Entities

Huntress and protector of the young, whose Ephesian cult statue looks nothing like her and whose temple gave the ancient world one of its most durable protective formulas.

Commands seventy-two legions, one for every spirit in the book. He is the Asmodeus of Tobit, who killed Sarah's seven husbands and was driven into Upper Egypt by Raphael, and behind that the Avestan Aeshma-daeva, the demon of wrath — one of very few Goetic spirits with an ancestry that can be traced.

The Canaanite goddess Astarte, three thousand years on, made a male duke of hell with her name intact. The Goetia has him discourse willingly on the fall of the spirits, and warns the operator to hold a ring to his face against the stench of his breath.

'Lord of the Flies' — a Philistine god of Ekron whose name was almost certainly deformed as a Hebrew insult, then inherited by Christian demonology as the second power of hell.

In the Hebrew Bible beliya'al is not a name but a word meaning worthlessness; by 2 Corinthians it is a person, and by the Goetia a king in a chariot of fire handing out senatorships. The text says he was created next after Lucifer and fell among the first, and will not answer truly without gifts.

Guardians of thresholds and bearers of the throne — four-faced in Ezekiel, flanking the mercy seat in Exodus, and nothing at all like the winged infants of later art.

The administrative choir: they regulate the duties of lower angels and never act directly on the created world.

The messenger. The angel who explains Daniel's visions, announces two births in Luke, and in Islam delivers the entire Qur'an.

Ruler of the dead by lot rather than by punishment — a god of the underworld who is not evil, a distinction Christian cosmology cannot express.

The thunderbolt-wielding king of the gods, who slays the serpent Vritra and releases the pent waters. It is the Indo-European form of the same combat myth as Baal against Yam.

Sky-father and state god of Rome, identified with Zeus by the *interpretatio romana* — the ancient world's official policy of treating foreign gods as one's own under different names.

The warring archangel: prince of Israel in Daniel, captain of the host in Revelation, and the only angel the New Testament calls an archangel outright.

Deposed father of Jupiter. His December festival inverted the social order for a week, and his planet later became the astrological signature of melancholy and malice.

Six-winged and burning, they attend the throne directly and sing the trisagion. Their name is the Hebrew verb 'to burn'.

Guardian spirits — Socrates had one that advised him — whose name the Greek scriptures borrowed for evil spirits, permanently poisoning the word.

The wheels of the chariot — rings of fire studded with eyes, on which divine justice is said to be seated.

The ninth and closest of the angelic choirs: the ordinary messengers who deal with individual people, and the only rank most human accounts ever describe meeting.

Guardians of nations, cities and institutions — an angelic choir that operates at the scale of peoples rather than persons.

Hesiod has Zeus honour her above all others. By the medieval period she presides over witchcraft instead, a demotion with no wrongdoing attached to it anywhere.

Not originally a name but an office — 'the accuser'. In Job he is a member of the divine court doing his job; only later does he become the enemy.

The border guard: the choir charged with restraining demonic incursion and keeping the boundary between the spheres.

Fire as the mouth of the gods — the one who carries offerings upward, and so the messenger of the Vedic system.

Oracle-giver at Delphi, and the god who both sends plague and lifts it. Later traditions split that duality between an angel and a demon; Greece kept it in one figure.

War as slaughter rather than strategy — disliked by the Greeks who worshipped him, and rehabilitated entirely by the Romans as Mars.

Born from the head of Zeus, and the only Olympian to hold both war and craft. Where Ares is violence, she is strategy.

Sovereign of the underworld who strips Ishtar of a garment at each of the seven gates and hangs her on a hook.

Herald, psychopomp, patron of boundaries and of thieves — the exact functional counterpart of Gabriel, plus everything Gabriel is not allowed to be.

Goddess of love, war and the planet Venus, whose descent into the underworld is among the oldest recorded narratives.

The sun at dawn, in the form of a scarab beetle rolling it up over the horizon — one of the three daily aspects of the sun, and a pun on the word for coming into being.

The morning star of Isaiah 14. Christian tradition reads the phrase as the devil's own name; the passage itself makes no such claim.

Splits Tiamat and builds the world from her body, and is voted fifty names and supreme authority for doing it.

God of the sea and of earthquakes — 'earth-shaker' — who receives the waters in the same three-way division that gives Hades the underworld.

The fierce archer who sends disease and withholds it — addressed in the Rigveda with open fear, and later absorbed into Shiva.

