Fallen Angels

. . . And Spirits of the Dark

Robert Masello

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781497637375
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria di miti e folklore

"My name is Legion: for we are many." —Mark 5: 9 They have been with us since the beginning of time. Walking the centuries in our myths, our art, our literature... and in our dreams. Victims of temptation and sin, they are spirits who fell from heaven's grace, emerging anew as servants of darkness. Here, in one spellbinding volume, are the most infamous denizens of the Underworld—from Lucifer, the first angel who challenged God's will, to the fathomless legions of demons and fiends who haunt us to this day. Explore their world, hear their stories, unravel their secrets, and discover for yourself that even angels can have a dark side...

Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.”

Coleridge,

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

(1798)

GIVING THE DEVIL HIS DUE

Although demons were often characterized as vile and animalistic creatures, it never paid to underestimate them—or their master. On this nearly all the theologians and demonologists concurred. If the devilish hordes were truly stupid and incompetent, they would never have made such successful inroads into human nature, nor would there be so much evil and corruption in the world. Johan Weyer, the German doctor, offered this warning, which almost amounts to a grudging admiration of Satan himself:

“Satan possesses great courage, incredible cunning, superhuman wisdom, the most acute penetration, consummate prudence, an incomparable skill in veiling the most pernicious artifices under a specious disguise, and a malicious and infinite hatred toward the human race, implacable and incurable.” (1563)

In 1580 Jean Bodin, the French witch expert, reminded his own audience that even the rank-and-file members of Satan’s legions possessed great powers with which to beguile and seduce humanity:

“It is certain that the devils have a profound knowledge of all things. No theologian can interpret the Holy Scriptures better than they can; no lawyer has a more detailed knowledge of testaments, contracts and actions; no physician or philosopher can better understand the composition of the human body, and the virtues of the heavens, the stars, birds and fishes, trees and herbs, metals and stones.”

The devils could argue, the devils could reason, the devils could negotiate with the best of them. According to Catholic teaching, the demons were “pure” impure spirits, highly intelligent and self-motivated. Their will was bent on evil, on corrupting and damning mankind, but the methods they used were singular and in many instances remarkably creative.

CLASS WILL TELL

A scholarly pursuit, and useful pastime, for many centuries has been the classification of the lower demons (also known as devils) into different groups; the criteria have ranged from where they lived (in what element, for instance, fire or air or water) to what kind of mayhem they liked to cause (war, pestilence, madness). But one of the most authoritative systems was devised by the demonologist Alphonsus de Spina, who lumped the infernal legions into ten main categories:

“(1) Fates. Some say they have seen Fates, but if so they are not women but demons.

(2) Poltergeists … who do little tricks at night, like breaking things, pulling off bedclothes, making footsteps overheard.

(3) Incubi and Succubi. Nuns are especially subject to these devils.

(4) Marching hosts, which appear like hordes of men making much tumult.

(5) Familiar demons, who eat and drink with men.

(6) Nightmare demons, who terrify men in their dreams.

(7) Demons formed from semen and its odor when men and women copulate.

(8) Deceptive demons, who sometimes appear as men and sometimes as women.

(9) Clean demons … who assail only holy men.

(10) Demons who trick old women into thinking they are flying to a sabbat.”

Strange as that taxonomy was, another, which proved quite popular, divided the devils into their habitats:

SIX KINDS OF DEVILS,

AS FIRST DETERMINED BY MICHAELIS PSELLUS

AND LATER RECOUNTED BY FRANCESCO-MARIA GUAZZO

IN HIS COMPENDIUM MALEFICARUM (1608)

“The first is the fiery, because these dwell in the upper air and will never descend to the lower regions until the Day of Judgment, and they have no dealings on earth with men.

“The second is the aerial, because these dwell in the air around us. They can descend to hell, and by forming bodies out of the air, can at times be visible to men. Very frequently, with God’s permission, they agitate the air and raise storms and tempests, and all this they conspire to do for the destruction of mankind.

