What the tradition records of the demons, and what it names to resist them.
This is a reference and a work of discernment, not a manual. It gathers what the oldest sources actually say, the Book of Enoch, the Scriptures, the Testament of Solomon, Jewish tradition, and the deliverance theology of the Church, about the fallen powers: their names, the harms attributed to them, how the tradition says their influence is recognized, and above all what it names to resist them.
It holds two lines. It will not supply the operative half, no invocation, seal, pact, or summoning, because that is instruction in evil rather than testimony about it. And it names demons the way the tradition does, by the sins and harms the texts ascribe to them, never by categories of persons. The tradition condemns acts. It does not mark a person as demonic for who they are, and neither does this.
The reason the exorcist still knows these names is not fascination. It is that you cannot cast out what you cannot name. Every tradition that takes the demonic seriously keeps a catalog, and keeps it for the same reason a physician keeps a book of poisons: to recognize, to resist, and to heal.
The Enochic account, canonical in Ethiopia, that the West let go.
Genesis 6 says only that the sons of God took wives among men and the giants were born. The Book of Enoch tells the whole of it. Two hundred Watchers descended under their leader Shemihazah, took human wives, and taught humanity the forbidden arts. Azazel taught the making of swords and shields, and the cosmetics and ornaments that followed; others taught sorcery, the cutting of roots, astrology, the signs of the sun and moon. Their offspring were the Nephilim, the giants, who devoured the earth.
And now the giants, who are produced from the spirits and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling.
1 Enoch 15:8–9 · tr. R. H. Charles
This is the origin the exorcists lean on. When the giants died, their disembodied spirits did not depart. They became the demons that roam and afflict the living, which is why the demonic is described as restless, seeking a body, bound to the earth it was never meant to inhabit. Jubilees adds the settlement after the flood: at the plea of their chief, a tenth of these spirits are left under Mastema to test humanity, the rest bound. The four archangels, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Uriel, are set against them.
Chief of the arts in Enoch: weapons, war, and the painting of faces. In Leviticus the sin of Israel is sent out to Azazel in the wilderness on the Day of Atonement. The tradition reads him as the one who taught the means of violence and vanity.
In Jubilees the prince left with a tenth of the spirits, permitted to tempt and accuse. It is Mastema who incites the testing of Abraham and who opposes Moses, the Accuser who works only by permission.
Scripture does not say the foreign gods are nothing. It says they are demons.
The prophets' quarrel with Canaan was not only idolatry but what the idols demanded. Deuteronomy puts it flatly: They sacrificed unto devils, not to God, to gods whom they knew not.
The Psalm names the worst of it: they sacrificed their sons and their daughters unto devils.
The catalog of the old gods is a catalog of demons, and at its center is the fire in the valley.
The deity to whom children were "passed through the fire" in the Valley of Hinnom, outside Jerusalem. The Law condemns it on pain of death; Jeremiah calls it a thing the Lord never commanded and never conceived; Josiah defiles the place so no man could make his son or daughter pass through the fire. Scholars debate whether Molech was a god or a kind of sacrifice, the molk; the horror is the same. From Ge-Hinnom, that valley of child-fire, comes the later word for hell itself: Gehenna.
The great rival of the God of Israel, defeated by Elijah on Carmel when the fire fell on the true altar and not the false. Jeremiah links the high places of Baal to the burning of children, binding the two abominations together: the false lord and the fire that consumes the innocent.
A local Baal consulted as an oracle, whose name the Gospels turn into a title for the prince of the demons. When Jesus is accused of casting out demons by Beelzebul, he answers that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand, the clearest word in Scripture that the demonic is a hierarchy, and a doomed one.
What Scripture condemns is real and historical: the cult of the burning at Hinnom, named to Molech and bound to Baal. This is the Bible's own testimony and the root of its word for hell. It is worth holding exactly there, in the sources, and not stretching it into the modern conspiracy theories that borrow its language. The ancient abomination needs no embellishment; naming it as the prophets named it is enough.
The oldest book that names demons one by one, and names what unbinds each.
The Testament of Solomon, from roughly the third century, is the ancestor of every later catalog. Its frame is the key to how the tradition thinks: Solomon, given a sealing ring by the archangel Michael, questions each demon in turn, and each is compelled to name the ailment it causes and the holy name or angel that thwarts it. The point was never to summon them. It was to know the remedy.
In the Book of Tobit he slays the seven husbands of Sarah before each wedding night, until Tobias, taught by the angel, drives him off with the smoke of a fish's heart and liver. In the Testament he confesses that he plots against the newly wed and is thwarted by the same angel.
A night-demon who confesses that she wanders the world to harm mothers in childbirth and strangle the newly born. She stands behind a long family of infant-threatening spirits across the ancient Mediterranean, and in the text she is undone when the angel who thwarts her is named over her.
In the Testament he is the ruler of the other spirits, who claims to have been the first of the angels of heaven, and who brings about the ruin of kings and the worship of demons. He is subdued not by a lesser angel but only by the Name of God itself.
The text continues through the thirty-six decans, the spirits of the degrees of the zodiac, each confessing the specific sickness it causes and the specific name that heals it. The structure is always the same: an affliction, and its cure.
The spirits of the dark hours in Jewish tradition, and a word about who they are not.
Alongside the Enochic and Solomonic streams runs a third, the folklore of the night-spirits gathered in later Jewish tradition. The Dead Sea community already sang hymns to frighten them off, naming Lilith among the "bastard spirits" and howlers. Isaiah lists the lilith among the desolate creatures of the ruined land. From there the tradition grew.
