Traveller's Guide to Hell: Who’s Who in Hell (extract)

Who’s Who in Hell

‘Demon’ is a Greek word, daimon, and in the Classical world it could be used for any sort of spirit—Socrates, notably, had one who sat on his shoulder offering him advice. Fiendish connotations only came with Greek bibles, which used daimon for Old Testament bogies and foreign gods frowned upon by the prophets of Israel, as well as the demons promised in the Gospels. They’re all evil, said Paul and Jerome and Augustine, to Hell with them. And to Hell they dutifully went.

Lacking regular censuses, the demon population of Hell can only be estimated. After careful calculations (based on estimates that either one half or one third of Heaven’s angels fell with Lucifer), philosopher Michael Scot put the exact number at 14,198,580, while Alphonsus of Spina of Spain, a nation of natural pessimists in spiritual matters, figured the total to be 133,306,668. While counting demons, those clever minds were also arranging them into a hierarchy, in a hellish mirror-image to the hierarchy of heaven. None of the sources agree much on the details, but here are some of the celebrities:

Abraxas: The top demon is a shadowy critter, one whose diabolically euphonious name gets him a mention in many fashionable incantations. The name, in fact, is probably more important than the demon; Abraxas is the same as abracadabra, and both go back to the Gnostics of 2000 years ago. It may be that the name of a demon got turned into a magic charm, from the talisman worn to get ride of a disease or a spell:

As the name dwindled away, so would the disease.

Adramalech: Demonologies place this gent among the top ten: in the 16th- century Pseudomonarchia Daemonum he is nothing less than Satan’s Grand Chancellor. By other accounts, he’s gone kinky in his old age; he is now in charge of the Devil’s wardrobe, and in his rare appearances he himself likes to take the form of a peacock.

Asmodeus: How can you tell a Jewish from a Christian demon? You’ll have to convince it to take off its shoes and relax. Christian demons, as everyone knows, have cloven hooves, but that would never be kosher, and in Jewish legends fiends always have goose feet. Asmodeus, besides goose feet, has a dragon’s tail, and on special holidays he appears in his full regalia of three heads (ram, bull and man). He began his career as the Zoroastrian archangel Aeshma. At one point he was evidently weighed and found wanting, or else the Jews simply needed another demon whose name began with an A, for they bought him from the Persians for a sheep and three bags of figs. Israel was lucky to find him: thanks to the magic ring that Solomon got from the Archangel Michael, he was able to force Asmodeus to help with the building of the Temple, as the demon knew the hiding place of the shamir, a worm that could split stones simply by touching them.

Later on, the king got a little too cosy with this useful demon. In one dark story, Asmodeus tricks Solomon into giving him his throne, which for pious fundamentalists nicely explains the decay in Solomon’s later reign, when he dallied with foreign women and allowed temples to foreign gods in Jerusalem. From there, Asmodeus went on to star in the Apocryphal Book of Tobit, where he became so enamoured of a woman named Sarah that he killed seven of her suitors before the Archangel Raphael chased him to Egypt. Since then he has been associated with lust, and he often takes female form to seduce men. He goes both ways, though, and was given credit with seducing the nuns of Loudun in the famous possession scare of the 1630’s, the subject of a novel by Aldous Huxley and Ken Russell’s film The Devils.

Astaroth: Hell is full of cross-dressers. Astaroth used to be Astarte, the beautiful love goddess of the Assyrians and the Phoenicians. Although always fond of the underworld, she really started to go wrong when she got involved with the Hebrews, who turned her into a very smelly demon.

Azazel: In Leviticus (16:26), God tells Aaron to find a Scapegoat, laden with the sins of the people, and lead it away and sacrifice it ‘for Azazel’. This character seems to have been the head of the se’irim, goat-like demons that worried the Israelites mightily while they were wandering in the desert. He appears next in the Apocryphal Book of Enoch, as one of the ‘Watchers’, who came to earth and taught humanity most of the evil tricks we still practice, from warfare to cosmetics.

Balam: A crowned goatish demon, usually seen riding a bear. Not to be confused with the biblical Balaam (Num. 22:24) who whipped his own ass in the middle of the road.

Beelzebub: Baal-Zebub, the ‘Lord of the Flies’ is often reckoned the second-in-command, or else it’s just another name for Satan himself. How he got the name is not entirely clear. One account has it that the idols of this particular Middle Eastern Baal (there were many) were smeared with the blood of sacrifices, which must have attracted a few flies. He’s a brute, this Beelzebub: big, black, and hairy, with long horns and bat wings, and though he is the most sought-after celebrity at black masses, all the black magic books recommend care; if you conjure him up, it’s hard to make him go away again.

