Onoskelis

Onoskelis is a demon with a woman’s body and a mule’s legs. The Testament of Solomon, a Greek text composed between the first and fifth centuries CE, is the only ancient source that names her. Solomon summons her, interrogates her, and puts her to work spinning hemp for the Temple ropes. Her testimony is brief. Her image is specific enough that it has outlasted the obscurity of the text that contains it.

The interrogation

The Testament of Solomon follows a repeating pattern. Each demon is brought before Solomon’s throne and forced to answer the same questions: What is your name? What do you do to human beings? What angel defeats you? Onoskelis answers all three.

Her name is her body. Onos is Greek for donkey; skelos means leg. She tells Solomon she was born from an unexpected voice, a spirit born from the echo in a wooded cave. She lives in ravines and caves, places on the boundary between the settled world and the wild. She seduces men who pass through these places and strangles them after the encounter is over.

Solomon asks what thwarts her. She names the angel Joel. Solomon stamps her with the seal and assigns her to spin hemp day and night for the Temple ropes. She joins the labor force of demons building God’s house, each one’s punishment calibrated to its crime: the seductress becomes a spinner, the violent become quarriers, the aerial become lifters of stone.

The mule-legged woman

The animal legs are the detail that sticks. Ancient Mediterranean demonology is full of beautiful women who turn dangerous, but Onoskelis is defined by a visible deformity that cannot be hidden. The mule legs announce what she is before she acts. In a text where many demons appear in human form and must be identified through interrogation, Onoskelis wears her nature on her body.

The Greek empusa, a shape-shifting creature associated with Hecate, was sometimes described with one leg of bronze and one donkey leg. Aristophanes mentions her in the Frogs (405 BCE). The parallel is close enough that scholars have noted the connection without being able to establish a direction of influence. The empusa tradition may have fed into the Testament’s characterization of Onoskelis, or both may draw on an older Mediterranean anxiety about women with animal features as markers of demonic origin.

The pattern

Onoskelis is one of three named female demons in the Testament of Solomon, alongside Obyzouth and Enepsigos. Each operates differently. Onoskelis seduces and kills individual men in wild places. Obyzouth targets newborn infants. Enepsigos shifts shape and dwells in the moon. Together they map three categories of female demonic threat as the ancient world understood them: sexual predation, infant mortality, and lunar madness.

The Testament does not moralize about these figures. It catalogs them. Solomon asks questions, records answers, assigns punishments, and moves to the next demon. The text reads less like theology than like a field guide to the invisible world, compiled by a king who had the authority to make every spirit in creation sit for an interview.

Related reading

• The Testament of Solomon. The full article on the text that contains Onoskelis’s interrogation.
• Obyzouth. The limbless child-killer, another female demon from the same text.
• Lilith. The most famous female demon in Jewish tradition, who shares thematic territory with Onoskelis.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Testament of Solomon (Greek text, 1st–5th century CE) — the only ancient source
• C. C. McCown, The Testament of Solomon (1922) — critical edition of the Greek text
• Dennis C. Duling, ‘The Testament of Solomon’ in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1, ed. James H. Charlesworth (1983)