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. It is one of the most comprehensive and influential works on the subject, containing entries on demons, occult phenomena, and superstitions. There were several editions of the book; perhaps the most famous is the 1863 edition, which included sixty-nine illustrations by Louis Le Breton depicting the appearances of several of the demons. Their odd depictions of stilt-legged owl men, insect-legged frog-cat kings, and spiral-horned jesters transformed the Dictionnaire Infernal from an occult oddity that could easily have been forgotten to a frightening bestiary that is still referenced and shared today. And it’s a good thing he did, as the bizarre images that accompanied the text are some of the most indelible depictions of demons ever created.

L. MacGregor Mathers’ The Goetia: The Lesser Key of Solomon, a famous grimoire that describes how to summon and control 72 demons. There, between the entry for a seventeenth-century Anglican theologian named Assheton and one for the Levantine goddess Astarte, is the demon Astaroth. 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.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. 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. The preface authoritatively claimed that Collin de Plancy had “reconfigured his labors, recognizing that superstitious, foolish beliefs, occult sects and practices . Like many demonologists before him, de Plancy set out to create an accounting of demonic events and forces in his book, Dictionnaire Infernal. 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.

The Dictionnaire Infernal (English: Infernal Dictionary) is a book on demonology, describing demons organised in hierarchies.Le Breton’s illustration portrays him in full pompous glory as an ass-headed version of the Yazidi’s “Peacock Angel”.