As depicted by the French artist Louis le Breton for his fellow countryman Jacques-Albin-Simon Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, Astaroth is a skinny man with reptilian claws punctuating long hands and feet, hobbled over on the back of a lupine demon sporting a massive pair of bat wings and a serpentine tail. There, between the entry for a seventeenth-century Anglican theologian named Assheton and one for the Levantine goddess Astarte, is the demon Astaroth. Ed Simon explores the work and how at its heart lies an unlikely but pertinent synthesis of the Enlightenment and the occult. These images and words will always be what comes immediately and vividly to my mind when the subject is demons or devils and if they can't inspire some epic old-school fantasy gaming encounters, I don't know what can.Astaroth, from the 1863 edition of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal / Īlthough Jacques Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal, a monumental compendium of all things diabolical, was first published in 1818 to much success, it is the fabulously illustrated final edition of 1863 which secured the book as a landmark in the study and representation of demons. If you've never experienced these, now is the time. Today, I found out that the Dictionnaire Infernal illustrations and English text are available online in PDF form here (very small download, about 2.8 MB). Including, at one time, a copy of the Book of Mormon. During the commercial breaks, I'd be busy ordering whatever free crap I could. Johnny Carson, original Star Trek reruns, Night Flight, and cheesy-sleazy horror and kung-fu movies were all favorites. As a kid, I would always stay up late watching tv. This was the heyday of paid tv advertising, and Time Life was famous for 'get the first book in our new twenty part series free'-type offers.

I first came across many of these awesome illustrations in the Time Life coffee table book Wizards and Witches, part of their Enchanted World series released in the 1980s. These illustrations are drawings which try to depict the descriptions of the appearance of several demons.' There were several editions of the book, but perhaps the most famous is the edition of 1863, in which sixty-nine illustrations were added to the book.

It was written by Jacques Auguste Simon Collin de Plancy and first published in 1818. 'The Dictionnaire Infernal (English: Infernal Dictionary) is a book on demonology, organized in hellish hierarchies.

Dictionnaire infernal 1818 pdf