means all.
One only needs to read through the descriptions in this book to see that they are not mutually exclusive. Spirits—including those we call evil—may, no doubt do, exist as part of a supernatural ecosystem about which we know only bits and pieces. In other cases, they may be the conscious or even unconscious creations of the imagination, endowed with a certain power and autonomous existence. Occultist Donald Tyson writes, “It was once believed in Church lore that all evil impulses and thoughts are not only inspired by evil spirits, but are themselves tiny evil spirits.”
These impulses—called passions in the language of the old esoteric Christian tradition—are the creation of the individual’s own mind that then assume a semiautonomous character. In other cases, they may be broken or fragmented parts of the self—as one suspects is the case with instances of multiple-personality disorder (i.e. dissociation).
As for the right attitude to take toward them, most people will instinctively avoid the matter entirely. Some will be satisfied to contemplate the possibility of the demonic from the point of view of the spectator—whether as a reader of occult fiction or as a horror-movie fan. Others will want to examine the concept of the demonic with somewhat more intellectual precision and fastidiousness, as I have tried to do here. Still others—and they may be the smallest category of all—will want to take the journey to invoke and experience these entities for themselves. They should probably heed the advice of Cellini’s necromancer, who warns him, “The man who enters upon such an undertaking has need of a stout heart and firm courage.” And of course, such adventurers should always be prepared for something to go wrong.
1 T.A.M. Fontaine, In Defence of Judaism: Abraham ibn Daud; Sources and Structure of ha-Emunah ha-Ramah (Maastricht, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, Assen, 1990), 184.
2 Richard Kieckhefer, Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 16.
3 Kieckhefer, 19.
4 Marvin Meyer and Richard Smith, eds., Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 204-06. Bracketed insertions are the translator’s.
5 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, 1422-1529.
6 The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon the King, Aleister Crowley and Hymenaeus Beta, eds. (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1995), 57, quoted in Lon Milo DuQuette, My Life with the Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician (York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1999), 95. The complete story of DuQuette’s encounter with Orobas appears in My Life with the Spirits, chapters 15 and 16.
7 For this version of Cellini’s account, I am relying on Jake Stratton-Kent, Geosophia: The Argo of Magic; Encyclopedia Goetica, vol. 2 (Bibliothèque Rouge, 2010), 1-10. Quotes are taken from Stratton-Kent’s version, as is the emphasis.
8 Homer, The Odyssey 11.37-40; my translation.
9 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus, act 1, scene 3.
10 “The Ritual of the Evocation unto Visible Appearance of the Great Spirit Taphthartharath,” The Equinox, vol. 1. no. 3: http://www.the-equinox.org/vol1/no3/eqi03010i.html; accessed July 26, 2017.
11 Nick Farrel , “Triangle of the Art,” Nick Farrel ’s Magical Blog, Nov. 5, 2013; http://www.nickfarrel.it/triangle-of-the-art/.
12 Éliphas Lévi, The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic: A New Translation, John Michael Greer and Mark Anthony Mikituk, ed. and trans. (New York: Tarcher Perigee, 2017), 128.
13 Hans Naegeli-Osjord, Possession and Exorcism, trans. Sigrid and David Coats (Oregon, Wisc.: New Frontiers Center, 1988), 26.
The Angelic Hierarchy
Many descriptions of demons allude to their place, or former place, in the heavenly hierarchy, which appears to be replicated in some form in hell. The classic outline of this organization is from The Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, dated to the sixth century AD. Here is Dionysius’s order, which is generally followed by the Christian tradition. The list proceeds from the top: i.e., the seraphim, the first, are the ones closest to the throne of God.
SERAPHIM
CHERUBIM
THRONES
DOMINIONS
VIRTUES
POWERS
PRINCIPALITIES
ARCHANGELS
ANGELS
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Belanger, Michelle. The Dictionary of Demons: Names of the Damned. Woodbury, Minn.: Llewellyn, 2010.
Bialik, Hayim Nahman, and Yehoshua Hana Ravnitzky, The Book of Legends: Sefer ha-Aggadah; Legends from the Talmud and Midrash. Translated by William G. Braude. New York: Schocken, 1992.
