The Penguin Book of Demons

The Penguin Book of... (Penguin Classics)

by Scott G. Bruce (Editor)

Three thousand years of encounters with malevolent beings that have invaded our waking lives and our nightmares

A Penguin Classic

For millennia, societies have told tales of their fears incarnate—otherworldly couriers of plague, death, temptation, and moral decline. Drawing from three thousand years of religious traditions and world literature, The Penguin Book of Demons follows these supernatural creatures—and the humans who have hunted and been haunted by them—through accounts across cultures and continents, the daimones of ancient Greece and Rome; the Nephilim, the giant, biblical half-humans who stalked the earth before the Great Flood; corrupted angels, condemned to eternity in Hell; the sickness-spreading fairy folk of Celtic mythology; the djinn of Islamic Arabia; the female, child-eating gelloudes of Byzantium; the seductive incubi and succubi of northern Europe; the animal spirits of early modern China; and the cannibalistic wendigo of Native American folklore. From demonic possession to black magic, these accounts give life to a spellbinding, skin-crawling history of the paranormal.

Genres: Nonfiction, Horror, Classics, Religion, Gothic, Satanism, Mythology

368 pages, Paperback

First published October 8, 2024

About the author

Scott G. Bruce is an historian of religion and culture in the early and central Middle Ages (c. 400-1200). He teaches in the Department of History at the University of Colorado at Boulder, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Classics. His research interests include monasticism, hagiography and Latin poetry. He is a specialist on the history of the abbey of Cluny. His work has been funded by the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation.

SGB is the author of Silence and Sign Language in Medieval Monasticism: The Cluniac Tradition (c. 900-1200) (Cambridge, 2007) and the editor of Ecologies and Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Studies in Environmental History for Richard C. Hoffmann (Leiden, 2010). His articles have appeared in Revue bénédictine, Cîteaux: Commentarii cistercienses, The Journal of Medieval Latin, and Early Medieval Europe.

SGB is an enthusiastic participant in the Medieval Academy of America (MAA). He is recently served a two-year term on the MAA Nominating Committee (2012-14) and is currently serving a three-year term on the MAA AHA Program Committee (2013-17).

SGB is Director of the University of Colorado's Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) for a three-year term (2013-2016).

Reviews

[Matilda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provides good background on history of demons throughout different periods for those who have little knowledge on subject

[Michelle Graf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Books for the ARC.

A fairly detailed exploration of every mention of the 'demonic' throughout religious and historical texts, from Mesopotamian to Judeo-Christian to Dante's Inferno and Paradise Lost. It's a good source to start your research if you're interested.

[Juan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I waited about a year to be able to read this book and ended up disappointed. The book attempts to explain how demons have been perceived by different cultures throughout history, but it does so very superficially. The author has actually written very little of the book since much of the text are excerpts from other works and he is just briefly commenting on them. Much of the book deals with demons according to judeo-christian mythology, then it moves to islamic mythology, and it briefly glosses over native american and east asian myths.

[Tim Pendry · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of a series of anthologies on the literature of imaginative dark phenomena (demons, dragons, exorcisms, the undead, hell, witches, magic), 'The Penguin Book of Demons' is an exemplary guide to the Western tradition mostly drawn from the Abrahamanic faiths with side journeys elsewhere.

One of the great virtues of the selection is that it does not patronise the reader. The anthologist, Scott G. Bruce, a Professor at Fordham University, is quite prepared to include quite large tracts of demon lore in order to educate us into what is truly important.

For example, there is the entire sequence of Solomonic encounters with entities. This is entirely appropriate because it is the story of Solomon that shapes much of early and late medieval visions of the demonic. This story enters via Judaism into both Islam and Western magical lore.

He begins with the relevant parts of the Old Testament (and does not forget the New), draws a distinction between the Judaeo-Christian and the Hellenic (where the 'daimon' is a very different being) and proceeds with case after case of the demonic's subsequent use for moralistic ends.

Some of the material, notably the descriptions of Hell, is truly sadistic and horrific, indicating that the medieval mind was as much in in thrall to horror as ours. Others indicate how much intellectual labour went into trying to understand the implications of human-demon interaction.

