Pazuzu

Pazuzu is the king of the wind demons in Mesopotamian mythology of the first millennium BC, son of the god Hanbi (or Hanpa), sovereign of the evil spirits. He is represented with a humanoid body of monstrous features: canine or leonine face, bulging eyes, body covered with scales, raptor claws on hands and feet, two pairs of wings and a scorpion tail. As lord of the winds, in his destructive facet he embodied the southwest wind, bearer of droughts, storms and locust plagues that ruined the crops. His figure thus gathered the fearsome power of the atmospheric forces of the Mesopotamian desert.

Although a demon, Pazuzu had a markedly protective (apotropaic) function, which distinguishes him from other evil beings. Precisely because of his ferocity he was invoked to combat other demons, especially Lamashtu, the devourer of children: it was believed that Pazuzu could force her to return to the underworld. Therefore, pregnant women and mothers wore amulets with his effigy or with his head alone, and these were hung in houses to repel evil and the diseases brought by the winds. Pazuzu thus fought evil with evil, dominating the forces of the pestilent air and turning them against the threats that lurked in the home and the most vulnerable.

Numerous statuettes, bronze heads and amulets of Pazuzu have been preserved since the Neo-Assyrian and Babylonian period, testimony to the spread of his protective cult throughout the Near East. Many included a ring for hanging them and an inscription that identified him as son of Hanbi and king of the wind spirits. In contemporary popular culture, Pazuzu achieved worldwide fame as the demon that possesses the girl in the novel and film The Exorcist (1971 and 1973), a modern association foreign to his original role: in ancient Mesopotamia he was not a demon of possession, but a fierce guardian invoked to protect, not to harm. His iconography remains one of the most recognizable in Mesopotamian demonic art.