Belphegor

The camp at Shittim smelled of roasting meat. Israel had stopped on the plains of Moab, in sight of the Jordan, and the women of the country came down with invitations to their feasts. The men went. They ate what had been offered on Moabite altars, and they bowed where their hosts bowed. The Book of Numbers puts it in one hard line: Israel yoked itself to the Baal of Peor.

That is the first appearance of the figure who would become Belphegor. Baal-Peor means the lord of Peor, and Peor was a mountain in Moab, the same height from which the seer Balaam had lately looked down on the tents of Israel and failed to curse them. The god of that mountain did what the curse could not. A plague broke out in the camp. It ended only when the priest Phinehas, grandson of Aaron, followed an Israelite named Zimri and a Midianite woman named Cozbi into a tent and put one spear through both of them. Twenty-four thousand were dead by then. The prophets never let it drop. Hosea says the fathers went to Baal-Peor and became as detestable as the thing they loved, and a psalm remembers that they ate sacrifices offered to the dead.

What the god looked like, the Bible does not say. It gives him a mountain, a feast and a body count.

The rabbis filled the gap, and they did it with a joke. The Mishnah states flatly that the proper worship of Baal-Peor was to relieve oneself in front of the idol. The Talmud adds a story. A man named Sabta ben Alas hired out his donkey to a gentile woman, and when they reached Peor she asked him to wait while she went in. He went in after her, did as the rite required, and wiped himself on the idol’s nose. The attendants were delighted. No one, they told him, had ever served the god so well. The point of the tale is contempt, and it is impossible to say now whether any Moabite ever did anything of the kind. The mud stuck all the same.

Greek and Latin Bibles wrote the name as Beelphegor, and in that shape it travelled into Christian Europe, where every old god of Canaan was already assumed to be a devil in disguise. In 1589 Peter Binsfeld, a bishop of Trier and a busy hunter of witches, matched seven princes of hell to the seven deadly sins. Lucifer took pride, Mammon greed, Asmodeus lust. Belphegor was given sloth. It is an odd fit for a god whose one recorded achievement was getting an entire nation up and dancing, and Binsfeld does not explain it. Later writers squared the account by making him the demon of discoveries and labour-saving inventions, the spirit who makes a man rich without the tedium of work. Sloth, in other words, with a patent.

His best story has nothing to do with Moab. Sometime between 1518 and 1527 Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a novella, printed in 1549, in which the kings of hell notice that nearly every damned man blames his wife. Pluto calls a council. The lot falls on Belfagor, an archdevil who had been an archangel before the fall, and he is sent up with a hundred thousand ducats and orders to live ten years as a married man. He arrives in Florence as Roderigo of Castile, rich, handsome and thirty, and marries Onesta Donati, a girl of good family and no dowry. She has more pride than Lucifer. Roderigo knows this for a fact, having met both. Her dresses, her brothers and her sisters’ dowries eat the hundred thousand, and within a few years the devil is climbing out of a window with his creditors behind him. A peasant named Gianmatteo hides him under a dunghill. In return Belfagor promises to make him rich: the devil will enter a woman, and Gianmatteo will be the only exorcist who can talk him out.

It works twice, in Florence and in Naples, and then Belfagor tells the peasant they are quits. When the daughter of the King of France is possessed and Gianmatteo is ordered to Paris on pain of hanging, the devil refuses to move. So Gianmatteo has a platform built in front of Notre-Dame and fills the square with trumpets, drums, horns and cymbals. At his signal they all sound at once, a wall of brass and hammered skin rolling over the stones. Belfagor asks what the noise is. Your wife, says Gianmatteo. She has come to fetch you. The devil leaves the princess without another word and goes back to hell, where he reports that the damned men were telling the truth.

The French demonologists took him more seriously. Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal makes Belphegor the demon of discoveries and ingenious inventions, says he gives riches, and adds that he often takes the body of a young woman. De Plancy repeats the rabbis’ story of the pierced chair with open relish, mentions an old claim that human victims were offered to him, and passes on the remark, credited to Johann Weyer, that this is a demon who always has his mouth open. The explanation offered is that Peor means a cleft or crevice, and that the god was sometimes worshipped in caves where offerings were thrown down through a hole. For the 1863 edition Louis Le Breton drew him accordingly: horned, bearded, long in the tail and the fingernails, sitting on a commode with the patience of someone who has been there a while. The same book’s list of hell’s diplomats posts him to France.

What he can do follows from where he came from. At Peor he worked by invitation, through food, company and an easy slide from the dinner to the altar, and no one in the camp had to be forced. As a prince of hell he works the same way. He offers money, and the clever shortcut that removes the need to earn it, and he can take a pleasing shape to make the offer. In Machiavelli he can also possess the living and leave at will.

His limits are just as plain. The plague at Shittim stopped at one spear thrust, and the god of the mountain did nothing to answer it. On earth, in a man’s body, the archdevil was bound by a man’s troubles, by debt and by in-laws, and all the gold in hell bought him less than ten years. He has no legions in the old grimoires and no seal that anyone troubled to draw. And he remains the only prince of hell on record to have been driven out of a king’s daughter by the rumour that his wife was in town.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Belphegor?

Belphegor is a demon of Christian demonology, named as the prince of hell who tempts people to sloth. He began as Baal-Peor, the Moabite god of Mount Peor in the Book of Numbers. Later writers also made Belphegor the demon of riches and ingenious inventions.

What is Belphegor the demon of?

Belphegor is the demon of sloth. Peter Binsfeld, a bishop of Trier, gave him that sin in 1589 when he matched seven princes of hell to the seven deadly sins. Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal adds that Belphegor is the demon of discoveries and ingenious inventions and that he gives riches.

Is Belphegor the same as Baal-Peor?

Yes. Belphegor is the Greek and Latin form of the Hebrew name Baal-Peor, which means the lord of Peor. In the Book of Numbers the Israelites joined the worship of Baal-Peor at Shittim, and a plague killed twenty-four thousand of them before the priest Phinehas ended it.

What happens in Machiavelli’s story of Belfagor?

In Machiavelli’s novella, the archdevil Belfagor is sent to earth to find out whether wives really drive men to hell. He lives in Florence as Roderigo of Castile, marries Onesta Donati, and is ruined by her pride and spending. He flees his creditors, possesses several women so that the peasant Gianmatteo can be paid to exorcise them, and finally runs back to hell when he is told his wife has come for him.

What does Belphegor look like?

The Bible gives Baal-Peor no appearance at all. Collin de Plancy says Belphegor often takes the body of a young woman and always has his mouth open. The best-known picture is Louis Le Breton’s 1863 engraving of a horned, bearded demon with a long tail sitting on a pierced chair.

Related Entries

Baal, Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Lucifer, Satan, Leviathan, Belial, Astaroth, Mephistopheles, Moses, Demons, Priapus