Butt Stuff Dragon (Transcript)

Chris Sims: "Take, O Solomon King, the gift which the Lord has sent thee, the highest Sabaoth. With it thou shalt lock up all demons of the earth, male and female, and with their help thou shalt build up Jerusalem." The Testament of Solomon, verse 5.

[Music: "The Monster Mash" by Bobby Pickett]

C: Hello everyone, and welcome to Apocrypals. It's the podcast where two non-believers read through the Bible and we try not to be jerks about it. My name is Chris Sims, and with me as always is the other set of footprints, Benito Cereno. Benito, how are you today?

Benito Cereno: Very spooky!

[Music: "Thriller" by Michael Jackson]

C: Yes, happy Halloween!

B: Happy Halloween to you as well. Blessed All Hallows Eve.

C: Very, very true. It is Halloween times, everybody. It is the time of haints, the time of spookums.

B: Yeah.

C: For us, it's the time of demons.

B: Yes. And Saints, it's Haints and Saints.

C: Haints and Saints.

B: Haints and Saints, baby. Yeah, because of course, all Hallow's Eve leading up to All Saints Day. Some of the Catholic kids that I know on All Saints Day, they extend the costume drama element of Halloween by dressing up as their favorite saint on November 1st and that's an actual thing. I don't know. Shout out to us if you were a Catholic kid who did the same thing. Let us know if you dressed up as Saint Isidore because you're an internet person.

C: So are you gonna just throw yourself into a bush and just like scream whenever you see an attractive person?

B: I might. You don't control my life. Actually, several years ago for Halloween, I actually went as Saint Peter of Verona, mostly because of how he's depicted in art. Like he was a martyr, as so many saints are, but he's usually depicted with a knife or an axe in his head. So I cobbled together a thing where I was dressed in monks' robes and had an axe in my head. And that was my costume, probably, I don't know, seven years ago or something.

C: I remember that.

B: Yeah.

C: I remember seeing pictures of that.

B: Yeah, that was... well, I was gonna say that was a year where I had to explain my costume to everyone, but that is literally every year. Except last year; I was Frankenstein last year. That was pretty straightforward. Pretty much I'm one of those where I have to explain my costume every year. And in fact, that feels like such a metaphor for my entire life, constantly having to explain what I'm talking about or what I'm doing or why I'm reading the book I'm reading in public or whatever. So it's a weird, great feeling to have all the time. Anyway, hey Chris, what are we what are we doing today?

C: Well it's Halloween.

B: Yeah, it is.

C: If people remember, last week we read about the harrowing of hell. We read the Gospel of Nicodemus, aka the Acts of Pilate, where Jesus went down to hell and dunked on Satan.

B: Yeah, that did happen.

C: Super hard. Why is Satan crying?

B: Because he just got dunked on.

C: But this week, I was a little disappointed in the Halloween aspects of that reading.

B: Right.

C: But this week, this might be the best section of Bible we have read.

B: Yeah.

C: Of Apocrypha, I should say.

B: Hey, look, man, it's all Bible.

C: It's all Bible.

B: It doesn't matter if it's not canon. That doesn't mean it's not Bible.

C: It is certainly the most wild. Which if people remember any of the other apocryphal books we've read, should be saying something.

B: Yeah, we're what twenty five episodes into this show now, basically, and we have seen some very wild things. We've seen talking dogs, talking lions, demons making a man fly. We've seen talking statues, we've seen bowing statues, man-eating seals. Some of those do not compare to the sights that await us within the Testament of Solomon. But speaking of saints though. Good timing. Very good news coming out today. It was just announced that the Vatican is releasing a game this is not made up as far as I know.

C: If it's a goof, then it is not one that we have come up with.

B: No, yeah, this is not a goof on our part. 100% not our goof. It is called JC Go. It is Pokemon Go, but for Saints, which is probably the most us thing that there could be. Did you play Pokemon Go, Chris? Were you were you a PoGo kind of guy?

C: I did.

B: Yeah.

C: I did. Because it was beautiful in that first couple weeks to live in a world where Pokemon were real.

B: Yeah.

C: And I know that with Let's go Pikachu and Let's Go Eevee coming out soon. a lot of people have jumped back on. I have not jumped back on.

B: Yeah, I know some people who have been playing continuously, which is very cool. Like I have an IRL friend who every time I see her at a restaurant or something, she's definitely got the Pokemon app open. But I know that there are some others, I know our friend Tracy Shepherd still plays Pokemon Go. Very cool. Shout out to people who are dedicated to things and don't just rise and fall with fads. That's what I say. But JC Go sounds good to me. I didn't do Pokemon Go. Sarah did Pokemon Go and like on the first week I had to drive her around to places, but I never really did it. And so I might get this one. I might do this one.

C: This is from Eurogamer, which is an actual video game news site So this is legit.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure it's not a goof, yeah. JC GO is a saintly version Pokemon Go devised by the Vatican, which tasks you with collecting famous religious figures to join your evangelization team. And they source an Italian newspaper here.

C: Okay, I have a lot of questions right at the start. Devised by the Vatican implies that Francis is coding.

B: Yeah.

C: Which I find hard to believe.

B: Or there's a team of Swiss guard guys sitting around and like...

C: Da Vinci's Coders!

B: Yeah, they're they're Swiss coders sitting around a LAN cafe.

C: The game is running on the Da Vinci Code!

B: They're in their big poofy yellow and blue pants and their helmets and they're just sitting there and they are typing like crazy getting that sweet code in there ready for you to hunt down Saint Isidore.

C: The other thing that got me about this article is, I actually think this is nice, it has microtransactions.

B: Yeah.

C: But, you get in-game money by donating to charity, which is actually pretty cool. That's a nice little thing.

B: Yeah, that extremely rules actually. Yeah.

C: Do you think Christopher's in there?

B: Man, you know he is. You know saying Christopher is in there.

C: Do you think Christopher is in there and appears as a 12-foot-tall werewolf?

B: I am skeptical about that element of it, I have to be honest.

C: I really hope, because all we see is... who is this?

B: Antipas. Yeah.

C: ...Antipas that we have a screenshot of here.

B: And then it's not in English, let's see here. This is in Spanish, which is weird. I would have guessed it was in it would be in Italian.

C: Well, I mean, Frances.

B: Well sure I guess.

C: If he's the one doing the code.

B: Then there's the blessed Jesus Emilio Paramarillo– Paramio, sorry. These are not what I would have considered like A-tier Bible characters and saints, but it's just a couple of sample screenshots here, in which it does it looks like Pokemon Go.

C: I wanna know if like when Saint Sebastian shows up, is he gonna be riddled with arrows?

B: That would be cool. Like i will they appear as they do in iconography? That would be well...

C: Let's talk about Lucy. Is Lucy gonna be carrying her own eyes?

B: Yeah.

C: How else would you know?

B: Got a couple of comments from some listeners, very good and faithful listeners. One relating to our Paul and Thecla episode regarding the idea that in Spanish speaking countries Tecla is venerated as saint of computers because of because the word Tecla is also the word for a keyboard key. Someone pointed out, not just someone, I should say, Twitter user @PonderStruck, cool name, pointed out that we have a similar situation in English speaking countries where, get ready for this Chris, Saint Aspren is invoked against headaches. So there is a Saint Aspren, A-S-P-R-E-N, who is a first century bishop of Naples, but because of a homophone of his name is invoked against headaches and migraines especially. So there's a there's the example I should have thought of when I was talking about a fictional Saint Keyboard. Doesn't exist.

Speaking of keyboards, our next comment comes from, mentioned previously, comes from Father Stephen Vrazel, who is a Priest in Mobile, Alabama. And like I know that this is wrong. I know this is incorrect, and I'm sure there are statistics that somebody is ready to toss out at me in response to this, but just completely going by my gut, right? Just going by my gut it feels like being a Catholic priest in Mobile, Alabama has got to be somewhat similar to being a snowmobile salesman in Tucson, Arizona, right? A little bit. I don't know. But maybe, maybe Father Stephen Vrazel brings 'em in because he also plays the keytar. We mentioned him because of that very cool fact. And in fact, you can find him on Twitter @KeytarCatholic. You should follow him. He's a cool guy. He commented, regarding the harrowing of hell, as we discussed last week in our Gospel of Nicodemus episode, that there is actually an ancient homily that is typically read on Holy Saturday, Huddle House Saturday, that is a dialogue, responsive reading maybe, between Adam and Jesus as Jesus comes in. And we will for sure post a link to that on our Tumblr so you can check it out, as well as another link he gave on the history of the composition of that. It is way older than I would have guessed based on reading it. So it's very cool, very interesting. So thank you, Father Stephen. Rock on.