In the earliest Rigveda a title of honour for the highest gods; by the later Vedic period, the demonic opponents of the devas. The same word, inverted within one tradition.

Born from the blood of the castrated Ouranos, they pursue kin-murderers without appeal. Christian tradition later hands that office to demons; in Greece it belongs to the gods.

Binder of the oath-breaker with his noose. The earliest hymns call him *asura*, using the word as an honorific, long before it turned demonic.

The first mortal to die, and so the king of the dead who judges those who follow. Azrael and Anubis hold the same office under other names.

Sky-father and enforcer of oaths, whose name descends from the same Indo-European root as Jupiter and Dyaus.

Embalmer and psychopomp, who leads the dead to the scales — the office Western tradition eventually gives to Michael and to Azrael.

Son of Osiris, who contends eighty years with Set for the throne. Every living pharaoh was understood to be his incarnation.

The great magician who reassembles Osiris and tricks Ra into surrendering his secret name. Her cult eventually reached as far as Roman Britain.

Set's wife who sides with her sister Isis against him, and mourns Osiris at the head of the bier.

Murdered by Set, reassembled by Isis, and installed as judge of the dead. He is the earliest fully developed dying-and-rising sovereign we have.

Carried below and bound to return each year by six pomegranate seeds. She is sovereign of the dead and the returning grain at once.

Murderer of Osiris and defender of the sun-barque — a god who was worshipped as a royal patron for two millennia before being recast as the enemy.

The offspring of the sons of God and the daughters of men, given two verses in Genesis and a full history in 1 Enoch — the corpus's clearest case of a silence in scripture being filled in elsewhere.

The hundred-headed monster who nearly unseats Zeus, identified by the Greeks with Set and echoed in Revelation's dragon.

Father of Romulus and second only to Jupiter in the state cult — an agricultural god as much as a martial one, and not simply the Greek Ares renamed.

Born from the earth and the blood of a castrated sky, they fight the Olympians and lose — and the English word giant descends from them rather than from anything in Genesis.

God of the binding contract, worshipped from India to Roman Britain. No other deity in this compendium can be traced across three civilisations so cleanly.

Consort of El at Ugarit and mother of the gods, whose cult objects stood in the Jerusalem temple itself for long stretches — and who disappears from English Bibles behind the word 'grove'.

God of plague, war and the underworld, consort of Ereshkigal — and one of the few Mesopotamian gods the Bible names directly.

Hangs himself on the world tree for nine nights to win the runes — a sovereign god who is also a liar, a sorcerer and a chooser of the slain.

The healer, whose name means 'God heals'. He spends the Book of Tobit disguised as a human travelling companion, which makes it the longest sustained portrait of an angel anywhere in the biblical corpus.

The defender who kills giants and will meet Jormungandr at Ragnarok. Whatever the poems give Odin, Thor was by far the more widely worshipped.

The eighth choir — which produces the tradition's sharpest inconsistency, since Michael is called an archangel yet commands the entire host.

The choir of miracles and of the movement of the heavens; traditionally the angels present at the Ascension.

The remaining 'spirit of X' phrases, grouped because the tradition's whole method stands or falls on how they are read.

First of the seventy-two and, by the Goetia's own account, chief among them — a three-headed thing on spider's legs, ruling in the east and granting invisibility. The name is the Canaanite storm god Baal, three thousand years and one demotion later.

The deity of the Tophet child sacrifices in Kings and Jeremiah — or, on a long-running scholarly reading, the name of the sacrifice itself rather than a god.

Wealth personified. The gospels use the word for money itself; demonology turned the metaphor into an officer of hell.

Two Egyptian lions facing opposite ways — yesterday and tomorrow — with the sun passing between them each night.

Waits beside the scales in the Egyptian judgment to eat the hearts that fail the weighing — annihilation rather than torment, which is not the same as hell.

His name means 'the hidden' — a god defined by being concealed, who nonetheless became the supreme state deity of the New Kingdom.

Baal's sister and avenger. She grinds Death himself to pieces and sows him in a field, which makes her the most violent figure in the Ugaritic corpus.

The lion-headed eagle who steals the Tablet of Destinies and is shot down for it — a rebellion against divine order predating any biblical account by a millennium.

The Egyptian chaos-serpent, who attacks the solar barque every night and every night has to be driven off again. Chaos here is a permanent condition, not a defeated enemy.

