Practical Manuals of Demonology

Saint Anthony and the demon's of the wastes, whose numbers include the heresiarchs Arius and Mani. FYI.

Again, apologies for mailing in the month of August. I am going to manage to get up one final post on his dark majesty. Since I have been busy with a few different projects next month will be played much closer to the vest. Next month's theme will be books that are useful to us here and now. Snapshot zeitgeists if you will.

But now for today's topic, which as you can guess will be from the "reference" section of the library. These two books are a couple of my favorites and for very different reasons. One is remarkable in its scholarship and the other in its sense of humor.

We'll start with the brainy one.


A Dictionary of Angels - Including The Fallen Ones by Gustav Davidson. Free Press. 386pp. ISBN: 9780029070529. $21. Buy it here and support the Devil's Accountant.

Born in 1895, Gustav Davidson was one of those pioneer writer/editor/publisher types that history has so few of. I am joking somewhat, but it is true that the man did work in nearly every capacity that a man of letters can find work doing. He briefly managed a publishing house, founded one of his own, had published several volumes of his verse and edited a wide variety of anthologies. Of all his efforts, including some bibliographic materials on collecting American juvenilia, it his dictionary of angels that has endured.

A Dictionary Of Angels is a large volume, nearly four-hundred pages in a tightly packed folio format. The book not only includes biblical and apocryphal references but also literary ones. So under the entry of Satan, you will find the root derivations as well as the more noteworthy literary manifestations of the dread demon, namely Milton's warring prince.

The quantity of angels, there classifications and derivations must of been a tall order to classify. Davidson didn't stop there. No, indeed he included one of the most enjoyable appendices found in any reference work about fallen angels. Namely a collection of seraphic spells and magic.

Want to conjure the sword of the archangel Michael? Gustav has you covered. How about a magic carpet? Didn't know you would need to invoke a the cherubim to own one of those, did you? Additional to these most useful evocations there is a complete series of charts demonstrating the orders of angels and who fits where. Add in the charts of angelic dominions over seasons, months and hours and you can find out which angel is in charge and when. Do the charts all the way through and you'll arrive at your guardian angels.

Just don't think it will be all sunshine and chubby cheeks. The angels are all under god's bidding and they take their responsibilities very seriously. Even the fallen ones.

For instance: My guardian angel is Samael. "The Severity of God," who is synonymous with the Angel of Death and whose visage terrified Moses so greatly that he begged God to not deliver his soul unto him. Good for me. No wonder some days seem so freaking hard to get through.

You should see who yours is. Maybe you've been living your whole life under the careful guidance of a metaphysical badass like me.


A Field Guide To Demons, Fairies, Fallen Angels and Other Subversive Spirits by Carol and Dinah Mack. Henry Holt. ISBN: 080506270X. 336pp. $17. Buy it here and support the Devil's Accountant.

While I have never yet had to draw upon the knowledge contained within this informative book, I walk confidently into the shadowy alley or along deserted canal walks with no fear of being overpowered by some foul spirit.

Why? Because of the Mack's inclusion of a "dispelling and disarming techniques" section in each entry of their field guide. See a Kelpie? Don't go near the water? Worried about St. Anthony's demons? Either stay true to your original moral position or find a densely populated place where you can talk with more tangible company. I have found that bars work wonders for driving St. Anthony's demons away.

Now for the ghoul of the desert you will need t keep your fire burning high and never, ever under any circumstances marry a woman without checking her for a tail. In fact, insist on checking her for a tail at the first pertinent opportunity.

The Mack's book is one that draws on a diverse selection of cultural legends, ranging from the woodlands of Germany to the humid balm of the Congo, with some more metaphysical 20th Century manifestations thrown in to assure the completeness of the field guide. The informative aspect of each entry is wonderfully written with a keen sense of the humorous nature of many of these dread creature's motives. I mean, if you can't smile while being devoured by the Incubi or Succubi then just when are you going to ever grin? Is a hirzute lizard man deceiving your best friend and masquerading as his wife? Lift that bridal gown. Show everyone the beast's tail before harvesting it and having a big cookout. Tastes like chicken, or so it is said.

