Fallen Angels . . . and Spirits of the Dark

by Robert Masello

  Francis Barrett, who in 1801 wrote The Magus, or Celestial Intelligencer, believed that succubi were either synonymous with, or descendants of, the classical wood nymphs: “And seeing the fauni and nymphs of the wood were preferred before the other [spirits] in beauty, they afterwards generated their offspring among themselves, and at length began wedlocks with men, feigning that, by these copulations, they should obtain an immortal soul for them and their offspring.” In other words, the nymphs tried to become a bit more human by mating with mortals.

  What happened instead was that humans imperiled or sacrificed their own immortal souls by indulging in these sacrilegious relations. Saints, in particular, were singled out by the succubi: St. Anthony of Egypt, the first Christian monk, was tormented at night by a succubus “throwing filthy thoughts in his way” and “imitating all the gestures of a woman”; his disciple, St. Hilary, reports having been “encircled by naked women.” When St. Hippolytus, who died in A.D. 236, was approached by a nude woman, he threw his chasuble over her, and she instantly became a corpse. (That’s what she’d been in the first place, before Satan got her walking again.) And in one sad instance, reported by the Bishop Ermolaus of Verona, a hermit was so consumed with lust for a beautiful succubus that he fornicated with her again and again, and died of exhaustion within a month.

  LILITH

  The succubus has a long and ancient history beginning, perhaps, with the Assyrian demon known as Lilitu. Sexually insatiable, this demoness prowled at night, looking for men to seduce and corrupt. In Hebrew myth, she was transformed and became Lilith, the queen of the succubi. Lilith searched for men who were sleeping alone, then seduced them and sucked their blood. She was also a great danger to children. Any boy under the age of eight, or any girl less than twenty days old, was possible prey. To protect them, parents were advised to draw a charcoal circle on a wall of the room, and write inside it “Adam and Eve, barring Lilith.” On the door they were supposed to write three names —“Sanvi, Sansanvi, Semangelaf.”

  What did these names mean? For Lilith, they were family history. According to one of the creation stories, Lilith was Adam’s first wife, made by God out of mud and filth. But the young couple didn’t get along at all. Indisputably the world’s first feminist, Lilith considered herself Adam’s equal, and objected to lying under Adam when making love. When he insisted, she flew away — and Adam went whining to God. God selected three angels — Sanvi, Sansanvi, and Semangelaf — and sent them to retrieve her. They picked up her trail by the Red Sea, where they found Lilith carrying on with a horde of lewd demons; by them, she had already produced hundreds of little demons, called lilin. The angels relayed God’s order — that she return forthwith to Adam — but Lilith refused. In a gesture of compromise, however, she did swear that if she saw the angels’ names written anywhere near a newborn, she’d spare that baby’s life. The angels took the deal.

  When Isaiah speaks of “the night hag,” who dwells in the wilderness with wild beasts and hyenas, it is Lilith he is referring to. And it’s Lilith in Psalms 91:5, too, when we are promised God will protect us from “the terror by night.”

  LAMIA

  But Lilith wasn’t the only female demon prowling the night and preying on children. She had an equally ancient cohort in Lamia, a cave-dwelling vampire who made her first appearance in Greek mythology.

  The original Lamia was the Queen of Libya, a beautiful woman by whom Zeus had fathered children. But when Hera, the wife of Zeus, found out about it, she forced the queen to devour them. Lamia did it — it wasn’t easy to defy the empress of the gods — but ever after she haunted the night, robbing other mothers of their own children. These she would rake with her clawlike nails, before draining their bodies of blood. Once a lovely queen, Lamia had become a hideous beast, with the ability to change shape at will. She was known, too, for her extraordinary vigilance — when she slept, she took the eyes out of her head, so that they could remain on guard.

  She also went, as it were, from one to many — over time her name came to refer to witches who were thought to steal children, and to female demons who could, while beautifully disguised, seduce unwitting men with their ardor. It was only after the men had been spent of passion that the Lamia also deprived them of their blood — and lives.

