Fallen Angels . . . and Spirits of the Dark Read online

  “A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seemed

  For dignity composed and high exploit:

  But all was false and hollow; though his tongue

  Dropped manna, and could make the worse appear

  The better reason, to perplex and dash

  Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;

  To vice industrious, but to noble deeds

  Timorous and slothful.”

  When the notorious mass murderer Gilles de Rais attempted to raise some demons (using the severed body parts of a child he had killed), it was Beelzebub and Belial he was after.

  THE GEOGRAPHY OF HELL

  Even demons had to have a home, and Hell was the one that God had chosen for them, “fraught with fire unquenchable,” as Milton put it, “the house of woe and pain.”

  Still, Satan and his crew did what they could with the place, exploring its vast wastelands, enduring its torments, even erecting some towering monuments of their own there. The infernal regions have always been a challenge — tough to live in, tougher still to get out of. And, since those who go to Hell seldom if ever return, it’s been an especially difficult place to map out. To get some idea of how the place is laid out, we have had to rely upon the accounts of saints and seers, poets and prophets. And over the centuries, the picture and the terrain have often changed.

  In the New Testament, Matthew gives a taste of the place, while describing how Jesus on Judgment Day will go about separating the good from the wicked:

  “And before him shall be gathered all nations; and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: and he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world . . . Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels . . .”

  (Matthew 25:32–34, 41)

  The fire stuck. Over the centuries, Hell has become an increasingly variegated landscape — with swamps and bogs, iceflows and forests, deserts and lakes — but in every conception, somewhere, a fire has been burning. In The City of God, written in the fifth century A.D., St. Augustine went on at great length about the quality of the flames in Hell:

  “Hell, which is also called a lake of fire and brimstone, will be material fire, and will torment the bodies of the damned, whether men or devils — the solid bodies of the one, and the aerial bodies of the others. Or, if only men have bodies as well as souls, still the evil spirits, even without bodies, will be so connected to the fires as to receive pain without bestowing life. One fire certainly shall be the lot of both.”

  In the Middle Ages, the abode of the damned began to assume an even greater definition — in part through a popular tract known as The Vision of Tundal, composed by an Irish monk in 1149. In this account, Tundal, a handsome knight and a bit of a rogue, falls into a kind of stupor at the dinner table. His soul leaves his body and is immediately assailed by a horde of gibbering demons. Paralyzed with fright, he is saved only through the intervention of his guardian angel, who offers to give him a preview of what he can expect if he doesn’t mend his ways.

  The preview is harrowing.

  First, Tundal is shown a great valley strewn with stinking coals where murderers cook on an iron grate; then, fiery mountains where demons with razor-sharp hooks torment heretics and heathens. Next he has to wend his way past Acheron, a monster with flaming eyes, who momentarily eats him. (The angel, apparently, thinks this might be an educational experience for him.) When he manages to emerge from the belly of the beast, he has to cross a bridge two miles long and the width of only one hand; in the waters below, a thousand hungry creatures swarm. On the other side (he does make it across) Tundal meets a huge bird with a beak of iron, who eats him again, and then defecates him into a frozen lake. After climbing out of the icy water, and up the Valley of Fires, he is captured by a gang of fiends, who hammer him on an anvil with a score of other sinners.

  When the guardian angel again steps in, Tundal is escorted into the depths of Hell proper. At the bottom of an enormous black cistern, he sees the Devil himself . . .

  “. . . blacker than a crow and shaped like a man except that it had a beak and a spiky tail and thousands of hands, each of which had twenty fingers with fingernails longer than knights’ lances, with feet and toenails much the same, and all of them squeezing unhappy souls. He lay bound with chains on an iron gridiron above a bed of fiery coals. Around him were a great throng of demons. And whenever he exhaled he ejected the squeezed unhappy souls upward into Hell’s torments. And when he inhaled, he sucked them back in to chew them up again.”