My favorite entry in the Guide is concerning the archdemon Ahriman. Great Ahriman of Zoroastrian derivation is the atavistic forebear of all the modern Devil's most notable traits. Unlike the Christian Satan, Ahriman was a equal of the good deity, Ahru Mazda. Ahriman's insidious schemes and unfathomably powerful evil is such that the common man is truly no match and even if drawing upon the strength of the good lord you might still come up insufficient. He was Ray Lewis before Ray Lewis. Sorry, football season is nearing.

The Mack's use Ahriman to construct one of their more interesting observations on the role of evil in religion. It is especially interesting if you consider the fact that Ahriman was essentially omnipotent when compared to a mortal's faculties. It is in light of this fully composed evil that the Mack's leave you, and I too shall leave you with it too, with no escape except... Well, let them speak for themselves.

When confronted with the power of Ahriaman:

When dealing with demonic forces of this order, and with the attributes of evil so clearly defined, the traveler is asked to choose.

So what's it going to be? With or against?

I'm Not Lazy - I Swear

Bruegel's Sloth.

Sorry folks. I have a couple (one small and one large) writing engagements that are pulling me away from the blog.

Add in best man duties a week or so ago and I've really fallen behind.

I promise a post this Thursday and hope to formulate a plan for managing next month in the process.

Carry on, readers.

Two Notable Hustlers

The Knight, Death and The Devil by Albrecht Durer. (1513).


The silvery tongue is perhaps the Devil's chief weapon. Whether he is bartering for a soul or sowing doubt, the Devil has always had to use deceit as his path to man's heart.

His goals have always been the same. Either he wants to possess man's soul and thus mimic God, or he desires to undermine God's authority. Both lead to the same thing: The Devil seeking an increase in power.

Today we will look at the latter devil, namely the devil that seeks to undermine God's authority and power on Earth. It is perhaps not without coincidence that the two novelists today are both American.

The first title is John Gardner's cleverly constructed anti-novel Freddy's Book, where the Devil plays the role of power broker and chaos sower in Sweden during the 1500's. Combining physical potency and political savvy, Gardner's Satan owes clear allegiance to the one rendered in Milton's Paradise Lost. The Devil as strategist par excellence.

The second book is an absolute favorite of mine. In Herman Melville's late offering, The Confidence Man, the Devil boards a Mississippi steam boat and heads up river. Changing form from crippled "negro" to gallant casuist, with a mad evangelical in between. The novel's bleak portrayal of man is not so much about man's inherent faults as it is about how easily exploited humanity is. Melville's confidence man is less interested in dollars and cents as he is in crippling faith and undermining resolve.

So lets get to it.


Freddy's Book by John Gardner. White Pine Press. 254 pp. ISBN: 1893996840. $16.00 (new trade paperback). Buy it here and support The Devil's Accountant.

Gardner is one of the Accountant's favorite writers, and perhaps in the distant future I might spend an entire month on his brilliant career, scandalous nonfiction and eventual blacklisting from the literary world's highest circles.

Today though, we are to talk of one of his most ingenious inventions.

Freddy's Book opens with a cliched image of an academic at the top of his game. He is a celebrated critic of folklore with a focus on northwestern Europe. Namely Sweden. His critical writings are of the sort that take obscure topics and attempt to sex them up with Freudian or Marxist theories. The end result is a work of evocative if dubious scholarship, where feminist rebellions and sexual innuendo replace the tale of Hansel and Gretel.

After giving a lecture at a prestigious university a party is thrown for him at one of the department head' homes. Gardner describes perfectly the incestual debauchery that can exist only when coworkers drink together, especially if they are inhabitants of the ivory tower. One professor is in attendance who is not interested in the grad students thighs or the willow wisp power of a professor with a book under his belt. This aging dean walks up to the modern scholar and asks him if he would like to meet a real monster.

A real monster...

The old man, a pillar of the very field of mythical studies that the young man now writes "crap" in (those are the old man's words to him), is talking about his son. Freddy to be precise.

The meeting occurs at the old man's creaking, foreboding old home. Sitting in the parlor, being dressed down by the old man for his poor scholarly habits, the young professor is unnerved by the sounds from the second floor.

Freddy is a towering, strange humanoid. A hulking mass of flesh, Freddy stands over seven-feet tall. This lumbering giant is a peaceful, studious one whose only rages are artistic in nature. He has written a book and he wishes to share it with the young professor, who is staying the night in the creepy mansion.

Cut to next scene. Or book rather.

Once Freddy's book is in his possession the reader no longer touches base with the modern world, well, in the literal sense. Instead the rest of the book is fragmented from the first and complete unto itself.

