Demonology

A goetic grimoire frankly concerned with commanding infernal spirits, setting out a hierarchy under Lucifer, Beelzebuth and Astaroth.

Christian theology built the fullest system, identifying demons with angels fallen under Satan and developing a formal rite of exorcism, while the grimoire tradition alongside it catalogued them by name, rank, seal and legion. The church condemns the summoning it made possible.

Islam has no fallen angels: Iblis and the shayatin are jinn, made of smokeless fire and possessed of will, so folk and magical traditions treat them as commandable or contractable, while orthodox scholars confine the response to Quranic recitation and ruqya.

Jewish sources supply much of the early material, the shedim of the Talmud, Lilith, Asmodeus from Tobit, and the fallen watchers of Enoch, which later Christian and grimoire demonology took up. Rabbinic Judaism records the lore without building a system for commanding it.

Luciferianism recasts the figure as a bringer of light and knowledge rather than an adversary, and so inverts the valuation demonology assumes: what the Christian system catalogues as spirits to be bound it treats as teachers to be approached.

Mesopotamia supplies the oldest documented demonology, Lamashtu who threatens infants, Pazuzu invoked against her, the utukku and the gallu, addressed through incantation series that name and expel them; the pattern of naming in order to bind runs through everything after.

Modern Satanism is mostly atheistic and treats the catalogued demons as symbols of appetite and drive, using the names for their psychological charge; the theistic minority hold their own principle real but reject the grimoire framing of demons as servants to be commanded.

Christian Science holds evil to be unreal, an error of mortal mind rather than a being with a will, so there is no demonic order for a demonology to describe.

The Satanic Temple is explicitly non-theistic and holds no order of spirits at all, taking Satan as a literary emblem rather than as a being to be studied or invoked.

The Church of Satan is atheistic and treats the demonic names of the old grimoires as symbols and psychological archetypes rather than as beings, so its demonology is a literature of self-knowledge.

The Temple of Set is theistic where the Church of Satan is not, holding Set as a real and distinct intelligence, so its account of such beings is an account of what exists rather than of what the mind projects.

Orthodox baptism opens with exorcisms and a renunciation, and the tradition's ascetic literature is largely an account of the passions as demonic assault.

The Talmud speaks of harmful spirits and the tradition preserves those passages, though they have never carried the doctrinal weight that the angels do.

Pentecostal practice includes deliverance, the naming and casting out of spirits, which makes demonology a working discipline rather than a doctrine held at a distance.

Rome holds the fall of the angels as a real event and retains a rite of exorcism reserved to the bishop's delegate, so the subject remains a matter of pastoral practice rather than of history.

Salafi practice includes the recitation cure against possession and the evil eye, so the jinn are treated as a live matter and not a figure of speech.

The jinn are Quranic creatures with free will, and Iblis is named among them, so an account of them belongs to Sunni doctrine rather than to folklore.