If the story of the Watchers could, as shown in my previous article, be used to explain the origin of supernatural beings prior to the Flood, the Bible provided many references to these same beings’ existence after the Flood.
The biblical passage dealing with the supernatural that was most discussed by church scholars is Isaiah 34:14. If you try looking this up in your own copy of the King James’ Bible, you might not understand what all the fuss is about because this standard translation is:
“The wild beasts of the desert shall also meet with the wild beasts of the island, and the satyr shall cry to his fellow; the screech owl also shall rest there, and find for herself a place of rest.”
This interpretation is shown to be lacking by a comparative analysis with the Latin Vulgate text:
“Et occurrent daemonia onocentauris et pilosus clamabit alter ad alterum ibi cubavit lamia et invenit sibi requiem.”
Most glaringly, the English wild beasts is willfully mistranslated from the Latin daemonia or demons (itself an inexact take on the Hebrew “original”). Equally serious are the assumptions that the Latin pilosus, or hairy ones, are satyrs; and that lamia means screech owl. The King James’ translators showed the limits of their logic in the satyr translation; whereas a Latin or Greek hairy one might well have been a satyr, it’s hardly likely that one from the Holy Land would have been so. More complex – and more frequently debated – is the meaning of lamia. Lamia was an individualized Classical, deadly demon that shared some of the attributes of lilith, the supernatural being which it translates for from the Hebrew.
The translation of lilith to lamia dates back to Hieronymus of Cardia’s 4th Century BCE writings; the translation of lamia to screech owl dates back to 1611. The latter was inspired by a general Anglicization and de-spiritualization of biblical references, which is rather odd considering that King James, himself, was a firm believer in, and writer about, demons.
What, exactly, is a lilith? The first apparent documentary occurrence of a lilith is in the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh from about 2100 BCE. The Gilgamesh passage is very inexact, but from about the 9th century BCE, the being is widely documented in Babylonian folklore, seemingly in the same form in which it appears in Isaiah. A lilith story is told in the terribly arcane Hebrew Book of Raziel (Raziel being an archangel particularly close to God and, possibly, the brother of Ravnica’s Razia), a central work to Cabbalist thought. As retold by the otherwise laughably psycho-analytic Diane Purkiss from Moses Gaster’s translation, the story is:
“The prophet Elijah meets Lilith, and says, ‘O, wicked Lilith, where are you going with your foul unclean host?’ [Lilith replies]: ‘My Lord Elijah, I am going to that woman who has given birth to a child, to give her the sleep of death, to take her newborn child, to drink its blood, to suck the marrow of its bones. But to leave its flesh untouched.’ Elijah tells her that if she does this she will be turned into a speechless stone by the will of God. Lilith, duly daunted, gives way: ‘My Lord, for God’s sake remove the excommunication, that I may be able to flee, and I swear by the name of God that I will avoid the roads that lead to a woman with a newborn child, and whenever I see or hear my names I will depart.’ And she tells him the names.”
It’s interesting to see that the ancient Hebrew fairies were under the same name taboos as those of Northern Europe. Just like Rumplestiltskin and countless Nordic and British giants, lilith (who is sometimes individualized and sometimes simply a “species”) can be driven away by the sound of her own name. Those who claim that the Bible includes no reference to fairies are not only ignoring leviathan, behemoth, and the hairy ones, but also this child-slaying night demon. It may be said that such demons are relegated to the Old Testament, yet this is also incorrect. There is, for example, the litany of devils encountered in the Book of Matthew, most famously (Matthew 8:28-32):
“And when he was come to the other side into the country of the Gergesenes, there met him two possessed with devils, coming out of the tombs, exceeding fierce, so that no man might pass by that way. And, behold, they cried out, saying, What have we to do with thee, Jesus, thou Son of God? art thou come hither to torment us before the time? And there was a good way off from them an herd of many swine feeding. So the devils besought him, saying, If thou cast us out, suffer us to go away into the herd of swine. And he said unto them, Go. And when they were come out, they went into the herd of swine: and, behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.”
These devils are hardly fallen angels. Indeed, the Pharisees themselves say as much in their criticism of Jesus (Matthew 9:34). If there is a textually-evident demonological gap between books in the Old and New Testaments, it’s a much more subtle one and involves the nature of the angels.
Angels are exceedingly popular in Magic but have little place in Northern European folklore. These were not, after all, localized beings so far as people living in Scotland or Denmark were concerned. Early Catholic theologians were, however, deeply interested in matters pertaining to the helpers of God. How, for example, did they look? Were they corporeal? Did they have wee-wees? What did their varying ranks represent? Looking at biblical angels from a folkloric standpoint, we can see a definite shift in character.
The following passage from Isaiah 14 is well-known, and only one of two Old Testament texts which mentions anything comparable to the revolt in Heaven (Isaiah 14:12-15):
“How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.”
This is not all that specific and, alongside a similar prophetic instance in the Old Testament, it is, at least contextually, addressed to a human king. In fact, we must read the Bible all the way through to its final book, Revelations, before we find a detailed description of the revolt. Here’s the full extent of it (Revelation 12:7-9):
“And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.”
Strange, isn’t it, that the one of the most important events in the history of the Christian world-view has so little canonical basis? Here’s where the Apocrypha becomes really informative.
In Judaism, Satan was not evil from the start. For example, just look at the Book of Job which, despite being among the best known parables in the Old Testament, portrays a Satan who is obedient to and a servant to God long after the revolt must have taken place. The Church Fathers often looked to the non-canonical Babylonian Talmud for advice. Although not compiled until the 4th Century AD, it contains some Hebrew texts of great antiquity. Here, we can see a middle stage between that in which all angels were good and that in which the angelic ranks were split. Just as people today have difficulty understanding why God would will a devastating tsunami or earthquake, people thousands of years ago had to accept that even though God sometimes did things that were unpleasant for individuals, they were in some way justified in the overall scheme of things. Thus, we have Satan who tries to provoke Job in the name of God and Sammael, the Angel of Death (recently – and oddly – re-envisioned in the film Hellboy) who does the dirty work of killing people.
Death is, of course, necessary. We simply wish that it would happen to other people instead of us. To this end, the Babylonian Talmud shows how prayer and scriptural study can hold off Sammael. As Katherine Briggs notes, “The very good were out of his [Sammael’s] jurisdiction. Sammael has no power over Moses, and God Himself took him with a kiss.” Briggs links this gradual change of belief to the Hebrews’ being influenced by the “dualistic Persian philosophy” during the Babylonian captivity. The Persian system got rid of the ethical concerns people had about God. It was no longer God’s fault but that of God’s nemeses. Angels, like Satan and Sammael, who had performed the functions of individual, malignant or, at least, dislikeable gods in polytheistic religions now became minor deities outright.
If it is true that this fundamental change in Judaism’s view of angels occurred during the Babylonian Captivity, then we can date the emergence of evil (in Magic terms, Black) angels to between the capture of Jerusalem in 586 BCE and the regime change in Babylon in 539 BCE. These are, by the way, not just biblical dates but secular ones as well.
Whatever the truth of Christianity, Judaism, or individual biblical passages, the Bible as a whole is inconsistent on a folkloric level. That said, it’s still a hell of a read.
Skål!
Adam Grydehøj
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