Defining the Demonic

There, between the entry for a seventeenth-century Anglican theologian named Assheton and one for the Levantine goddess Astarte, is the demon Astaroth. As depicted by the French artist Louis le Breton for his fellow countryman Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, Astaroth is a skinny man with reptilian claws punctuating long hands and feet, hobbled over on the back of a lupine demon sporting a massive pair of bat wings and a serpentine tail. His face — described by Collin de Plancy as that of a “very ugly angel” — is rendered by le Breton as thin and effete, almost equine, with eyes dismissive and uncaring, a slight sneer of cold command. Ignoring Astaroth’s claws and demon mount, his look of calculated intelligence could easily be that of one of the armchair intellectuals who dined with the philosophes of the Enlightenment Paris of Collin de Plancy’s youth.

Not an entirely inappropriate connection, for the Dominican inquisitor Sebastian Michaelis, who classified the demons he encountered as an exorcist at the infamous monastery of Loudun in the seventeenth century, associated Astaroth with the new rationalist philosophies that were just being born in France. Michaelis’ Astaroth was a kind of hellish René Descartes, who drew the nuns and priests of Loudun astray with the pernicious promises of Epicureanism and invitations to “Do what thou wilt”. Perhaps for Collin de Plancy, born almost two centuries later amidst the convulsions of revolution, the thin, reptilian demon with the aristocratic bearing still represented some of the dangers of the new learning, for Astaroth “willingly answers the questions he is asked about the most secret things, and . . . it is easy to have him talk about creation”.

Astaroth is a convenient symbol for the oddity of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire, for the demon represents a muddle of cultural forces: rationalism and superstition, systematization and the occult, the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement. When the Dictionnaire was first published in 1818, Collin de Plancy was a dutiful student of the new rationalism who set out to catalogue what he called “aberrations and germs or causes of errors”. As he labored at subsequent editions, however, the secular folklorist found himself more and more pulled in by the lure of demonology, a passion which would eventually lead him, by the 1830s, to enthusiastically embrace Catholicism. By the Dictionnaire’s final edition of 1863, the publishers could assure the reader that the “errors” previously highlighted had now been eliminated, the catalogue now fully congruent with Catholic theology. The preface authoritatively claimed that Collin de Plancy had “reconfigured his labors, recognizing that superstitious, foolish beliefs, occult sects and practices . . . have come only from deserters of the faith.”

All together, across nearly six hundred pages, Collin de Plancy provided entries for sixty-five different demons, including favorites from the pages of Dante, Milton, and others, such as Asmodeus, Azazel, Bael, Behemoth, Belphégor, Belzebuth, Mammon, and Moloch. The most interesting edition of the text is the final one of 1863, illustrated with creepy exactitude by le Breton, whose brilliant Doré-esque engravings elevate the work beyond the relative staidness of previous editions.