Those that believe shall cast out demons.
—MARK 16:17
One of our favorite demon anecdotes is from a thirteenth-century French friar, Thomas of Cantimpre. He tells of how a virgin in the town of Nivelles went to church to pray in the middle of the night, after a dead man had been brought into the church. When the devil saw her, “He looked at her with malice, and entering the dead body he moved it at first in the coffin. The virgin therefore crossed herself and bravely shouted to the Devil, ‘Lie down! Lie down, you wretch, for you have no power against me!’ Suddenly the Devil rose up with the corpse and said, ‘Truly, now I will have power against you, and I will revenge myself for the frequent injuries I have suffered at your hands!’ When she saw this, she was thoroughly terrified in her heart, so with both hands she seized a staff topped with a cross, and bringing it down on the head of the dead man she knocked him to the ground. Through such faithful daring she put the demon to flight.”
We’d have liked to have met that girl.
The thing about demons is that they hate themselves, and so they hate everybody else, too. Ebenezer Sibly, a Renaissance demonologist, gives you both sides of the coin. On the one hand, Sibly notes that demons are who they are because of what they’ve done. Their physical forms reflect their spiritual state. “As to the shapes and various likenesses of these wicked spirits or devils,” Sibly says, “it is generally believed that, according to their different capacities in wickedness, so their shapes are answerable after a magical manner, resembling spiritually some horrid and ugly monsters, as their conspiracies against the power of God were high and monstrous when they fell from heaven.”
And the consequences of that fall?
Their misery is unquestionably great and infinite; but not through the effect of outward flames; for their bodies are capable of piercing through wood and iron, stone, and all terrestrial things. Neither is all the fire or fuel of this world able to torment them; for in a moment they can pierce it through and through.
Their misery, to put it another way, is the misery of someone in hell. Simple as that. The demon that we know only as Meg, whom we threw out a window and then exorcised, is a perfect example of this. She told us, when she came back from hell after the exorcism, a little bit about what it was like. A prison made of flesh and bone and fear is the way we remember her describing it.
Demons come in all shapes and sizes. The one we’re really interested in, the one with the yellow eyes who we saw in the hospital where Dean nearly died after the car wreck—the one who killed our mother and Jessica, the one our father traded his life to—we don’t have any idea what it looks like. We know it’s big-league, some kind of demonic bigwig. Is it Satan? Probably not. It’s high enough in the demonic chain of command to have a whole lot of other demons doing its work, though. And it came after our family. That’s all we need to want to put it down, and when we say put it down, we mean for keeps. The Yellow-Eyed Demon gets a one-way ticket back to hell, where all of the torments Meg hinted at are its breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
We owe it that much.
In the interest of knowing our enemy, we’ve done an awful lot of research on demons. A lot of it has piggybacked on the work of earlier demonologists, and some of it has been just a matter of paying attention. For example, you don’t need to read John Dee to know that demons stink like sulfur. If you’ve ever been around one, that’s clear enough.
Anyway, here are Dad’s notes on some prominent demonology texts and what he thought about each:
A NEW AND COMPLETE ILLUSTRATION OF THE OCCULT SCIENCES (OS)
Written by Ebenezer Sibly. Fourth volume in a series begun 1784 and mostly dedicated to astrology. A disciple of Swedenborg and Mesmer. Makes liberal use of Reginald Scot’s DISCOVERIE OF WITCHCRAFT and Agrippa’s DE OCCULTA PHILOSOPHIA.
PSEUDOMONARCHIA DAEMONUM (PD)
Written by Johann Weyer, 1563, from a book he calls LIBER OFFICIORUM SPIRITUUM, SEU LIBER DICTUS EMPTO. SALOMONIS, DE PRINCIPIBUS ET REGIBUS DAEMONIORUM (note reference to Solomon here and in Weyes’s subtitle: SALOMONS NOTES OF CONJURATION). Weyer a student of Agrippa. The PSEUDOMONARCHIA has much in common with the first book of the Lemegeton, called GOETIA. A lengthy catalog of demons, with variations on their names, notes on their appearances, and brief instructions on conjuration and abjuration. Translated into English prior to 1584 by Reginald Scot as part of his DISCOVERIE OF WITCHCRAFT. Full of odd notes about how many legions each demon controls, etc. Most of this isn’t useful, but the characteristics of individual demons shed some light on the quest.
GOETIA has better diagrams and is more useful for actual conjuration.
THE TESTAMENT OF SOLOMON (TS)
Probably written first to fourth century CE. In Solomon’s voice, tells of the building of the Temple and of the binding of numerous demons to perform menial labor. Several of these demons not attested in other sources. The story goes on to tell how Solomon fell in love with a Jebusaean woman (Shunammite?) and desired her for a wife, but was told by the priests of Moloch that he could not have her unless he sacrificed five grasshoppers to Moloch. In a moment of weakness, he did, and fell away from God, becoming “the sport of idols and demons.”
One of dozens of texts that characterize Solomon as an arch-magician. Queen of Sheba characterized as a witch, unlike her presentation in the Old Testament. Also interesting that the KORAN refers to the tradition that Solomon built the Temple with the assistance of bound demons: see suras 21, 34, 38.
The PD, in its entry on Gaap, says that Solomon wrote a book of conjurations and “mingled therewithal all the holy names of God.”
There are some weird, weird folk remedies for demonic possession. Take this one from a book called Saxon Leechdoms, by someone called Cockayne. It’s a “spew-drink,” which is pretty self-explanatory, and goes like this: “lupin, bishopwort, henbane, cropleek; pound these together, add ale for a liquid, let stand for a night, add fifty libcorns, or cathartic grains, and holy water.” It might actually work, is our take. No demon would want to be in the same body with that.
Demons come in all shapes and sizes. There are thousands of named demons in the world’s various pantheons—maybe millions if you really do your homework on the Hindus—but there are also categories. Species, maybe, although we’ve found it never works too well to apply concepts from the natural world to demonology. Here are a few that we’ve run across and others that we’ve only heard about. A complete listing would take a lifetime to compile, and we don’t even want to think about how long it would take to waste them all.
At the end of the book, we’ve added a list of the primary demons of Judeo-Christian demonology. For right now, though, here’s a quick tour through some examples of what the demon hunter might come up against.