Final comment. You guessed it. It wouldn't be a comment section without a note from our friend of the show, Ben Rowe. Speaking of whom, hopefully, it's October. hopefully you guys are listening to the Scream Scene podcast. Getting your spook'em knowledge on about historical scary movies. It's a good time to listen to that show. Good show. Very smart. Here's what Ben says. This was in regard to one of your question questions, Chris, from last week. And this is one of my favorite my favorite comments I get from Ben are the ones where he points out something that I definitely should have known. Those are always my favorite ones. This is one of those, falls into that category. Should have mentioned this. So he says, "early on in today's episode Chris expresses how weird it is that heaven existed in the religious belief before Jesus. He points out how Jacob saw it and everything, but that it apparently was sitting empty with no one in it, and that's strange. Maybe you guys hit on it later in the episode." Spoilers, we don't. "But I think it's important to remember that while we think of heaven as a place you go when you die, no one in a Hellenistic context would have thought that. Honestly, the big differentiator of Christianity compared to any other contemporary religion more than any other factor." Oh, "it's the big differentiator." "Heaven is where God lives. That's all it really is, and that's what it is in the Old Testament and in other beliefs of the time. Mount Olympus, Asgard, etc. The afterlife is basically the same in all these traditions, whether it's Hades or Hell or Sheol. It's just that grey, shadowy, waiting room, limbo realm. Only if you were the greatest of the great could you aspire to anything more, not necessarily a good person, but a doer of great deeds, a heroic person. Then you get to the Elysian Fields or Valhalla, but that's not for anyone who isn't a capital H hero. In Judaism, there's Enoch who's risen up to hang with God in heaven, and that's it. [Elijah.] But Christianity is the first major religion to come along and say the only criteria for getting into heaven, if you're following Paul and not James, is belief in Christ. So it's not weird that heaven was empty, because heaven was empty because heaven wasn't for us. That's the big selling point, because now it is." So thank you, Ben, for that very good comment that I absolutely should have thought of since we were especially looking at hell in a Hellenistic context anyway. So hopefully that answered your question.

C: I mean except that Enoch was there.

B: No, Enoch was in heaven. Enoch and Elijah were waiting for them in heaven when they got up there.

C: Yeah. So it wasn't just where God lives.

B: Right, well I mean it's...

C: Enoch was there.

B: Yeah, it was God and the angels and then like two dudes for a thousand years, two thousand years.

C: That's even weirder than if it was just God.

B: You're correct. Yeah, it's God and his two human friends.

C: It's God, his two bros, and then a bunch of flying four-headed monsters.

B: Yeah.

C: And dudes covered in eyes with six sets of wings.

B: Yes, and that feeling you're feeling? Hang on to that. The feeling of a regular dude who gets brought up into heaven and suddenly there's all those things around him. That's what that's what first Enoch is about. So just hang on. Hang on to that, because we'll get there. Maybe episode 50. That'll be our episode 50 extravaganza. We'll finally do First Enoch.

C: I've always said that if we ever get popular enough to do a live episode, then our live episode is gonna be Revelation.

B: Oh, that's yeah.

C: Because I feel like that's the best one to do in front of a crowd. We don't want to do like Psalms or Leviticus in front of people.

B: No. No, probably not. Don't want to lay out like here's all of these specific mosaic laws, everyone. Nah, probably not that.

C: But I'm kind of feeling like, yeah, we might need to do First Enoch for a special occasion, as much as I want to get there. Immediately.

B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This that we did today is a little bit, it's definitely more in the ballpark of what we did today than what we've done in the past.

C: That is a good segue.

B: Yeah, that is a good segue, because let's get into it, because that's that's it for, Comment Corner. Very very cool, helpful comments from listeners. We appreciate it. You can always hit us up. On Twitter is usually the best way. Ask us questions on our Tumblr as well. Using #Apocrypals on Twitter is the easiest way for us to find you if you can't find us and tag us directly. Yeah, let's talk about Testament of Solomon.

C: This is not canon.

B: No, no, it sure isn't. Not for anybody.

C: I feel like I know why. Usually I have to ask you like why something was not considered canon or not like included. I do think I know why this one wasn't.

B: Yeah, do you have a specific reason or is it just kind of a general sensation you have about it?

C: Well, I mean, even for me as a casual reader, it's very clearly, very clearly not of the time of Solomon.

B: True, yes.

C: That's that I think is probably thing one.

B: Yeah, that's a good, that's a very good instinct to follow up on.

C: The second, and I think probably more important, strike against it is that there's a dragon who does butt stuff.

B: Yeah, the butt stuff dragon is really something. You don't really that's not something you expect in a Pauline letter for example.

C: Yeah, we thought it was weird when there was like a pool, like a lake that could heal you. Cause an angel stirred it up.

B: Right.

C: That's like 18 degrees less weird than a dragon who shows up and goes, "I'm into butt stuff."

B: Yeah. Yes, there's quite a gap. There's quite a gap. Yeah, also just the general fact that this is a book of "how to do magic" is probably a good reason it's not in official Bible.

C: It's definitely a book about a man just chilling with demons. There's very little plot in this book. It's mainly just Solomon. It's an episode of Next MTV's next with demons.

B: Yeah. It's the official Marvel handbook to demons. It lets you know all their vital stats and history.

C: "What's up? My name is Ornias. I'm an Aquarius. I love sucking thumbs and strangling virgins. And also, don't fall asleep around me!"

B: Yeah.Wow. It is like Next when you put it in the back.

C: It's exactly like Next.

B: Wow. And he's like "Next! You go cut some go cut some bricks. I gotta see another demon."

C: Except for instead of saying "next," he glorifies God

B: Or he summons the angel to whom you are weak and has that angel carry you out by your ear.

C: He kinda does some Pokemon battling.

B: Like he's putting together his demonic Pokedex in this story, really.

C: Yeah, and there are some angels who are super effective against particular demons.

B: Exactly.

C: If you're a strangle demon Then you might be weak against Uriel.

B: Exactly. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about where this came from. The answer is nobody knows. And I'm gonna give you the vaguest sense of information about anything that could be known about this. So this book was written sometime between the first century and the fifth century CE. And that is about as much as people can narrow it down. There are arguments. Some say that it's probably from the early third century, but it incorporates elements from a first century document.

Some scholars argue that it might be contemporary with the Christian writer Lactantius, because the demonology bears some similarities to the famous Institutiones Divinae of Lactantius. Lactantius was a writer who lived around the same time as Constantine the Great and I believe he did some work with him as well. So maybe that would be around 300 CE. So maybe?

Early scholars really thought it was either super early or super late, and now people are thinking maybe somewhere in the middle, so probably early to late third century CE, maybe. The original document, probably written in Greek, except maybe not, possibly of some kind some Semitic origin. Especially for the segment that's the list of decans, which we'll get to what that means. So that might have an origin somewhere else outside of Greece, but could be that the whole thing is maybe from Galilee, or maybe it's Egypt, or maybe from Asia Minor. The work is either a Jewish composition with Christian interpolations, which will stand out like a sore thumb. Chris definitely, I know you notice those as well.

C: I mean, spoiler warning, there's a part where Solomon is talking about how one day Jesus is gonna show up and get crucified by "the Jews."

B: Yeah, it's not subtle the parts that are Christian. But it could also be a Christian work that incorporates Jewish material. So the author might be an ethnically Jewish Christian, might be Greek, might be Egyptian? It could be a composite work. It's definitely there are some patches, there are some inconsistencies in some places, but it definitely features elements of Jewish mysticism, Christian philosophy, Greek mythology pops up in a handful of places, Egyptian astrology is in there. Other stuff. Demon and angel names from who knows where. We've got all sorts of names in here that don't show up anywhere else. Yeah, who knows?

The only the only thing people are less certain of than when it was written was who wrote it. We know it definitely wasn't Solomon. It was definitely written well over a thousand years after actual Solomon. The work certainly suffered during the copying process. The scribes were a little bit asleep at the wheel here. The version we read on the esoteric archive has some notes in the margins and will occasionally mention when there are lacunae, lacuna is a gap in the text, and it'll let us know when there's like a part missing. And those gaps are sometimes just because literally the paper is missing from the manuscripts that we have.

So there's that, but there's also a large number of what's called a vox nihili, which literally means the "voice of nothing," but what that means is it's just a nonsense word. Like it look it doesn't mean anything. It's just it's gibberish. And there's a large number of those throughout here that are made note of where it's just like, "this is not a word." It's usually because the scribe wasn't paying attention or they couldn't read what they were copying or whatever. So there's a large number of nonsense words. There's a large number of places where I feel very certain Chris and I, as we're going through it, we're just gonna go I don't know what this means. Like I literally cannot parse what this sentence means. And so it's very strange in a lot of places aside from the fact that there are talking lions, and talking dogs and headless guys and that kind of stuff.

C: Aw, spoiled it. You spoiled it.

B: Sorry.

C: The return of talking dogs, everybody.

B: Return of talking dogs and talking lions and dragons. We got it all. This one's got everything.

C: It really does truly it can be said.

B: Yeah. The book is working within a long tradition of the idea of Solomon having the power to control demons. That stuff is mentioned as early as Josephus in his Antiquities, so that is legit first century. Roughly contemporary to this, we've got the Talmud. The Babylonian Talmud has the very famous story of Solomon and Ashmedai, which is Solomon and Asmodeus, which I really super wanted to cover today, but I know we're not gonna have time, so we're gonna have to do it on another episode, but it's a very similar story where Solomon commands Asmodeus to build the temple for him. It's an awesome story that we'll definitely cover another time.

C: And you remember Asmodeus, right, everybody?

B: Yeah. From Tobit. He'll show up again today too. Spoilers again.

C: He shows up and there's continuity.

B: There is continuity between this book and Tobit, which I appreciate. And then there's many, many later stories in the medieval Arab tradition. So Solomon as a ruler of demons or jinns is very popular in Arabic stories, including Tales of Sinbad and that kind of stuff. And of course this is one of the earliest works of demonology that is going to be copied in various grimoires and things throughout the Middle Ages and later, where you get catalogs of demons and their powers and what they do and how you invoke them and how you control them and that kind of stuff. And many of those are also tied to Solomon. The lesser key of Solomon probably being the most famous example of those. So this is part of a grand tradition. It's the beginning of that tradition, but it's pulling from other like different mystical and astrological traditions as well. So yeah, Let's get in it. Let's get into it.