The West Semitic goddess of love and war, cognate with Ishtar — and the direct ancestor of the Goetic duke Astaroth, who kept the name and lost the gender.

The god who made himself out of the waters and then sneezed and spat the next two gods into being.

The scapegoat's destination in Leviticus, and the Watcher who taught weapons and cosmetics in 1 Enoch. Translators cannot even agree whether the word is a name, a place or an abstraction.

The Canaanite storm and fertility god who defeats Sea and Death — and whose title, *baal* ('lord'), the Hebrew Bible turns into a generic term for false gods.

The gentler face of the lioness — Sekhmet's rage domesticated into a household guardian, and the object of the rowdiest festival in Egypt.

A grotesque dwarf god who guards bedrooms and births by pulling faces and making noise — shown facing the viewer, which Egyptian art almost never does.

National god of Moab, known from the Bible and from the Mesha Stele — where a Moabite king describes his own history in language almost identical to Israel's.

The aged high god who presides over the assembly at Ugarit — and whose name is one of the Hebrew Bible's own words for God.

God of the abzu and of cunning, who repeatedly saves humanity by finding the loophole in another god's decree.

Holder of the Tablet of Destinies, and the god who decrees the flood. He was supreme until Marduk's Babylonian promotion displaced him.

The earth as a male god lying on his back — an inversion of the usual arrangement, since in Egypt the sky is female and the ground is not.

Two-thirds god and one-third man, king of Uruk in the Sumerian King List and the subject of the longest narrative surviving from the ancient Near East — a story about failing to escape death.

The Chinese water god who loses a fight and knocks down the pillar holding up the sky — which is why the heavens tilt one way, the rivers run the other, and Nüwa has repairs to make.

The annual Nile inundation as a god: a fat, breasted figure who is neither male nor female because he is not a person but a season that fed a country.

Goddess of love and music who is also the one who meets the dead at the desert edge — and who, in the Sekhmet story, is the same goddess pacified.

Magic itself as a god — the power that makes the gods effective, present at creation before anything was made.

The frog-headed goddess of childbirth, whose amulets were worn by pregnant women and whose animal multiplied across Egypt every year as the water went down.

The Egyptian god who shapes each child and its ka on a potter's wheel before birth — creation as a manual trade rather than a word or an act of will.

Moon god of the Theban triad, sent abroad in one famous text to drive a spirit out of a foreign princess.

A daughter of the sky god who preys on pregnant women and newborns. She is the closest parallel to Lilith, and most likely the actual ancestor.

The protective spirit set at a palace gate, and the standing counter-example to the assumption that a Mesopotamian spirit is something to be warded off.

The seven-headed sea-serpent slain in the Baal Cycle, described in language Isaiah reuses almost verbatim for Leviathan.

Both a goddess and the principle of order itself — the feather against which every heart is weighed.

One of the oldest gods in Egypt, patron of fertility and of the desert roads out of Coptos, whose festival opened the harvest with the king cutting the first sheaf.

Death itself as a god, with a throat wide enough to swallow Baal. The later mouth-of-hell is this image, several cultures downstream.

One of the oldest deities attested in Egypt, a weaver and a warrior who is called on to arbitrate when the gods themselves cannot agree.

The god sent against what the other gods will not face — the Asag, and the Anzu bird that stole the Tablet of Destinies — and the one who reorganises the world afterwards.

The featureless water that was there before anything, still lying outside the created world and underneath it.

The Egyptian sky-goddess, who swallows the sun each evening and gives birth to it each dawn, so the inside of her body is the night sky the dead travel through.

She makes people from yellow earth and patches the broken sky with five-coloured stones. A creator whose defining act is repair.

A wind demon of the first millennium BCE, worn as an amulet. He was invoked *against* Lamashtu, which makes him that rare thing: a protective evil.

Creates by thinking a thing and then speaking its name — a theology of creation by word that predates Genesis by a long way.

The sun, who sails the sky by day and the underworld by night, fighting off Apep at every crossing.

The ten-headed antagonist of the Ramayana — a devout scholar, musician and ascetic whose downfall is a single act of pride.

Plague-god of the Levant, whose name survives in the Hebrew Bible as a common noun for pestilence and burning fever.

Sent by the Egyptian sun-god to destroy humanity, and stopped only by being tricked into drinking beer dyed red. Her priests were physicians: she sends pestilence and she lifts it.

Goddess of venom and therefore of its cure — her priests were the physicians who treated stings and bites.

