A few pages later there is Amon, a horrific hell beast with globular pitch-black eyes, a “great and powerful marquis of the infernal empire” who appears as a “wolf, with a serpent’s tail . As with the many demonic chimeras that populate his dictionary, Collin de Plancy was a mélange of disparate parts. Perhaps for Collin de Plancy, born almost two centuries later amidst the convulsions of revolution, the thin, reptilian demon with the aristocratic bearing still represented some of the dangers of the new learning, for Astaroth “willingly answers the questions he is asked about the most secret things, and . English: The Dictionnaire Infernal (1818) is a 19th century reference book on demons and demonology.

citation needed] In later years, De Plancy rejected and modified his past works, thoroughly revising his Dictionnaire Infernal to conform with Roman Catholic theology. The information in this book is stuff that can be found online but is much better to have a physical copy of in your hands. For example, the book reassures its contemporaries as to the torments of Hell: "To deny that there are sorrows and rewards after death is to deny the existence of God; since God exists, it must be necessarily so.Dictionnaire Infernal was first published in 1818 and then divided into two volumes, with six reprints—and many changes—between 1818 and 1863.

He became an ardent defender of the faith and denounced his previous writings as erroneous and dangerous.Ed Simon explores the work and how at its heart lies an unlikely but pertinent synthesis of the Enlightenment and the occult. The Dictionnaire Infernal (English: " Infernal Dictionary") is a book on demonology, describing demons organised in hierarchies.

If anything, the strange verisimilitude of the insect-like creature makes le Breton’s image all the more terrifying. The Dictionnaire Infernal is a 19th-century encyclopedia of the occult and demonology, written by Collin de Plancy and illustrated by Louis Breton. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. There is Eurynome, who has “long teeth, a frightful body full of wounds, and a fox skin for clothing.

There is ambiguity in the book’s project itself, for what could be more modern than the dictionary, and yet what could be more antique than the knowledge collected in this particular dictionary?

Like his uncle, Collin de Plancy was originally a partisan of liberty, equality, and fraternity, an enthused reader of Voltaire and a zealous rationalist and skeptic; also like his uncle, he would ultimately see himself reconciled to that Church he had rejected, though with a detour through the darker corners of demonology. De Plancy published dozens of titles in his lifetime, but he never surpassed the success (or infamy) of the Dictionnaire Infernal, which first appeared in 1818 and was followed by several updated editions.It lists, describes, and provides illustrations of a variety of demons, including most of the Goetia, as well as demons pulled from other religions, such as Hinduism, and re-branded as Christian demons. And then there is my favorite, Belphégor, who is associated with the deadly sin of sloth and is shown sat hunched with pinched brow, straining atop a toilet, holding his tail from harm’s way, trying to take a shit. This book attempts to provide an account of all the knowledge concerning superstitions and demonology.