  THE MARE

  In sleep, it is common enough to feel a shortness of breath, or congestion in the chest. But these feelings of suffocation were often attributed to a demon known as the mare; as these creatures customarily made their visits at night, they also came to be known, along with the dreams they inspired, as nightmares.

  During the night, the mare supposedly perched on the chest of the victim, squeezing the breath out of him. In The Philosophy of Sleep, written in 1830 by Robert Macnish, the mare at work was described thus: “A monstrous hag squatting upon his breast — mute, motionless, and malignant; an incarnation of the evil spirit — whose intolerable weight crushes the breath out of his body and whose fixed, deadly, incessant stare petrifies him with horror and makes his very existence insufferable.”

  Fair young maids were also quite vulnerable to attack. As Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) wrote:

  “So on his nightmare, through the evening fog,

  Flits the squat fiend o’er fen, lake, and bog;

  Seeks some love-wildered maid with sleep oppressed,

  Alights, and grinning sits upon her breast . . .

  Back o’er her pillow sinks her blushing head,

  Her snow-white limbs hang helpless from the bed;

  While with quick sighs and suffocative breath

  Her interrupted heart pulse swims in death.”

  Finally, horses, too, were considered to be in danger from the mare. But for some reason a stone hung up in the stables would protect them.

  THE DREAM LOVER

  In 1698 Johann Klein, a professor of law at the University of Rostock in eastern Germany, recounted the story of Mme. de Montleon, a woman who claimed her husband came to her, and impregnated her, in a dream. It would have had to be in a dream: her husband, the nobleman Jerome Auguste de Montleon, had been away from home for four years, and he died before returning. But shortly after his death, a son was born, and Madame insisted that the boy was the rightful heir to his father’s estate. A lower court begged to differ, but the case was appealed to the Parlement of Grenoble; there, midwives and doctors testified that such dream-impregnations were not only possible, but commonplace. Based on their testimony, the Parlement accepted Mme. de Montleon’s account, though the faculty of the Sorbonne in Paris, taking their own look at the case, came to the conclusion that the Parlement was just being kind to a lady in a difficult spot.

  IMPS

  What guardian angels are to those who live righteously, imps are to those who follow Satan; they are the errand boys of evil. Small in size — Paracelsus, the medieval physician and alchemist, reputedly kept one sealed in the crystal pommel of his sword — they are employed to perform everything from pranks to murder.

  Not surprisingly, witches had a particular fondness for imps, keeping them as their familiars. Indeed, when Mary Scrutten of Framlingham confessed to her witchcraft, she admitted that she kept three imps, and suckled them in her bed at night. She had tried to allay her husband’s suspicions by telling him that they were mice, but he had remained unpersuaded.

  Imps took all sorts of shapes — some looked like tiny humans, others looked like toads or moles. Low-maintenance demons, they could be kept anywhere — bottles were a popular place to store the smaller ones — but they did have to be fed. Mrs. Heard in 1582 said she provided hers with “wheat, barley, oats, bread and cheese . . . and water and beer to drink.” Margaret Cotton in 1602 said her imps liked roasted apples and claret wine. And Anne Bodenham in 1651 said hers were kept content with only crumbs of bread.

  But there was one dietary supplement that all imps required without fail — and that was blood.

  Henry Hallywell, a Master of Arts at Cambridge University, offered a
scientific explanation for this sanguinary addiction in his Melampronoea, published in 1681. The imps, he reasoned, “being so mightily debauched . . . wear away by a continual deflux of particles, and therefore require some nutriment to supply the place of the fugacious atoms, which is done by sucking the blood and spirits of these forlorn wretches (their witch mistresses) . . . And no doubt but that these impure devils may take as much pleasure in sucking the warm blood of men or beasts, as a cheerful and healthy constitution in drawing in the refreshing gales of pure and sincere air!”

  That, at least, was the medical explanation.

