Are you interested in angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, then sit back, relax, and welcome to Seven Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
Welcome to Southern Demonology. As always, I am your friendly neighborhood, ancient demonologist JJ. And for today, I want to do something that is probably long overdue considering that I have somehow managed to host a podcast called Southern Demonology for almost a decade. I want to figure out what the hell a demon actually is. And you would think that would be a fairly easy question to answer. After all, we use the word constantly. I obviously use it constantly.
You can pull up any number of websites, books, TikTok videos, YouTube channels, podcasts, and I'm certainly including myself in that last category where someone will happily tell you about this demon or that demon. We create enormous lists of them. We divide them into hierarchies. We give them names, appearances, jobs, personalities, astrological correspondences, favorite brands of toothpaste. Okay, maybe not that last one, though I'm sure if I look hard enough, someone has done it. But underneath all of that is a problem that I don't think we acknowledge nearly enough.
What do we mean when we call something a demon? Is a demon a fallen angel? Well, sometimes is it an evil spirit? That's getting closer. But what exactly is a spirit and is a ghost a demon? What about the spirit of a dead giant? What about a foreign god? What about a spirit that causes disease? What about a supernatural entity that kills people but does so because God sends it to accomplish a particular task? Is that a demon? And that last question is going to become incredibly important.
Because one of the biggest mistakes we can make when studying ancient demonology is to take the fully developed idea of the demon that we have inherited from much later traditions, carry it backward several thousand years, slap it onto every supernatural being that happens to do something unpleasant, and then congratulate ourselves for having solved the mystery. We haven't solved anything, we have just changed the labels on the boxes.
And I think this problem becomes obvious when you look at the entry for demon in the dictionary of deities and demons in the Bible, which is going to serve as one of the primary sources for this episode. The entry makes what I think is a fantastic observation. The word and more importantly, the concept of a demon changed dramatically in antiquity. And the thing that helped drive that change was dualism. That is where we're eventually going today.
But before we get to ancient Persia, the Second Temple period, first Enoch, and the ghosts of dead giants, and yes, I promise you there will eventually be ghosts of dead giants. We need to go much farther back. Because if we want to understand what a demon became, we first need to understand what a demon was before there was a devil for it to work for. Let's travel to Mesopotamia. And right off the bat, I need to throw up one enormous warning sign. Mesopotamian religion existed for thousands of years. Thousands. That's easy to say and incredibly difficult to internalize.
We have this nasty habit of taking ancient civilizations and compressing them into a single moment. We'll say the Mesopotamians believed or the Egyptians believed, as if someone living in Uruk in 3000 BCE necessarily thought exactly the same thing as someone living in Babylon 2,000 years later. That's roughly the equivalent of finding something written by Marcus Aurelius and using it to explain what your neighbor believes today. Things change, religions change, words change, supernatural beings change. And sometimes an old name remains while almost everything around that name has shifted.
Thorkill Jacobson actually spends time warning about exactly this problem in the treasures of darkness. Ancient Mesopotamian material can preserve traditions for enormous stretches of time while the meaning attached to those traditions changes underneath them. And that is something we're going to have to keep in mind throughout this entire series. But Jacobson gives us a useful starting point. He argues that one characteristic of early Mesopotamian religion was the tendency to experience supernatural, or to use his terminology, numinous power as a mainent.
In other words, the power wasn't necessarily standing somewhere outside of the thing you encountered. It could be the power in the thing. The sun, the storm, the grain, the river. The fertility that caused crops to grow, the terrifying wind that came screaming across the landscape. And this is where things get really interesting for demonology. Because if the supernatural world is encountered through all of these different phenomena, then the immediate question isn't necessarily is this being morally good or morally evil? The question is, what does this power do to me?
Is this something I want close, or is this something I very desperately want to go away? Jacobson describes that distinction beautifully. A beneficial supernatural power was something you sought, something whose continued presence you wanted to ensure. A harmful power was something you defended yourself against. And those harmful powers could be associated with sudden illness, pain, storms, winds, ghosts who could not find rest in the underworld, or even particular diseases. That is already a world populated by beings that we would very comfortably call demons. But there's a catch.
Demon is our category. The ancient system is much messier. You can have an evil spirit, a harmful god, a ghost, a disease that possesses supernatural agency, or even a wind that isn't merely meteorological, but carries a numinous power of its own. And what unites these things is not necessarily that they have signed enlistment papers with the cosmic forces of evil, they hurt people. That's enough. They are hostile powers. You ward them off, you use incantations against them, you seek divine assistance against them.
