Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Southern Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more. Hello all. Welcome back to Southern Demonology and to episode 29, and as always, I am your host, J Jam. My family shows love to one another by picking on each other. To this day I keep the tradition alive to all of those I care about, even at work. One of my most used phrases is if I don't pick on you, I don't like you.
And yes, please excuse the double negative in that sentence. Well, one fateful night my uncle Ernest, who was the closest I ever had to a father, decided to walk me around our front yard in the dead of night to tell me all about the monsters called hide of behinds. Of course his goal was to scare the ever living crap out of me, which he succeeded at by the way, by telling me of creatures who could run so fast that they could get behind you before you ever saw or heard them. I was surprised years later by finding out that these were the monsters created for the old TV show Gunsmoke.
But I think I sprung the greater surprise on my uncle and the rest of my family by creating an entire race of hideah behinds. I made them monsters with two large curved horns on the top of their head, two smaller versions as fangs, large horns coming out of their shoulders, and arched feet so that they only ever walked in their clawed toes. I drew them constantly, and I even made generations of the monsters by coming up with different varieties such as the ninja behind or the dragon behind. Yes, I was in elementary school, so cut me a little bit of slack.
One night of teasing turned forth years of lore and drawings. Well, one day in fifth grade I decided to make a comic book featuring these monsters. I sold it to as many kids in my elementary school for a quarter of pop as I possibly could until one fateful day the principal called me into his office and demanded that I make no more, for I was giving the younger kids nightmares. Thus began and ended my grand career as a comic book artist. The reason I bring this up is because it's quite easy to generate a world of lore in world building. Kids do it with their creations.
Video games like Dark Souls are celebrated for their lore and have created quite a few profitable YouTube channels out of the mix to boot. But I would argue that there's no more fertile ground for lore than religion itself, for both the sheer volume and for the real world consequences for it, especially when the world is shaking up and people are looking for answers. We see this very clearly in ancient Judaism. After the destruction of the first temple and the people were exiled, not only had the Jews lost their homeland, but their God had also lost his place of power.
The symbol of might for Adonai was in ruins. To put this in a modern context, what if the seat of power for a major religion was suddenly conquered and raised with its people taken away by its conquerors? I'm not going to give an example for just the idea is too horrible to put into more concrete scope. Plus, I in no way, shape or form want to give the impression that I would support such a thing for whichever religion I happen to make an example of. But that's only a portion of the pain.
Let's go further and say that the seed of power isn't just a symbol, but the actual point of manifestation for that deity where the God's will is made manifest. Given the enormous religious and sociopolitical importance, the events of the temple's destruction and the exile of its people were going to cause ripples and ripple it did. In fact, those causalities are still in effect to this very day. For one of the biggest changes that were wrought was the birth of dualism.
We've seen the tenacity of religions firsthand, how doomsday cult cults that predict the end of the world and suffered from the failure of those predictions still managed to survive by claiming that the potents were read wrong, but that the end is still very nigh. We've even seen it with the sad rise of QAnon. So we know that these events weren't the death kneel for the Jewish faith. However, it did undergo a major shift in thinking. We covered this at length in episode twelve, the dualistic paradigm, and episode twenty two, Zoroastrianism.
But to quickly sum up, there was a belief that an angel was responsible for each of the seventy nations, and if those nations turned against God's chosen people, then that must mean that there were evil angels that are responsible for such blasphemous actions. This was further compounded by the exile Jews encounter with one of the most advanced dualistic religions there is, Zoroastrianism. Before dualism, the Jewish faith believed that there were bad spirits and forces of natural destruction, of course. The key difference is that all of these were under the direct control of God.
But now that dualism had seeped into the very marrow of Judaism, that worldview shifted to these forces of destruction being ruled by God's enemy. But who could that enemy be? Yes, my friends, it's taken me a while to get to the point, but we are picking up at the second part of the Name of the Devil series that I promised so long ago. Yet now you're in a pickle, no? The tides are changing and the water is rising. Yet who is directing that water? Who is truly God's spiritual enemy?
You can either attempt to go back through the Tanakh and look for a name or a clue, or you could just make one up out of wholesale cloth. Now I don't mean to imply that there was a big meeting where all of this was consciously decided. This was more of a gradual evolution over at least two hundred years. To be clear, there are many, many precedents for dualism in the ancient world. You have many different versions of the combat myth. Marduk faces Tiamat, the face of chaos, Baal battles Yom, the the sea, and molt death.
