They’re something like viruses, working their automatic evil-like sandstorms in their torrential, inorganic malice. The scholars don’t even necessarily agree that these demons have minds or wills like ours, nor that they actively desire to do evil. (In fact, there’s something distinctly computational about all these chimeras, a mathematical recombination of elements, all mad permutations indexed in the logical architecture of hell.) The demons of the Talmud are far more protean: a nameless, numberless swarm. They are bureaucratic beings whose natural environment is the database-even if Adramelech wears the head of a donkey and a peacock’s tail. Demons, these taxonomies suggest, are not simply anarchy and adversity they are legible to the classifying powers of human reason. In Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal, we meet beings such as Adramelech, “great chancellor of the underworld, steward of the wardrobe of the sovereign of the demons, president of the high council of the devils,” and Behemoth, a “heavy and stupid demon” who serves as “butler and high cupbearer” in hell.
Later, Christians gave names and ranks to the demons they made catalogues. What they don’t tell you is how you will ever sleep comfortably again. Scatter a circle of fine black ashes around your bed at night, and in the morning, you will see their footprints, their claws like a rooster’s, their terrible number.
And though seeing the demons is fatal, the rabbis tell you how it may be done. Our ordinary world, the one in which we work and fall in love and watch TV-it’s thinner than paper, and the demons pour through it in hordes. “They stand over us like mounds of earth surrounding a pit.” Rav Huna teaches that “each and every one of us has a thousand demons to his left and ten thousand to his right.” Abba Binyamin tells us that “if the eye had the power to see, no creature would be able to withstand the demons.” Fourteen centuries before Lovecraft, the Talmudists knew that what we see is only the tiniest portion of what’s really there, and the rest is monsters. Translated by richard pevear and larissa volokhonskyĪccording to the Talmud, the demons are more numerous than we are.
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