Dictionnaire infernal, tome 1

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Among the spirits presented in de Plancy’s book are well-known evils such as Lucifer and greedy Mammon, but also more obscure devils such as the lower demon Ukobach, who tends to fireworks and oils, and the bellows-bearing fallen angel Xaphan.

It also covered a wide range of topics related to the occult, such as magic, divination, grimoires, folklore, and superstitions. He combined realistic details with fantastical elements, creating some of the most original and vivid depictions of demons ever made. There is Eurynome, who has “long teeth, a frightful body full of wounds, and a fox skin for clothing. He collaborated with Jacques Paul Migne, a French priest, to complete a Dictionary of the Occult Sciences or Theological Encyclopaedia, which is described as an authentic Roman Catholic work.Like many demonologists before him, de Plancy set out to create an accounting of demonic events and forces in his book, Dictionnaire Infernal. In both cases, words have the power, if they’re properly organized, to change the world for better or for worse.

He joined forces with Collin de Plancy to provide 69 engravings of various demons for the 1863 edition of the Dictionnaire Infernal. Le Breton depicts Eurynome as a caprine, saw-toothed creature on bended knee, grimacing at some unseen victim, “showing his great teeth like a starving wolf”. Etymology was like dissection, another Enlightenment innovation, and the dictionary a sort of dissection theater. He first published the Dictionnaire Infernal in 1818, as a skeptical and rational investigation of the occult world. Later in life, de Plancy embraced Catholicism and revised his work to conform to the Church’s views.

For example, the book reassures its contemporaries as to the torments of Hell: "To deny that there are sorrows and rewards after death is to deny the existence of God; since God exists, it must be necessarily so. Our small-group adventures are inspired by our Atlas of the world's most fascinating places, the stories behind them, and the people who bring them to life. Both kinds of book are partisans of a Platonist philosophy that sees a type of word magic as being able to enact transformations in real life. This book attempts to provide an account of all the knowledge concerning superstitions and demonology. In his later editions of the Dictionnaire Infernal, he affirmed the existence and power of the demons and added many engravings and stories to illustrate their nature and actions.

The Dictionnaire Infernal is a 19th-century encyclopedia of the occult and demonology, written by Collin de Plancy and illustrated by Louis Breton. A few pages later there is Amon, a horrific hell beast with globular pitch-black eyes, a “great and powerful marquis of the infernal empire” who appears as a “wolf, with a serpent’s tail . For Dr Johnson and his Dictionary of the English Language, or James Murray, who, in the Bodleian’s scriptorium, assembled the testament to humanity that is the Oxford English Dictionary, positivist knowledge could be found in the process of collection and measurement. And then there is my favorite, Belphégor, who is associated with the deadly sin of sloth and is shown sat hunched with pinched brow, straining atop a toilet, holding his tail from harm’s way, trying to take a shit.This connection between the ideals of the Enlightenment and the old world of magic and superstition from which these demons sprung was, in many ways, made literal by the figure of Collin de Plancy himself. This influence is most clearly seen in the sixth and final 1863 edition of the book, which is decorated with many engravings and seeks to affirm the existence of the demons.