C: I would love nothing more. So things get weird pretty quick.

B: Right. Out the gate.

C: We have our introduction that's like, "hey everybody, you know that temple in Jerusalem? Did you know it was built by demons?"

B: Yeah.

C: "Because it was."

B: It was. And again, that's a longstanding tradition that predates this book. And the question is, how did that come to be? Well, if you guessed it involved thumbsucking, you're right. And that's weird. Why did you guess that?

C: Here's why it had to be demons and not dudes. Because there were a bunch of dudes trying to build this temple, and just demons just kept messing with 'em. And one guy comes to Solomon. And he says, "Hey, I'm having a real hard time building this temple. Cause a demon shows up and takes half my food and half my money, and also then sucks my thumb." And Solomon does not, despite his legendary wisdom, go, "Hey, that just sounds like a weird dude."

B: Yeah.

C: That's not really demon stuff to like take money, like take half your paycheck and a sandwich.

B: Right, like it's definitely that's an insult to injury. That's a that's a dog in the manger kind of thing, right? Demons don't need money. So taking half of his money, that's just cruelty. That is how you know it's a demon. But Solomon knows it's a demon because there are physical effects on this worker. This is Solomon's favorite worker. He's the son of the master workman. And Solomon gives him double food and double wages of everyone else. He should be healthy and fat and happy. But the fact that he's wasting away every day, he knows that there's something supernatural going on. And yeah, it turns out it's because this demon, Ornias, is sucking his life force out through his thumb every night. He takes his money, takes his food, "he takes hold of my right hand and sucks my thumb, and lo, my soul is oppressed, and so my body waxes thinner every day."

C: I feel like the weirder thing is the thumb sucking.

B: Yes, I would say yes.

C: Yeah, this is like something the Yule lads would do.

B: It is, yeah. If you told me that there was a Yule lad called Thumbsucker, I'd be like, you know what? There's so many of those, I don't have them all memorized. Sure, maybe you're right. Thumbsucker, he comes on St. Thorlax Day and he just he sucks your life force out through your thumb. Sure. Could be.

C: Is there any like reason for this? Or is it just something weird that demons do?

B: I think it's just something weird that specifically this demon does. Like, This is not something I'm familiar with from another source.

C: Well, I mean look, we've talked about how feet aren't always feet.

B: Yeah. No...

C: Is this thumb a thumb? I guess.

B: I believe it is. I have I currently have no reason not to think so, but yeah, who man, who knows?

C: I mean I don't know why they would use a metaphor, cause they get pretty explicit about some demon activities later on.

B: Yeah, that's true. I mean I feel like maybe they wouldn't have self-censored in this instance cause they don't do that much later on. So yeah, anyway. Solomon goes to pray, he's like, "What do I do about this demon? How can I deliver?" And this is this whole thing, I should point out, is first person perspective of Solomon and every single time refers to himself as "I Solomon." "When I Solomon heard this."

C: Yeah, it's very much, "I'm Solomon, by the way. I'm not some dude in 300 CE. I'm definitely Solomon."

B: Yeah. So he goes to pray, and here we get the first mention of the name Lord Sabaoth, which Chris, you asked me about that. The name Sabaoth which is from the Hebrew word "Saba'ot" and it just means "of hosts." So if you've ever seen the Lord of hosts, because it usually goes along with either the word Yahweh or Elohim, one of the names of God. So it's usually Yahweh Saba'ot, right? So it's usually going to be Lord of Hosts. So this is his role as the commander of the angelic armies or whatever. You know, if you're going with the polytheistic Israelites, then this would be the war god aspect, right?

C: So this is this is the same root word as Sabbath, then?

B: No, it is not.

C: Okay. Okay.

B: Sorry. Yeah, this is a word that comes from a word that means army. Anyway, so St. Michael, the Archangel, Ccmes to him. He brings him a ring. This is the seal of Solomon, which is a very important element in the Solomon, the demon queller story tradition. Here, in this version, the Seal of Solomon is what they call a Pentalpha in this version of the text, which is that's a pentagram or a pentacle, sometimes it's called. Pentalpha is a cool name because it makes you realize that a five-pointed star is actually five capital A's stuck together.

C: Very true.

B: Yeah.

C: Very true.

B: So in this...

C: I hadn't ever thought of that before.

B: Yeah. So in this version, in this book, the Seal of Solomon is a pentagram. It's a five-pointed star. In later traditions, it becomes a hexagram, the six-pointed star, which we know today as the Star of David, which has its origins in the six-pointed star as a symbol for Solomon. I don't know why it gets called the Star of David instead of the Star of Solomon like it should, but whatever. Yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff about the history of the Star of David. It was not originally a purely Jewish symbol, and it was only when it started getting picked up as a symbol by Zionists in the 1800s, blah blah blah. We don't have time for that. But anyway, it should be called the Star of Solomon. David, uncool to take your son's thing. But anyway, here it's five-pointed.

And so it's a signet ring, right? So like the ring that you would use to place your royal seal on a thing by plunging it in wax and it's like a stamp that you wear on your hand and that's what it is here too except instead of imprinting into wax, Solomon is imprinting his godly power into demon flesh, and he does that throughout the entire book, sometimes by throwing the ring at people.

C: Sometimes he throws the ring at people. I assume that since it is a ring, whenever he is not specified as throwing it, he is just straight punching them.

B: Yeah, I imagine it's a lot like the Phantom, how the Phantom punches people with his skull ring and it leaves a skull imprint on their face. I think...

C: Oh so you're saying he slams evil.

B: Yeah, Solomon slams evil and it leaves the five pointed star on them and then they're in his control. And that's basically what happens. Yeah, he summons, well actually he gets the ring, once he gets it from Michael, the archangel, he gives it to the boy, the worker who was plagued by Ornias, and he says, "Go find the demon when he shows up to you, throw this ring at him, when it stamps onto his chest, tell him that Solomon wants to see him. And then come follow him, bring me back the ring, and we'll get this taken care of." And so he does it.

C: Pretty boss move, by the way.

B: Yeah. There's a number of boss moves in here on both sides. Both sides of the coin, human and demon, in my estimation. But yeah, so it works. Ornias comes to Solomon and Solomon's like "Who are you? What are you doing? Why are you here?" And so this sets up the pattern of things that we're going to learn about each of these demons. He asks them, "what's your sign?"

C: That's not a joke.

B: Yeah.

C: Literally, "What's your sign?" And Ornias is like, I'm an Aquarius.

B: He's an Aquarius. Yeah. Some of them are not going to be actual stars, some of them are gonna say the moon, some of them are gonna say specific parts of the moon, some are gonna say the planet Venus. It's gonna happen. And sometimes it'll be constellations, sometimes it'll say star but it means constellation. The word for star and constellation were often the same. It's usually it's usually talking about constellations when it asks what's your star. But yeah, he's an Aquarius, and we see we get a little bit of what he does. There is a lacuna here, there's a gap. "Those who were consumed with desire for the noble virgins upon earth, dot dot dot, these I strangle." That seems like a very important yada yada yada in the middle there.

C: I mean, I think you can get it from that. You got it.

B: Yeah.

C: If you do not follow the advice of Saint Benedict

B: Mm-hmm.

C: Or St. Thecla.

B: Yeah.

C: Or Paul, who was never horny.

B: Never.

C: Not once.

B: Not like Simon Magus. That's how you know he's not Simon Magus. Simon Magus was super horny, Paul not horny at all.

C: Horny: not even once.

B: Yeah.

C: That's what Paul says. Then Ornias is gonna show up and strangle you to death.

B: Yeah, more like Hornias. There it is, did it.

C: Which is kind of a trend among the demons.

B: Strangling?

C: There's a lot of strangling and there's a lot of don't be horny.

B: Yeah.

C: Like if you thought Thecla was pro-abstinence, was True Love Waits?

B: Yeah.

C: This book is True Love Waits or you are going to die. This book is straight up a Baptist Church Hellhouse.

B: Yeah. Oh man, it's very Hell House. Speaking of Halloween. Oh boy. Yeah.

C: We should go to one.

B: We should go. That should be a very special episode. We will live stream our reactions to a Hell House. All right. So yeah, he comes in different forms. Sometimes he's a beautiful woman, sometimes he's a lion.

C: Same, same.

B: Extremely same.

C: We all have different aspects of our personalities, you know?

B: Yeah, we do. We learn that he's the offspring of the archarchangel Uriel, and so that's true. We see the different demons have different origins. Some of them are the children of angels, and so implying a connection with like the Nephilim that we saw in Genesis, the giants and the offspring of humans and angels. Sometimes they're just children of angels. Sometimes they're children of other demons. Sometimes they have other stranger origins, like one that we're gonna get to pretty soon.

C: Yeah, there's definitely a couple in here that are like "I am the child of a human woman and an angel man."

B: Yeah, for sure.

C: And that again: wild.

B: Yeah.

C: So basically the Testament of Solomon is kind of like the world's first urban fantasy.