In the Qumran hymns and in Isaiah she is a night-spirit of the wilderness. In the medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira she becomes Adam's first wife who would not be subject to him and fled, and thereafter a demon who threatens women in childbirth and the newborn, warded off by the names of three angels. She is, in every source, a spirit of the night and a danger to mother and child, pictured as a seducer of men in their sleep.
In the Kabbalistic tradition of the Zohar, Naamah stands with Lilith among the mothers of demons, succubus-figures said to trouble men in sleep. Later tradition counts four such queens, Lilith, Naamah, Agrat, and Mahalath, each assigned a quarter of the night. They are, throughout, figures of seduction and of harm to the vulnerable.
These are demons of the night, of seduction, and of danger to infants. That is the whole of what the tradition assigns them. Modern retellings sometimes attach Lilith or her companions to particular groups of people, as if a demon belonged to a kind of person. No source does this. Classical demonology names demons by the sins and harms the texts ascribe to them, never by who someone is. To read it otherwise is to turn a catalog of spirits into an accusation against people, which is a misuse the tradition itself would not permit.
The medieval scheme that fixes the whole principle: demons are catalogued by vice, not by person.
By the sixteenth century the tradition had mapped the capital sins to the princes who preside over them. The scheme, set down by Peter Binsfeld, is less a roster of individuals than a diagram of how temptation works, and its logic is the logic of the whole field: each demon is the personification of a disordered appetite, and each is answered by the virtue that heals it.
The table is the thesis of this whole book in miniature. A demon is named for a sin, and the sin has a cure. Nowhere is a demon named for a people.
What the deliverance tradition describes, with the caution it insists on first.
The Catholic deliverance tradition, and exorcists such as Father Chad Ripperger who write within it, are careful to begin with a warning that outweighs everything after: the overwhelming majority of what seems demonic is not. It is illness, wound, habit, or the ordinary disorder of a fallen will. Discernment belongs to the Church and to trained clergy working with physicians, never to the curious or the amateur. With that said, the tradition distinguishes degrees.
Ordinary activity is simple temptation, the suggestion toward sin that every person meets and that is answered by ordinary grace. Extraordinary activity is rarer and graver, and the tradition names its forms: infestation of a place or object, oppression as affliction of body or circumstance, obsession as relentless assault on the mind, and possession, the rarest, in which the body is at times controlled against the will.
The tradition also names the doors through which the extraordinary is said to enter: deliberate occult involvement, unrepented grave sin held onto, severe trauma, and what Ripperger treats at length as generational patterns, the wound handed down a family line. The remedy in every case is the same shape, and it is the point of naming any of this at all.
The pastoral question, asked honestly.
People do not seek the forbidden powers for love of evil. They seek them for the oldest reasons: to know the future when the future is unbearable, to reach a beloved the grave has taken, to be healed when medicine has failed, to hold power over a life that feels powerless, to take revenge, to belong to something, to matter. The occult has always sold exactly what the human heart is starving for, and sold it on credit.
That is why the catalog exists, and why the tradition keeps it. Not to satisfy the craving but to understand it, so that the one who is tempted can be met with the thing actually wanted, which was never the demon. The answer the tradition gives is not better technique. It is a different source for the same needs: the God who knows the future, keeps the dead, heals the sick, and gives the powerless a name.
The reason every name above was worth writing down.
In every source the pattern holds. Azazel is bound by Raphael. Asmodeus flees the medicine of God. Beelzeboul is subdued only by the Name. The night-spirits are warded by the angels set against them, the seven sins are each undone by a virtue, and the whole demonic hierarchy, in the Gospel, cannot stand because it is divided against itself.
The tradition's answer is not a spell to match a spell. It is a greater authority: the Name of God, the sacraments and the sacramentals, the protection of the holy angels, the prayers of the Church, and repentance that closes the doors sin opened. The demons are named so that they can be commanded, and they are commanded by a power not our own. To know the fallen is finally to know how small they are before the One who binds them.
Name the enemy, know the cure, and the knowing is already half the deliverance.
Enochic — 1 Enoch 6–16 (the Watchers, the arts, the spirits of the giants); 1 Enoch 15:8–9 (Charles tr., public domain); Jubilees 10, 17–18 (Mastema). Canonical in the Ethiopian Tewahedo Church.
Scriptural — Deuteronomy 32:17; Psalm 106:37–38; Leviticus 18:21, 20:2–5; Jeremiah 7:31, 19:5, 32:35; 2 Kings 1, 23:10; 1 Kings 18; Matthew 12:24–28 (KJV, public domain). On Molech as deity vs. molk-sacrifice, scholarship is divided; both are noted.
Solomonic & folkloric — the Testament of Solomon (3rd c.); Tobit 6–8; the Alphabet of Ben Sira; Isaiah 34:14; the Dead Sea Songs of the Sage (4Q510–511); the Zohar on Lilith and Naamah. These are presented as tradition records them, with the folkloric clearly named as such.
Deliverance theology — the Roman Ritual; the degrees of extraordinary activity and the entry points as treated in Catholic deliverance literature, including the work of Fr. Chad Ripperger. The tradition's own first rule is stated: most apparent cases are natural, and discernment belongs to trained clergy.
A book of poisons, kept by the physician. Named to be resisted, never to be used.