But, and this is absolutely critical, they still exist inside the same supernatural system as the gods. There isn't necessarily a separate infernal government running in opposition to the divine world. And I think one of the best examples of this comes from the Atrahasis epic. I've talked about Atrahasis before because it is one of those texts that you simply cannot avoid when dealing with the ancient Near East. It is also one of those texts where every time you think things can't get stranger, the ancient writer politely asks you to hold his beer.
Toward the end of the flood story, the gods have a problem. Humanity had become too numerous and too noisy. The flood had been an absolutely catastrophic attempt to solve that problem, and afterward a different mechanism is established to keep the human population under control. One of those mechanisms is Pashitu, and Pashitu kills children at birth. Let that sink in for a second.
By almost any modern popular definition, if I tell you there is a supernatural being whose job involves killing infants, you're probably going to place that entity under the heading demon in letters large enough to see from space. And Jacobson himself uses that term for Pashitu. But within the narrative, Pashitu isn't rebelling against the gods. She is part of the solution devised by them. The horror is real, the destructive function is real. But the cosmic rebellion isn't, and that distinction is the first major key to this entire episode.
Harmful does not automatically mean opposed to God or the gods. I want to say that again, because we're going to watch that distinction change. A supernatural entity can be destructive without belonging to some independent kingdom of evil. And there is another Mesopotamian example that I absolutely love, because it demonstrates how different this worldview can be from ours. Jakobsen describes incantations against harmful ghosts and demons of illness in which the afflicted person can essentially take the spirit to court. I am not being metaphorical here.
The victim appeals to the sun god as judge or to other judges of the underworld and asks that the offending ghost or demon be arrested and returned to where it belongs. Think about what that implies. The demon is not necessarily outside cosmic law, it can be sued under cosmic law. And I desperately wish modern legal systems work this way, because the court transcripts alone would be amazing. Your Honor, the defendant entered through the hinge box like a wind, caused three days of fever, and refuses to vacate the premises. But joking aside, that tells us something extremely important.
The harmful supernatural being is still part of an ordered cosmos. It may violate that order. It may prey upon humans. It may need to be expelled, restrained, returned, or punished. But we're still not dealing with the later idea of two supernatural armies locked in a war over the fate of creation. And that brings us closer to ancient Israel. Now I need to be very careful here, because this is where chronology becomes everything. There is no one single biblical demonology. The Hebrew Bible is a collection of texts produced and edited across a very long period of time.
If we take something from an earlier stratum, something from the Persian or Hellenistic period, throw both into a blender, and call the result what the Bible teaches about demons, we're going to manufacture a system that the individual texts themselves never actually present. So let's start earlier. In 1 Samuel 16, Saul is afflicted by what the text calls a ruach ra'ah, an evil or harmful spirit. But here is the problem. If we want to call that thing a demon in the later sense, it comes from God.
The Dictionary of Deities and Demons points out that the Spirit is not really personified in this narrative. It functions as an objectification of God's abandonment of Saul after David has been chosen. The spirit torments Saul. David's music temporarily alleviates the suffering. Later, as Saul becomes increasingly jealous of David, the spirit returns and Saul becomes violent. Whatever psychological, literary, or supernatural layers we want to explore in that story. And there are quite a few. The point for today is simply that this harmful spirit does not belong to an opposing kingdom.
It isn't a soldier of Satan slipping behind enemy lines, it operates within divine sovereignty. And then 1 Kings 22 gives us something even more fascinating. The prophet Mekaiah sees the heavenly court. God asks how Ahab might be enticed into going to Ramath Gilead where he will die. A spirit steps forward, it volunteers, and its plan is to become a lying spirit in the mouths of Ahab's prophets. Again, stop and think about how strange that sounds if we impose later demonology upon it. Lying, deception, false prophecy.
Those are precisely the sorts of activities that later Jewish literature can associate with the forces of cosmic evil. But here the spirit stands in the Heavenly Council and receives permission to carry out the task. The Dictionary of Deities and Demons notes that this spirit is more personified than the harmful spirit afflicting Saul and appears at least partly independent.
But it still isn't the devil. It isn't working for the devil. There is no infernal opposition party sitting across the aisle from God. The framework is different. And this is where I want to draw a line in the sand before moving forward. Because longtime listeners may already be thinking, JJ, what about Psalm 91? And yes, Psalm 91 is absolutely loaded with supernatural danger. I've done an entire episode breaking down those dangers. We have the terror of the night, pestilence, destruction, the arrow flying by day.