B: Kinda, yeah, a little bit. And so yeah, this really sets the pattern because then once he learned all these things, when he hears the name of the Archangel, he knows, "ah, this is how I can tame this demon." And so he seals him, i.e. he slams evil, and then he gets him to start cutting stones for the temple, and he's like, "Hey, I have this idea for indentured servitude, workforce, free labor, free labor." Then he says, wait a second, "Let's get some more demons. Bring me the king of the demons." Oh, actually, hold on. I'm skipping. I'm skipping the appearance of Uriel.

C: You're skipping a little bit because before that we get Onoskelis.

B: Well, I want to talk about these whales for a second, because I don't know what is going on. So...

C: Okay, there's a lot of Not knowing what's going on in this, but do talk about the whales.

B: Yeah, so he prays to Uriel. He says, Uriel, come help me. Uriel comes, and when he comes, Uriel summons whales. Or possibly sea monsters, right? It could be Behemoth and Leviathan coming up. Because the word for whale and the word for sea monster is the same. And I don't know what this means. "He cast his destiny upon the ground, and that destiny made subject to him the great demon." So this version that we're reading, we're reading the public domain 1890s translation of this. However, the version on the esoteric archives has footnotes that include snippets of a 1980s translation that you would think would make things a lot clearer, but the alternative translation of this bit is "He withered up their species and cast his fate to the ground," which does not clarify what happens with the whales to me. Anyway, Uriel commands Ornias to cut the stones. Great. But then he sends Ornias to go get the prince of all the demons. So Ornias takes the finger ring and he goes to get Beelzeboul, which is just, you know, a variant of Beelzebub or possibly the original name. It's hard to say, right? Beelzebub we know related to the name Baal, meaning Lord, and so Beelzebub's Lord of the Flies, which might be a goof on the name Beelzeboul, which might mean Lord of the Heavenly Realms. Who knows?

But anyway, Beelzeboul is here. He's the Prince of the Demons. Hhe definitely seems to be conflated with Satan in this work. Because Satan is not otherwise mentioned. But Beelzebub is the key guy. And yeah, Beelzeboul comes to him because Solomon called him and he says, "hey, bring me some other demons. Also are their girl demons."

C: Yeah, yeah. Solomon specifically goes, "Are there girl demons? And can you describe like what they look like very slowly?"

B: Yeah. And so...

C: I need to cast my destiny on the ground real quick.

B: I see what you did. And so, yeah, Beelzeboul goes off at high speed, and he brought to him Onoskelis, who had "a very pretty shape and the skin of a fair-hued woman." That's not really what it says. "She had a fair complexion, but her legs were those of a mule. The name Onoskelis means donkey legs."

C: But I mean Solomon's into it. Like don't act like Solomon's not into it, because he very clearly is.

B: He is. He's very interested in this. And so we get our first explicitly non-human looking demon here with Onoskelis who's got donkey legs, which, just a quick side note. So from ancient Greek I have like three favorite words that I really like. And like one of them is "asideros," which means "not made of iron." Because I find it very funny that they had to have a word to describe things that are not made of iron. That's one of my favorite.

C: It does seem very specific.

B: Yeah. Or actually very nonspecific, because it's literally anything that's not iron. So I like that one. I also like the word "pankakes," which is the specific form of a word that means completely evil. But I like it because one time my college roommate went to IHOP and embarrassed himself by ordering a short stack of pankakes. And so when I saw that Greek word later, I was like "It's pancakes."

C: That's weird because pancakes are the opposite of evil.

B: Exactly.

C: As we as we know from Hellboy.

B: We do know that. You eat those pancakes, you'll never end up in pandemonium. Pancakes, they're more like pankales, they're all good. But then my third favorite word from Ancient Greek is "hemionos," and so "onos," we see here, is the Greek word for donkey. And you can probably..."heme" is like hemi, like hemisphere, right? It means half. And so the Greek word for mule is hemionos. It literally means half-ass. And that is one of my top three favorite Greek words, because that makes me laugh. So anyway, that was just my Benito's Greek Corner for you.

C: So do we want to talk about what Onoskelis is into? Because she's very specific.

B: Yeah, she likes men, but she's got a type.

C: She has a type.

B: Yeah.

C: She... and again, this is not us goofing. This is specifically and explicitly in the text that we are talking about.

B: Yeah.

C: She likes black dudes.

B: She does. Or possibly guys with honey-colored skin, which could still just could be fairer skinned black dudes.

C: The translation that we have is dark-skinned.

B: Yeah, "above all with those of a dark skin, I consort with men in the semblance of a woman." Yeah.

C: And she also likes caves.

B: She lives in a golden cave.

C: Ravines. Strangling.

B: Strangling men with a noose. Something about worms that doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

C: I do like the verbiage here, which is when she talks about strangling men, "I sever them utterly by many calamities and I waste away the beauty of virgin women and estrange their hearts." Which is pretty good. That's good language.

B: It's some good. So here's a bit I wanted to call attention to here. So Solomon questioned her, "I Solomon, questioned her about her birth, and she replied 'I was born of a voice untimely, the so-called echo of a man's ordure dropped in a wood.'" Now, Chris, you're a really smart guy, and you're an exceptional writer. You know all the best words.

C: I do.

b: Do you know what ordure means? Is this one you have encountered in your day-to-day?

C: I have encountered it before.

B: Yeah.

C: But in a place I'm not proud of.

B: Oh, okay.

C: Which is that I used to review the Anita Blake comics.

B: Oh wow.

C: ...commonly on my website at the time.

B: Yeah.

C: And so I know that one of the things that happens later in the series, because I was told about it, is that Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter...

B: Yeah.

C: ...later gets like sexy powers. Like she can really turn you into a non-Paul, if you know what I mean.

B: Sure. Yeah.

C: And that is referred to as the ordure.

B: That's weird because the word ordure means a poop.

C: Oh no wait, wait, wait, wait sorry I got that confused. I got that completely... I'm gonna cut that all out. I'm gonna cut that all out, because I did get that confused. If somebody was like... it's like, it's like. I remember what it was now. This is just for you.

B: Okay.

C: Somebody was like, "Whatever the word is, more like 'ordure'."

B: Ah, I see.

C: It's something like it.

B: I see. I gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, so an ordure is a poop.

C: Yeah, I've only seen that in fantasy novels.

B: Yeah.

C: That's a very fantasy novel word.

B: It is. It is. It's also an 1890s "doing my best to bowdlerize for my Victorian era audience translation." Including, like we see later, the part where he leaves the sexy part in Latin, which is my favorite move. So this particular demon was born when a man did a boom boom and it made an echo in the woods, and then there's suddenly a there's a donkey leg demon from that.

C: This is not the last time that someone will be born of butt-noises.

B: That's true. You are not wrong.

C: It's kind of a recurring theme.

B: Yeah, it is.

C: In this completely bonkers book.

B: Yep. Anyway, Onoskelis? Her star is the moon. That's a star. Why not?

C: Yeah, why not?

B: And then and the angel that frustrates her is named Joel.

C: Yeah, Onoskelis is a real uptown girl.

B: Onoskelis is a real uptown girl.

C: She's been living in her uptown world.

B: And now she's spinning hemp for ropes. Next demon. Hey, we know this one. Asmodeus, Asmodeus, Asmodeus, Asmodeus, Asmodeus, Asmodeus, Asmodeus, Asmodeus, oh oh, Asmodeus.

Both: Rock me Asmodeus!

B: Yeah.

C: Our returning demon champion.

B: Yeah.

C: Who's like, yo, what's up? I'm Asmodeus. Really like strangling dudes on their wedding nights. So that more virgins will waste away.

B: Yep.

C: Lots of concern about virgins wasting away in this book.

B: Yeah, these widow virgins who have no recourse but to just pine until they are nothing but a voice. Redounding on the wind.

C: Redounding?

B: Redounding, yeah. It's bouncing back, echoing.

C: Okay, that's also not a word that I know.

B: Yeah.

C: Sounds like maybe a word you made up.

B: I didn't. It's related to the word redundant. Anyway, so yeah, we get Asmodeus and yeah, we got some continuity here with Tobit because he definitely talks about showing up, killing dudes on their wedding night, plots "against the newly wedded, so that they may not know one another. And I sever them utterly by many calamities,"

C: That's not the only bit of continuity with Tobit, either.

B: No, it sure isn't.

C: There's like a Roy Thomas footnote in this.

B: Yeah.

C: Asmodeus goes, "oh, but I don't like fish."

B: Yeah, well also he specifically mentions Raphael, who is our boy from Tobit. What angel are you frustrated by? "By Raphael, the archangel that stands before the throne of God. But the liver and gall of a fish put me to flight when smoked over ashes of the tamarisk." And he's like, "Hey man, what fish is that?" It's called Glanos, and that is a catfish. And this is good to know because Chris, you know this. Listeners may not know this. I'm getting married. In fact, I'm getting married on Friday. I will be married by the time this episode comes out. I might be dead by Asmodeus, possibly.

C: I hope not.

B: I hope not too because look, between you and me and the Theophiloi, I retrieved my True Love Waits card from the stack in the Georgia Dome. It's time to rip it up, man. It's been long enough. It's time to go, and I don't want to be strangled to death by Asmodeus. So I'm very glad to learn that the solution is cooking up some catfish. Because your boy loves catfish.

C: Yeah, I mean it's delicious.