The sun sees everything, so the sun is the god of judges. Hammurabi's law code is carved beneath an image of the king receiving it from him.

The Egyptian god of air, who holds Nut off Geb with his own body — the reason there is a gap between sky and earth at all.

The crocodile as a god — feared as a killer and honoured as the power of the river that made Egypt possible.

Ezekiel is shown women weeping for Tammuz at the north gate of the temple — a Sumerian god still being mourned in Jerusalem two thousand years after his cult began.

Shu's twin and counterpart in the Egyptian ennead, moisture to his air. When she left Egypt in a rage the land dried out until she was coaxed home.

A Mesopotamian night spirit: a young woman who died before marriage, returning to the sleeping — and the earliest end of a report that later runs under the names incubus, mara and Old Hag.

A demon that fathers an army out of the mountain stones and makes fish boil in the rivers — and whose name becomes the ordinary Akkadian word for a class of illness.

The Mesopotamian ghost of a person, and a problem of neglect rather than of malice: the etemmu that troubles the living is usually a spirit nobody buried and nobody remembers.

Forty-two Egyptian judges of the dead, each responsible for exactly one offence, addressed by name and told 'I have not done it'.

Four gods, four jars, four organs: liver, lungs, stomach and intestines, each with its own guardian and its own compass direction.

Bailiffs of the Mesopotamian netherworld, who take a person below because the law of that place requires a substitute — the corpus's clearest case of harm done by officials rather than by monsters.

One word doing two jobs: a people east of the Jordan, and the shades of the dead — a double sense the Ugaritic texts already carry centuries before the Hebrew ones.

The plural divine beings who make up God's council in the Hebrew Bible — present at creation, attending audiences, allotted the nations, and in one psalm sentenced to death for judging unjustly.

The class the largest surviving body of Mesopotamian protective material is named for, and a spirit defined almost entirely by what it does rather than by who it is.

The saltwater ocean personified as the mother of the gods, split in two by Marduk to make heaven and earth.

The cobra goddess of Lower Egypt, worn on the king's forehead as the uraeus that spits fire at his enemies, and half of the pairing that made a king ruler of both lands.

'Opener of the ways' — goes ahead of the army and ahead of the dead, clearing the road before either has to walk it.

The Chinese goddess who begins as a tiger-toothed sender of plagues in the Classic of Mountains and Seas and ends as the serene keeper of the peaches of immortality — a demotion running backwards.

The Sea as a rival claimant to kingship, put down by Baal with two named clubs. It is the Ugaritic version of Marduk against Tiamat.

A place-name in the Hebrew Bible — 'destruction', a synonym for the grave — that Revelation personifies as the king of the locusts of the pit.

A single living bull, identified by its markings, kept at Memphis as the visible body of Ptah and buried in a granite sarcophagus with royal honours when it died.

The ferryman of the Greek underworld, who takes the dead across and takes payment for it. The coin placed in a corpse's mouth was his fare.

A real valley outside Jerusalem, remembered as the site of child sacrifice and deliberately defiled, whose name became the New Testament's word for final ruin.

The Philistine champion of 1 Samuel 17, and the best-known giant in any of these texts — whose height the manuscripts do not agree on, and whose death the Hebrew Bible reports twice with two different killers.

God of thresholds with no Greek equivalent — the doors of his temple stood open in war and shut in peace, and they were almost never shut.

A Phoenician princess married to Ahab, who backed Baal and Asherah against the prophets of Israel. Revelation later borrows her name for a rival teacher, and it has been a label rather than a person ever since.

Terrifying and maternal at once — a goddess whose iconography reads as demonic to outsiders and as protective to those who worship her.

He assaults the Buddha under the Bodhi tree, first with armies and then with his daughters. The canon keeps glossing him as craving itself rather than as a being.

The first man the Bible calls mighty on the earth, founder of Babel, Erech and Akkad — a king in Genesis and nothing worse, who becomes a tyrant everywhere afterwards.

A king east of the Jordan, described as the last remnant of the Rephaim, and evidenced in his own text by a piece of furniture — an iron bedstead nine cubits long, on display at Rabbah.

The Roman Hades, whose alternative name Orcus survives in 'ogre' — and whose realm supplied Christian writers much of their imagery for hell.

The Greek pit below Hades, built to hold defeated gods rather than dead people, and borrowed once by the New Testament to say where the sinning angels went.

