Pazuzu

The bronze is fifteen centimetres tall and closes comfortably inside a fist. Down its back, from shoulder blade to heel, runs a tight column of syllabic cuneiform in which the figure introduces itself in the first person: I am Pazuzu, son of Hanpa, king of the evil spirits of the air, who comes violently forth from the mountains, raging. A small loop was cast into the crown of the head so the thing could be hung from a cord. Someone in Assyria, some time between the ninth and the seventh century before the common era, went to the expense of casting that face in metal because they wanted it in the room with them.

It is not a face that invites company. The head is squared off and heavy-browed, with the curling horns of a goat, deep-set round eyes and ears that stand out from the skull. The jaw is a dog’s, open, teeth and tongue on show, and beneath it hangs a stiff two-pronged beard ruled with horizontal lines. Below the neck the anatomy stops making sense in a very deliberate way. Human arms end in talons. Two pairs of feathered wings rise from the shoulders. The legs are a bird of prey’s, the tail is a scorpion’s, curling up behind, and the erect phallus terminates in the head of a snake. One arm is raised and one is lowered, a gesture repeated on figurine after figurine with almost no variation across three centuries.

Nobody has ever found a large one. Every securely ancient Pazuzu is small enough to carry: pendants, fibulae, amulets meant to be strung at the wrist or the throat, plaques the size of a paperback. The earliest that can be dated by excavation is a gold garment pin from the grave of a royal woman at Nimrud, which means the first thing we can prove about him is that a queen kept him pinned to her clothes.

Where the shape came from is a harder question, and the best answer runs through the weather. Frans Wiggermann traced the body backward through Mesopotamian cylinder seals to the personified West Wind, a crouched, forward-leaning figure that acquires talons and a scorpion tail across successive generations of engraving until it is unmistakably Pazuzu. The bent posture is the clue. It is a body built to lean into a gale, or to be one. In the same seal repertoire the West Wind sometimes keeps company with the severed-looking head of Humbaba, the ogre of the cedar forest, which is probably why later readers assumed the two monsters were brothers. No ancient text says so. The only relative the inscriptions give Pazuzu is his father Hanbi, about whom nothing else survives.

What the texts do give him is a job. The wind he embodies is the kind that arrives with grit in it and strips the breath out of a person, and the standard incantation carved on his amulets has him boasting that he broke the wings of the evil winds against the mountainside. That boast is the whole logic of the amulet. A power that can shatter winds can be pointed at something worse than wind.

The something worse was Lamashtu. She was the terror of Mesopotamian childbirth, a demoness who came for infants and the women carrying them, and more than sixty bronze plaques survive from the first millennium showing the ritual mounted against her. One of the finest sits in the Louvre, catalogued as the Plaque of the Underworld, fourteen centimetres of cast and incised bronze with two rings for hanging. Read it downward. The top register is a row of divine symbols, horned crown and thunderbolt and lance and the winged sun disc. Below that, seven demons walk in a line with the heads of a panther, a lion, a wolf, a ram, an ibex, a raptor and a snake. Below that again, a lamp burns on a tripod beside a bed, and on the bed a sick man lifts his right hand to pray while two priests in fish-skin cloaks stand over him. In the lowest register Lamashtu kneels on a donkey in a boat, floating down a river full of fish, holding a snake in each hand and suckling a dog and a pig at her breasts. She is being escorted out. And on the reverse of the plaque, cast in relief, Pazuzu grips the whole thing from behind with his head rising over the top edge, looking down into the room he is guarding.

That is the picture the object was made to make. The monster is outside the frame, holding the frame, staring at the exit while the household sweats it out below.

The trade in him was brisk and it travelled. A bronze Pazuzu turned up in Egypt. A macehead carved with four Pazuzu faces set back to back was dedicated at a Greek sanctuary on Samos, a long way from any Assyrian sickroom, by somebody who presumably knew what it was for. Ritual instructions from Assyria prescribe a Pazuzu head as a means of banishing illness, and the incantation written on those heads is known from tablets at Nineveh, Sultantepe and Uruk, which is to say it was standard practice across the empire rather than a local quirk. Then it stops. By the Parthian period only two images of him can be dated at all, and after that his face goes out of use entirely.

His powers are the powers of the storm, borrowed and redirected: he arrives at speed, he carries sickness in the air, and he can be turned so that the sickness lands on something other than the client. His limits are stranger and more revealing. He has no temple. He receives no offerings, holds no domain, and owns no myth of his own, no adventure, no defeat, no cycle of stories in which anything happens to him. He exists only inside the apparatus of amulet, plaque and spell, which means his entire strength is on loan from whoever bothers to hang him up. He is a tool with teeth. When people stopped making the amulets, there was nothing else holding him in the world, and he went quiet for two and a half thousand years.

He came back in 1973, in a film that opens on an archaeological dig at Hatra and closes with a small girl’s bedroom in Georgetown, and the film got him precisely backwards. It cast the guardian as the invader, the thing hung above the bed as the thing in the bed. Ancient Mesopotamian demons were not sorted into the good and the wicked in the first place. They were forces, appeasable and steerable, and a competent exorcist set one against another the way a farmer sets a dog on a wolf. Pazuzu was the dog. He was simply an appalling one, and that was the point of him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Pazuzu?

Pazuzu is a demon of Assyrian and Babylonian belief who calls himself the son of Hanbi and the king of the evil wind demons. He embodies the destructive wind that comes down off the mountains. Mesopotamians used images of him as protective amulets rather than worshipping him as a god.

Is Pazuzu good or evil?

Neither, by the standards of his own culture. Mesopotamian supernatural beings were treated as amoral forces that could be appeased, directed and set against one another, and Pazuzu’s ferocity was exactly what made him useful. He was a destructive demon deliberately pointed at other destructive demons.

What did Pazuzu protect people from?

Chiefly from Lamashtu, the demoness blamed for the deaths of newborns and the women who bore them. More than sixty bronze plaques survive on which Lamashtu is shown being driven back to the underworld while Pazuzu grips the plaque from behind and looks over its top edge. Pregnant women also wore Pazuzu-head pendants and pins.

What does Pazuzu look like?

Pazuzu has a squared, horned head with bulging eyes, a snarling dog’s jaw and a stiff two-pronged beard. His body combines human arms ending in talons, two pairs of wings, the legs of a bird of prey, a scorpion’s tail and a snake-headed phallus. One arm is raised and the other lowered in nearly every surviving image.

Was Pazuzu really in The Exorcist?

The 1973 film names Pazuzu as the possessing demon and opens at the ruins of Hatra in northern Iraq, but it reverses his ancient role. In Mesopotamia Pazuzu was hung above a sickbed to expel demons, not to inhabit anyone. His modern reputation as pure evil is a twentieth-century invention.

Related Entries

Lamashtu (Labartu), Humbaba, Utukku, Gallu, Rabisu, Ardat-Lili, Lilitu, Edimmu, Asakku, Girtablilu, Lamassu, Shedu, Apkallu, Marduk, Bes