Astaroth

Also Known As: also Astarot, Ashtaroth; from Hebrew ʿAštārōt, the plural of ʿAštōret, the biblical name for the Canaanite goddess Astarte
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: Christian Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: He answers truthfully about things past, present, future and hidden, and can make a person remarkably learned in the liberal arts, but he exhales a stench no exorcist can stand.
Role in Mythos: A great duke of hell commanding forty legions, first known as the false healing god whom the apostle Bartholomew drove out of an Indian temple, and later a fixture of every European grimoire that ranked the infernal court.
Relation to Humans: The oldest account has him farming the people who worship him, inflicting illnesses so that the sick will come to his temple with offerings, then easing what he caused. The grimoires reverse the traffic entirely, making him a spirit summoned by a magician who wants an honest answer and is prepared to hold a silver ring to his own face to get one.

The sick came to the temple on litters and went home cured, and the god who cured them had put the sickness in them to begin with. That was the arrangement in the far country the Latin text calls the third India, in a shrine where a stone figure of Astaroth stood taking offerings from people who never understood they were paying twice. Then a traveller in a much-worn cloak walked in and stayed, and the healing stopped.

The temple filled. Litters came in and did not go out. Incense burned over the smell of illness and nothing happened, day after day, until the crowd gave up and carried their sick across to a second shrine, where a demon named Beireth told them exactly what had gone wrong. There was an apostle in the building. Beireth described him well enough for anyone to pick him out: the same clothes and the same sandals for twenty years, neither worn through nor dirty, a man who is never hungry and never tired, who speaks every language there is and knows what you are thinking before you say it, and who can simply not be seen when he prefers not to be.

Bartholomew came back and made the thing in the statue say out loud what it had been doing. The people took ropes to the idol and could not shift it, so he sent the demon into the desert, and on his way out the demon tore down every other image in the temple and stripped the walls of their paintings and insignia. An angel of the Lord arrived, flew to the four corners of the building, traced a cross into the stone with one finger and called the demon back so the crowd could see what it had been feeding. He came back in chains of fire, hands bound behind his shoulders, eyes burning, sparks spitting from his mouth, his wings thorned like a porcupine. The Latin reaches here for the stock image of a soot-black Ethiopian, which is the ordinary shorthand of medieval Latin demonology for any devil at all and says nothing about Astaroth in particular. Then the angel sent him back to the desert to wait for Judgement Day.

That story is old. It sits in the apocryphal Passion of Bartholomew, copied in Latin by about the year 800, retold in Old English by Ælfric of Eynsham around the 990s, and passed on through Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend in the thirteenth century, where Caxton’s 1483 English keeps the sharpest line in the whole tradition: the fiend in the idol said he could heal all manner of sickness, but he lied, for he could not make them whole, but might better them for a while.

The name arrived in Christian hands by accident. In Hebrew, ʿAštārōt is a plural. It is the plural of ʿAštōret, itself the consonants of the Canaanite goddess ʿAštart fitted with the vowels of bōšet, the word for shame, so that the goddess of Sidon could not be named in scripture without an insult riding along inside her. The plural does duty in the Bible for foreign goddesses in general, paired with the Baalim whenever Israel is said to have gone wrong, and it also names a real town, Ashtaroth in Bashan, the seat of King Og, along with the older site called Ashteroth Karnaim. Greek and Latin translators carried the word across as Astaroth without marking it as feminine or plural, and readers who came after them inherited a single impressive proper noun with no gender attached. The most famous duke of hell began as a grammatical misunderstanding.

By the sixteenth century the misunderstanding had a rank, a mount and a number of troops. Johann Weyer, writing the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum in 1577, gives him in four lines of Latin: a great and strong duke who comes forth in the shape of a most foul angel, sitting on an infernal dragon and carrying a viper in his right hand. He answers truly about the past, the present, the future and all secret things. He will talk at length, and willingly, about the creator of spirits and about the fall, how the angels sinned and how they dropped, and he insists that he did not fall of his own accord. He makes a man wonderfully learned in the liberal arts. Forty legions answer to him. Reginald Scot Englished the passage in 1584, and the seventeenth-century Lesser Key of Solomon lists him again as the twenty-ninth spirit, riding an infernal beast like a dragon, viper in the right hand, seal to be cast in copper and worn as a lamen or he will not appear and will not obey.