It is the tale of a young knight, Gustav Vasa and the Devil. Gustav Vasa, the first King to unite Sweden and modernize it autonomous from the Danish or Germans, was also the first person to revolutionize the use of the printing press. As a military strategist, Vasa's first move was to take printing presses and remove the bible from its que and in its stead print propaganda. He was the first to do such a thing. Certainly not the last.

The knight is named Lars-Goren and he is a man who fears nothing, save the devil. As Vasa's chief advisor and warrior without peer he calmly paces through Freddy's novel as a noble and chivalrous man. His only fault perhaps is that he is a workaholic, something worth noting.

The Devil is a fascinating character in this work. He exists as a physical potential, a terrifyingly bestial humanoid who is at once a force of nature and a clever Machiavellian schemer. It is he who assists Vasa in every step of his rise to power. The whole world is available to the Devil for his battles with god and yet it is there, in the Sweden of the early 1500's that he has chosen for his work. He is both the first proletarian revolutionary and the first market research guru. He is, in more clear language, a deluded liar.

The dawn of massed media and the reordering of the world's power to incorporate the merchant classes is essentially the dawning of the modern world. Both Freddy's book and the overarching frame of Freddy's Book are allegorical constructions meant to display the dawning of a world and a moral blueprint (Freddy himself and Lars-Goren in the story) to deal with the machinations that inhabit and create the world we live in.

The devil, as you shall see over and over again, is merely causality.

I feel I have don a poor job of explaining this book. Know that it is one of the most complex works around, where the connections of essentially two stories exist only by implication and allegorical reference. The Devil, as seen by John Gardner, is a clever manufacturer of tastes and perhaps with that in mind we can understand why Gardner was careful to write this wonderful novel in a straight manner, using only allegory (perhaps a devilish reference unto itself) as his mode of conveyance.



The Confidence Man: His Masquerade by Herman Melville. Northwestern University Press. 251 pp. ISBN: 9780810119680. $13.95 (new trade paperback). Buy it here and support The Devil's Accountant.

Flattery is perhaps my favorite drug. How about you?

Yours, sir, if I mistake not, must be a beautiful soul — one full of all love and truth; for where beauty is, there must those be.

One of the more consistent themes to Melville's late masterpiece is one of beauty equating to love and truth. By theme I mean argument, because it is the art of arguing that Melville's conman practices. Part of a confidence game is convincing the victim. In this case convincing is everything. The conman here wants something more than money.

The confusion of beauty with sublimity is one that the Devil benefits from. It's simple: If beauty is truth and love then god would have to be beautiful. Beauty of course is a worldly trait, thus god is either worldly or not beautiful, with a legion of other variable limitations to god born of such a philosophy.

While a dark and muddled commentary on the frailty of man before causality is very much in line with Melville's writing, The Confidence Man is a bit of an anomaly in the Melville canon. The plot seems more apropos of Mark Twain than the author of Moby Dick.

This is superficially speaking of course, as the further you read the darker and more brooding the humor becomes. At times the comedic element exists only as implication, half languishing before the sinister progress of the protean conman. In these moments the reader may feel something not unlike dread. Melville essentially plops the reader into the miasma of the devil's clever word-twisting arguments.

But what of this devil?

The story opens with a flaxen-haired youth standing in a dandies getup proudly displaying no piece of luggage save a slate bearing different slogans in chalk.

"Charity thinketh no evil." It proclaims at first and then after a quick change it reads:

"Charity suffereth long, and is kind."

And so on... The young man is mute and a mixture of enduring and disturbing to the passengers boarding the steamship.

Cut to the next scene and we find a crippled negro, whose ugliness is surpassed only by his cooing servitude to all who bestow charity upon him.

In another seen we have a tonic salesman, and in yet another a down and out business man who needs a helping hand.

All the same. While never explicitly stated as being supernatural, the confidence man's proficiency in changing garb, and bodily makeup too, is unnatural. His arguments are too polished, too inane from a fiscal standpoint for someone who is merely grifting.

Melville sets the novel on the day of its publication date of April 1st, 1857. The author had become increasingly cynical about man's nature and in particular man's constructed philosophies.

It is in this spirit that Melville loosed his most comic character, an insinuatingly clever shapeshifting thief whose only objective is the theft of the confidence of others.

