Have you ever stumbled across something so strange or so unsettling that you can’t look away?
That’s how I feel about the Dictionnaire Infernal.
What exactly is it?
Well. Back in 1818, Jacques Collin de Plancy decided the world needed a proper guide to demons. That’s right. This Jacques Collin de Plancy guy decided we had to have a catalog of Hell’s most notorious (and obscure) residents. (And let’s call him Jack from here on out.)
I suppose it wasn’t enough for this guy to know that Lucifer and Mammon were lurking around. Nope. Instead, good old Jack wanted a full roll call of everyone in the deep, dark, below.
Now, plenty of writers before him had tried their hand at demonology. Two books, the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and the Lesser Key of Solomon, already gave us hierarchies of Hell. Who knew?
But de Plancy did something different. In 1863, he added pictures. And not just any pictures. These things were nightmarish woodcut illustrations by Louis Le Breton. These were not just doodles in the margin of some notebook. No.
These were fever dreams committed to paper. There were owl-headed angels, frog-cat kings with insect legs, and jester demons with spiral horns.
When the Dictionnaire Infernal first came out, Jack was known as a skeptic, even an enemy of superstition. He just didn’t buy into all of it.
But a funny thing happened after he got involved in all of the research and the writing. He converted to Catholicism.
By the time those creepy illustrations were added, he had shifted from debunker to believer. That change in him may explain the intensity of the artwork. Mostly, though, those images became the book’s legacy.
The 1863 edition included hundreds of spot illustrations, more than 60 of them demons, each stranger than the last.
Because the drawings fell into the public domain, they’ve had a second life. We can find them in reprints of the Lesser Key of Solomon and in books on the occult. But as you may have guessed, they are all over the internet. If you need to send an image that says “unholy nightmare,” these are the images for you.
Somehow, even after 150 years, they’re still fresh, still unnerving, and completely creepy.
So the next time you see one of those bizarre demons pop up in your feed, give a big nod to Jacques Collin de Plancy and Louis Le Breton.
All of this has given us one of the most haunting visual works ever made. Believe in them or not, it shows us that once an image is released into the world, it can haunt us forever. Unfortunately, there are many everyday demons in our current world. Like the image of a president dancing in Japan.
May we all be free of these demons and more.
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“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” — G.K. Chesterton
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“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.” — William Shakespeare
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“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
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