  Tundal, unable to shake this terrible vision, stumbles on toward purgatory, and a brief glimpse of Heaven behind a high silver wall, before suddenly awakening in his earthly body again. The minute he does, he asks for Holy Communion, gives everything he has to the poor and unfortunate, and goes off to spread the word.

  Who wouldn’t?

  The most complete, ingenious, and detailed description of Hell most certainly belongs to Dante Alighieri (1265–1321). At the beginning of The Divine Comedy, Dante finds himself lost in a dark wood, threatened by wild animals that block his path. The shade of the poet Virgil appears to him and says that the only way out is through Hell itself, and Dante — the Pilgrim — reluctantly agrees to make the journey.

  Hell in this account is like a great inverted cone, a dagger that pierces to the center of the Earth. At the top of the cone it’s widest, because this is where Lucifer and his angels hit the Earth, like a colossal meteorite, when they were thrown from Heaven. Over the gates to the underworld are inscribed the words, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” Dante shivers in his boots, and Virgil comfortingly takes his hand.

  And down they go. The vestibule of Hell is a great dark plain, where the souls of those who never really lived even in life, who took no decisive course, who “lived without blame, and without praise,” flee endlessly from hordes of angry hornets. Dante and Virgil pass on and stop at the bank of the river Acheron, which flows all around the perimeter of Hell. Charon, the infernal boatman, ferries them across.

  When they step off the boat again, they are in the first ring of Hell, called Limbo. Things here aren’t really too bad. There’s a meadow, a stream, a seven-walled castle. This is the place where Virtuous but Unbaptized souls reside, among them the great pagans. Virgil himself hangs his hat here.

  But things rapidly get worse. The second ring of Hell is reserved for the Lustful, who are blown about forever in pitch blackness by the fierce winds of unquenchable desire.

  The third ring is set aside for the Gluttonous, who lie on the ground beneath a pelting storm of rain and hail; Cerberus, the three-headed dog, barks incessantly and rips them limb from limb. In the fourth, the Avaricious and the Prodigal are divided up into two camps, and spend eternity rolling heavy weights against each other. Dante and Virgil hurry on until they reach a rushing current of dark water; they follow its course downward and into a dismal swamp known as the Styx.

  Dark and dank as it is, even Styx is home to some: here, in the fifth ring, live the Wrathful and the Gloomy, either tearing at each other in anger or gurgling in the black mud below. Watching their step, Dante and Virgil take the long way around the marsh, board another ferryboat across the moatlike Styx, and pass from what is essentially upper Hell into the lower regions. If they thought they’d seen trouble before . . .

  Now they enter what Dante calls the City of Dis (Dis being Satan), the Washington, D.C., of Hell, the place where the fallen angels kick back and relax. Here, in the sixth ring, he finds a wide plain, dotted with burning tombs; inside the tombs, Heretics burn.

  Another river — the Phlegethon — must now be crossed, but this one is broad and filled with boiling blood. In its turbulence Dante sees the souls of those who have committed
Violence — assassins, tyrants, warmongers. The shore is not much better, where Dante and Virgil must enter the dismal Wood of the Suicides. Here, the souls of those who have killed themselves take root and grow, becoming stunted trees with gnarled branches and poisoned fruit. Beyond this is a scorching expanse of sand, where those who have committed violence against God and Nature are showered with eternal fire.

  Still Dante hasn’t reached bottom. The eighth ring, home to Fraudulence and Malice, is known as the Malebolge. Shaped like an enormous amphitheater, it descends for ten more levels, on each of which a different class of sinner is tortured. Horned demons whip the seducers and pimps, hypocrites struggle to walk in lead-lined cloaks, simonists are wedged into stone holes, the soles of their feet licked with fire. Barrators, those who bartered their public office for private gain, are ducked in boiling pitch by a particularly frolicsome band of demons, known as the Malebranche (or “Evil Claws”).

