Demonic figures, fallen angels and entities from religious and demonological traditions.
Samael (Sāmāʾēl — probably from Hebrew sam, "poison/venom," and El, "God" — "Poison of God" or "Venom of God," though alternative etymologies exist) is one of the most theologically complex and ambiguous figures in Jewish and related religious traditions. He occupies a unique position: not purely evil in the manner of Christian demonic fig...
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The Nephilim (Nəp̄ilîm in Hebrew — etymology disputed: possibly from nāp̄al, "to fall," giving "fallen ones," or "those who fell upon others," i.e. assailants; the Greek Septuagint translates it as gigantes, "giants") are the mysterious beings described in Genesis 6:1–4 as the offspring of "the sons of God" (bene ha-elohim) and "the daug...
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Moloch (also Molech, Molekh — Hebrew Mōlek, possibly from the consonants of melek, "king," combined with the vowels of bōšet, "shame," as a deliberate derogatory distortion) is one of the most contested and misrepresented figures in ancient Near Eastern religious history — a name associated in the Hebrew Bible with child sacrifice, condemn...
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Lilith is one of the most complex and contested figures in Jewish religious tradition: variously a storm demon, the first wife of Adam, a child-killing night spirit, a seductress of sleeping men, and — in contemporary feminist reinterpretation — a symbol of female independence and equality. Her name derives from the Hebrew lilit or Akkadian l...
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This entry covers Leviathan specifically as a demonic and demonological figure in Jewish, Christian, and occult tradition — as a prince of Hell, the embodiment of envy, the demon of the sea, and a major adversarial power. For the broader mythological and cosmological tradition (biblical chaos-monster, connections to the Canaanite Lotan, Thomas H...
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Beelzebub (Ba'al Zebub in Hebrew — likely "Lord of the Flies," possibly a deliberate derogatory corruption of Ba'al Zebul, "Exalted Lord" or "Lord of the High House") is one of the most prominent demonic names in Western religious tradition. Appearing originally as the name of a Philistine deity consulted for oracles, Beelzebub was systemati...
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Baphomet is one of the most visually distinctive and semantically loaded figures in Western occultism — a goat-headed, winged, hermaphroditic deity depicted seated on a throne in the famous illustration by Eliphas Lévi (1854), which has become ubiquitous as a symbol of Satanism, the occult, and transgressive spirituality. The figure's history, h...
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Baal (Ba'al — simply "lord" or "master" in Semitic languages) is the primary storm and rain deity of ancient Canaan and Phoenicia, one of the most important gods in the ancient Near Eastern pantheon, and — through the lens of the Hebrew Bible — the great antagonist of Yahwistic religion, the idol par excellence against which the Hebrew prophet...
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Azazel is one of the most enigmatic figures in Jewish religious tradition — a name associated with the desert wilderness and the scapegoat ritual in Leviticus, expanded in the Book of Enoch into a fallen angel who taught humanity forbidden knowledge, and developed in Islamic tradition (Azazil) as a name for Iblis before his fall. The ambigui...
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Asmodeus (Ashmedai in Hebrew; from Avestan Aēšma Daēva — "demon of wrath" combined with daeva, a class of evil spirits in Zoroastrianism) is one of the most prominent figures in Jewish and Christian demonology: a demon of lust, jealousy, and destruction, who plays a major narrative role in the Book of Tobit (deuterocanonical/apocryphal), i...
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