Belphegor (demon)

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Belphegor, illustration from the Dictionnaire Infernal (1863)

Belphegor is in the LXX ( βεελφεγωρ LXX ) and then in the Vulgate ( Beelphegor VUL handed) form of the name of the Moab deity Baal Peor ( בעל פעור"Lord of the Peor") or Baal Pegor . As a demon , Belphegor found its way into Christian mythology and from there into the literature of the Renaissance and modern popular culture .

Baal Peor

The Peor ( 31 ° 48 ′ 8,5 ″  N , 35 ° 46 ′ 18 ″  E ) was a mountain in Moab ( 4 Mos 23.28  EU ). A place in its vicinity called Beth-Peor is mentioned several times ( 5 Mos 3.29  EU ). Opposite Beth-Peor (i.e. on Mount Nebo ) is also said to be the place where YHWH buried Moses :

And Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the LORD. And he buried him in the valley, in the land of Moab, opposite Bet-peor; and nobody knows his grave until this day. ( 5 Mos 34,5f  ELB )

There, in the last camp of the Israelites before the entry into the Holy Land , the apostasy of parts of the people of Israel from YHWH as described in the Book of Numbers occurred . The relevant position is:

And Israel stayed in Shittim. And the people began to fornicate the daughters of Moab; and they invited the people to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and prostrated themselves before their gods. And Israel clung to Baal-peor. Then the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel. And the LORD said to Moses, Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the LORD before the sun, that the glow of the LORD's wrath may turn away from Israel. ( 4 Mos 25,1–4  ELB )

Nothing is known about the nature of the god worshiped on this mountain and possible identifications with other Canaanite deities, since Belphegor is only mentioned (abbreviated to Peor ) with reference to this event except at the place mentioned in the Book of Numbers in the Bible ( 4 Mos 31, 16  EU , Jos 22.17  EU , Hos 9.10  EU , where Baal Peor and Beth-Peor are apparently identified with one another, and Ps 106.28  EU ).

The cult of Baal Peor is occasionally mentioned in rabbinical literature, giving the impression that the cult was still practiced at the time of the Tannaites . The tradition implies that the cult of Baal Peor was strongly influenced by sexual acts, in particular that the bare of the buttocks and the pubic parts belonged to the cult acts and that there was some relationship to excrement, which, however, is the factual basis for remains unclear. The "conduct of fornication" that appears in the Bible does not have to be interpreted literally, since every form of apostasy from YHWH is often referred to as "fornication" in the Bible. The rootפער( pa'ar "wide open") can mean tearing open the mouth, another body opening or transferring an opening (cave) throat. From the etymology of "opening" it was then concluded that defloration and therefore Baal Peor becomes a "Priap, which the heathen served with feasting, drinking and unchastity, so that they also gave their wives and daughters to practice unchastity with them" .

According to the biblical context, Belphegor was considered the name of a demon in Christian demonology . According to Peter Binsfeld , who assigned a prince of hell to each of the seven deadly sins , Belphegor was responsible for indolence . Belphegor also appears in Johann Weyer's De praestigiis daemonum , but there is a rationalizing explanation as a symbol for crevices in the cave into which offerings were thrown. This and other things can be found in the Infernal Dictionnaire by Collin de Plancy (1818), collected from a wide variety of sources :

Demon of discoveries and ingenious inventions, Belphegor appears as a young woman and donates wealth. He was worshiped by the Moabites as Baalphegor on Mount Phegor. Some rabbis claim that he should be worshiped in a toilet with the digestive products being the sacrifice. Hence, it has been concluded that he is the fart god Crepitus , while others believe he is the Priapus . Banier quoted Selden as saying that people were to be sacrificed to him and that the priests ate the meat. Wierus wrote that he always had an open mouth according to his name Phegor , which, according to Leloyer, means chasm or crevice and referred to his worship in caves, where victims were thrown into an air shaft.

Incidentally, Wierus is the aforementioned Johann Weyer.