  And even farther down, at the base of the Malebolge, is a well, guarded by fifty-foot giants whom Dante calls the Titans of Tartarus. Virgil commands one of them, Antaeus, to help them on their way by picking them up and depositing them lower down; Antaeus obliges. Dante is now in the ninth and final circle of Hell, Cocytus — the frozen marsh where the Arch Traitor himself, the monstrously sized Satan, is forever immersed up to his breastbone. His giant wings, with which he attempts to free himself, flap uselessly, producing nothing more than cold winds to freeze the ice harder. “If he was once as beautiful as he is ugly now,” Dante writes, “well may all affliction come from him.” Satan has three faces, one black, one red, and one yellow, with mouths gushing bloody foam and six eyes weeping. And while he weeps, he relentlessly chews the bodies of three traitors —Judas, Brutus, and Cassius — whose terrible crimes were still less heinous than his own. Lucifer betrayed the greatest Lord of all, and so he suffers here, in cold and dark, at the farthest possible remove from the source of all light and warmth.

  Dante and Virgil escape from Hell by climbing down Lucifer’s shaggy side — he’s too distraught to notice them — and then crawling through an opening in the rock, into the clean air and starlit night.

  In John Milton’s Hell, as portrayed in Paradise Lost (1667), the same four rivers flow — the Styx, the Acheron, the Phlegethon, the Cocytus — but there is also a fifth, Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, which seems to encircle all of Satan’s domain.

  By Milton’s reckoning, Satan and his cohorts are “hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ Ethereal Sky,” plummet through the mighty void of Chaos, and land with a mighty splash in a lake of fire. No longer are they bright angels, and no longer do they inhabit the happy fields of Heaven. Their new home?

  “A Dungeon horrible, on all sides round

  As one great Furnace flam’d, yet from those flames

  No light, but rather darkness visible

  Serv’d only to discover sights of woe,

  Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace

  And rest can never dwell, hope never comes

  That comes to all . . .”

  When some of the more enterprising demons decide to explore this vast underworld, hoping to find some part of it that isn’t quite so awful, they come up empty-handed — it’s all either freezing waste, swept by wind and hail, or parched and searing plain, “a Universe of death, which God by curse / Created evil . . .” It’s enough to make any self-respecting demon give up altogether.

  But not Satan.

  With the same pride that brought about his ruin in the first place, Satan takes stock of his dreadful new surroundings and decides ... to build! An imperial new palace, to suit his station as sovereign of his own domain! As luck would have it, Hell is rich in minerals, gold among them. (Milton advises us not to be surprised by that; Hell may be the soil that best deserves “the precious bane.”) Mammon, the demon of avarice and riches, is of course the first to spot the gold, and to excavate it with his crew. And Mulciber, who once built towers and battlements in Heaven, is now available to raise the walls of a mighty and glittering new palace in Hell, “Pandaemonium, the high Capital / Of Satan and his Peers.” In no time, the underworld has a showpiece of its own.

  According to Milton, the palace had many gates and porches, and a meeting hall as large as an open field, fit for jousting. And the decor? Opulent might be the operative word. When the demons assemble for their first council there . . .

  “High on a Throne of Royal State, which far

  Outshon the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,

  Or where the Gorgeous East with richest hand

  Showrs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,

  Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d

  To that bad eminence . . .”

  As it was later interpreted by the English painter John Martin, the meeting hall of Pandemonium (literally, “All Demons”) was a great curving amphitheater, with rising tiers and a domed ceiling lighted by scores of burning chandeliers. Vaguely Byzantine in style, with massive walls and galleries, towers and bridges, the capital of Hell was a palace meant to rival, in stateliness and scope, that of Heaven itself.

  THE ARMY OF THE NIGHT

  Not surprisingly, Satan put great stock in his private army. He liked armies, and he liked what they were good for — war. When it came to death and destruction, what could beat a good uprising, a bloody revolution, or an international conflict now and then? For demons, a battlefield was like an amusement park. And Satan’s chain of command was even more complicated than the Pentagon’s; the main players were as follows:

  Punishment for the sin of gluttony.

