Belial  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Belial is a term occurring in the Hebrew Bible which later became personified as a demon in Jewish and Christian texts.

Belial in Literature

• John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book I

BELIAL came last, than whom a Spirit more lewd
Fell not from Heaven, or more gross to love
Vice for it self: To him no Temple stood
Or Altar smoak'd; yet who more oft then hee
In Temples and at Altars, when the Priest
Turns Atheist, as did ELY'S Sons, who fill'd
With lust and violence the house of God.
In Courts and Palaces he also Reigns
And in luxurious Cities, where the noyse
Of riot ascends above thir loftiest Towrs,
And injury and outrage: And when Night
Darkens the Streets, then wander forth the Sons
Of BELIAL, flown with insolence and wine.
Witness the Streets of SODOM, and that night
In GIBEAH, when hospitable Dores
Yielded thir Matrons to prevent worse rape.

• Robert Browning (1839), "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister", eighth stanza:

Or, my scorfulous French novel

On gray paper with blunt type !

Simply glance at it, you grovel

Hand and foot in BELIAL's gripe:

If I double down its pages

At the woeful sixteenth print,

When he gathers his greengages,

Ope a sieve and slip it in't?

Occult

The 17th-Century German grimoire The Lesser Key of Solomon mentions Belial, as does Aleister Crowley's Goetia (1904) and Anton LaVey's The Satanic Bible (1969). In The Satanic Bible (Earth: The Book of Belial), Belial means "without a master", and symbolizes independence, self-sufficiency, and personal accomplishment.

Belial in popular culture

Popular culture contains many references such as in the silent 1929 film, Nosferatu, Philip K. Dick's novel The Divine Invasion, Graham Masterton's novel Master of Lies, Aldous Huxley's novel Ape and Essence, contemporary horror The Exorcism of Emily Rose and so on.

See also

• List of theological demons
• Bel