And you even have in Judaism God pushing back the sea, which does indeed represent chaos. However, now we have a case where the waters aren't just enough to satisfy the thirst of dualism. Please forgive me the pun, I just could not resist. I have to love a good pun. So which path do we choose? Something old or something new? Well, the answer is complicated in that there were many attempts, some of which uh picked an existing figure and others decided to get fanciful. Yet as we will see, both approaches agreed on one thing. There was not another type of God doing battle with the Lord.
God is always supreme. That concept was so baked into Judaism that there was no overcoming that fact. Rather, the enemy is a lesser spiritual being who is rising up against God. Fair warning I am going to be running down a great many of the contenders for the name of the devil, but I am absolutely not going to be doing so in a strict chronological fashion. That would be a nice topic for a PhD dissertation, but considering that I am not in such a program, well there's only so much time of the day. So let's go back to one of my favorite wells, first Enoch.
For in this work you can see both paths attempted. If you recall, we covered this in episode eleven, the Giants of Antiquity. But to make a long story short, a group of angels called the Watchers were sent to guard over the generations of men, but having seen the daughters of humanity decided to bind themselves in a curse and take wives from amongst them, which gave rise to the birth of the giants. The leader of the group was Simias.
He was the one who, upon gathering the chiefs of ten, suggested that they curse themselves so that no one individual could claim ignorance of the evil deed they were about to commit. And there are sections of first Enoch that suggest that the chief of the watchers is the prime evil. But then you find renewed attention being applied to one of those chiefs of ten, Azazel.
Now it is true that he taught some of the most lawless arts such as blacksmithing, antimony, and yes, cosmetics, but in many of the rebukes delivered by the watchers, Azazel is often recited by name and is singled out as being the worst of the offenders, even above their leader. Now for these two angels we see both places at play. The leader is a new character. However, Azazel is a very familiar something. Some translations substitute the word Azazel here as scapegoat. In fact, that's where we get the English meaning for the word.
However, in all honesty, this is a passage that's so old that we honestly have no idea what the true meaning of this particular ritual is. The dictionary of deities and demons does sum up the scholarly research nicely. The name could be an epitaph for a demon or a geographical designation, or it could be a combination of words, which is Ion Zed and Ozel, which is Olif Zed Lamuth, meaning goat and to disappear respectively. That Sibtuagint and the Vulgate choose the last possibility, but first Enoch went with the first, namely that a goat is sent to him in the desert.
Remember that bad things live in the desert. In fact, Doom, amongst others, even spoke of a cacodemon de worst who was appeased through the offering of a he goat. Now this is pure speculation on my part, but I would not doubt that there was an earlier version of First Enoch that blamed the leader, Simehaz, but then a later author came along and substituted out Azazel for name recognition. And that's why you see such a tension in First Enoch as to who should shoulder the ultimate blame and serve as the face of the watchers.
But having Azazel in the book makes a great deal of sense, since one of the primary reasons first Enoch was written was to explain many problematic parts of the Hebrew Bible, especially Genesis six. But that is not the end of Azazel as a candidate. You see him again identified as the devil in Jubilees ten, and as the serpent who deceived Adam and Eve in the apocalypse of Abraham in chapter twenty three. Yet that is not the only contender.
In the Testament of Solomon, uh Baal Zebub, which in Anglicized as Bel Zebub, literally from the Hebrew, the Lord of the Flays, Baal meaning Lord and Zebub flies, is the name is named as the devil who was formerly quote the highest ranking angel in heaven, unquote. Here he is the prince of the demons who is responsible for quote wars, tyranny, demon worship, violence and lust, and resides in the evening star. This name comes up four times in the Hebrew Bible, all contained within the first chapter of 1 Kings, where he is referred to as Baalzebub, the god of Ekron.
Though there's been a ton of back and forth about what this name actually means and from where it's derived, it does appear that this entity was one who could cause or cure disease. And the Testament of Solomon is not the only place that bestows um old uh Zeb with that title. And the litany continues to roll. Jubilees also names the chief of the evil spirits as Mastema, literally from Hebrew the hateful one. The martyrdom of Isaiah calls forth the names of Samael, literally the Gall of God, Melkira, the king of evil, and Beliar, which can also be construed as Belial.
In fact, honestly an entire episode needs to be devoted to Beliar Belial due to its importance. To come back to the ultimate and perhaps predictable repurposing repurposing of names, we of course arrive at Job. The story of Job is an ancient one with variations found throughout the ancient world. We covered this in episode twelve as well. But in the Hebrew retelling we do get the appearance of Hasatan, the prosecutor. Of course this was meant in a legalistic sense, i. e. as in a chief prosecutor in a trial, but through the lens of dualism this was reinterpreted as being the enemy of God.
