Pazuzu

Pazuzu is one of the most striking figures of Mesopotamian demonology because he is a demon invoked for protection, an evil turned against a worse evil. King of the wind demons and son of the god Hanbi, he is the bringer of the searing, disease-laden west wind and of famine, a malevolent power in his own right. Yet precisely because he was dreaded, he was enlisted against the demoness Lamashtu, the killer of mothers and infants who was reckoned his enemy.

Amulets and small bronze heads bearing his grotesque image, a canine or leonine face with bulging eyes, a scaly body, taloned feet, a scorpion's tail, and wings, were hung in the home and worn by pregnant women to frighten Lamashtu away, on the logic that only a monster could repel a monster. He is thus an "apotropaic" demon, harnessed to guard the very people demons were feared to harm. (Twentieth-century popular culture, borrowing his fearsome image for The Exorcist, made him a symbol of pure malevolence, almost the reverse of his protective role in the ancient world.) Pazuzu illustrates the Mesopotamian intuition that the powers that threaten and the powers that guard were often one and the same, a matter of which way they were turned.

Pazuzu does not fit a simple hostile demon category, and Mesopotamian religion in general did not divide its supernatural beings into good and evil camps the way later traditions would. Surviving amulets and figurines show Pazuzu's hideous image, part lion, part bird, part scorpion, worn and displayed specifically for protection, most often against Lamashtu, a separate and more consistently dangerous demoness blamed for harming pregnant women and infants.

A being genuinely understood as dangerous, king of the wind demons and associated with famine and locusts, was nonetheless invoked because his own destructive power could be turned against a still greater threat, a common logic in Mesopotamian magical practice where danger and protection were not opposites so much as two uses of the same force, correctly directed. This ambivalence, a figure both feared and appealed to, sits uneasily with the modern popular image of Pazuzu introduced to wide audiences through the film The Exorcist, which draws on his frightening appearance while dropping the protective, apotropaic role that defined his actual use in the ancient sources. The cinematic Pazuzu is essentially a new invention wearing an ancient face, borrowing the iconography of a genuine Mesopotamian demon while discarding the specific ritual logic that made ancient people want his image in their homes.