ColossiansOne

household · 2 claims

Strife in the House

A decan whose whole business is making a household fight, countered by writing a name on laurel leaves.

QuarrelsFactions

The Testament gives one of the thirty-six specifically to strife inside houses — the spirit that sets a family quarrelling — and the counter is a written charm rather than a spoken one. Another of the thirty-six is given to drunkenness and to the forming of factions, which in a small community amounts to the same harm.

It is a useful corrective to the modern picture of possession as a single dramatic event. A great deal of what these texts describe is chronic, domestic and unspectacular: the house that cannot stop arguing, the marriage that fails, the child that will not thrive.

Oldest first

Who was blamed, and by which text?

Each card is one text making one attribution, in its own framing. Reading down the column is a transmission history rather than a set of independent witnesses — and where a claim carries a grading, that grading is about how well it is grounded in the passage it cites, nothing more.

Katanikotael

The Testament of Solomon · c. 100–400 CE

Says he causes fights and wrongs in homes, and sends hard trouble on the household.

What stops it
A name written on seven laurel leaves and placed in the house, with water sprinkled from it.

Testament of Solomon 18

Saphathoraél

The Testament of Solomon · c. 100–400 CE

Says he leads men into drunkenness and into forming factions against one another.

Testament of Solomon 18

Countermeasures

What the texts say stops it

c. 100–400 CE

A name written on seven laurel leaves and placed in the house, with water sprinkled from it.

Which texts make these claims?

Oldest first. The distance between the earliest and the latest is the thing worth looking at: a claim made in an incantation four thousand years ago and one made in a paperback in 1973 are different kinds of evidence about the same symptom.

All afflictions