B: Catfish is very good. I enjoy it a great deal. And especially since I don't eat red meat anymore. I can no longer eat of the beasts of the field. I can only eat the fowl of the air and the fish of the sea. It's very important that I eat catfish because I can't have ribs, you know? So it's all chicken wings and catfish for your boy. So good to know. Anyway, Asmodeus, you've heard of him.

C: Yeah, you know him.

B: He lives in the Big Dipper, by the way.

C: Yeah, so when you're looking up at the stars at night, trying to find your way, that's Asmodeus that you are looking up at. Also, this is where things start to get mega-Lovecraftian, where like all these demons are like straight up, "I am from space."

B: Yeah. Of course, you know, you have to understand that like the cosmology of the time would be that space is basically like there's a big black globe around us and these stars are stuck on them like a Lite-Brite or something.

C: Oh, I know, but still.

B: No, I know, I know you know, but yeah, straight up, they're from space. There's some space Flight going on. He talks to demons about like, "Hey man, what are you doing?" It's like, "Oh yeah, I just fly around space until I get tired and fall to the earth." That's where shooting stars come from. Anyway, let's not spoil this book as we keep doing.

C: Yeah, so who do we have next?

B: Well we get Beelzeboul. He gets his actual interview here.

C: And by the way, all these demons, when they show up? They get different jobs building the temple that do not seem to fit their skill sets.

B: Well, yeah, I think Solomon is specifically assigning them jobs that they do not like in order to weaken their powers, right?

C: That is capitalism.

B: Yeah, yeah it is. He does not want the worker to rise up and seize the means of production and so he does specifically put them in irons which makes them weak. One says please don't put me in water and he's like why don't you go? make some clay by stomping around in water. Yeah, he specifically in the case of Asmodeus, he leaves the fish that hurts him smoking nearby because Asmodeus is so strong, and so he was able to frustrate his unbearable malice in this way.

But yeah, then Beelzeboul comes back, and this is where we can see him strongly identified with Satan and here we can see this is again very non-canonical but hugely believed by everyone, even today, story about Satan being that he was the first angel in the first heaven, but now he's fallen, now he's the demon. He's the Lord of the demons, right? The idea that Satan was originally the most beloved of the angels: bompletely non-canonical, but we can see it goes back at least this far. That probably deserves a Satan watch drop, but we're not gonna do that because it's all Satan. It's all Satan all the time.

C: Yeah, there's a lot of Satan in this book.

B: And he also mentions his son, and I love this, I love this, I love this so much. He goes, I too have a child and he haunts the Red Sea, and on any suitable occasion he comes up to me again, being subject to me, and reveals to me what he has done, and I support him. That is a good dad. Good job, Beelzeboul. That is A+ parenting.

C: I mean, look. I'm not picking sides here and I'm not telling people what and who they should worship. That is for each individual to decide. I will say that of the dads we've discussed in our journey through Bible, one of them is very supportive of his son who is the Red Sea.

B: Mm-hmm.

C: And the other one sent his son to die a horrible death on the cross.

B: Yeah, he might have specifically explicitly forsaken his son, perhaps.

C: Yeah, but I mean as we know that was a good thing.

B: It was the good kind of forsaking. But I love this line because Solomon says, "Beelzeboul, what is thy employment?" And he says, he looks him dead in the eye and says, "I destroy kings," which is an incredibly dope flex. That is very good. It could also mean "I destroy people by means of tyrants." It could mean that, but eh. "I destroy kings," the dopest possible thing to say to Solomon straight into his face. And "I ally myself with foreign tyrants," which that's a weird thing to say because foreign relative to whom? You know? Like what does that mean?

C: Well I mean I was about to say relative to Solomon, but I mean probably not in the third century.

B: Yeah. Yeah, who knows? But yeah, wicked sins, evil heresies, lawless deeds. And he says, "Bring me your child who's in the Red Sea." And he goes, "No, I'm not gonna do that. And I'm not gonna tell you his name." He comes up later. But hey, here's another demon. Here comes Ephippas. Ephippas.

C: I believe Baelzebub also says at this point, cause I wrote this down: There's not four demons, but there's like four fallen angels, and that's it.

B: Yeah.

C: If you thought all the demons are fallen angels, nope, just four of them.

B: Yeah.

C: The rest of them are like angel and human babies.

B: Or who knows? What they might come they might come from a poop echo. So like...

C: Could be.

B: Yeah.

C: Could be.

B: Yeah, it's just like "Now tell me about this son from the sea." And he's like, "No, no, I'm not gonna do that. I'm not gonna do it. He'll come to thee by any command and we'll tell you openly." It's like, okay. We'll deal with that later. We'll deal with that.

So here's an interesting thing, because this is something that comes up that's going to come up a lot throughout this book. He so he says, "Tell me what by what angel thou art frustrated," and he says, "By the holy and precious name of the Almighty God, and I'm not going to be able to do it. Called by the Hebrews by a row of numbers, of which the sum is six forty-four, and among the Greeks it is Emmanuel."

C: I definitely had some questions.

B: Right, so that's actually backwards because Emmanuel is the Hebrew name, but if you spell Emmanuel in Greek... so okay, so here's the thing you need to know. In ancient Greece, numerals, well depending on the time and depending on the place, but generally speaking The numerals were the different letters of the alphabet. Not quite like Roman numerals, although there was a system that was much more similar to Roman numerals. But rather the standard ancient Greek alphabet is 24 letters long, but there are a couple of archaic letters: digamma, koppa, so on. If you add them in it gets you 27 letters and then the first nine letters in order are used for the units, the one place, one the numbers one through nine. And then you use the next nine digits to represent 10, 20, 30, 40, and so on. And then the last nine digits are 100, 200, 300, 400, etc. And so, if you, in the Greek alphabet, spell out the name Emmanuel, the way it's spelled in Greek which would be Amannewel, which has an Omicron in there, an O in there, and you put the numeric values of each of those letters and add them up, you get 644. And so the number 644 recurs throughout this work as a holy number that will repel demons. This is actually very similar to the method by which the number of the beast, 666, is arrived at. That one involves a more of a mishmash of Hebrew numerology, but it has to do with spelling. If you spell out the name Nero Caesar, and then you add up those letters, you get 666, but we'll talk about that in our Revelation episode whenever we happen to do that. But in this case, if you spell out Emmanuel, add up the numeric values of the letters, it adds up to 644. I promise it works. If this is not a Christian document, this part is certainly a Christian interpolation. Because the name Emmanuel, although it originates in Isaiah, is definitely a name used for Jesus. And so that would...

C: You might have heard of it at Christmas time.

B: You might have heard of him, yeah. Beelzeboul is sent off to cut some marble and he says, "Hey man, tell me a cool thing about what it's like in space." And Beelzeboul says, "If you burn gum and incense, bulb of the sea, and nard," here's nard again, "and saffron, light seven lamps in an earthquake", which is weird, might also mean just seven lamps in a row, "thou wilt firmly fix thy house." And if you're pure, if you're richly pure, light them at the dawn in the sun, you can see the dragons that pull the chariot of the sun. Did you know that's why the sun moves? Because there are dragons. That pull the sun.

C: Yeah, but I mean those aren't the dragons we're concerned with. He shows up later.

B: Yeah, there are there are plenty of other dragons.

C: So I believe it's at this point that we get the seven deadly enemies of man?

B: There's another one in between there who it's... who cares? Like there's another quick one who's a spirit of ashes, he burns fields and houses. Anyway, but yeah, let's get to the seven sisters here.

C: "And I glorify God afresh," that's how every part of this starts, "who gave me this authority and ordered another demon to come before me and there came seven spirits, females, bound and woven together, fair in appearance and comely." Solomon, very into these demon ladies. It's like Coop's drawing 'em, I think.

B: Yeah.

C: Like Solomon's the original Coop.

B: Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

C: "And I, Solomon, seeing them, questioned them and said, 'Who are ye?' But they, with one accord, said with one voice, 'We are of the thirty-three elements of the cosmic ruler of the darkness.'"

B: Right, which is weird. This is an inconsistency because the elements of the cosmic ruler we get later, there's thirty-six of them and they don't include these seven.

C: Oh don't worry.

B: Yeah.

C: We'll get to them.

B: Yeah, we will. So I'm just saying my point is this is evidence that maybe this is a bit of a patchwork because this is a for real inconsistency in the text.

C: Benito, would you like to know who these seven sisters are?

B: I would. Please tell me.

C: "And the first said, 'I am Deception.' The second said, 'I am Strife.' The third, 'I am Klothod, which is battle.' The fourth, 'I am Jealousy.' The fifth, 'I am Power,' the sixth, 'I am Error,' the seventh, 'I am worst of all, and our stars are in heaven, seven stars humble in sheen and all together, and we are called as it were goddesses. We change our place all and together, and together we live, sometimes in Lydia, sometimes in Olympus, sometimes in a great mountain.' That is dope.

B: It's very dope.

C: That is the coolest thing.

B: I love that you get to them all and they're like, oh, these are bad things. And the last one doesn't even say her name. She's just like, I'm the worst of them all.

C: Yeah, super good. Now, a thing that stuck out to me about this. Do you know about "I am Error"?

B: "I am Error"?

C: Yes.

B: Via the Richard Matheson book about clumsy vampires? No.

C: "I am Error" is a very famous piece of dialogue from Zelda 2.

B: Oh.

C: It was thought to be a mistranslation, like a famous mistranslation. But it's actually completely on purpose because it's a joke among the programmers because there's one guy named Error and one guy named Bug.