Cavendish, Richard. The Black Arts. New York: G.P. Putnam, 1967.
Charlesworth, James H., ed. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, volume 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments. Peabody, Mass: Hendrickson, 1983.
Davidson, Gustav. A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967.
DuQuette, Lon Milo. My Life with the Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 1999.
Fontaine, T.A.M. In Defence of Judaism: Abraham ibn Daud; Sources and Structure of ha-Emunah ha-Ramah. Maastricht, Netherlands: Van Gorcum, Assen, 1990.
Kieckhefer, Richard. Forbidden Rites: A Necromancer’s Manual of the Fifteenth Century. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
Lévi, Éliphas. The Doctrine and Ritual of High Magic: A New Translation. Translated by Mark Anthony Mikituk. Edited by John Michael Greer. New York: Tarcher Perigee, 2017.
Meyer, Marvin, and Richard Smith, eds., Ancient Christian Magic: Coptic Texts of Ritual Power. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994.
Naegeli-Osjord, Hans. Possession and Exorcism. Translated by Sigrid and David Coats. Oregon, Wisc.: New Frontiers Center, 1988.
Peterson, Joseph H., ed. The Lesser Key of Solomon: Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis. York Beach, Maine: Samuel Weiser, 2001.
Scot, Reginald. The Discoverie of Witchcraft. 1584. Accessed July 25, 2017; https://archive.org/stream/discoverieofwitc00scot/discoverieofwitc-00scot_djvu.txt.
Stratton-Kent, Jake. Geosophia: The Argo of Magic; Encyclopedia Goetica, vol. 2. Bibliothèque Rouge, 2010.
Tyson, Donald. “Murmurs in the Dark: Possession by Spirits.” Dark Discoveries 36 (fall 2016), 21-27.
Wise, Michael, Martin Abegg Jr., and Edward Cook, trans. The Dead Sea Scrolls: A New Translation. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.
ASMODEUS
Stories about Asmodeus are among the most colorful in demonology. His name—Ashmedai in Hebrew—means “destroyer.” Some have also attempted to connect him with a Persian demon called Aeshma Deva. Asmodeus is not mentioned in the Bible, but he does appear in the Apocrypha, in the B
ook of Tobit, where he kills in succession seven husbands of a righteous woman named Sarah, each time before the marriage can be consummated. But when the righteous Tobias marries her, he drives Asmodeus away by following the advice of the angel Raphael, who tells him to take a fish he has caught, and, “when you enter the bridal chamber, take some of the fish’s liver and heart, and put them on the embers of the incense. An odor will be given off; the demon will smell it and flee” (Tobit 6:17-18). There is a longstanding tradition that foul smells repel demons, as we have seen in Cellini’s account described in the Introduction: he dispelled the spirits by burning asafetida.
Later versions of Tobit refer to Asmodeus as “king of the demons.” In the pseudepigraphal Testament of Solomon, he describes himself thus: “I am called Asmodeus among mortals, and my business is to plot against the newly wedded, so that they may not know one another. And I sever them utterly by many calamities; and I waste away the beauty of virgins and estrange their hearts.… I transport men into fits of madness and desire when they have wives of their own, so that they leave them and go off by night and day to others that belong to other men; with the result that they commit sin and fall into murderous deeds.” Traditionally he is the devil of sensuality, luxury, and lechery.
In Jewish lore, Asmodeus comes to King Solomon’s court and vies with him in wisdom (a term that, in biblical times, included magical knowledge and power). In one case Asmodeus impresses Solomon by transporting a man from the race of people who live below the earth. For some reason, Asmodeus cannot take the man back to his own land, so the man stays on earth, marries, and has seven sons. The last resembles his father in having two heads. When the father dies, the two-headed son quarrels with the others over the division of the estate, claiming that he is really two people and so is entitled to two shares. Solomon resolves this dispute by the simple expedient of having a servant pour boiling water over one of the man’s heads. The other head cries out, “My lord king, we are dying!” proving that the two-headed man is really one person.
The Demons of King Solomon Page 2