Demonic · Jinn · c. 650 CE
The Ghul
Also called Ghoul, Ghūl · also recorded as Sila, غُول, غول (per Wikidata)
Desert jinn that lure travellers off the road and prey on the dead. English took the word 'ghoul' from them.
Single lineage
Shape-changing jinn of the waste places, attested chiefly in hadith and in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, whose method is misdirection rather than force — they take a form that draws a traveller off the road, and what happens afterwards happens away from the road. They also feed on the dead, which is the element English kept when it took the word. That borrowing is the entry's second subject: ghoul enters European languages through eighteenth-century translations of the Arabian Nights and arrives stripped of everything but the graveyard, so the word now names a horror-fiction category rather than a class of jinn.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
None. The graveyard and the empty road are where they are met, not where they are served.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- Qur'an & Hadith · 7th c. CE onward
- Named there as
- Ghūl
- Rank
- Class of Jinn
- Order
- Jinn
- Base of operations
- None. The graveyard and the empty road are where they are met, not where they are served.
- Era
- c. 650 CE
- Traditions
- Islamic
- Placed in
- The Offices of the Mala'ika
Traits
- Domain
- Graveyards, waste places, luring travellers
- Traditional form
- Shape-shifting; often a woman on a lonely road
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to The Ghul, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- transformation1
- malefic2
1 mark
Which marks is it attached to?
A mark a figure carries and a mark used against a figure are opposite claims, so each link says which it is.
1 texts
Which texts say so?
Attested chiefly in hadith and pre-Islamic Arabic poetry; changes shape to mislead travellers in waste places.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention The Ghul?
Is The Ghul the same as Satan?
What rank is The Ghul?
How else is The Ghul spelled?
What is The Ghul said to do?
How old is The Ghul?
Nearest in the corpus
If The Ghul is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
The Ifrit
Class of Jinn · Jinn
A powerful class of jinn — and jinn, crucially, have free will, so an ifrit may be Muslim, hostile, or neither.
Asmoday
King · Goetic Spirit
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.
Astaroth
Duke · Goetic Spirit
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.
Beelzebub
Prince · Infernal Court
'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.
Belial
King · Goetic Spirit
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.
The Spirits of Affliction
Group of Named Spirits · Deliverance tradition
The remaining 'spirit of X' phrases, grouped because the tradition's whole method stands or falls on how they are read.
The book behind The Ghul
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. It is public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
Qur'an & Hadith
Various · 7th c. CE onward · Arabic
Read Qur'an & Hadith in full ↗Cover: Public domain · AnonymousUnknown author · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.