Origin from 1450
Demonology is the systematic study and classification of demons and evil or unclean spirits, their names, natures, ranks, and dealings with humankind. It appears within many religions as an account of malevolent powers, the fallen angels and devils of Christian theology, the jinn and shayatin of Islam, and the harmful spirits of countless folk traditions, and it shades into the practical lore of the magician who would command or repel them. The Western grimoire tradition compiled detailed catalogues, most famously the seventy-two spirits of the Goetia in the Lesser Key of Solomon, each given a rank such as king, duke, or president, a number of legions, a seal, and the powers and knowledge it can impart. Such works set out the offices of demons alongside the means, the names, circles, and seals, by which they were to be safely summoned, bound, or driven off. Both a branch of theology concerned with evil and a shadow companion to angelology, demonology maps the darker orders of the spirit world.
Facts
Origins
Origin Periodfrom 1450 1Tradition: early-modern grimoire demonology Origin Periodfrom 300 BCE 2Tradition: Second Temple and early Christian demonology Place of Origin Status
Status TodayIn active religious use 2 Demonology remains an active concern within exorcism ministries, folk religious practice and multiple living religious traditions rather than a closed historical subject. Learn More
The Systematic Study of Demons
Demonology is the systematic study and classification of demons and evil or unclean spirits, their names, natures, ranks, and dealings with humankind. Far from being a single tradition, it appears within many religions as the counterpart to angelology: an ordered account of the malevolent powers, the fallen angels and devils, set against the hosts of good.
In the Jewish and Christian traditions it developed out of the Second Temple period's elaboration of figures like the fallen Watchers of the Book of Enoch and the growing conception of Satan and his subordinates, and reached extraordinary complexity in the medieval and early modern West, where treatises and grimoires catalogued the demonic realm with bureaucratic precision, naming demons, assigning them ranks (princes, dukes, presidents of Hell), hours, and offices, and specifying the rites by which they might be summoned or repelled.
Works such as the Lesser Key of Solomon and Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum enumerated the infernal hierarchy in detail. This literature stood in close and uneasy relation to the theology of exorcism and to the witch-hunts, in which demonological theory had lethal practical consequences. Comparable systems appear in Islamic accounts of the jinn and the shayatin, and in many other traditions. As a subject, demonology reveals how a culture imagines the sources of evil, temptation, and affliction, and how it maps, with sometimes disquieting thoroughness, the powers it most fears.
The Lists, and Where the Names Actually Came From
Demonology in the Western tradition is above all a literature of lists, and the lists have a traceable history that is more interesting than the entries.
The catalogue that stands behind most later ones was printed as an appendix to Johann Weyer's work on the deceptions of demons in the sixteenth century. Weyer's own purpose was the opposite of what his list has since been used for: he was arguing that the women being executed as witches were deluded or ill rather than guilty, and he set out the hierarchy of spirits in part to show how absurd the whole apparatus was. His catalogue was then copied, extended and eventually reissued as an instrument for summoning.
The names themselves come from several directions. A number are recognisably deities of neighbouring or earlier religions, demoted rather than invented, with their titles worn down by transmission through Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Others are corruptions that entered as copying errors and acquired biographies afterwards, so that a scribal slip becomes a duke of hell with thirty legions.
The offices attached to each spirit follow the anxieties of the people compiling them: finding treasure, teaching languages, revealing the future, procuring favour.
Read as a record of what demons are, the lists are worthless. Read as a record of what their compilers wanted, feared and had inherited, they are among the more revealing documents in this atlas.
Connections
Associated With
A goetic grimoire frankly concerned with commanding infernal spirits, setting out a hierarchy under Lucifer, Beelzebuth and Astaroth.
Source Grimoires: A History of Magic BooksOwen Davies
Belongs to Tradition
Christian theology built the fullest system, identifying demons with angels fallen under Satan and developing a formal rite of exorcism, while the grimoire tradition alongside it catalogued them by name, rank, seal and legion. The church condemns the summoning it made possible.