Belial: His name apparently means ‘worthless’ in Hebrew, and Belial suffered throughout the Middle Ages as a low stock character in sermons. Yet in Milton’s Paradise Lost, he was ‘...graceful and humane/A fairer person lost not Heaven’ He gives Lucifer prudent counsel after the Fall: that the new demons should lay low for a while, and not provoke Jehovah into giving them another bashing. Belial is always whispering advice to somebody, often the rich and famous. According to Milton’s contemporaries, he was the Devil’s special envoy to the Turkish sultan, helping him plan new outrages against the innocent Christians of Europe. As one of the more learned demons, Belial turns up as a lawyer in many medieval stories, complaining to God that ‘a certain fellow named Jesus’ was robbing him of souls that rightfully belong to Hell. In most versions, Jesus gets in touch with a smart Jewish lawyer—Moses himself —and as always, wins the case.

Belphegor: ‘Baal’ in the ancient Middle East, was not the name of an individual god, but a generic term for the reigning deity of a place. One of these, a Moabite god called Baal-Phegor, was worshipped by many Israelites for a long time, and his cult became the state religion in the time of King Ahab. Then King Jehu massacred his worshippers, and Baal-Phegor was demoted to the disgracefully vulgar demonship he has occupied ever since: he is the demon most closely associated with shit. If the devil-worshippers in your building have been smearing it all over the basement walls, it is probably Belphegor who is to blame.

Incubi: The Devil sends these deceptively hunky male spirits, creatures of dreams, to knock up virtuous women in the dead of night; if in doubt, look out for cloven hooves on an otherwise desirable specimen. The incubi have left any number of little monster love children in our mortal plane. The Huns, all of them, were among these, as was the wizard Merlin, and Martin Luther (according to the Catholics). Documented cases in modern times include Rosemary’s Baby, the late President Kim Il Sung of North Korea, and many of the people with strange hair and perky smiles on the television. The female version, the Succubi, prey especially on saints, and their demonic progeny is one of the main reasons why Hell’s so densely populated.

Lilith: The first woman, according to Hebrew legend, was also the first woman with a Bad Attitude. According to the Haggadah, God created Adam and Lilith at the same time, meaning the two to start a nice patriarchal family. Lilith had other ideas. She thought she was as good as her man, and demanded equality and a little respect. She didn’t get it. When they explained to her that the Missionary Position was the only holy way to go downtown, it was the last straw. She walked out of Adam’s loving arms, out of Paradise, and into a lonely career of eternal vilification at the hands of Judaeo-Christian storytellers.

After she left, God sent angels to talk her into coming home and being a good girl. She said no, so God put an everlasting curse on her and her offspring. Then he created a more submissive, if devious mate for Adam (and look what happened). Lilith, meanwhile, went off to live in the ‘waste places’; she doesn’t seem to spend much time in Hell, no doubt finding the boys there just as backward as the ones in Paradise. They say Lilith dances in the ruins of cities, that she fools around with demons, and that she hangs around cradles hoping to steal babies (the word ‘lullaby’ is probably a charm against her). They say that she seduces poor innocent men and then kills them and throws their carcasses down to Hell. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Mammon: A minor character, Mammon didn’t come into his own until he was discovered by the nation that would make his worship into a holy philosophy, the English. In that first Hellish Parliament, in Paradise Lost, he is one of the demons who counsels Lucifer against more warring with Heaven; he thought there would be plenty of Gems and Gold and Magnificence in their new abode to keep them all happy.

Even before Milton, however, Mammon had a major role in Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Sir Guyon, representing Chastity in Spenser’s sprawling allegory, occupies its Second Book combatting the various aspects of Desire. In Canto VII he finds himself alone in a wilderness, where squatting among the shrubs he meets ‘An vuncouth, saluage and vnciuile wight’, in ragged clothes and hands with nails like claws. This dirty Mammon is the prototype of all misers in literature. Guyon disputes with him a while, then follows the demon through a secret passage down to the nether regions where he kept his palace:

Guyon spends three days roaming this infernal Scrooge McDuck money bin, with a huge monster breathing down his shoulder who would tear him to pieces if he touched or even secretly coveted a bit of it. Guyon survives, but after breathing the air of corruption for so long, when he reaches the surface again the first breath of fresh air sends him into a death-like swoon.

Mephistopheles: A rare demon without a Biblical pedigree, Mephistopheles only makes his appearance in the Faust legends. Luther’s colleague Melancthon saw Faust’s tempter as a devil in the form of a long-haired dog with red eyes, but the men of the Renaissance were ready for a new kind of demon, a debonair, sophisticated and philosophical one, and Mephistopheles stepped up to fit the bill, tickling parts of our intellectual fancy the old hairy demons could never reach. In Doctor Faustus, Christopher Marlowe defined the character and provided him with some of his most memorable lines:

Shakespeare might have tried his hand with this provocative new demon—but he couldn’t. For reasons that had nothing to do with Marlowe, the old mystery plays were outlawed at that time, taking any other legal stage representation of the Devil with them. Mephistopheles reappears again in Goethe’s Faust. Suave and sardonic, the perfect demon for the Enlightenment, he is less concerned with seducing mortals to evil than simply letting them find the way themselves. Being the Devil, he knows us, and he knows our ways:

© Dana Facaros and Michael Pauls