Onoskelis

The rope yard of Solomon’s Temple smelled of wet hemp and stone dust, and one worker there never stopped and never slept. She stood at the fibre day and night, palms rolling the strands into cord for the scaffolding of the house of God, and from the waist up she was the handsomest thing on the site. Below the waist she had the legs of a mule.

That is where the Testament of Solomon leaves her, and it is the last anyone hears of her. Her name is Onoskelis, which in Greek is less a name than a label: onos, donkey, and skelos, leg. Ass-legged. The book that gives her a life was written in Greek somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean between roughly the first and the fifth centuries of the common era, and it is a peculiar, procedural, faintly bureaucratic text in which the king interrogates the demons of the world one at a time, extracts from each its name, its governing star and the angel who defeats it, and then puts the thing to work on his building project.

She arrives because Solomon asks for her. He has been questioning Beelzeboul, prince of the demons, and wants to know whether there are females among them. Told that there are, he says he would like to see one. Beelzeboul goes off at speed and returns with Onoskelis, who tosses her head.

The interview that follows is the whole of her surviving biography, and it runs to perhaps fifteen lines. Asked who she is, she says she is a spirit made into a body. She lies in a golden cave. Her usual haunts are precipices, caves and ravines, the cold sort with running water at the bottom, but she describes her nature as many-sided and her position as one that keeps shifting. Sometimes she strangles men with a noose. Sometimes she works on them more slowly and perverts them from their true natures. Often she goes among them wearing the shape of a woman, and she reserves particular attention for those who share her star, who worship it in secret or in the open, and who imagine they are buying money by remembering her. They harm themselves and do not notice. She admits, with something close to a shrug, that she pays out a little to those who worship her fairly.

Solomon asks how she was born, and here the manuscripts fall apart in an interesting way. The oldest published English rendering, F. C. Conybeare’s of 1898, has her born of an untimely voice, the echo of a man’s filth dropped in a wood. D. C. Duling’s later translation of a different recension has her generated from an unexpected voice, called the voice of the echo of a black heaven, cast into matter, and marks the sense as uncertain. Both versions agree on the essential thing, which is that she was not begotten by anybody. She condensed out of a sound in an empty place. Conybeare noticed the resemblance to the Hebrew bath kol, the daughter of a voice, and the comparison flatters her: this is a demon whose mother was an acoustic accident.

Her star, she says, is the full moon, because the moon travels over most things. Then Solomon asks which angel thwarts her, and she answers that it is the one reigning in him. He takes this for insolence and orders a soldier to strike her. She cries out at once and submits, naming the wisdom of God given to the king and the angel Joel. He seals her, binds her, and sets her to the hemp. Then he calls for the next demon, and Asmodeus comes in furious, and Onoskelis is forgotten.

The word is older than the book. Greek lexicographers and commentators knew onoskelis as a description of the Empusa, the shape-shifting phantom of Hecate’s train who appears to Dionysus and his slave in Aristophanes and turns into a bull, a mule, a beautiful woman and a dog while they watch. The Suda records that the Empusa had one leg of bronze and one of a donkey, which earned her the by-names Onokole and Onoskelis. There is also a nastier little tale in the Parallela Minora that circulated under Plutarch’s name, credited to a writer called Aristocles: Aristonymos of Ephesos, son of Demostratos, hated women and kept company with a she-ass, and the ass in time bore a very beautiful girl whom they named Onoskelis. It is a joke about bestiality with a monster at the end of it, and it shows that Greeks were telling stories about a donkey-legged woman well before anyone put her in front of Solomon.

So there are two layers, and the Testament of Solomon is the one that hardened the description into a person. The book took an existing Greek insult about hooves under a pretty hem, gave it a voice, a birthplace, a star, an angel and a sentence of hard labour, and filed it in a demonology that Jewish and Christian readers went on copying for a thousand years.

Her powers are exactly the ones her origin implies. She is a creature of sound and appearance, so what she does is seem: she wears a woman’s shape convincingly enough that men follow it into the rocks. She can strangle, and she can corrupt, and she can produce money, which in a text obsessed with Temple finance is a real power and not a metaphor. Her authority is lunar and therefore roving. She goes where the moonlight goes, which is nearly everywhere, and she keeps no fixed address.

Her limits are the same shape. She gives almost nothing. The wealth she trades in is a trickle, and the text is blunt that her worshippers are damaging themselves for it. She cannot lie about her name, her star or her adversary once a properly authorised questioner asks, and in this book that is the fatal weakness, because a demon that has told you which angel undoes it has handed over the key to its own cell. Joel undoes her. So does a ring, a seal and a king with the right credentials. What finishes her is not violence but paperwork, and the last image the tradition offers is not a seductress in a ravine but a bound thing standing in a yard, working hemp between her hands, going nowhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Onoskelis?

Onoskelis is a female demon in the Testament of Solomon, a Greek text composed between roughly the first and fifth centuries CE. She has the body of a beautiful woman from the waist up and the legs of a mule below. Her name is Greek and means “ass-legged”, from onos, donkey, and skelos, leg.

What does Onoskelis do to people?

Onoskelis approaches men in the shape of a woman and either strangles them with a noose or turns them gradually from their own natures. She also promises money to those who worship her star, though the Testament of Solomon says she gives only a little and that her worshippers harm themselves without realising it.

Where does Onoskelis live?

Onoskelis says she lies in a golden cave and that her most frequent dwelling places are precipices, caves and ravines. She also describes her position as one that keeps shifting, and her governing star is the full moon, on the grounds that the moon travels over most things.

How was Onoskelis defeated?

Solomon interrogated her and learned that the angel who thwarts her is Joel. When he had her struck, she submitted, invoking the wisdom of God given to the king. He then sealed and bound her and set her to spin the hemp used for the ropes in the building of the Temple, where she stood working night and day.

Is Onoskelis the same as the Empusa?

They are not the same figure, but the name links them. Greek sources including the Suda record that the Empusa, the shape-shifting phantom associated with Hecate, had one bronze leg and one donkey leg, which gave her the by-names Onokole and Onoskelis. The Testament of Solomon takes that description and makes it the personal name of a distinct demon with her own birth, star and adversary.

Related Entries

Empusa, Lamia, Gello, Mormo, Hecate, Lilith, Succubus, Incubus, Strix, Onocentaur, Churel, Pontianak