During the hundred and thirty years that Adam lived apart from Eve, some of the rabbis said, demons were born from him. They meant it plainly. The shedim, the lilin, the night-spirits of later Jewish tradition, were begotten in those years of separation after the expulsion from Eden. The claim sits in the Babylonian Talmud, at Eruvin 18b, and in the midrash. It is one of the roots of the figure who would become Lilith.
In 1641, a Lutheran Hebrew professor in a small university town near Nuremberg took that tradition, and a great deal like it, seriously enough to lay it out in Latin, in the original Hebrew, and to weigh it against everything the Church had said about spirits. His name was Theodor Hackspan. The short book he produced is now translated in full in our Library, as On the Names of Angels and Demons.
A professor who read the sources in the original
Altdorf in 1641 was a Lutheran university town in the hills near Nuremberg. Hackspan held the chair of Hebrew there, and later the chair of theology. He was a Christian Hebraist, one of the scholars who learned the Jewish languages well enough to read the Talmud and the Kabbalah for themselves rather than through a hostile summary. That skill is the whole reason the book repays reading.
The disputation followed the ordinary form of the day. A professor, the praeses, drew up numbered theses; a student, the respondens, defended them in a public exercise; the whole was printed as a thin pamphlet. Hackspan’s student that day was Johann Frischmuth of Wertheim, who had matriculated at Altdorf a few years earlier and gone on to a career of his own as an orientalist. The theses were printed under a double title, Hebrew and Latin: Mal’akhim we-Shedim, “Angels and Demons,” and De Angelorum Daemonumque Nominibus, “On the Names of Angels and Demons.”
The title page carries one more flourish. Beneath the names it prints the opening words of the Quran in Arabic, the Basmala, “In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate.” It is a quiet boast about the range of tongues the author commanded, and a signal of the kind of mind at work: a Christian in Reformation Germany who thought the way to understand spirits was to read what the Jews and the Arabs had written about them.
A university disputation like this was not a book by a single author in the modern sense. The professor wrote the theses; the student’s job was to stand up and defend them against objections from the floor. The printed pamphlet is the record of that public exam.
The method is the argument
There are no circles here, no spirits called by name to appear. Hackspan is doing comparative scholarship. He takes the angelology and demonology of the rabbis, the Talmud, Maimonides, the Yalkut, the Zohar, the Kabbalists as they had reached him through Johann Reuchlin and Cornelius Agrippa, and he sets it beside the Church Fathers and the theologians of his own century, Catholic and Lutheran alike.
He is hunting the seams. He wants the places where the two traditions part, and the places where the Jewish material kept a thread the Christian schools had dropped or never held. He does not swallow the rabbinic reports whole. He marks what he finds credible and what he finds, in his own word, “slippery.” That posture, reading a strange tradition closely without mockery and without surrender, is a rare thing in a seventeenth-century theologian, and it is why the book reads less like a period curiosity than like a colleague’s notes.
Names that came up from Babylon
The argument opens on the names themselves. The Jerusalem Talmud, in the tractate Rosh Hashanah, says that the names of the months came up with the Jews from Babylonia, out of the exile. A second voice in the passage adds that the names of the angels came from the same place. Gabriel, Michael, Raphael: on this reading they are imports, carried home from captivity along with the calendar. Hackspan works through the objection, noting the older month-names the Bible does preserve, before letting the point stand.
From the names he moves to rank. Maimonides, in the Mishneh Torah, sorts the angels into ten orders, from the chayot, the “living creatures of holiness” who stand nearest the throne, down to the ishim, the lowest rank, the ones who speak with prophets because they are closest to the human mind. The four living creatures of Ezekiel and of Revelation become the four Evangelists, or do not, Hackspan notes, depending on whether you follow the Catholic Bellarmine or the Lutheran Chemnitz. The reader watches a Christian scholar move between a Jewish hierarchy and a Christian one without forcing either to win.
Do they have bodies, and where do they come from
Then the questions sharpen, and the book reaches its strangest ground. Do angels and demons have bodies? And where do demons come from?
Here Hackspan gathers the material that stands behind so much later legend. The rabbinic tradition of the demons begotten from Adam in the years of his separation. The names of their kinds, the shedim, the lilin, the ruchin. The half-bodies and appetites the Talmud assigns them. This is the seedbed of the medieval and early-modern demonologies that followed, the world of the sealed spirits in the Testament of Solomon and the named seventy-two of the Ars Goetia. It is the same current of Jewish demonology that runs, centuries on, into the possession dramas of the dybbuk. On the angelic side, the counterpart is the older story of the fallen Watchers who taught forbidden arts in the Book of Enoch.
Hackspan does not tell you what to make of any of it. He tells you what the sources say, and where they disagree, and lets the reader carry the weight.
The lowest of Maimonides’ ten angelic ranks, the ishim, takes its name from the Hebrew for “men.” These are the angels close enough to the human intellect to appear to prophets. The word puts the border between the human and the angelic at the very bottom of the ladder, not the top.
Why we translated it
A generation earlier and a confession away, a Jesuit disputation at Ingolstadt, now also in our Library as Disputatio Philosophica de Natura, Arte, Magia, had examined what demons can and cannot do. Set the two side by side and you see the same problem worked from opposite ends of the Reformation: a Catholic asking what spirits are permitted to do in nature, a Lutheran asking what the oldest Jewish sources say they are.
Hackspan settles nothing. He shows how a learned Christian of the early seventeenth century held the Jewish demonology up to the light, what he trusted in it and what he did not, and where he thought the rabbis had kept a thread worth following. Whether anything stands behind the names, the disputation does not finally decide.
Neither do we. The full text, translated from the Munich copy and kept paragraph by paragraph in Hackspan’s own numbering, is in the Crazy Alchemist Library: On the Names of Angels and Demons.
Sources
Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.
- Theodor Hackspan (praeses) and Johann Frischmuth (respondens), מלאכים ושדים — De Angelorum Daemonumque Nominibus (‘On the Names of Angels and Demons’). Altdorf: Typis Scherffianis, 1641. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich; digital copy bsb11852740; VD17 23:264880U.
- Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Sefer ha-Madda, Hilkhot Yesodei ha-Torah, ch. 2 (the ten ranks of angels).
- Babylonian Talmud, Eruvin 18b (demons begotten in the years Adam lived apart from Eve); Genesis Rabbah 20:11.
- Jerusalem Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 1:2 (the names of the months, and of the angels, ‘came up with them from Babylonia’).