The imagery can be read at the mundane level, but it also opens very naturally into a mythological and demonological reading. But Psalm 91 is not evidence for the same period we have just been discussing. Psalm 91 is a late psalm. I have argued before on this show that it sits solidly within the Second Temple period. And that matters enormously. In fact, it matters so much that I think Psalm 91 works better for us today as evidence for how much the supernatural landscape had changed. So put a bookmark there. We're coming back to it. First, we have to go to Persia.
In 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great conquered Babylon. And if you're wondering why a podcast episode about demons has suddenly turned into ancient political history, I promise this isn't one of my normal tangents where I somehow start talking about Japanese convenience stores and forget what the original subject was. This matters. Judah had already fallen to Babylon. The temple had been destroyed. A portion of the population had experienced exile. And then Babylon itself fell to the Persian Empire.
That placed Jewish communities within a Persian political and cultural environment for roughly two centuries. And somewhere within that enormous period of contact, we begin to see Jewish supernatural thought developing in ways that are difficult to miss. Now, this is also where I want to pump the brakes slightly. Religious influence is extraordinarily difficult to prove. It is very easy to say religion A has an idea, religion B has a similar Idea. Therefore, B stole it from A. That's garbage methodology. Cultures can develop similar ideas independently.
Ideas can travel through intermediaries. We often don't know the dates of traditions nearly as precisely as we would like. And Zoroastrianism itself has a long and complicated textual history. So I am not going to tell you that Judaism simply copied and pasted Zoroastrian demonology. That would be irresponsible. What I am saying is that the Persian encounter provides a profoundly important historical context for developments that appear with increasing clarity in post-exilic and second temple Jewish literature. And the dictionary of deities and demons makes the argument rather strongly.
It describes the older cultures of the Near East as essentially monistic in the sense that the supernatural world forms a unified system. That does not mean there are no conflicts. Good grief read Enuma Elish. The gods can fight. It does not mean there are no destructive spirits. We just spent a significant amount of time discussing them. It does not mean every supernatural being is nice. Quite the opposite.
What it means is that there is not yet the later cosmic structure of an archenemy of God commanding a rival camp of evil spirits whose purpose is to oppose the divine order, corrupt humanity, and eventually face eschatological destruction. Zoroastrian dualism offers something much closer to that framework. Two opposed spiritual camps, ranks of benevolent and destructive beings, human behavior entangled in that cosmic struggle, and an eventual resolution in which evil is defeated.
The DDD argues that Jewish encounter with this framework helped transform the meaning of the Greek words daemon and daimonian. And this is another place where our modern language trips us up. If I say the Greek word daimon, your brain immediately wants to translate it as demon. Please don't, at least not automatically. A daemon in earlier Greek usage was not necessarily an evil supernatural monster. The related daimonian could refer to divine power or to a lower class of divine beings mediating between gods and humans. The famous daimon of Socrates wasn't Satan whispering into his ear.
Even the verbs built from this root could originally describe being under the influence of a God or divine spirit, and that influence might be beneficial. The word did not inherently carry the freight that our English word demon carries today. But during the Second Temple period, particularly as Jewish literature increasingly appears in Greek, Daemon and Daimonian begin taking on a much more consistently negative meaning. And I think this is the moment where our question changes. Earlier, the question could be: what does this spirit do? Does it bring disease? Does it bring good fortune?
Does it protect? Does it destroy? Does it carry out a divine punishment? But under an increasingly dualistic framework, another question becomes possible. Whose side is this spirit on? That is a very different taxonomy. And once you have that question, you can begin reorganizing the entire supernatural world around it. This is where translation becomes absolutely fascinating. And yes, I know that I say translation is fascinating entirely too often, but this time I mean it. Okay, I mean it every time. But stick with me. Look at Psalm 96.
5, and in the Hebrew, the gods of the nations are called Elilim. Depending upon how you want to translate that, you're dealing with something like idols or worthless gods. But when the Septuagint translates the verse into Greek, what do those gods become? Daimonia. Demons. That isn't merely swapping one perfectly equivalent Greek word for one perfectly equivalent Hebrew word. Something has happened conceptually. Or look at Deuteronomy 32.17. The Hebrew refers to Shadim. The DDD describes these here as tutelary spirits, but the Septuagint renders them again as daimonia, demons.