Deliverance teaching names this spirit for the Levite who told Moses the whole congregation was holy, so why did he exalt himself — and was swallowed by the ground.

The serpent powers of the Buddhist material — rain-bringers and treasure-keepers who shelter the Buddha under their hoods rather than opposing him, which is what a dragon does almost nowhere else in this corpus.

The seven who present the prayers of the saints — a group named as a body in Tobit and Revelation before any list of individual names settled.

Scribe of the gods, who records the weighing of the heart — an office matching Metatron's almost exactly, and the seed of the whole Hermetic tradition.

'Fire of God' — the archangel of the fourth seat, never named in the canonical Bible, and formally struck from the approved list by a Roman synod in 745.

The Moabite Baal of Peor, reassigned by demonology as the demon of sloth and of ingenious inventions. A god turned into a joke about laziness.

A major grain deity of Syria and Philistia. A Hebrew pun on *dag*, 'fish', turned him into a fish-god in medieval illustration, and de Plancy finished the job by making him a demon.

The sea-dragon of Job and Isaiah, drawn from Canaanite chaos myth, and later assigned the sin of envy and the office of admiral of hell.

Companion of the Aesir and their eventual destroyer — a figure whose slide toward the demonic is visible within the surviving texts themselves.

War-goddess who appears as a crow over battlefields and foretells the deaths below. Sovereignty and slaughter, held in one figure.

The most discussed figure in modern deliverance teaching, and a category rather than a being — built from a queen in Kings and a rival teacher in Revelation.

The demon of wrath and of the bloody club. He also supplies the most defensible etymology for Asmodeus: *Aeshma-daeva* to *Ashmedai* to *Asmodeus*.

The uncreated god of Zoroastrianism, opposed by Angra Mainyu — the pairing that probably gave Judaism and Christianity their two-sided cosmos.

The hostile principle, with his own army of daevas — the first fully developed adversary in the record, and the likely structural template for Satan.

The highest rank in Maimonides' ten-fold scheme — the living creatures of Ezekiel's chariot, placed where the Dionysian system puts the seraphim.

He guards the soul for three nights after death and stands directly opposed to Aeshma. It is an angel's job description, written before there were angels.

Six emanations of Ahura Mazda, each paired against a specific demon — the earliest ranked, functionally-paired hierarchy of spirits anywhere.

Beings with enormous stomachs and throats too narrow to swallow. Not a species of demon: a condition you can be reborn into, and eventually leave.

A Buddhist class of spirits that are neither good nor evil by nature — tree-dwellers and gate-keepers who can eat travellers or take refuge in the Buddha, and frequently do the second after threatening the first.

Chief judge of the Chinese underworld — a civil servant with a ledger, in a hell organised as a court system rather than a torture chamber.

The three-headed serpent of the Avesta, who becomes in the Shahnameh a tyrant with snakes on his shoulders fed on human brains, chained beneath a mountain until the end.

The Latin class term for a spirit that lies on a sleeper, mentioned in passing by Augustine as a common report and turned by the Malleus Maleficarum, a thousand years later, into a doctrine with a procedure attached.

A god of Sepharvaim who received child sacrifice, promoted by early-modern demonology to chancellor of hell.

A Greek word for the avenging spirit of a household's blood-guilt, taken up by demonologists as hell's executioner.

'Lord of the covenant', a god of Shechem — reassigned by demonologists as the notary who countersigns infernal pacts.

Job's land-beast, paired with Leviathan — presented there as a creature of God, not an enemy of him.

A night-demon of Mesopotamian ancestry. The famous story that she was Adam's first wife comes from a satirical medieval text and has no basis in Genesis at all.

The Aramean storm god Naaman bowed to in 2 Kings, given a diplomatic posting by nineteenth-century demonology.

Named in deliverance teaching for the son who stood at the gate, listened sympathetically to everyone with a grievance, and stole the hearts of Israel.

The passive half of the pair — named for the king who let his queen act and then took the vineyard she obtained for him.

The biblical term for a medium's attending spirit — and at Endor, the one occasion where the practice is depicted as working.

Job's sea-beast read as a spirit of pride, and specifically of the twisting of words between people who are trying to understand each other.

A spirit that volunteers to deceive, is asked how, explains, and is authorised — by God, in open council.

A goddess the people of Judah tell Jeremiah, to his face, that they will keep worshipping — because things went better when they did.