B: Ah, right. Okay, okay.

C: And so, if you go to this village in Zelda 2 and you just talk to this dude, all he says is, "I am Error."

B: Nice.

C: And so there's a book about like translations and stuff that's called "I Am Error," named for this character. The thing is, I don't, as far as I know, we might be the first people to connect that to the Testament of Solomon.

B: Yeah.

C: Where one of the seven deadly enemies of man shows up and says that herself. So if you were wondering if Zelda 2, the Adventure of Link for the Nintendo Entertainment System was in fact a satanic document, it is.

B: Yeah. Hey guys, that's the show. It's Zelda 2 plus a piece of Jewish pseudepigrapha from the 3rd century CE. Tying them together. Tell your friends. Apocrypals. TM. TM. Yeah.

C: Later they all kind of get like that's their kind of intro verse.

B: Right.

C: And then they start in on the posse cut.

B: Yes.

C: And they all sort of explain who they are. And my favorite bit of this is when Strife shows up and she goes, "I am Strife, strife of strifes."

B: Yeah. Come on. Very good.

C: You know, I think that we should meet her man-to-man and quite literally face-to-face.

B: Oh yeah. Yes.

C: Deep cut cable reference, everybody.

B: There it is. And yeah, they mention all sorts of angels here that do not exist anywhere else except in like documents that copy from this. You know, other works inspired by this. And maybe, maybe some of these appear in like Enoch or something. But we get angel names like Baruchiachel, Lamechalal, Marmarath, Balthial, and so on. And then here we actually get Asteraoth, which Astaroth is usually a demon name. He's Hellboy's uncle.

C: Yep, and also the final boss of Ghouls and Ghosts.

B: Yeah. Yes.

C: If you want to get another NES reference there.

B: Yeah. Speaking of Hellboy, I always forget to mention this. Hellboy encounters Asmodeus in probably my favorite single issue of Hellboy, Hellboy: the Bride of Hell. And it includes some stuff similar to thi, but it's more based on that story of Solomon and Ashmedai which has Solomon taming Asmodeus to build the temple and includes the twist where Asmodeus gets a hold of the ring and that kind of stuff. We'll cover that story in a later episode, but if you want to see a story that's based on lore very similar to what we're reading right now, Hellboy and the Bride of Hell is a very cool one that features Asmodeus as a spooky lion guy.

C: I feel like there's a lot of Hellboy content in this episode, like pancakes, Asmodeus.

B: It's appropriate. Also, Hellboy's the best. You guys should be reading Hellboy if you're not.

C: Yeah, I mean it's quite a good comic book.

B: It's very good. We get a reference to canonical Bible here. Error says, "I'll make you make mistakes like you did before when you killed your brother." And that's from First Kings chapter 2, that's a real thing. Solomon executed his brother in order to ascend to the throne. So ouch. And some stuff about necromancy here. And then we get a bit of foreshadowing.

C: That's how wild this book is, is that we can just go, "yeah, there's some stuff about necromancy."

B: Yeah, there's some necromancy stuff. A little bit of foreshadowing about locusts here. We'll see, Solomon makes some locust-based mistakes later on. Yeah, so we got we got those seven sisters, which by the way, the reference is to the Pleiades, right? So much of this is astrological. So when you hear Seven Sisters, your thought should be the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters. And then we get a series of pretty wild ones here. We get Envy, who is a dude without a head, and he is a Fletcher Hanks nightmare.

C: Yes, yes, that is, I mean, of course I also thought this, but this is straight up the dude who shows up in Stardust.

B: Yeah, it is. He has no head, but he's envious of people who have heads, and so he'll eat your head through his neck stump. He'll take your head and then eat it through his neck stump.

C: And there is a great moment here where Solomon goes "Hey, how can you talk though?" Like that's what he has a problem with. All of the stuff you've seen, he doesn't know how this demon who has no head can talk.

B: Yeah.

C: That is what needs to be explained in this document.

B: "I'm all voice. I'm all voice, baby. I've inherited the voices of many men. I steal their voices when I eat their heads through my shoulders." And he makes people mute, including children. When people are mute, it's because this guy smashed their heads when they were children. How'd he find them? He followed the sound of their voice, because he doesn't have a head to see. He travels by his other senses. He says here "by my feelings," which is very funny, but like he uses his other senses to move about and he can follow the sound of your voice and he'll make you mute. "I grasp in all instant a man's head, and with my hands, like a sword, I cut it off, and I put it on myself. And in this way, by means of the fire which is in me, through my neck it is swallowed up. "It is I that sends grave mutilations and incurable on men's feet and inflicts sores." Yeah, there's a weird pun here about crossroads and s blisters on your feet. Because the crossroad is enodia, which is the thing that literally means like in the road, but that's also the word also means blister. So I don't know. There's some puns here, and then yeah, well tell me about this fire. What's this demon fire? And the demon fire comes from the day star, that's really Venus. That's the morning star, which is also the evening star, right? The morning star and the evening star are both Venus. And so he talks about a fire demon that people call Elburion, but that's not his real name, but he's worshipped like a god. And he gets power that way. But he can't tell him his real name. I don't know, strange, another demon comes then. Looks like a giant dog.

C: Yeah, and Solomon's like, "huh. A dog." And the dog goes, "that's right!"

B: Yeah.

C: And Solomon's like, "what? A talking dog?" And yes, that's right, everybody. We are back with a talking dog. Our second talking dog. But this is this is like Destructo. He's a bad talking dog.

B: Yeah, this is not Heavy the Heaven Hound. This is definitely a bad one. His name is Staff. His name is Staff or Rot.

C: Bad name. I think we should call him Dem-o.

B: Dem-o, yeah.

C: Or Hell-o!

B: Hell-o, yeah. Hell-o the Hellhound. Yeah, and he sees his frenzied men by the larynx and just it's more strangling. It's all strangling all the time.

C: I was thinking about that and then I realized that like you know, it's old times. They hadn't really invented a bunch of different ways to kill people.

B: Yeah. Now it's like I shoot people. Well, okay.

C: Yeah. Like I mean that's the demon Garth Ennis came up with. Multiple times.

B: Yeah. Or I electrocute them with car batteries. Okay, well

C: Yeah. And like you could stab somebody back in old times. But like that means that you know the action figure has to come with an accessory and you don't want to get into like okay well how come none of these demons stabbed Solomon with their swords?

B: Yeah.

C: Because I feel like a sword could beat a ring. Don't need to worry about that if all they do is strangle. Ring beats hands.

B: It's like a production code era horror movie where all the monsters strangle people. The Wolf Man strangles people, the Mummy strangles people, because they can't do anything else. Anyway, the giant dog shows Solomon where some emeralds are that he could build the temple out of. Yeah, we got the headless demon, the hound, it was so huge. There's so many, I feel like maybe we need to kind of give the reader's digest version of some of these.

C: Well there's a phrase of... he shuts one demon up in a skin bottle?

B: Yeah, that comes...

C: ...which is a completely bonkers phrase.

B: That's near the end. We'll get to that. Let's look at this dragon...

C: Yeah, this is in verse sixty-one. I wish it had been eight verses later.

B: Yeah, in that good-good number. A little bit before that I should say there is a female demon who is basically a Medusa head. She's a flying head with disheveled hair, and she does what Lilith does. She strangles babies.

C: Yeah, basically everything you've seen in Castlevania comes from this.

B: Yeah, more or less. But yeah, let's look at this dragon. So he doesn't get a name. He's called the winged dragon. The Greek word is pterodrakun.

C: Pterodrakun. Which is... rad. I almost swore.

B: Yeah.

C: It's very cool. The pterodrakun, like pteradactyl.

B: Yeah. And what we learn about him is that he chambers not with many women, but only a few that are of fair shape, which possess the name of xuli. What does that mean? I don't know. There's an alternative translation that maybe it means touxylou, or maybe it means from the woods, or from wood, actually. Xylou would be wood. Completely unclear. Anyway, he chambers with some women. "And I pair with them in the guise of a spirit winged in form, coitum habens per nates." Just, you guys, we all know what that means.

C: I was already excited when the dragon showed up and was like, "yeah, I just like, I just basically get the hottest ladies around."

B: Yeah.

C: That was good. Then when I looked over at the footnote to find out why he was speaking Latin.

B: Yeah. Maybe coi-tum, you guys can hear that and you can figure out, coitus, what that is.

C: Butt stuff.

B: Maybe in this case, yeah, nates is a word for your butt cheeks.

C: For the butt, yeah.

B: It is specifically the cheeks in case you're wondering. It's the... and yeah, so here we go. This is the butt-stuff dragon.

C: I love the idea of some dude in the 1800s reading this and just turning beet red and then being like, "well, I can't not put it in there."

B: Yeah, I can't leave it out, but you if you put it in Latin, that's how you are a little bit more modest about it. I mean that's the strategy. "She on whom I have leapt goes heavy with child, and that which is born of her becomes eros." Which is a little bit strange and a little bit confusing, but she had a baby that either is Eros, I don't know if he's actually supposed to be like the Greek Eros, this is where Cupid comes from, or if it's a just a demon who's also named Eros, who has very similar powers and abilities, because he shows up at the end. Eros comes back up at the very end to haunt Solomon. "But since such offspring cannot be carried by men, the woman in question breaks wind." Yeah, so she had fart baby.

C: Uh-huh.

B: From the butt stuff.

