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Defining the Demonic

Although Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, a monumental
compendium of all things diabolical, was first published in 1818 to much success, it
is the fabulously illustrated final edition of 1863 which secured the book as a
landmark in the study and representation of demons. Ed Simon explores the work
and how at its heart lies an unlikely but pertinent synthesis of the Enlightenment
and the occult.
Astaroth, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal — Source.
T here, 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.
Adramelech, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal —
Source.
It’s both edifying and frightening to consider the magnificence of some of these
illustrations. For example, among the more minor demons there is “Adramelech, great
chancellor of the underworld, steward of the wardrobe of the sovereign of the demons,
president of the high council of the devils”, who “showed himself in the form of a mule,
and sometimes even that of a peacock”. Le Breton’s illustration portrays him in full
pompous glory as an ass-headed version of the Yazidi’s “Peacock Angel”. Or there is
Amduscias, in “the form of a unicorn”, to whose voice “the trees bow”, and who
“commands twenty-nine legions.”
Amduscias, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal — Source.
A few pages later there is Amon, a horrific hell beast with globular pitch-black eyes, a
“great and powerful marquis of the infernal empire” who appears as a “wolf, with a
serpent’s tail . . . [whose] head resembles that of an owl, and its beak shows very sharp
canine teeth.” As if le Breton’s rendition of the beast wasn’t terrifying enough, Collin de
Plancy reminds us that this nightmare creature “knows the past and the future”.
Amon, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal — Source.
And then there is Ephialtes — a pug-faced, bird-winged, wild-eyed little gremlin perched
atop the chest of a man, like Fuseli’s Nightmare — who Collin de Plancy describes in
just a single sentence, explaining that he derives from the “Greek name for the nightmare
. . . a kind of incubus that stifles sleep.”

Ephialtes, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal — Source.
There is Eurynome, who has “long teeth, a frightful body full of wounds, and a fox skin
for clothing.” Le Breton depicts Eurynome as a caprine, saw-toothed creature on bended
knee, grimacing at some unseen victim, “showing his great teeth like a starving wolf”.
Eurynome, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal — Source.
And then there is my favorite, Belphégor, who is associated with the deadly sin of sloth
and is shown sat hunched with pinched brow, straining atop a toilet, holding his tail from
harm’s way, trying to take a shit.
Belphégor, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal — Source.
Of course, Collin de Plancy’s concern in the Dictionnaire infernal wasn’t just the
defecation of minor demons. He also aimed to provide instruction on both the history and
the practical utility of the more exalted among Satan’s minions. There is Asmodeus, who
the Talmud claimed was born of a succubus who slept with King David, but who Collin
de Plancy argued was “the ancient serpent who seduced Eve.” Associated with lust,
Asmodeus is presented as a fearsome three-headed monstrosity, though not one above
doing the bidding of King Solomon (regarded by the occult tradition as having had a
special ability to control demons), who “loaded him with irons and forced him to help
build the temple of Jerusalem.”
Asmodeus, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal — Source.
Or reflect upon that “heavy and stupid demon” Behemoth. Calling to mind his
appearance in the Book of Job, Collin de Plancy wrote that some “commentators pretend
that it is the whale, and others that it is the elephant”. Le Breton chose to depict
Behemoth as a bipedal version of the latter, clutching his hairy, engorged belly like some
sort of malevolent Ganesh.
Behemoth, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal — Source.
Then there is Bael, “the first king of hell” who has “three heads, one of which has the
shape of a toad, the other that of a man, and the third of a cat”, to which le Breton made
the fine addition of a number of fur-covered arachnid legs.
Bael, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal — Source.
The Phoenician god Ba’al, from whom Collin de Plancy’s Bael derives his name, was
associated with all manner of idolatries and blasphemies, and is also the inspiration for
that other lieutenant of hell, Belzebuth (or Beelzebub), the trusted advisor of Lucifer
whose name appears in the records of exorcists from Loudun to Salem. As Belzebuth
literally means “Lord of the Flies”, le Breton decided to depict this demon as a startlingly
biologically accurate insect, with long pinching mandibles, weirdly human eyes, and a
skull and crossbones upon his paper-thin wings. If anything, the strange verisimilitude of
the insect-like creature makes le Breton’s image all the more terrifying. His segmented
thorax and spindly arms recall the flea magnified by Robert Hooke two centuries earlier,
the English polymath’s Enlightenment monstrosity demonstrating that the nightmares of
reason and superstition are not always as divergent as we might think.
Belzebuth, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal — Source.
This connection between the ideals of the Enlightenment and the old world of magic and
superstition from which these demons sprung was, in many ways, made literal by the
figure of Collin de Plancy himself. He was born in 1793, only four years after the
crowning (or most condemnatory) event of the Enlightenment: the French Revolution.
Perhaps in reaction to that affair, he added the aristocratic “de Plancy” to his otherwise
plebeian name. Indeed it was not just a plebeian name, but one with positively republican
associations, for Collin de Plancy’s maternal uncle was none other than George Danton,
the radical president of the Committee on Public Safety who, like so many of his fellow
Jacobins, ultimately found his severed head looking up at the guillotine blade one
morning in the month of Germaine.