  Put Satanachia, the Commander-in-Chief, had a profound knowledge of all the planets and provided witches with their animal familiars. He also had a peculiar power over mothers.

  Agaliarept, a grand general of Hell and commander of the second legion, held sway over Europe and Asia Minor, and also controlled the past and future. Possessed of the power to discover all secrets, he was especially good at stirring up enmity and distrust among men.

  Africa was under the command of Beelzebub’s own lieutenant general, Fleurety. An expert in the use of poisonous plants and hallucinatory herbs, Fleurety worked the night shift, whipping up lust and the occasional war among men. He was usually accompanied by a rowdy band of his familiars.

  Amon, a marquis of Hell, handed the marching orders to 40 legions of the infernal army. A demon who vomited flame, he had the head of a wolf and the tail of a serpent. He also had the gift of prophecy, and could see the future.

  Aguares, a grand duke of the eastern regions of Hell, had 30 legions under his command. A master linguist, he was also known to incite dancing among mortals.

  Amduscias, another grand duke, commanded 29 legions, and was known, strangely enough, for making terribly disturbing music. He was usually depicted as human in form, except for his head, which was that of a unicorn.

  Sargatanas, a brigadier major directly under Astaroth’s command, was uniquely skilled — he could steal into a human being’s mind and share in his innermost thoughts. If he felt like it, he could then wipe out those thoughts, along with all memory, and carry the person off to another part of the globe altogether.

  The field marshal on Astaroth’s staff was a demon named Nebiros, who personally oversaw North America and often employed animals to perform his nefarious acts.

  Raum, a count and the commander of 30 legions, was an accomplished destroyer of cities. He also had the uncanny ability to determine, in the event of theft, who the culprit was.

  Baal, grand duke, in charge of 66 legions, was one of the most unsightly of Satan’s officers. His body was short and fat, like a squashed pillow, and his legs, which sprang up all around, were those of a spider. His three heads were those of a cat, a toad, and a man wearing a crown. His voice was just as awful —raucous and shrill—and he used it to instruct his followers in guile, ruthless cunning, and the ability to become invisible.

  In command of 60 legions, which he directed from atop
a winged horse, was Abigor, a cavalier skilled in the secrets of war and prophecy. Unlike most demons, Abigor was usually represented as handsome and rather dashing.

  Azazel was the chief standard bearer of the infernal armies.

  PUBLIC OFFICE

  On the political front, Hell had its own prime minister, too, by the name of Lucifuge Rofocale. Lucifuge could only assume a body at night and he hated the light. Among his many duties were the infliction of disease and deformity, the creation of earthquakes, and the destruction of sacred deities. His powers extended over all the treasures of the Earth.

  The grand president of Hell, a robust, white-haired old man, was Forcas. He taught logic and rhetoric, and commanded 29 legions of the infernal forces.

  Leonard, a first-order demon, was the inspector general of black magic and sorcery — something like a quality-control expert — and master of the sabbats; when he presided over a sabbat, he appeared as an enormous black goat with three horns and the head of a fox.

  Abbadon (Apollyon is another common spelling) bore the nickname The Destroyer, from his days as one of the destroying angels of the Apocalypse. In the Book of Revelation, he is identified as the chief of the demon locusts, which are themselves described as having the bodies of winged warhorses, the faces of humans, and the poisonous, curved tails of scorpions. His other appellation was Sovereign of the Bottomless Pit.

  Adramelech, grand chancellor, was also the supervisor of Satan’s wardrobe. Though he was chiefly a mule, part of his torso was human, and he had a peacock’s tail.

  Baalberith was the chief secretary of Hell, head of its public archives, and the demon who tempted men to blasphemy and murder. When seated among the princes of Hell, he was usually seen as a pontiff. He was also quite a voluble sort: according to the Admirable History written by Father Sebastien Michaelis in 1612, Baalberith once possessed a nun in Aix-en-Provence. In the process of the exorcism, Baalberith volunteered not only his own name and the names of all the other demons possessing her, but the names of the saints who would be most effective in opposing them.