Belphegor

Belphegor comes from the biblical Baal-Peor, the god worshipped on Mount Peor to whom, according to the Book of Numbers, Israel gave itself on the plains of Moab. He was a local title of «Baal», tied to fertility, and the Bible recalls him only to condemn him. Christian demonology retrieved him centuries later and gave him a new post: in The Lanterne of Light, an English Lollard treatise of around 1409, each deadly sin is assigned its demon, and Belphegor draws sloth. That assignment is what fixes him. It is worth saying what he is not: despite what is often repeated, Belphegor does not figure among the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia, nor does he appear in Johann Weyer's Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, so he has no goetic seal. His place is in the lists of deadly sins and, above all, in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal, where he takes the shape by which he is known today.

The Dictionnaire Infernal sums him up in one line that explains him whole: «demon of discoveries and ingenious inventions». And it adds two things that clash on purpose: that he often takes the body of a young woman, and that he gives riches. The grotesque image attached to him comes from that same entry, though it repays slow reading: what Collin de Plancy reports from the rabbis is that homage was paid to him on the pierced chair (the privy) and that the residue of digestion was offered to him. It is not that he sits there: it is that he was honoured there. The engraving of the sixth edition, in 1863, drew him enthroned on it outright, bearded and horned, and that print prevailed over the text. As prince of acedia (spiritual sloth, which medieval theology reckoned a vice of monks rather than of idlers) he embodies the temptation to let go of effort in exchange for what comes easy.

He was invoked for what he promised: profitable discoveries, contrivances that produce without one working, money arriving by a shortcut. The price, in the moral logic that holds the figure together, is dependence: whoever takes the shortcut no longer knows the way back to the long road. His literary career starts there, and it gave him a life of his own that few list-demons have. Around 1518 Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a satirical novella, La favola di Belfagor arcidiavolo, in which hell sends Belphegor up to the world of the living with a fortune and orders to marry, to find out whether the newly arrived souls are telling the truth when they claim their wives damned them. The archdevil marries, is ruined, and ends up fleeing back to hell, which turns out to be the restful place. The joke had long issue (Machiavelli took it from an earlier tale and versions of it spread across Europe) and it explains why Belphegor survives in popular culture less as a fearsome demon than as a comic character.