C: From the butt stuff.

B: Yeah. Yeah, I think if I had to guess probably that line could probably also mean that she died, but this translation is straight up, yeah, she breaks wind. So yeah, it's our butt stuff dragon. What else do we have here?

C: Yeah, I wasn't I wasn't kidding.

B: Yeah.

C: I don't make things up when we talk about Bible.

B: No, there's no goofs. Zero percent goofs on this show.

C: There is no need.

B: No, yeah.

C: No need for goofs.

B: We can just play it straight and the material will carry it. Let's see, then we get Enêpsigos, who is another female demon who's got multiple forms, including changing into the Greek god Kronos. That's weird.

C: That's weird.

B: Yeah. Let's see. Who else do we have that we want to talk about here?

C: Well, when we get to verse 72, we get some dudes who show up.

B: We get the 36 decans here.

C: Yeah, that's right. And they say, with one voice, "We are the 36 elements, world rulers of this darkness."

[Music: "Bring da Ruckus" by Wu-Tang Clan]

C: That was basically the only 10 seconds of 36 Chambers I can play on the show.

B: Nice. Really good.

C: It's the Wu-Tang demons?

B: There's 36. 36, and they're the decans, and what decans are, they are the constellations that appear on the horizon. And they're called decans because there's a new one every ten days. And you if you do that math, 36 times 10 gets you 360, which is approximately a year. And so that's the idea. This is the bit that is thought to be Egyptian in origin, because there's definitely some Egyptian astrology going on here with these. We definitely do not have time to go through these 36 demons. But each one causes like a different illness, and you usually can drive them off with a name that you either say or you write down and then affix the piece of paper to you. One of 'em, the coolest one, you write his name on a stack of fig leaves and then you stack them up and you and then you spell his name backwards by taking a leaf. away and then he'll go away.

C: Then he goes back to the fifth dimension.

B: Yeah, exactly. It's a very it's a very Myxzptlk kind of situation.

C: Yeah, all 36 get names.

B: They do.

C: All 36 get like file cards. Like full-on G.I. Joe file cards with their specialty and their weakness.

B: Yeah, and then each one...

C: I love it.

B: Yeah, it's very good. Some of them cause malaria. That's a weird thing. They call it the tertian or the hemitertian fever, that's malaria, if you see that come up. Yeah, each one causes a different illness and things. The 36 decades, that's a large portion. There's like 130 sections or verses, I guess we're calling them, but they're 130 sections, and that takes up a lot. The 36 guys get up to get us up to like 106.

C: And there's I mean, and you've heard of some of them, I'm sure. There's the RZA. Yeah. GZA.

B: The Ghostface Killer.

C: Inspectah Deck. He's like the head. They form like Voltron and he's the head.

B: Big Baby Jesus. Yeah.

C: Dirt McGirt.

B: Dirt McGirt.

C: Johnny Blaze.

B: Tony Starks. Then, after that, we get a queen from the south who is a witch, and she comes to be impressed by Solomon's great wisdom and his mastery over the demons. And what happens is we get this segment where there's a father and a son and they're mad at each other, but then Ornias starts laughing and Solomon's like, "why are you laughing?" He says, "It's because I've seen the future and I know that son is gonna die and this dad is going to feel bad about being so mad at his son." And that turns out to be true. And he says, "How do you know this?" And he says, "We demons, we fly up into the firmament." So the firmament, again, would be the inside of the giant dome that surrounds the earth on which the stars are affixed, right? "We fly up in the firmament, fly among the stars, we hear what the angels and God are saying, and we fly around and listen to all these things. And either we make something bad happen to people or we transform ourselves in such a way to appear to them and be worshipped." And he says, "What we do is we basically go up there, but there's nowhere to rest, so we fly around until we get tired, then we fall down like lightning, and this is where falling stars come from, because real stars don't fall, because they're affixed to the heavens, just like the sun and the moon are." Obviously. That's science. And then the son does die, just like Ornias predicted, and so the queen from the south is amazed.

Then we get this next section where the king of the Arabians writes a letter to Solomon and says, "Hey man, please help me out. We have this killer wind. Please do something about it." And so this is where we get the demon in the bottle.

C: Come, come, come on in, let me out.

B: Yeah, demon in the bottle. Tony Stark is there speaking of Tony Starks. He sends a young man out with a wineskin or a flask here, and he tells him, "Go out, look for this wind demon, and when you see him, hold the ring up to the mouth of the flask, and the demon will fly in to the flask, and you'll know he's in there because it will inflate like a balloon. And then seal it with the ring and bring him back."

C: This book's like the origin of every fetish.

B: Yeah, there is an inflation thing going on here, huh?

C: Yeah, and like the half donkey lady?

B: Yeah.

C: It's a lot, I guess is what I'm saying.

B: Strangling while thinking about noble virgins... Anyway, so the young man brings the flask full of wind demon back, and we find out that the wind demon is Ephippas, who Beelzeboul mentioned way earlier in the text. And here we see who can tame Ephippas? "The only ruling God, he that is born of a virgin, crucified by the Jews on a cross, whom the angels and archangels worship, he doth frustrate me, and feebles my great strength, which has been given to me by my father, the devil."

And we learned that Ephippas is very strong. He can move mountains, he can do whatever. And what problem Solomon is having is that he can't place the cornerstone on the temple. Like the temple's very nearly done, but there's a huge cornerstone that he wants to be the final piece, but it's too heavy for his men to lift. And so he tells Ephippas, the wind demon, "Hey man, if you can move mountains, why don't you put this stone in?" And he goes, "I will do that, and also, tell you what, if you summon my friend at the bottom of the Red Sea, we've got something else we can do for you." And he goes, "Okay." And so he does not let Ephippas out of the wineskin, which is the amusing imagery to me, that there is this flask dancing around and described as like the bottom of the flask basically being like little legs carrying him around and then I thought he was gonna open it, right, and that the wind was gonna come out and the wind was gonna put the stone in place, you know what I mean? But instead you get a little bottle picking up this enormous stone and carrying it, walking on its little legs like a broom from the Sorcerer's Apprentice. And he puts the cornerstone in place.

And then we finally solve the mystery of who's at the bottom of the Red Sea. Because he goes down there and we find out that he's a demon called Abezithibod. And he was a descendant of the archangel, which, I mean, Beelzeboul said he's his son, but I guess if Beelzeboul was an archangel, I don't know. But what we learn about him is he was the one who hardened Pharaoh's heart against Moses, although the Bible, canon Bible, specifically says that it was God who did that. But here we see that Abezithibod is the one who... Every time I say it, I think of that episode of Brooklyn 99 where they talk about Ahmadinejad and they call him call him Armin Jibijab. I keep thinking that every time I think of Abezithibod. And he was the one that gave Iannes and Iambres — get those guys another mention, gosh, we just had those guys last week who are the evil, the evil wizards that Moses and Aaron did wizard battle with — he was the one that gave them their powers. He fought against Moses, and he was captured in the Red Sea. When the Red Sea closed back up, he was somehow pinned under this giant column. I don't know why there was a pillar in the Red Sea, but there was. It's made of some kind of purple material that we do not know because we cannot properly translate the word. But it's made of some kind of secret purple stuff.

C: My favorite prince album.

B: Yeah.

C: Secret Purple.

B: Secret Purple. And so Ephippas and Abezithibod together use their strength to carry this giant pillar from the bottom of the Red Sea, and they bring it to the temple, but instead of placing it down, they hold it up. And so the pillar is held aloft in the air. And it's continually held there because Solomon's like, great, stay there. So these two incredibly powerful demons are trapped holding this column within the temple. And I should point out we did gloss over a lot of stuff, but there is a point where one of the demons does prophesy the destruction of the temple, which is coming. Of course we know, multiple times.

But then we get here at the end, there is a beautiful woman, a woman of the Shunammites, which is a reference to Song of Solomon. The woman in Song of Solomon is described as being a Shunammite. And so he wants to marry this woman. But the priests of the Shunammites say, "Yeah, you've got to worship Moloch and the great god Raphan, and you have to make sacrifices to them." And Solomon says, "I'm not gonna do that. That's a terrible thing." And they're like, "Look, man, it's easy." And so they put five locusts in his hand. And he's like, "You don't have to sacrifice a major thing. Just crush up these locusts in your hand." And here we see Eros, here he is, comes back. Here's the butt baby, the butt baby of the dragon. Puts the grasshoppers in his hand, crush 'em, and then you'll have the you'll have the woman of the Shunamites. And he does it, and that was very dumb because the Spirit of God departs from him. He's weak and foolish and he loses control of all of the demons. And yeah, so he leaves with the warning "wretch that I am, followed her advice, the glory of God departed from me, and my spirit was darkened, and I became the sport of idols and demons. And that's why I wrote this testament. So you can feel pity for me, and also don't do what I did. Don't crush a locust. Just do those push-ups. Throw yourself in some brambles. Leave those Shunammites alone."

C: Yeah, don't don't crush up the locusts, but do summon demons and use them to build things.

B: Sure.

C: That was not a problem.

B: You make them subject to you. You don't make yourself subject to them. That's that's the trick.

C: That's the best thing. Because as we all know, like you can never get into trouble as long as you know you can just quit anytime you want to.

B: This is God-endorsed slavery in this case.

C: Jiminy Christmas.

B: I mean it is.

C: Yeah, I mean it's demons, it doesn't count.