In fact, this is made explicit in the Septuagint by its rendering the rendering the term as Diablos, which of course is the devil. Yet the name Satan arises in an earlier work, and with that we go full circle back to first Enoch. Yes, I am sorry, I keep bringing that up a lot in this episode. In chapter fifty-four we get this passage And I looked and turned to another part of the earth, and saw there a deep valley with burning fire, and they brought the kings and the mighty and began to cast them into this deep valley.
And there mine eyes saw how they made these their instruments, iron chains of immeasurable weight, and I asked the angel of peace who went with me, saying, For whom are these chains being prepared? And he said unto me, These are being prepared for the host of Azazal, so that they may take them and cast them into the abyss of complete condemnation, and they shall cover their jaws with rough stones as the Lord of Spirits commanded.
And Michael and Gabriel and Raphael and Fanuel shall take hold of them on that great day and cast them on that day into the burning furnace, that the Lord of Spirits may take vengeance on them for their unrighteousness in becoming subject to Satan and leading astray those who dwell on the earth. Have I ever mentioned that first Enoch is all over the map?
First you had the difference of comparison of comparing uh Semiah and Azazel, and now you have Azazel being the representative of Satan, which yeah, uh so the translations version that I'm reading is by RH Charles, but there are numerous examples of the translation of actual textual editions of first Enoch.
Uh in fact, there is a uh and I know I've mentioned this before, but there is a complete tome of the pseudopigrapha, and the version of first Enoch is wildly condemned, uh, that re appears within that tome because it uses a very strange uh deviated text in which the um the scholar actually used a translate from. So I'm not quite sure what version this is, but this is obviously something that was added later uh from its first or if you go by my speculation, second rewriting of this text, because now we're getting shoehorned in men messages of Satan.
So as you can see, the name of the devil is a very complex subject, and we have only begun to scratch the surface on it. You know, so we have brought up the you know two characters from first Enoch, uh now adding in a third of Satan, we have um Baalzebub, we have um Mastema and quite a few others. And if you go back and look at the sources, we can see that these were all legitimately put forth as names of the devil. They are not princes, they are not artisans. Dark demons, they are not cacao demons, they are actual proposed entities to be the enemy of God.
If you've ever came into demonology by reading magical, you know, grimoires or texts uh from medieval Europe and you get this entire like proposed hierarchy of demons, where you know, these were the princes, these are the you know w whatever category they happen to be in. You know, I would hear these tales of you know people confusing um you know Beelzebub for the devil, and I'm like, no, Beelzebub is obviously, you know, a a lesser demon who, you know, may have served alongside the devil, but is not the devil.
And if you can trust what I'm saying here, which you know I've done a fair bit of research, I hope you can, you can see that's not really the case. Um the name of the devil was certainly never decided upon. And in fact, in a future episode, I hope to kind of do the same thing for the name of God. Um, you know, we have the tetragrammaton, which is the four-letter character for the name of God, who we think we know how it's pronounced, but maybe not really. But that's not the only one.
You have other synonyms in there Adonai, Elohim, and comes to find out there's not as much agreement as to which one's the original. So anyway, we have a lot more to explore on this topic. Um, I'm not trying to deliberately stretch this out. I promise you, it's just I delivered a lot of details on this one, and I'm not trying to overwhelm you or try to speed everything up and condense what I'm trying to say just to artificially get this episode underneath 30 minutes. So I hope you forgive me. We are going to have a part three of all this, um, and I hope you look forward to that one.
As always, if you have any questions regarding anything that you've heard, please feel free to join our Discord, which is filled with very nice and wonderful people, or to join our Patreon if you would like to help support this podcast. Uh, details for both can be found at our website at uh southerndemonology.com or on our Facebook page, which is Facebook.com slash Southern Demonology. But before I go, I do want to mention that our Facebook page has officially reached over 500 likes and followers. To those who have made that happen, I want to sincerely thank you from the bottom of my heart.
And on that note, I would really like to encourage everyone listening to like this podcast and this episode on whatever platform you happen to be listening on, whether it's iTunes or Google Podcasts or Spotify or wherever else happen would happen to be, because that truly helps me out uh more than I could tell you. But thank you for listening to me yet again. I truly appreciate it.
Uh, I hope that you're staying safe out there, especially since we are you know right on the verge of maybe being able to return to at least some form of normacy with uh within the next few months, which would be fantastic. I have lived in this basement for so long. I would love to be able to get out and just do regular activities. I can't even begin to tell you how nice that would feel. Even though I'm a homebody, it would still be a wonderful thing to take my wife out on a date. So, anyway, stay safe out there. Thank you once again for listening.
And again, feel free to reach out if you have any questions at all. Thank you again. Have a good night.