In the West, the names given to the Devil are less monstrous, just as the forms under which he is shown are less repulsive. The name Dragon is preserved, and to it have been added those of Satan, Demon, Devil, Serpent, Asmodeus, Prince of the World, Zabulus or Zabolus; he has even been endowed with the glorious title Lucifer, or Lightbearer, just as the Greeks called their furies Eumenides, or well-doers. The opposite phrase also applies to Satan, for he is Ahriman, or the god of night. The name that seems to have prevailed every where is that of Demon, though, like that of tyrant, which at first simply signified king, it was not meant to express either good or evil. The evil has triumphed, and demon, which only means genius, has been used to signify, and still signifies, a wicked spirit; tyrant also now means nothing more than a wicked king.*

We must make a selection among all these names in order to avoid confusion. However, as among Christians the Devil is not a single being, but extraordinarily multiform-as multitudinous as the angel-we must try to distinguish him in the midst of this crowd. In the Gospel describing the man possessed, Jesus Christ asks his name while exorcising him. "My name is Legion," he answered. This response signifies the number to which demons may attain; for here is one who in himself alone is the personification and aggregate of a multitude of others. Mary Magdalene, whom Jesus Christ also exorcised, possessed seven demons who were driven in succession from her body.

We have been enabled by the help of St. Denis the Areopagite to indicate the ranks in the hierarchy of angels; but such a hierarchy could not exist among demons, because of the discord and confusion in which they live, disorder being their sovereign order. Milton gives us a picture of a revolt of demons, but if the attempt were now made to introduce order among the diabolic crowd it would prove labour in vain. As the Apocalypse bears the same relation to devils that the Divine hierarchy of the Areopagite holds to angels, it is through its pages

*In Friar Bacon, ix. 144, and xi. 109, the titles of "guider" and "ruler of the nor.h" are given to Asmenoth.

we must seek for any light upon the present question. When we carefully reperuse the Apostolic vision, this is the order which we believe may be traced throughout.

First there is a devil called the Old Serpent [Rev. xii. 9], the great Dragon Satan, the Devil properly so-called, the king of the bottomless pit, the Exterminator. This, in the Apocalypse, is the great red dragon, having seven

Fig. 184.-BEAST WITH SEVEN HEADS.
Painting on glass, St. Nizier, Troyes.*

heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads, and a tail which drew the third part of the stars of heaven. This is the chief devil, the master of all those we shall see afterwards pass before us in succession.

Satan has two lieutenants, if we may so say: one on the earth and one on the sea; for, master of the whole world, his power extends over seas and continents. His repre

* See Ann. Arch. vol. i. p. 77.

sentative on the sea has, like himself, seven heads and ten horns,* but he carries ten crowns, three more than his master, and upon his heads the name of Blasphemy; and the beast is like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion which vomits blasphemy.

Then coming out of the earth [Rev. xiii. 11], the agent of Satan is a beast with two horns, which speaks the language of the dragon. This is the third great symbol of the Genius of Evil. This dragon holds the whole world, the sea and the earth in his hands; he gives the leopard the empire over the floods, and the beast over the earth. Here we have the Satanic Trinity. It shares the sovereignty of evil just as the Divine Trinity shares that of good.

But the diabolical trinity, as the Divine Trinity, has its ministers, its inferior agents who execute his orders. From the mouth of these monsters three impure spirits not named in the Apocalypse come forth; they have the form of frogs. They are the ministers of these three great demons. They are the agents who summon the kings of the earth to fight against God.

The army that these chiefs command is composed of grasshoppers who come forth from wells in the bottomless pít like the smoke which exhales from a great furnace. The beasts that follow in the Apocalypse resemble horses ready for the battle. Their face is as the face of a man, on their heads are crowns as of gold, they have hair as women, lions' teeth, iron cuirasses, scorpions' tails pointed like barbed darts, wings that resound like horses and chariots rushing to the combat. Such is the infantry of the Devil. As to the riders, they have breastplates of fire, of jacinth, and of brimstone. Their horses, which vomit brimstone, fire and smoke, have heads like lions, tails like serpents, armed at the end by heads which poison and slay.

This diabolical company is very monstrous. It is conceived in such proportions as to furnish forms of horror for all demons engendered from it and represented in images of plastic art.

On the ancient sarcophagi and in the old frescoes the *Rev. ii. 3, 4, 9.

Genius of Evil is seen under the form of a serpent; this is the serpent who seduced Eve, and the being in the Apoca

Fig. 185.*

lypse called the Old Serpent, the Great Dragon Satan, the Devil properly so called, the king of the bottomless pit, the Exterminator.

品

Fig. 186.-ON SARCOPHAGUS, VATICAN MUSEUM.

In Christian iconography the serpent appears, as might be expected, most frequently in the temptation of Adam * This illustration is taken from the Biblia cum Figuris, MS., Bibl. Nat. Paris, No. 9561, fol. 8a.

and Eve. We see it represented simply with its mere zoological character on a sarcophagus of the first Christian period in the Vatican; and again it is represented as borrowing the head and arms of a human being, a treatment which Raphael has not feared to adopt in his turn from the thirteenth century. The serpent has occasionally two heads, one female with which to address the man, the other male with which to address the woman. He also assumes the form of the ancient hydra, which

PO

Fig. 187.

French MS., XIII. cent., Bibl. Nat., Paris.

is only a multiform serpent, and it is converted into the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse, transforming the hydra into the dragon.

Each of the horned heads in this seven-headed beast, which is represented in the stained-glass window of the sixteenth century at St. Nizier at Troyes, is surrounded by an aureole.* In the East, the nimbus is given as a symbol of power; therefore at Troyes, where certain

* See Vol. I. supra, p. 163.