Weyer adds the detail that everyone remembers. Let every exorcist take care not to let him come too near, because of the intolerable stench he breathes out, and let him hold a silver magic ring close to his own face, by which he will easily be protected. Four centuries of occult literature have copied that ring forward without once improving on it.

The hierarchies that followed kept promoting him. Sébastien Michaelis, publishing the Aix-en-Provence possession case in 1612, put Astaroth in the first hierarchy as a prince of thrones who tempts people into idleness, sloth and vanity, and named his adversary in heaven as Bartholomew, who prayed a hundred times a day and a hundred times a night on his knees. Six centuries after the Passion, the same two were still paired off. The Grimorium Verum divided the world between three superior spirits and gave Astaroth the Americas, with Lucifer over Europe and Asia, Beelzebuth over Africa, and two subordinates, Sagatana and Nesbiros, carrying his orders. Francis Barrett’s Magus of 1801 made him the eighth of nine princes, called him the prince of accusers and inquisitors, and left him living in America. Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernal handed him to the engraver Louis Le Breton, who produced the image most people now picture: a crowned figure with long reptilian claws and feathered wings, a serpent in one hand, riding a wolfish demon with dragon wings and a serpent’s tail.

He turns up in court records as well as in grimoires. When the judges at Loudun needed evidence against the priest Urbain Grandier in 1634, they produced a pact written backwards in Latin and signed by devils, six of them with sigils, and Astaroth’s name is on it among Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub and Leviathan. Grandier was burned on 18 August 1634 without confessing. Nobody now defends the document.

His powers follow from what he was made to be. He is a witness, not a warrior: the sole demon in the catalogue who will explain the fall from the losing side, and the fastest route to an education in the liberal arts that a magician could ask for. Truth is his whole stock in trade, which is a strange thing to hand a liar. His limits follow just as neatly. He cannot be approached, because of the reek; the silver ring holds him at arm’s length and the copper seal compels him at all. And the oldest limit is the one the grimoires forgot. In the temple he could not heal anybody, only postpone what he had inflicted, and with an apostle standing in the room he could not manage even that.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Astaroth?

Astaroth is a Great Duke of Hell in Christian demonology, said to command forty legions of spirits. He first appears as a false healing god expelled from a temple by the apostle Bartholomew in the apocryphal Passion of Bartholomew, and later becomes a standard entry in European grimoires including Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and the Lesser Key of Solomon.

Where does the name Astaroth come from?

The name comes from Hebrew ʿAštārōt, the plural form of ʿAštōret, which is the biblical name of the Canaanite goddess Astarte. The biblical form deliberately combines the goddess’s consonants with the vowels of bōšet, meaning shame. Greek and Latin Bible translators transliterated the plural as Astaroth without preserving the fact that it was a feminine plural, and later Christian demonology read it as the name of a single male demon.

What does Astaroth look like?

Johann Weyer and the Lesser Key of Solomon both describe Astaroth as a foul or hurtful angel seated on an infernal dragon, carrying a viper in his right hand. The older Passion of Bartholomew describes him with eyes of fire, sparks coming from his mouth, thorny wings like a porcupine’s quills, and his hands bound behind his shoulders with chains of fire.

How is Astaroth kept at a distance?

According to Weyer and the Lesser Key of Solomon, the danger is his breath rather than his strength, and a magician must never let him come close because of the intolerable stench he exhales. The remedy in both texts is to hold a silver magic ring near the face. The Lesser Key adds that his seal must be made in copper and worn as a lamen, or he will neither appear nor obey.

Is Astaroth the same as the goddess Astarte?

Astaroth takes his name from Astarte by way of the biblical plural Ashtaroth, but the demon keeps nothing else from the goddess. Astarte was a Canaanite and Phoenician goddess associated with love, fertility and war, while Astaroth is a male duke of hell invented by Christian writers who inherited her name as a word for foreign idols.