The only spirit in the gospels that answers when asked its name — and answers with a military unit.

A single phrase in Ephesians that supplies the whole idea of spirits holding territory in the air above a place.

The one figure in this tradition whose name is genuinely in the Greek text — and invisible in English, where the KJV renders it 'a spirit of divination'.

A woman bent double for eighteen years, described by Luke as having a spirit of infirmity and by Jesus as bound by Satan.

Sun goddess who hides in a cave and must be lured out — and from whom the Japanese imperial house claimed descent until 1946.

Fomorian king of Irish myth whose single eye destroys whatever it looks at. He was killed by his own grandson, exactly as the prophecy he tried to prevent had said.

The Irish goddess of poetry, smithing and healing who invents keening over her son's body at Mag Tuired — and whose name, feast and attributes are carried straight over to a Christian saint.

The Slavic sun god of Vladimir's pantheon at Kiev, whose people are still calling themselves his grandsons in a poem written two centuries after they were baptised.

Loki's son, bound by a fetter made of impossible things at the cost of Tyr's hand, and fated to kill Odin when the binding fails.

Goddess of love and of sorcery who takes half the slain — the other half, not Odin's, which is rarely remembered.

Daughter of Loki, and ruler of the realm that gave English the word 'hell'. Hers is cold, and nobody in it is being punished.

The Japanese god who stirs the sea into land with a spear, goes into Yomi after his wife and looks at her against her word, and washes afterwards — producing Amaterasu and Susanoo from the washing.

The Japanese goddess who makes the islands with her husband, dies giving birth to fire, and becomes the ruler of Yomi — where she promises to kill a thousand people a day for the insult of being seen.

The serpent that rings the world and bites its own tail — the Norse entry in the chaos-serpent pattern that runs from Tiamat to Leviathan.

The Irish god who gets into Tara by being master of every art at once, and who kills his own grandfather Balor with a sling — the Tuatha Dé Danann's answer to the Fomoire.

The Irish king who loses his hand in battle and with it his kingship, because the Tuatha Dé Danann will not be ruled by a blemished man — and gets both back when a silver arm is made for him.

Chief god of Vladimir's pantheon at Kiev, whose idol was thrown into the Dnieper at the conversion in 988.

The feathered serpent who goes down into the underworld to recover the bones of humanity. Here, for once, the serpent is not the monster.

The Slavic wind god of Vladimir's pantheon, whose grandsons in the Tale of Igor are the winds themselves, blowing arrows across the steppe at an army.

Expelled from heaven for wrecking his sister's rice fields, and then immediately kills the eight-headed serpent and becomes a hero.

God of the night sky, sorcery and arbitrary fate — Quetzalcoatl's rival, and impossible to place on a good/evil axis.

'The good god' — good at everything rather than morally good — with a club that kills at one end and restores at the other.

The enemies of every group that settles Ireland in the Lebor Gabála, and the clearest case in this corpus of a monastic redactor turning a defeated people into demons.

The Chinese court of the dead — ten magistrates who each hear a case at a fixed interval after death, with clerks, registers and a right of appeal, and Yanluo Wang sitting fifth.

The Japanese moon god, born from Izanagi's washing beside Amaterasu — and the reason the sun and moon are never in the sky together, having killed the food goddess at dinner and been refused his sister's company ever since.

Perun's opponent, god of herds, wealth and the world below — and one of the clearest cases of a god converted directly into a devil.

The eight-headed serpent given a daughter to eat each year, until Susanoo made it drunk and cut it apart. Japan's branch of the serpent-slaying pattern.

Of the thirteen chiefs of tens, his is the only name that reaches English in a single form — the rest arrive with two spellings or three. What does not arrive at all is any account of what he did after the descent.

Stands second among the leaders, immediately after Semjaza, and the text never returns to him. His name travels worse than any other Watcher's: Arâkîba where Charles translates the Ethiopic, Urakabarameel in the witnesses behind the Greek — barely recognisable as the same word.

One of the two hundred Watchers who descended in 1 Enoch. He taught the signs of the earth, which is to say geomancy.

Taught how to break enchantments — the counter-spell to Semjaza's spell, and the only Watcher whose art is purely defensive.

The sun-disc of Akhenaten's reform: for about twenty years the only god Egypt was permitted, worshipped without an image, and erased almost completely afterwards.

Taught astrology; his name means 'lightning of God'.

