Demonic · Infernal Court · c. 1863 CE
Xaphan
A rebel angel who proposed setting heaven on fire and now tends the furnaces below. No source before the nineteenth century has heard of him.
Single lineage
He appears in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal and in Milton-influenced Romantic writing, not in any grimoire, scripture or medieval source. The story — a lesser rebel whose idea was to set heaven alight, given the job of keeping the infernal fires going — is nineteenth-century literary imagination, and is recorded here as that rather than quietly listed beside figures three thousand years older.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
None. He appears in Collin de Plancy and in nineteenth-century compilations after him, which is a bibliography rather than a geography.
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
- First attested
- Dictionnaire Infernal · 1818; illustrated ed. 1863
- Rank
- Stoker of the Furnaces
- Order
- Infernal Court
- Base of operations
- None. He appears in Collin de Plancy and in nineteenth-century compilations after him, which is a bibliography rather than a geography.
- Era
- c. 1863 CE
- Traditions
- Folk & Demonological
Traits
- Domain
- The fires of hell
- Traditional form
- Fanning the furnace with his mouth
Stats
2 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 2 offices attributed to Xaphan, 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.
- knowledge1
- malefic1
1 texts
Which texts say so?
Keeps the furnaces of hell alight. No attestation earlier than the nineteenth century — a literary invention, not an inherited tradition.
“Xaphan, démon du second ordre. Quand Satan et ses anges se révoltèrent contre Dieu, se joignit aux mécontents, et il en fut bien reçu, car il avait l’esprit inventif.”Xaphan, a demon of the second order. When Satan and his angels revolted against God, he joined the malcontents, and was well received among them, for he had an inventive mind. — translated for ColossiansOne
Connections
What is it connected to?
No relationship to another figure in this corpus is recorded in the texts cited above. Where an edge exists here it is because a source states it, so an empty section means the sources are silent rather than that the connection is unknown.
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Xaphan?
What rank is Xaphan?
What is Xaphan said to do?
How old is Xaphan?
Nearest in the corpus
If Xaphan 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.
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.
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.
The book behind Xaphan
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.
Dictionnaire Infernal
Jacques Collin de Plancy · 1818; illustrated ed. 1863 · French
Read Dictionnaire Infernal in full ↗Cover: Public domain · Collin de Plancy · 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.