Then look at Isaiah 65.11. The Hebrew has Gad, the god of fortune. What does the Greek translation do with Gad? Daimon. The god has become a demon. And this is the process that the DDD rather wonderfully calls demonization in the literal historical sense. Older gods, foreign gods, lesser supernatural powers, spirits of nature. They can all be reevaluated and moved into a new category. They are no longer simply the supernatural beings worshipped by somebody else. They become members of the wrong side. And that, I think, gets us much closer to answering our original question.
A demon isn't necessarily a species, it is increasingly a classification. A supernatural being has been placed within a moral and cosmic taxonomy. And once that happens, the entire map changes. The question isn't merely whether the entity is dangerous. God can be dangerous. Angels can be dangerous. Divine judgment is certainly dangerous. Danger alone cannot define the demon, nor can supernatural agency, nor can invisibility, nor can causing disease. The thing that increasingly defines the demon within the developing Second Temple framework is its alignment with a hostile supernatural order.
And now, now we can finally go back to Psalm 91. When I covered Psalm 91 before, I made the point that it is a very late entry into the Psalter and belongs within Second Temple Judaism. That isn't a minor dating note. It changes how we read the supernatural imagery. Psalm 91 talks about the terror of the night, the pestilence that stalks in darkness, the destruction that wastes at noon. And the DDD's entry on the terror of the night points out that later Jewish sources very clearly understood Psalm 91 as protection against demons and harmful spirits.
The Greek translation even turns the destruction at midday into the famous noonday demon. Now compare that world to 1 Kings 22. In 1 Kings, a lying spirit can walk into the heavenly court, volunteer a plan, receive authorization, and carry out deception against Ahab. In Psalm 91, written much later, we have a protective text increasingly surrounded by a demonological interpretation in which named or personified dangers stalk particular times and spaces and are warded away through divine protection. Those aren't interchangeable snapshots. There is development between them.
And I think this is where I went wrong when I've occasionally talked about these things too broadly in the past. If we simply create a giant category called biblical demons and toss the lying spirit, the harmful spirit afflicting Saul, Deborah, Kiteb, the terror of the night, Lilith, Azazel, and every other unpleasant supernatural entity into it, we've erased the very history we're trying to understand. Psalm 91 belongs much closer to the world we're moving toward, a second temple world, a world increasingly concerned with hostile spirits.
A world in which the supernatural opposition to God is becoming more structured. A world that will give us the watchers, mastama, belial, spirits of deceit, spirits of darkness, angelic armies, demonic armies, cosmic lots, final judgment, resurrection, and an increasingly elaborate geography of good and evil. Not all at once, not in every Jewish community, and definitely not in one universally agreed upon system. I cannot stress that last part enough. Second Temple Judaism was spectacularly diverse.
There was no demonology committee sitting in Jerusalem issuing quarterly updates to the official org chart. Different texts solve the problem differently. And that is exactly what makes this period so fascinating. Because once demons have increasingly become a coherent category of hostile evil spirits, a rather obvious question appears. Where did they come from? And this is where we finally reach First Enoch. Not because First Enoch invented demons. It didn't. Not because ancient people had never imagined hostile spirits before. They absolutely had. And longtime listeners know this story.
Genesis 6 gives us the incredibly short and frustrating account of the sons of God, the daughters of humanity, and the Nephilim. It does not tell us that demons came from this event. I want to be very clear about that. Genesis does not give us the demon origin story, the Book of the Watchers does. First, Enoch expands the tiny episode from Genesis into an enormous myth of cosmic corruption. The Watchers descend. They cross a boundary between heaven and earth. They take human women. They transmit forbidden knowledge. Their offspring become giants.
The giants consume what humanity produces, turn upon humanity, and fill the earth with violence. Eventually judgment comes, the watchers are bound, the giants are killed. And if the story stopped there we would have no demon origin story, but it doesn't. Their bodies die, their spirits remain. The DDD summarizes the tradition by noting that the souls of the giants live on as evil spirits that harm humanity. And that distinction is incredibly important. The watchers themselves are not the demons in this system. The watchers are rebellious heavenly beings.
Their dead children produce the evil spirits. So once again, fallen angel does not automatically equal demon, at least not here. And I think the reason this answer works so well within 1 Enoch is because it solves several problems simultaneously. Why are these spirits evil? Because their very origin lies in the transgression of heavenly boundaries and in the violence of the giants. Why are they on earth? Because their mothers were earthly and their bodies were earthly. Why do they survive physical death? Because their fathers were spirits. Why do they attack humanity?