B: Okay, yeah, I mean sure. I'm just saying. So I mean that's it. That's the Testament of Solomon.

C: Completely wild.

B: Very wild.

C: Completely wild.

B: Yeah, and I'm sorry if we glossed over your favorite demon, if you're really into a particular one.

C: I mean let's let's be real here, your favorite demon is Pterodrakun.

B: Yeah.

C: Like that's who your favorite demon is. That's who there's gonna be fan art of.

B: Yeah, or someone just wants to draw that giant dog doing a strangle. I don't know. Maybe. Yeah, anyway...

C: Just draw the giant dog doing a strangle, and then Sonic's there.

B: Right.

C: And they're just besties.

B: And they're just inflated with the spirit of Ephippas, the wind demon from Arabia. Yeah, why not?

C: Hey Benito, did you have a verse?

B: Nope. Did you have one?

C: Pretty much just the seventh sister saying, "I am the worst of all, and our stars are in heaven, seven stars humble in sheen and all together, and we are called as it were goddesses."

B: Yeah.

C: There have been a lot of extremely dope ways for people to announce themselves in Bible.

B: Yeah.

C: That's maybe number one. That's number two behind Jesus knocking people over with one word.

B: Yeah, that's a pretty good one.

C: That is a strong flex.

B: "I'm Strife, strife of strife." Ah, so good. They just do a one-by-one verse, they all come in.

C: Like the whole bit about "I'm Deception, I'm Strife" is like really fun in a super fable-ish Billy Batson-y sort of way.

B: Yeah, oh for sure. Yeah, man.

C: Wy aren't there I mean we all look we all know the seven deadly enemies of men. They're the seven deadly sins.

B: Kind of. Kind of.

C: I mean kind of.

B: Yeah.

C: Yeah, but more or less. You got it.

B: Yeah.

C: They didn't have lust in there until like 1990.

B: Yeah, and then one of the other ones is different too. Like gluttony is something else, I think. They cut gluttony and lust.

C: Gluttony's still in there.

B: Really?

C: Maybe one of the original ones wasn't gluttony.

B: Yeah, maybe. There's two of them. I know lust is one of them because that's the obvious one, but one of the other ones is changed to something else too. I can't I can't remember off the dome.

C: But like Mary Marvel should absolutely fight these guys, right?

B: Oh yeah. Mary Marvel should fight...

C: Mary Shazam now, I guess.

B: Yeah. Ugh. Ugh.

C: I don't like it either.

B: But yes, she should actually be there. She should fight those seven sisters. Absolutely, I endorse that. Just pull that from the Testament of Solomon.

C: Alright, so that's it for the Testament of Solomon, and that means it's it for Halloween, everybody. Happy Halloween!

B: Happy Halloween!

C: Were you scared this time?

B: I was. I was scared that we could not possibly cover 60 demons in a span of one episode.

C: I was scared that there's a lot that I'm gonna have to cut out when I'm editing this show and we're talking about dragons doing butt stuff.

B: Yeah. Yeah, it's true.

C: We're never gonna get that oh so clutch Pontifex retweet.

B: That's true.

C: If we don't have that clean tag. He's just not gonna listen.

B: We're keeping that clean tag for Pontifex, we're keeping that clean tag for your moms, because I know one person told us they said if we didn't cuss on the show, they would show it to their mom. And so it's for you. I hope your mom's listening. I hope your mom's not listening to this episode.

C: I mean, you know, we didn't write it.

B: It's true. This is Bible. It's Bible.

C: This is Bible.

B: We didn't make up the Bible.

C: We did not. Even though in this particular instance it might sound like we did.

B: Yeah.

C: So what are we doing next week now that Halloween is over, now that we have honored all the saints?

B: Well, as I mentioned, I'm getting married, I'm getting married, and you can't have a wedding, you can't have an a Christian or even ethnically Christian wedding without First Corinthians. So we gotta do those Pauline epistles eventually. We can't ignore them forever. We gotta get back to canon. We've done very much Apocrypha and pseudepigrapha in the last couple weeks. So we're gonna get back to the New Testament. We've done all of the narrative stuff. Now we gotta hit those epistles. So we're gonna hit First Corinthians. The one you've heard at every wedding you've ever been to.

C: Yeah, and we will be using the version that's in the HCSB. If you do have the Bible in Hell, there are 21 chapters. It's true. So you are Keanu Reeves or Rachel Weisz.

B: And we have already covered Third Corinthians, so it's important that we go back and hit the first one.

C: So that is what we're gonna be doing next week in honor of your nuptials.

B: Thanks, man.

C: And congratulations. I'm very I'm very happy for you and Sarah.

B: I appreciate it very much.

C: I can tell you, marriage is great. Love being married.

B: Good. I'll take that as a recommendation. Five stars on Yelp for Marriage from Chris Sims.

C: I would six stars even. You know what? Seven stars, because that's the most number of stars.

B: The most number of stars.

C: In the meantime, where can everybody find us? Online.

B: If you want to find us online, you want to find links, images, supplemental material, essays, maps, that kind of stuff, including recently images of Paul and Thecla, images of Judith and Holofernes. I haven't posted them yet, but I'm gonna post images of the Harrowing of Hell. We're gonna have some images of these demons coming up. We're gonna have that link to the homily about the harrowing of hell. All that stuff you can find on our Tumblr at apocrypals dot tumbler dot com. There you can also ask us questions, which we usually answer on the Tumblr, but occasionally some of those questions make it onto the show. So head over there and look for us, find our stuff there.

Also, if you like the show, you want to support us monetarily, help us keep the show going, hit us up at K O dash F I dot com slash apocrypals. That's kofi dot com slash apocrypals. There you can leave us a donation in increments of three dollars. It can be as little as three, it could be as much as three million if you so felt, if you really like the show.

If however you can't or don't want to support us monetarily, you can help us out by leaving us a review on your podcast app of choice, whether Apple Podcasts or Stitcher or Google Play or Spotify or whatever. I don't think Spotify has reviews and comments, but who knows? Leave us a rating and review. You can just give us the rating. It's real easy. Just click the number of stars that you think it should be. Seven stars is not an option, but we'll accept five. It's fine. Leave a review if you want. Reviews are better. They help us get featured more. Help us climb the top of that Christian comedy podcast, so choice, and it gets us ever closer to that clutch Pontifex retweet.

You can also just talk about us on Twitter and other social media using #ApocryPals on Twitter. That way we can find you. Usually we'll retweet people who post about that or if you have a question, you can hit us up that way. You can also find me on Twitter @Benito_Cereno. I'm there. I tweet quite a lot. You can also find me on Instagram at the same name. You can find me on Tumblr at Benito-Cereno. Those are my main ones. Chris, what about you?

C: You can find all of my stuff by going to T H E dash I S B dot com. If you are still in a Halloween mood, then boy do we have some comics for you that we actually wrote, not just Hellboy.

B: That's true. We didn't write Hellboy.

C: We did not write Hellboy.

B: Yeah, but comics that we wrote.

C: Yes, I write a comic that is very irregularly published called Dracula the Unconquered. It's pretty much what I would do if I was writing Hellboy. S the fourth issue of that, which is about Dracula and his assistant Thalia meeting Carmilla, a famous vampire from the novel of the same name, is out now and the first three issues are on sale for a dollar each. The new issue's two dollars. That means you can get ninety-six pages of full color adventure comics that I have written for a mere five bucks. That's a good deal.

B: It's a steal, honestly.

C: I have paid more money than that for less pages of bad comics.

B: It's true. I certainly have.

C: Fewer pages, I should say.

B: Recently, I feel like I have.

C: Yeah, same. Same, buddy. Same.

B: Yeah.

C: But also if you like Benito and me, which of course you do, why would you not? We're we're the most lovable Bible podcasters there are. We both have stories, me with my writing partner Chad Bowers in this year's Army of Darkness Halloween special. And kinda spooky, not quite in the same vein, is Infinity Wars: Sleepwalker. Chad and I are writing that for Marvel Comics. It's great. If you want to know what the insides the Infinity Stones are like, read that book. I can tell you in number three, we introduce a new character to the Marvel Universe, uh, and she is great. You're gonna love her, and you're gonna love what she does. So read that. In the meantime, you know, Benino, you said people can talk about us on Twitter and Tumblr. That's always great because we can see that. But I would say if you do like the show just tell one person that you think might like it. Tell a friend who might enjoy the show, that you like listening to Apocrypals. Because I think a personal recommendation goes a long way. And that is a technique I am stealing from Tyler Mahan Coe of Cocaine and Rhinestones, a very good podcast about the history of country music.

B: Nice. Yeah. You tell one friend, and then they'll tell one friend.

C: Yeah. And then eventually seven people listen.

B: Yeah, that's the goal. We want seven, seventy times seven. It sounds impossible, but I feel like we can get there.

C: We want a number of listeners that are uncountable like the stars in the heavens. Like the descendants of Abraham.

B: Absolutely. Grains of sand upon the seashore. That's what we want.

C: These are the days of our lives.

B: Indeed. That's what we want.

C: Alright, so next week, 1 Corinthians, everybody, we will be patient and we will be kind when you join us for that. Until then, we hope you've enjoyed our very good Halloween special about demons and King Solomon. Benito, happy Halloween and peace be with you.

B: And also vith you, Bleh!

[Music: "The Monster Mash" by Bobby Pickett]

[Benito and Chris continue singing Monster Mash...]