Batârêl in Charles, Batraal in the lists that reached English through Greek. Under either spelling he swears the oath on Hermon and does nothing further that the text records.

Three unrelated figures carry this name — a Ugaritic king, the biblical prophet, and this Watcher — and only the coincidence connects them. 1 Enoch records his oath and nothing he taught.

Formed from clay to be Gilgamesh's match and made human by a week with a woman, he is the corpus's clearest statement that civilisation is a loss as well as a gain.

Meteorology is on the charge sheet. He taught men to read the clouds, and 1 Enoch files that beside metalwork and astrology as one of the crimes that brought the flood.

1 Enoch names him rather than the serpent as the one who led Eve astray, and credits him with inventing weapons besides.

His entire biography as a Watcher is one act: binding himself by the oath on Hermon in 1 Enoch alongside the other chiefs. Yomiel is what the name becomes once the diacritics are dropped, and it is no better attested than the original.

Taught the smitings of the spirits and the demons, and the striking of the embryo in the womb.

Taught the constellations — astrology as one of the forbidden arts brought down at the descent.

Consort of Amun and mother of Khonsu, completing the triad that ruled Thebes at the height of Egyptian power.

The bronze serpent of the Hebrew Bible: Moses was told to make it, Israel kept it for centuries and burned incense to it, and Hezekiah finally broke it up with the dismissive name 'bronze thing'.

Taught humanity to write — which 1 Enoch treats as one of the gravest of the transmitted sins.

The archangel who takes vengeance on the world of the lights — and one of those condemned by name at the Roman synod of 745.

Shares a name with Remiel, one of the holy archangels — a collision 1 Enoch keeps apart and later lists do not, which is how the same figure ends up filed on both sides of the rebellion.

Set over those who rise — the archangel of the resurrection and of true visions.

The cobra goddess of the harvest, honoured at the threshing floor and the granary, who also gives a newborn its name and its share of fortune.

Both an archangel and an adversary. Jewish tradition makes him the accusing angel, the angel of death and the guardian prince of Rome; all three are offices he was assigned, not verdicts on his character.

Holds the sun's share of a three-way division of the sky, with Sariel on the moon and Kokabel on the stars. What 1 Enoch condemns is not what the signs foretold but that he explained them at all.

One of the seven archangels of 1 Enoch, set over the spirits who sin against the spirit. Canonical scripture never names him.

Only nine of the leaders named in 1 Enoch 6:7 are given a teaching in chapter 8, and he is not among the nine. He is recorded as Satarêl and as Sartael, and silent under both.

The Watcher who proposed the descent and bound the other two hundred to it by mutual oath on Mount Hermon.

The Hebrew underworld: a silent, dusty place where everybody goes, righteous and wicked alike, and where nobody praises God. Not hell, and not a punishment.

Later tradition made him a teacher of astronomy. 1 Enoch does not: it gives him an oath, a rank over ten of the two hundred, and no art at all. The astronomy is an inheritance from somewhere else.

A composite of the three most dangerous animals in Egypt, arranged to frighten off whatever threatens a woman in labour.

A people of Hebron whom the scouts of the Hebrew Bible report as impossibly tall and identify with the Nephilim — inside the very report the text goes on to call false.

Four Philistine champions the Hebrew Bible says were born to the rapha in Gath — the giant's household, killed one by one in a short appendix at the end of 2 Samuel.

No teaching, no punishment, no later appearance: of the Watchers named in 1 Enoch he is among the emptiest entries. He binds himself by the oath and leaves the narrative there — the fate of most of the twenty, and of none of the ones anybody remembers.

The serpent who encloses the waters, slain by Indra — the Indo-European cousin of Lotan, Leviathan, Tiamat and Apep.

The two forms his name reaches English in, Zaqîêl and Sathiel, have almost nothing in common but the ending — the -el that marks him as one of God's, and that survives in these names long after everything else about them has been lost. Neither form is given a teaching.

Defined in the epistle by one specific test — denying that Christ came in the flesh — and stretched considerably since by deliverance teaching.

An old man riding a crocodile with a goshawk on his fist, credited with teaching every language and with hauling back anyone who has fled. The same entry has him causing earthquakes and stripping men of office, temporal and spiritual alike.

The book's arsonist: cities, castles and great houses set alight, by a three-headed spirit carrying a firebrand and riding a viper. The same entry has him making men clever and answering truly on private matters.