Because violence and corruption were their nature while embodied. And why doesn't the flood eliminate supernatural evil? Because killing the giants only removes their bodies. Their spirits remain behind. That's an incredibly clever theological solution. And it tells us something else about demonology that I think gets lost when we try to create one grand unified theory. There wasn't one origin story. Different cultures and different texts could explain hostile spirits differently. Jacobson describes Mesopotamian demons that might be winds, diseases, restless ghosts, or offspring of gods.
Atrahasis gives us Pashitu as a destructive being created as part of the divine solution to human overpopulation. Earlier biblical traditions can place harmful spirits directly under God's authority. Then the increasingly dualistic environment of Second Temple Judaism reorganizes the supernatural landscape into opposing moral camps. And within that new landscape, first Enoch gives one Jewish answer to where at least a major category of evil spirits came from. They are the ghosts of the giants. That isn't the beginning of demons.
It is the beginning of one enormously influential explanation for them. And I think that distinction changes almost everything. So after spending entirely too much time wandering around ancient Mesopotamia, Israel, Persia, Greece, and the Second Temple period, and somehow I managed not to drag Japan into this one, which may be a first. Can we finally answer the question of what the hell is a demon? And unfortunately, the academically responsible answer is the most annoying answer possible. It depends. I know, I'm sorry, but I think we can do better than leaving it there.
Demon is not a timeless biological category of supernatural creature. There isn't some ancient supernatural field guide where you can check the number of horns, inspect the wings, and determine that you have found Demon Vulgaris. The category develops historically. In the ancient Near Eastern world, human beings encountered or conceptualized a huge range of supernatural powers. Some were gods, some were spirits, some were ghosts, some manifested disease, some inhabited winds, some protected, some destroyed, some were actively hostile to humanity.
But hostility toward humanity did not necessarily make a supernatural being part of a cosmic rebellion against the divine order. Sometimes the destructive spirit actually served that order. That is the peace we have to understand first. Then, during the post-exilic and second temple periods, Jewish thought encounters and develops within a world where radical dualism provides a different conceptual possibility. Good and evil can become opposing supernatural camps. Human morality can become participation in that cosmic struggle.
Older gods and spirits can be reassigned to the evil side, and the word daemon itself can move from the broad idea of a divine or intermediary spirit toward the much narrower idea that we recognize as a demon. So if I had to give you a working definition for the rest of this series, I would say this. A demon in the form that emerges most clearly during Second Temple Judaism is a hostile supernatural spirit increasingly understood not merely as dangerous to human beings, but as belonging to or participating in the cosmic sphere opposed to God's order.
And even that definition is going to have exceptions. Because ancient religion apparently exists specifically to punish anyone foolish enough to demand perfectly clean categories. But it gives us somewhere to start. More importantly, it prevents us from doing something I think is far worse. It prevents us from reading backward. The lying spirit of 1 Kings is not automatically a demon because later demons lie. Pashitu is not a satanic rebel because she kills children.
The destructive powers in Psalm 91 should not simply be pulled backward several centuries and used to define earlier Israelite religion. And the watchers are not demons simply because later traditions collapse fallen angels and demons together. Chronology matters, context matters, words matter. And sometimes the most important thing we can learn about an ancient supernatural being is not its name. It's what category the people describing it thought it belonged to. Because categories tell us how a culture understood the universe.
And during the Second Temple period, that universe was changing, the supernatural world was dividing, lines were being drawn, spirits were being sorted, and evil was beginning to look less like an isolated danger encountered in the darkness and more like a kingdom. Which raises the obvious next question. In our next episode, we're going to turn to the Book of Jubilees, and one of my absolute favorite figures from Second Temple Demonology, Mastima. Because Jubilees takes the Enochic spirits of the dead giants and does something fascinating with them. It gives them a prince.
And even more strangely, that prince negotiates with God for permission to keep some of them. Which means that just when you thought we had finally created a nice clean division between good and evil, Second Temple Judaism is going to come along and ruin it for us. I absolutely love ancient demonology. Until next time, my friends, stay safe out there. Thank you for listening to Seven Demonology. Find us online at 7Demonology.com where you can find all of our social links, including YouTube, TikTok, and Patreon. In addition to listen to episodes and read their transcripts.
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