“The third is terrestrial, and these were certainly cast from Heaven to earth for their sins. Some of them live in woods and forests, and lay snares for hunters; some dwell in the fields and lead night travelers astray; some dwell in hidden places and caverns; while others delight to live in secret among men.

“The fourth is the aqueous, for these dwell under the water in rivers and lakes, and are full of anger, turbulent, unquiet, and deceitful. They raise storms at sea, sink ships in the ocean, and destroy life in the water. When such devils appear, they are more often women than men, for they live in moist places and lead an easier life. But those which live in drier and harder places are usually seen as males.

“The fifth is the subterranean, for these live in caves and caverns in the mountains. They are of a very mean disposition, and chiefly molest those who work in pits or mines for treasure, and they are always ready to do harm. They cause earthquakes and winds and fires, and shake the foundations of houses.

“The sixth is the heliophobic, because they especially hate and detest the light, and never appear during daytime, nor can they assume a bodily form until night. These devils are completely inscrutable and of a character beyond human comprehension, because they are all dark within, shaken with icy passions, malicious, restless, and perturbed; and when they meet men at night they oppress them violently and, with God’s permission, often kill them by some breath or touch … This kind of devil has no dealing with witches; neither can they be kept at bay by charms, for they shun the light and the voices of men and every sort of noise.”

THE INCUBUS

According to the church fathers, the incubus was an angel who fell from grace because of his insatiable lust for women. As a demon, the incubus continued with his carnal desires, preying upon vulnerable women, raping them in their sleep or provoking in them sexual desires that only the incubus (sometimes known as the demon lover) could satisfy.

Since demons, according to the traditional wisdom, were only spirits and had no corporeal form, the incubus was presumed to come upon his physical form in one of two ways: he either reanimated a human corpse, or he used human flesh to create a body of his own, which he then endowed with artificial life. Especially mischievous and clever incubi were often able to make themselves appear in the persons of real people—a husband, neighbor, the handsome young stablehand. In one case, a medieval nun claimed to have been sexually assaulted by a local prelate, Bishop Sylvanus, but the bishop defended himself on the grounds that an incubus had assumed his form. The convent took his word for it.

Incubi preying on a sleeping girl.

So how could a woman tell for sure if her lover was a demon or not? There were a few clues. If she freely admitted the incubus to her bed, it would have the power to put everyone else in the house into a deep sleep—even her husband, who might be lying right beside her. Other clues were even more obvious—the incubus often proved to be a nasty lover, with a sexual organ that was painfully large, freezing cold, made of iron, or even double-pronged.

Occasionally, these unholy unions were thought to create offspring. Any children who were born with a deformity were automatically suspect. Twins were looked at askance, too. The magician Merlin was believed to be the fruit of demonic intercourse. And medieval records are filled with graphic accounts of half-human, half-animal creatures that were reputedly sired by incubi.

But even with all the attention that was paid to them, there never seemed to be a foolproof way of warding off these demon lovers. Sometimes prayer worked, sometimes exorcism and benediction, but in many cases, even these proved futile. According to Ludovico Sinistrari, the seventeenth-century Franciscan friar who authored Demoniality, incubi “do not obey the exorcists, have no dread of exorcisms, show no reverence for holy things, at the approach of which they are not in the least overawed … Sometimes they even laugh at exorcisms, strike at the exorcists themselves, and rend the sacred vestments.” If they were sufficiently irritated by these attacks, incubi could respond with random violence and mayhem. When Sinistrari himself tried to free a virtuous matron from one persistent incubus, the demon gathered hundreds of roofing stones and with them erected a wall around the woman’s bed. When it was finished, the wall was so high, Sinistrari reports, “the couple were unable to leave their bed without using a ladder.”

THE SUCCUBUS

The incubus wasn’t the only demon wielding sex as a weapon. He had a female counterpart—the succubus. In the view of most medieval theologians, incubi outnumbered succubi by nine to one, but the ladies made up in menace for what they lacked in numbers. Alluring and persuasive, they used their considerable charms to seduce men and lead them to eternal damnation.

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 t...