  For anyone still intent on conjuring up an imp of his own, another book, an eighteenth-century grimoire entitled Secret des Secrets, offered the following formula. The imp, it advised, “was called forth by God, by Jesus, by the Holy Trinity, by the virginity of the Holy Virgin, by the four holy words God spoke to Moses (Io, Zati, Zata, Abata) and by the nine heavens”; he was admonished to appear “visibly and without delay in a fair human form, not terrifying, without or within this phial, which holds water prepared to receive thee.”

  GHOULS

  One of the most unsavory lot of evil creatures, surpassing even the demons with whom they were commonly associated, were the ghouls.

  Derived from the Arabic word ghul, ghouls were thought to dwell in dark and lonely places, the shadows, the desert, the bleak and parched mountains, where they would leap out and seize their prey at night. In Middle Eastern stories, they fed on small children . . . and corpses. In the traditional Western literature, they gradually came to haunt graveyards in particular, unearthing the freshly interred bodies and feeding upon them.

  But even a ghoul could assume, under certain circumstances, a pleasing disguise and demeanor. In one account, from the fifteenth century, there was an elderly merchant in Baghdad, who had only one son. To this son, named Abdul-Hassan, the merchant was leaving his entire fortune. But the boy was still unmarried, and to make sure he would be well cared for, the merchant decided to arrange for his marriage. As a bride, he chose the daughter of a fellow merchant, a man with whom he had often traveled. But when he told Abdul about the planned nuptials, and showed him a picture of his bride-to-be, the son — who had never before defied his father’s wishes — asked for some time to consider. The girl wasn’t at all pretty, and the boy didn’t know what to do.

  One night, while thinking about his dilemma, he went walking in the outskirts of the city. From a grove, he heard the sound of a woman singing — the most beautiful singing he had ever heard — and he quickly stole up to the trees. What he saw there was a humble house with a vine-laden balcony, and on the balcony he saw a beautiful young girl, quite unaware of his presence.

  Abdul was instantly enraptured by her.

  The next day he hurried right back to the place, asked some questions of people passing by, and learned that the girl was seventeen years old, unbetrothed, and very well brought up. Her name was Nadilla, and her father, though a wise man, was quite poor. That, he knew, wouldn’t sit well with his father, but he was determined to try his luck anyway.

  He went to his father and spilled his heart. He didn’t want to marry the merchant’s daughter, he said, he wanted to marry a girl he had discovered on his own, a girl he couldn’t get out of his thoughts. His father, predictably, argued at first, but then, seeing how intent Abdul was, relented; he met with the wise man and asked that the daughter be married to his son. The wise man agreed, the young people were now properly introduced, and they promptly fell in love with each other.

  For the next several months, the newlyweds were very happy with each other . . . until one night when Abdul awoke and found himself alone. He waited in the dark for his wife’s return, growing more anxious all the time, but it wasn’t until just before dawn that she slipped back into the room, with a strange look on her face. Abdul pretended to be asleep.

  The next night, it happened again. But this time Abdul jumped into his clothes and followed her at a safe distance. To his horror, he saw her turn into the cemetery, then descend into a tomb lighted by three funerary lamps. He crept closer and looked inside . . . where he saw his lovely young wife laughing, singing, and feasting with several hideous ghouls. As he watched, speechless, a freshly buried corpse was brought in, cut into pieces, and shared out among the revelers. When they were done eating, they gathered up the picked-clean bones and once again interred them.

  Abdul raced home, and feigned sleep when Nadilla returned. At dinner that evening he pressed food upon her but, as she always did at the dinner table, she declined. Abdul tried again, she refused, and in anger he cried out, “I suppose you prefer to eat with the ghouls!”

  Nadilla didn’t say a word. She stood up, left the room, and got into the bed. In the middle of the night, when she thought her husband was fast asleep, she leapt on his chest, tore at the veins in his neck, and tried to suck his blood. But Abdul threw her off, grabbed a dagger he’d kept close, and stabbed her. She died on the bedroom floor, and her body was buried the next day.

  Three nights later she returned, and Abdul had to fight her off again.