Is he truly a devil, let alone the Devil? It is not made clear. However, the influence is certainly rebellious and the goals are satanic ones. Read "satanic" in the Miltonian sense and not in heavy metal aesthetics.

As cool as they are...

The Devil's Domicile - Hell

Dante's vision of a circular and tiered Hell. The progression of the circles organize Hell by way of ever-increasing gravity of sin and cruelty of torture. The final level belongs to traitors, whose crime mirrors that of Satan's most closely. They are frozen in ice.


Tardiness is better than absence and any hell is by other name the Hell.

Let us quickly proceed as I'm running late for work.


The History of Hell by Alice K. Turner. Harcourt. ISBN: 0156001373. 275 pp. Buy it here to support The Devil's Accountant.

The first recorded story of Hell goes something like this: The Babylonian gods are throwing a party. All will be in attendance except Erishkigal, Queen of the Dead. She must stay and tend her flock in her subterranean kingdom less they (the dead) get loose and eat the living. So she sends an envoy to this divine party to collect victuals and celebrate in her stead.

One problem: The gods mistreat her envoy and after he returns to her humiliated, she is furious. Hell have no wrath and all that. She voices her disappointment with the other gods by threatening to release the dead upon the living. It is a troublesome predicament.

The gods send the young demigod, Nergal, who apparently was something of a looker. Nergal journeys down through the dangerous underworld to confront and apologize to the Queen of the Damned. She accepts.

Nergal is cautious, of course. One does not want to become a permanent fixture in a Babylonian Hell. He politely declines her offers of beer, bread, meat and water. Then she offers up her divine body. Apparently the Queen of the Damned is a looker too.

They cohabit (a word involved in almost all good devil stories) for a week straight. As god and goddess they require no actual food so this is supposed to imply an actual week straight.

At the end of which Nergal comes to his senses. He is in Hell, albeit with a very pretty devil. Now that he has had his fun he resolves to return to the world above. Oops. Erishkigal wants him to cuddle (okay, so the myth just has her wanting to stay with her).

Nergal is not a bright demigod. His lie to Erishkigal is an unfortunate one. Ladies, let me know if you’ve heard this one before. Nergal tells his dark mistress that he merely wants to return to the world above to proclaim to the living and the other gods that he loves her, and that they are now a couple. Ahem…

Erishkigal is touched by this sentiment and basking in the afterglow of their recent lovemaking she allows him to head up to inform everyone. Nergal, like any idiot, fails to see the end of his story.

Sure enough Nergal tells no one and enjoys a short while as the guy who got the dark queen. Erishkigal is not thrilled.

“I will send up the dead that they might devour the living./ I will make the dead more numerous than the living.”

Needless to say, Nergal is now aware of his lack of forethought. When the dread queen sends her vizier to retrieve the wayward lover he is found trying to disguise himself as a bald and palsied old man. The disguise does not work and down he goes.

The tablet containing this story is missing after this point, but in registries of stories Nergal is listed only as “Erishkigal’s consort.”

Keep up the work, bud. I don’t want to fight any zombies.

The History of Hell is full of comic stories, though perhaps none as slapstick funny as this one. The two most striking aspects of Turner’s wonderful history is that 1) The Hell of all cultures is a derivative work, which has evolved and incorporated pervious story traditions (see Anubis for Cerberus, “dread” Persephone for Erishkigal, Satan for Ahriman, Dante for Orpheus, etc) and 2) Hell was often treated comically in its early manifestations.

In fact the terrifying hell that lends itself to brimstone preaching is a relatively recent item. Sure, it borrows heavily from the polarized deities of Zoroastrianism and the disturbingly populous hell of classical Greece, but its consistently sober treatment is a development of the last five-hundred years.

One need only look at the satire of Dante or the oblique humor of Greek tragedy to understand that we have always had a laugh at the Devil’s expense. Now whether he/she can “send up the dead” is the humorless question always being begged to be asked.

The most chilling moment in Turner’s history comes when describing a lost mural that was present at the Oracle at Delphi. It is the work of Polygnotus and it is perhaps the largest depicture of hell ever rendered. The only accounting of it (it was destroyed a long time ago, probably by early Christians) comes from the Greek travel writer Pausanias. In his accounting of it he is particular struck by one anomaly in the painting. A figure known as Eurynomos. This creature is apparently rendered with fearful detail.