Like his uncle, Collin de Plancy was originally a partisan of liberty, equality, and
fraternity, an enthused reader of Voltaire and a zealous rationalist and skeptic; also like
his uncle, he would ultimately see himself reconciled to that Church he had rejected,
though with a detour through the darker corners of demonology. As with the many
demonic chimeras that populate his dictionary, Collin de Plancy was a mélange of
disparate parts. He combined the rectilinear logic of men like Voltaire and Diderot with
the chthonic visions of the symbolist and decadent poets of a generation later —
Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Verlaine, who drunkenly stomped through the rainy streets of
Paris clutching their fleurs du mal. Collin de Plancy did not just convince himself that
demons were real, but indeed he developed a wish to control them through language, a
desire as fervent as that of his Enlightenment forebears to categorize and define words
and ideas in dictionaries and encyclopedias. The demonologist was a man stuck between
logic and faith, the salon and the Hellfire club, who heard the screams of horrific
monsters while writing with the sober pen of a naturalist.
Frontispiece to the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy Le diable peint par lui-même: ou,
Galerie de petits romans, de contes bizarres, d’anecdotes prodigieuses, in which the
“author” (Collin De Plancy) is shown chatting to the devil in the night — Source.
Like its creator, the Dictionnaire spanned the interests of two eras. It recalls such
grimoires (practical manuals of magic) as Johann Weyer’s sixteenth-
century Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, or the seventeenth-century Lesser Key of
Solomon, as much as it does the Enlightenment’s systematized compendiums of
knowledge, such as Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie. There is ambiguity in the book’s
project itself, for what could be more modern than the dictionary, and yet what could be
more antique than the knowledge collected in this particular dictionary?

Despite ancient and medieval precedents across several different cultures (one can think
of Aristophanes of Byzantium, who compiled a type of dictionary called the Lexeis two
centuries before Christ), the dictionary and especially the encyclopedia were products of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Dr Johnson and his Dictionary of the English
Language, or James Murray, who, in the Bodleian’s scriptorium, assembled the testament
to humanity that is the Oxford English Dictionary, positivist knowledge could be found in
the process of collection and measurement. The dictionary was sober, rational, and
practical. Etymology was like dissection, another Enlightenment innovation, and the
dictionary a sort of dissection theater. For Johnson, the dictionary was a reaction to
“speech copious without order, and energetick without rules”, it served to tame
vocabulary, for its approach to language was one “reduced to method”.

But what then of Collin de Plancy’s infernal version? Is it a dictionary by name only, or
could the affinities touch a deeper vein? In his Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, the
historian Owen Davies writes of how grimoires are marked by a “desire for knowledge
and the enduring impulse to restrict and control it”, a description that could certainly be
applied to the projects of Johnson and Murray. “Grimoires exist”, he goes on, “because of
the desire to create a physical record of magical knowledge, reflecting concerns regarding
the uncontrollable and corruptible nature of . . . sacred information.” While it’s true that
the grand experiment of the Enlightenment was supposedly to shine the light of
rationality upon the shadows of superstition, the desire to assemble all possible
information is one which the grimoire and the dictionary share. And this yearning
towards completion and the all-encompassing is not just a superficial similarity, for in
their obsessions with words and language, the grimoire and the dictionary share a
common faith — that mere verbal pronouncements have the ability to rewrite reality
itself. Both kinds of book are partisans of a Platonist philosophy that sees a type of word
magic as being able to enact transformations in real life. For the rationalist lexicographer
this means that mastery of rhetoric and syntax can affect our lives through the ability to
explicate and convince; for the wizard this means that the magic of words can conjure
alteration. In both cases, words have the power, if they’re properly organized, to change
the world for better or for worse.
Detail from the frontispiece to the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire
infernal — Source.
At the heart of this shared mission is the fact that both magic and reason have a
motivating belief in the inherent explicability of reality: that there is a given order to the
world and that human minds can comprehend and control this order. Whether that order
is supernatural or natural is somewhat incidental; that there is structure to the system is
what is important. Collin de Plancy’s dictionary may be a grimoire, or his grimoire may
be a dictionary, but fundamentally the distinction between them is less stark than might
be supposed.

Ilan Stavans writes that “dictionaries are like mirrors: they are a reflection of the people
who produced and consumed them.” If this is true, then the Dictionnaire infernal is not
just a reflection of Collin de Plancy, a man who dwelled among shadows yet desired to
illuminate, but also a reflection of our own modern world. With their words listed like
demons, their concern with proper order and grammar (lest our spells don’t work),
dictionaries can be seen as modern, secular grimoires. The Dictionnaire infernal, far from
being an archaic remnant, reminds us that sharp distinctions between antiquity and
modernity ultimately mean little. Ours has always been, and always shall be, a demon-
haunted world. But, with apologies to C. S. Lewis, what grimoires prove is not that
demons exist, but that they can be tamed. If there is any consolation to be found, it’s that
controlling our demons is possible if we’re able to name them, whether they are of the
supernatural or of the rationalist variety — and in either case, a dictionary is what we
shall need.

Ed Simon is the associate editor of The Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of The
Los Angeles Review of Books. He holds a PhD in English from Lehigh University and
regularly contributes to several different sites. He can be followed at his website or on
Twitter @WithEdSimon.

Public Domain Works

 Dictionnaire infernal (1863 edition), by Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin de Plancy, and

illustrations by Louis Le Breton.
 Internet Archive
 Le diable peint par lui-même : ou, Galerie de petits romans, de contes bizarres,
d’anecdotes prodigieuses (1819), by Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin de Plancy.
 Internet Archive

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Further Reading

Infernal Dictionary Deluxe Edition

(Abracax House)
by J. Collin de Plancy
The first full English translation of “Dictionnaire Infernal” by Jacques Auguste Simon
Collin de Plancy (1793-1887). Includes all of le Breton’s illustratiosn as well as
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