Source Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler)
Islam has no fallen angels: Iblis and the shayatin are jinn, made of smokeless fire and possessed of will, so folk and magical traditions treat them as commandable or contractable, while orthodox scholars confine the response to Quranic recitation and ruqya.
Source Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler)
Jewish sources supply much of the early material, the shedim of the Talmud, Lilith, Asmodeus from Tobit, and the fallen watchers of Enoch, which later Christian and grimoire demonology took up. Rabbinic Judaism records the lore without building a system for commanding it.
Source Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler)
Luciferianism recasts the figure as a bringer of light and knowledge rather than an adversary, and so inverts the valuation demonology assumes: what the Christian system catalogues as spirits to be bound it treats as teachers to be approached.
Source Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler)
Mesopotamia supplies the oldest documented demonology, Lamashtu who threatens infants, Pazuzu invoked against her, the utukku and the gallu, addressed through incantation series that name and expel them; the pattern of naming in order to bind runs through everything after.
Source Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler)
Modern Satanism is mostly atheistic and treats the catalogued demons as symbols of appetite and drive, using the names for their psychological charge; the theistic minority hold their own principle real but reject the grimoire framing of demons as servants to be commanded.
Source Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)Anonymous (unidentified compiler)
Rejected Here
Christian Science holds evil to be unreal, an error of mortal mind rather than a being with a will, so there is no demonic order for a demonology to describe.
Source The Oxford Handbook of New Religious MovementsJames R. Lewis (ed.)
The Satanic Temple is explicitly non-theistic and holds no order of spirits at all, taking Satan as a literary emblem rather than as a being to be studied or invoked.
Source Satanism: A Social HistoryMassimo Introvigne
Held Differently
Church of Satan, Denominations The Church of Satan is atheistic and treats the demonic names of the old grimoires as symbols and psychological archetypes rather than as beings, so its demonology is a literature of self-knowledge.
Source The Satanic BibleAnton Szandor LaVey
Temple of Set, Denominations The Temple of Set is theistic where the Church of Satan is not, holding Set as a real and distinct intelligence, so its account of such beings is an account of what exists rather than of what the mind projects.
Source Satanism: A Social HistoryMassimo Introvigne
Element Of
Orthodox baptism opens with exorcisms and a renunciation, and the tradition's ascetic literature is largely an account of the passions as demonic assault.
Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)
The Talmud speaks of harmful spirits and the tradition preserves those passages, though they have never carried the doctrinal weight that the angels do.
Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd editionMichael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.)
Pentecostal practice includes deliverance, the naming and casting out of spirits, which makes demonology a working discipline rather than a doctrine held at a distance.
Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised editionF. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.)
Rome holds the fall of the angels as a real event and retains a rite of exorcism reserved to the bishop's delegate, so the subject remains a matter of pastoral practice rather than of history.
Source Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd editionHoly Seethe holders' own account
Salafi practice includes the recitation cure against possession and the evil eye, so the jinn are treated as a live matter and not a figure of speech.
Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)
The jinn are Quranic creatures with free will, and Iblis is named among them, so an account of them belongs to Sunni doctrine rather than to folklore.
Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd editionP. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.)
Originates in Language
Source Grimoires: A History of Magic BooksOwen Davies
Sources
1. Grimoires: A History of Magic Books
2. A Dictionary of Angels, Including the Fallen Angels
Divinity Atlas Entity Records, First Edition
Lemegeton Clavicula Salomonis (The Lesser Key of Solomon)
Anonymous (unidentified compiler)Demonology and the Lesser Key of SolomonView the Source Essays About This Entity (1 essay)
Demonology Spans Six Religions, From Ancient Babylon to Modern Satanism
The discipline itself, tied for the strongest open convergence candidate at six religions
Read the EssayReader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
Choose a year to see this entry's facts and connections as the atlas records them at that moment: what it held then, what it held instead, and what it had not yet adopted. Choose Present for the current record.