Belphegor in Renaissance literature

In the Italian Renaissance , Belphegor appears as Belfagor arcidiavolo (" Arch Devil Belphegor") in the novella of the same name by Niccolò Machiavelli . The plot is as follows: The lord of Hell Pluto notices that many of the male souls arriving in Hell hold their wives responsible for their damnation. He calls a meeting that decides to ask the former archangel and current archangel Belfagor to investigate the phenomenon of "marriage". He went to Florence in the form of a Roderigo from Castile with 100,000 ducats in his pocket, where he quickly found a married lady named Onesta Donati. Don Roderigo's fortune soon melted away through his wife's vanity and addiction to cleaning, and the greed of her relatives. He is persecuted by believers and shackles and can only barely save himself from the guilty prison home to hell.

Machiavelli's material (the version of which appeared together with his works in 1549, but was written earlier) was edited many times, including by Giovanni Brevio (1545) and Giovanni Francesco Straparola (1551). As a result, there were arrangements all over Europe: in the German Schwank, so Der Dewffel nam ain alt Weib zw der Ee, who in vertrieb (1557) by Hans Sachs , and in the English drama, so Belphegor, or The Marriage of the Devil ( 1691) by John Wilson .

Regardless of the subject of the unhappily married devil, Belphegor gains prominence as a hell-dweller: as Peor , he is now one of the twelve closest confidants of Satan in John Milton's Paradise Lost .

Belphegor in popular culture

The French writer Arthur Bernède published a popular horror novel in 1927, Belphégor, le fantôme du Louvre . Belphégor is, as the title suggests, a mysterious phantom that, by analogy with the phantom of Gaston Leroux's opera, haunts the Louvre rather than the opera . Four film adaptations were made based on this novel :

In the series of magazines, Ghostbusters John Sinclair , Belphegor is portrayed as one of the arch demons and appears as a recurring opponent of the eponymous hero. Belphegor is nicknamed "the witcher with the flame whip".

Belphegor's prime number , a sequence of digits containing the number 666, was named after him.

literature

  • AJ Hoenselaars: The Politics of Prose and Drama: The Case of Machiavelli's Belfagor. In: Michele Marrapodi (Ed.): The Italian World of English Renaissance Drama: Cultural Exchange and Intertextuality. University of Delaware Press, Newark, DE 1998
  • William I. Scribe: Belphegor. In: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology , Vol. 44, No. 4 (Oct. 1945), pp. 351-359
  • Julius Rosenbaum : History of the lust epidemic in antiquity together with detailed studies of the Venus and phallic cults, brothels, Νοῦσος ϑήλεια of the Scythians, paederasty and other sexual excesses of the ancients presented as contributions to the correct explanation of their writings . 7th edition, H. Barsdorf, Berlin 1904, pp. 70-80 ( Plage des Baal Peor ).
  • Franz Cumont : Beelphegor . In: Paulys Realencyclopadie der classischen Antiquity Science (RE). Volume III, 1, Stuttgart 1897, Col. 185.

Web links

  • BAAL-PEOR in the Jewish Encyclopedia (English)

Individual evidence

  1. Presumably near today's Ayun Musa on Mount Nebo , see J. Andrew Dearman: Roads and Settlements in Moab. In: The Biblical Archaeologist, Vol. 60, No. 4, The Archeology of Moab (Dec. 1997), pp. 207f
  2. See a report on the "discovery" of the tomb of Moses near Beth-Peor: Ivar Lissner : The Tomb of Moses Is Still Undiscovered. In: The Biblical Archaeologist Vol. 26, No. 3 (Sep. 1963), pp. 106-108
  3. Sifre Numbers 131; Treatise Sanhedrin 106a
  4. Biblical Real and Verbal Hand Concordance , Basel 1890, p. 121, sv "Baal-Peor" (online)
  5. Edition from 1853, p. 79f digitizedhttp: //vorlage_digitalisat.test/1%3D~GB%3Dng8JAAAAQAAJ~IA%3D~MDZ%3D%0A~SZ%3DPA79~ double-sided%3D~LT%3D~PUR%3D