Pausanias writes (Turner’s selection):

The guides at Delphi say that Eurynomos is one of the daimones in Hades, and that he devours the flesh of the dead, leaving them only their bones. Now, the poems of Homer, as well as the Minyad and the Returns do not know of any daimon Eurynomos. Nevertheless, I will describe Eurynomos and the way he has been represented: his complexion is between blue and black, like that of the flies that gather around meat; he shows his teeth, and a vulture’s skin is spread for him to sit on.

Who might you be, Eurynomos? Perhaps some lord of the flies.

Que scary organ music.


The Lower Depths by Maxim Gorky. Translated by Jennie Covan. Dover Books. ISBN: 048641115x. Buy it here and support The Devil's Accountant.

Born Alexey Maximovich Peshkov, Gorky adopted his nome de plume in order to explain where he was writing from. Gorky, or “Bitter,” was the first of many great writers to emerge from the working classes. His stories of poverty and proletarian struggle had gained literary influence even before the rise of the Soviet Union. With its birth however, Maxim Gorky catapulted to literary stardom. He was not always comfortable with this role.

The Lower Depths is perhaps his greatest play. Even if there are other plays or stories that are constructed with greater fluidity this play is yet the most definitive. Center to Gorky’s stage are the poor inhabitants of a decaying boarding house’s basement lodgings, the play presents the reader with unflinching squalor and pain. Death and life are the same here and passing from one to the other meets with neither envy nor celebration. The dead will pay no rent. They will sweep no floors.

A failed actor, a fallen aristocrat turned pimp, a prostitute, a thief and a conman… Each has his own crime to bear and in the case of all there is no return to freedom or redemption. They are condemned to live in the subterranean death-trap that is the boarding house’s basement.

The room is literally beneath the earth. It is dank and lit by only one filmy window. The unclean conditions often lead to the development of consumption and indeed early in the play one of the inhabitants dies of pulmonary infection. Her body is cast into the only other set in the play, a field leading to the external world. It is a waste of broken things and ill deeds. One wonders whether it exists to keep the living from the condemned or the other way around. Methinks that hells, fantastic or otherwise, are like all ghettos. It is always the other way around.

I chose this cruel play (Gorky never flinches – the pain of these lost souls’ poverty is nonstop and served up raw) as foil to the lurid “Hells” described above. While the fantastic hells of Plato and Dante are certainly more entertaining and the Devil a convenient answer for human baseness, it is in fact the hells of this earth that are the most dangerous.

I am a secular person. In saying this I freely admit to you that I believe in no hell other than that of human squalor and no devil other than indifference and cruelty.

You had to know that this site would not be all heavy metal and black candles at midnight.

August 2009 - The Devil

Okay. Breaks over. Time to talk brass tacks and blood-soaked contracts. It had to happen at some point and really, what better time than August to dwell on his infernal majesty? So, wiping the sweat from my brow and staring longingly at a bowl full of ripe chile peppers, I humbly announce the world's most arrogant servant: The Devil.

The literature of the Devil, and his or her various manifestations, is a rich and ancient tradition. And tradition it is, as you shall see over the next few weeks (especially as a comic tradition - the first stories of Hell and the devil are often satirical). Over time the Devil has gained and lost power, but always held sway over the Earth's most presumptuous inhabitant. He is found in nearly every tongue and his fate has been accounted for by some of history's most silvery ones.

The mighty Ahriman of Zoroaster's nightmares, fickle Hades beyond the Avernus Cavern, Ibliss of the scorching wastes, the legion of Satan tempting Christ in the wilds, the slobbering glutton envisioned by Dante, the dread tactician of Milton's Paradise Lost and even the confused latter manifestation of Lucifer in 20th century popular culture - these are this month's cast. Not a thieves company nor murderers' row, but instead a shape-shifting lord of the sale.

Keeping with the spirit of the Devil's Accountant, the books I will choose may be less obvious ones. The reader of this site is not one who needs to be told that Dante spins a great yarn or that Milton's Satan is by far the most interesting. Instead I will dwell on some lesser known devils and the mortals they have dealt with.

Starting tomorrow (and then back at the traditional Monday spot - and an actual Thursday entry too!) the DA is all Devil all the time. So dust off your Robert Johnson recordings and proceed with some courtesy, some sympathy and some taste. We are discussing royalty here.

Even if infernal.