Speaks loudly and hoarsely from a great horse, red-faced and flaming-eyed like a lion — an alarming delivery for a spirit whose subjects are astronomy and the liberal sciences.

Preceded by trumpets and every kind of instrument playing with nobody visible to play them — one of the more theatrical entrances in the Ars Goetia. He makes music heard where he goes, bends trees to the operator's will, and gives excellent familiars.

This marquis of the Ars Goetia procures feuds between friends and then reconciles the quarrels he started, which is the whole of his office and runs in both directions at once. He comes as a flame-vomiting wolf with a serpent's tail, or else as a man with a raven's head.

Recovers the particular class of treasure that other spirits are guarding, which is a narrower promise than the plain treasure-finding around it. He arrives as a flaming fire before taking human shape.

Marked in the Goetia as dangerous to the operator himself, which almost nothing else in the book is: handle him carelessly, the text says, and he will kill the man who called him along with his assistants. He arrives raven-headed on a black wolf with a drawn sword.

Teaches geometry and every kind of measurement exactly, makes men subtle in astronomy, and turns them into birds. He announces himself as a peacock making a great deal of noise, and is ranked marquis in the Ars Goetia.

For all the apparatus — three heads, flaming eyes, a bear to ride and a goshawk on the fist — his offices are modest: true answers on past and future, invisibility, and quickness of wit.

Comes only while the Sun stands in Sagittarius, and comes with four kings and their companies behind him. What he gives is comprehension: the song of birds, the voices of other creatures, and treasure hidden by enchantment rather than by hand.

Moves people bodily from one country to another without warning, and knows the virtues of herbs and precious stones. He rides a pale horse in the shape of a strong man with a serpent's tail.

The Goetia's instructions here are unusually anxious: hold a hazel wand, and be courteous. He arrives in a fury on a pale horse with every kind of music sounding ahead of him, and he causes all the love that may be until the operator's desire is met.

Turns any metal into gold, and is in the same breath called a great liar unless the operator compels him with the ring. He rides a red horse as a soldier in red crowned in gold, and is ranked duke in the Ars Goetia.

Commands six legions, fewer than any other spirit in the seventy-two. What the entry is remembered for is not the astrology or the geometry but the graveyard work: he shifts corpses between plots and sets what look like candles burning on the graves.

The arrival is fearsome — an ugly viper, then a horned man with great teeth and a drawn sword — for a spirit whose actual work is telling the past and the future and making peace between enemies.

Appears under Sagittarius as a lion's head with five legs radiating from it like the spokes of a wheel. His teaching is medical: moral and natural philosophy, the virtues of every herb and plant, and the cure of all distempers.

A spirit of the graveyard: he moves the dead from where they lie and gathers other spirits onto their tombs. He speaks with a high and comely voice from three heads — dog, griffin and man — on a dragon's body, and gives riches and eloquence.

Answers out of burning ashes or coals rather than speaking directly, which is unusual even among the seventy-two demons of the Ars Goetia. What he gives is comprehension of things that do not speak: the voices of birds, oxen and dogs, and the sound of running water.

Given a territory rather than a subject: the Goetia has him ruling every spirit in Africa. He also teaches grammar, logic and rhetoric, finds lost and hidden treasure, and makes men valiant in war.

Makes a great noise like the rushing of many waters, and speaks darkly of hidden things in the shape of an angel. His oddest credited power is domestic: he warms water, and finds baths.

Appears first as a star inside a pentacle. His office is birds — their virtues and those of precious stones, and the trick of making them fly before the operator and stay, singing and drinking exactly as real ones do.

Consulted chiefly about war — the Goetia credits him with knowing how a conflict will end before it does. He appears as a goodly knight with lance, ensign and serpent, and secures the goodwill of lords and knights.

Messenger between humanity and the orisha, addressed first in any rite. Missionaries met a trickster at a crossroads and called him Satan, and the mistake has proved very hard to undo.

Has power over the winds and the sea, drowns men and overturns ships of war — and will harm nobody at all, the Goetia adds, if he is commanded otherwise. He appears as a man with a griffin's wings.

One of the most broadly credited entries in the book — herbs and stones, logic and ethics, invisibility, lost property, hidden treasure, and, alone among the seventy-two, long life. He arrives in plain human shape, which is itself unusual here.

His gifts are entirely social: languages, rhetoric, a good reputation, and the affection of enemies as readily as friends. The Ars Goetia makes this marquis a great sea-monster, which fits none of it.