  Her tomb was reopened, and her body, to all appearances, was as fresh and uncorrupted as it had been in life. When Abdul demanded an explanation from her father, the old man confessed that she had been married once before, to one of the Caliph’s officers, who had introduced her to terrible debaucheries and then murdered her. She had come back to life that time, too, and returned home.

  When Abdul heard this, he knew there was nothing else he could do but destroy the body altogether. He built a pyre of scented wood, laid the beautiful Nadilla on top, and set it afire. And when the fire went out, he took the cinders and ash and cast them into the swirling waters of the Tigris.

  THE GOLEM

  In Jewish folklore, the golem is a creature fashioned from red clay, inspired with life through magic, and made to do his master’s will. But as with many such creatures that appear also in Greek and Arab legend, the golem often had a problem doing as he was told.

  Crafted in the shape of a man, the golem was invested with life when the name of God was pronounced over him, and the word emeth (truth) was written on his forehead. Once alive, the golem was mute but powerful, and served as a kind of willing automaton. His job was to do heavy labor and household chores, but he was never under any circumstances to leave the house. The problem with many golems was that they grew; they got bigger and stronger all the time, and soon it became difficult if not impossible to control them. To do so, one had to touch a golem’s forehead — which became harder and harder to reach — and rub out the first letter of the word there. When emeth was thus reduced to meth (he is dead), the golem immediately lost his vital force, crumbling back into the clay he was made from.

  The golem’s most famous appearance was in sixteenth-century Prague, where legend has it that Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezaleel created a golem to help guard the members of the Jewish community from plots against them, particularly the dangerous charges of ritual murder with which Jews were often maligned. Unlike most golems, this one was not only strong but clever, and according to the legend, did his job well.

  But another part of the legend recounts how the rabbi’s golem ultimately went berserk, and had in the end to be destroyed.

  Because all creatures must rest on the Jewish Sabbath, the rabbi regularly reduced his golem to clay again each Friday. But one Friday dusk, he forgot to do so. The congregation was in the synagogue and had just finished reciting the Ninety-second Psalm when a great commotion was heard in the streets. The golem was running wild, rattling whole houses, destroying everything in his path. The rabbi ran outside into the evening streets, charged up to the rampaging golem, and wiped away the magic word from his forehead. The golem collapsed, and the rabbi ordered its dust to be gathered together and buried in the attic of the synagogue. Years later, one of the rabbi’s eminent successors was said to have gone up to the attic to see what remained of the golem for himself. When he came d
own, somewhat shaken, he issued an order that no one else, in this or any future generation, must ever go up to that attic again. . . .

  THE DYBBUK

  The ancient Jews believed in another supernatural creature, too, though this one was incorporeal.

  According to the Cabalistic-Chassidic conceptions of the universe and its mysteries, souls that were still burdened with sin were doomed to wander this earth for a time before finding rest. But while they were wandering, these souls were afflicted by evil spirits; to escape them, these unclean souls, known as dybbuks, sometimes took unwelcome refuge in the bodies of pious men and women whom the demons could not harm. Once they had possessed their victims, the dybbuks used their newfound bodies to complete the things they had failed to do in previous transmigrations.

  As in the Christian tradition, ridding someone of a dybbuk required holy men to perform a ritual exorcism.

  THE HOMUNCULUS

  A homunculus might be described as a golem in miniature. A man-made creature, fashioned in the human Form, the homunculus was well-known in Europe for many years (Arnold of Villanova, a thirteenth-century alchemist, was one of the first reputedly to have made one) and may have provided the inspiration in part for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).

  But the acknowledged master of the homunculus was undoubtedly Paracelsus, the Swiss physician and alchemist. It was Paracelsus who provided the detailed recipe for the making of one.

  It is not a recipe you can whip up anytime.

  The first step was to take a retort, or flask, place inside it a goodly portion of human semen, and then seal the flask. Once closed, the flask was to be buried in horse dung for forty days, and “magnetized” (a process that is not entirely clear). During this gestation, the homunculus—a tiny and transparent protohuman—was assumed to take shape.