Demonic · Deliverance tradition · c. 400 BCE
The Spirits of Affliction
Also called Spirit of Fear, Spirit of Heaviness, Spirit of Bondage, Spirit of Slumber, Spirit of Whoredoms
The remaining 'spirit of X' phrases, grouped because the tradition's whole method stands or falls on how they are read.
Well sourced
Five phrases, each appearing once or twice: a spirit of fear that God has not given us, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, the spirit of bondage again to fear, the spirit of slumber, the spirit of whoredoms that causes people to err.
Deliverance ministry reads each as naming an entity with a personality and a method. The ordinary alternative reading takes them as Hebrew and Greek idiom for a disposition or condition — the way 'a spirit of generosity' works in English — and notes that Isaiah's contrast is with a garment of praise, which suggests a mood rather than a being.
Both readings are held by people who take the text seriously, and the difference is not about whether the supernatural exists. It is about what kind of phrase this is. Grouping them here rather than giving each its own entry reflects that: the question is the same question five times over.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
None. A category in modern deliverance teaching rather than a figure anyone has ever worshipped — these are diagnoses of a condition, and a diagnosis has no address.
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
- Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE
- Named there as
- The spirit of heaviness
- Rank
- Group of Named Spirits
- Order
- Deliverance tradition
- Base of operations
- None. A category in modern deliverance teaching rather than a figure anyone has ever worshipped — these are diagnoses of a condition, and a diagnosis has no address.
- Era
- c. 400 BCE
- Traditions
- Christian, Deliverance & Spiritual Warfare
Traits
- Domain
- Fear, grief, addiction, spiritual dullness, compulsion
- How firm the basis is
- Each is a real phrase; whether any names an entity is the dispute
- Textual basis
- 2 Timothy 1:7, Isaiah 61:3, Romans 8:15, Romans 11:8, Hosea 4:12
Stats
Known connections
Identified with
4 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 4 offices attributed to The Spirits of Affliction, 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.
- martial1
- malefic3
3 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 3 texts that names The Spirits of Affliction, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
3 texts spanning roughly 2,373 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as The spirit of heaviness, The spirit of fear, Spirit families
- Rank: given as Disposition or entity; Disposition or entity — the disputed point; Groupings

Isaiah promises the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness — a contrast that reads more naturally as mood than as being.
“The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.”

God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.
“For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”
Each phrase is treated as a ruling spirit with a family of subordinate spirits beneath it, which is the organising principle of the whole book.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention The Spirits of Affliction?
Is The Spirits of Affliction the same as The Python Spirit?
What rank is The Spirits of Affliction?
How else is The Spirits of Affliction spelled?
What is The Spirits of Affliction said to do?
How old is The Spirits of Affliction?
Nearest in the corpus
If The Spirits of Affliction 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.

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.

Bael
King · Goetic Spirit
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.
Moloch
Prince · Infernal Court
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.
The books behind The Spirits of Affliction
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.

Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon
Various · c. 900–100 BCE · Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek
Read Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon in full ↗Cover: Public domain · see en:Aleppo Codex; scanned by · Wikimedia file page

New Testament
Various · c. 50–110 CE · Koine Greek
Read New Testament in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Wikimedia file page
Pigs in the Parlor: A Practical Guide to Deliverance
Frank and Ida Mae Hammond · 1973 · English
Read Pigs in the Parlor: A Practical Guide to Deliverance in full ↗
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.