It will be no surprise that the demonic in the early and medieval imagination was bound up with the sexual. There was interest in such arcane matters as whether children of demon seed could go to heaven or how it was possible for physical threats to frighten immaterial demonic spirits.

The impression here is that the fear was not merely invented to frighten young monks into sexual compliance but was sincerely believed in. This is not as crazy as it sounds today once you slip back in time and forget scientific or psychological explanations for illness or abnormal human behaviours.

The terror of demonic harm to women in childbirth and to their infants (well known from ancient Mesopotamia) must be at the back of some of the representations of evil that appear in later folklore and literature. The Byzantine material on the gelloudes is particularly interesting in this context.

Possession or temptation by immaterial spirits alongside a cogent religious back story (whether of fallen or craven angels) will be a better explanation than none at all for a species that craves explanation and meaning. If there is no other explanation, the demonic will have to serve.

Bruce extends the exploration both geographically along the silk road to East Asia and to the Americas, with decent representation for indigenous Americans and African-Americans, and forward in time to the weird fiction of the early twentieth century.

The Chinese tales of life-sucking fox demons are also sexual. The normality of men asking for support from their wives when they get too deep in with very nubile young fox girls is culturally very far from Judaeo-Christian assumptions and yet just as representative of similar young male sexual anxieties.

Bruce is an intelligent anthologist, choosing his material with care to show how each relates to the other in order to create a tradition. Of course, Milton's maginificent evocation of the fallen angels under their charismatic and defiant master is given more than adequate space.

A book can only hold so much material. Bruce is right to concentrate on the roots of the demonic tradition and to emphasise the Judaeo-Christian but he does make space to connect later literature to the older mythos and to folklore (whether Dartmoor devil hounds or cannibal Wendigo).

There is a Walter Scott poem, MR James' 'Canon Alberich's Scrap-Book' and a closing Lovecraft poem amongst other items to round off the collection but the emphasis is fully on the construction of the mythos rather than global anthropology or the use of the demonic in the modern age.

Truth to tell, there is plenty of material out there already on the latter, especially with the high level of academic interest in Gothick Studies and public interest in weird fiction so this attempt at literary archaeology is all the better for sticking largely although not excusively to origins.

What is admirable about the book is its intellectual integrity and coherence. By the end, you will have (as a non-specialist) a much clearer idea of the use, abuse and appropriation of demons (including the necessary passing but important reference to the witch trials) in Western culture.

Today, popular culture is still fascinated by the demonic as much as it is by serial killers, sometimes merging the two as in the 'Millennium' TV series in the late 1990s. There are some in the American boondocks who still believe in them. Not to understand demons is not to understand ourselves.

[Chloe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found it a little boring, but may read again if I ever get interested in demons/evil spirits. It is a good book that documents a lot of history and relevant information regarding demons, I guess I just wasn’t very interested.

Also, a lot of demons related to women almost always highlight their sexuality with “lust” or infidelity. It would have been interesting to see that explore a bit further, as we know misogyny is very prevalent in some religious texts so even with evil spirits it would still be present. I think it was a missed opportunity to just explore that a tiny bit. There’s also a lot of stories about men committing awful crimes, in one instance rape, and it being blamed on demons. I understand that these stories are from people who believe in demons and are not exactly entirely factual - but I bet this was an excuse used many centuries ago when men would abuse women, they would blame the “demons”.

So I guess the above did provoke a lot of deeper thoughts for me, so it was quite interesting to be guided to that.

[Phil · Rating 3 out of 5]

A perfectly workman-like collection of stories around demons. Very little character for such a spicy topic, and it feels like there's no real thesis to what a demon is, and what they mean to a society etc.beyond the very superficial. Further, it's extremely tied to Christian theology, with a very small section at the end for Eastern and other cultures, and this feels like a situation where they should have fully claimed the Western demons, or spend much more time on demons in other cultures. Further, there's a flattening of the concept and there seems to be a mono culture which demons are coming out of as echoes of the biblical stories which the book book spends most of its time with.

I suppose the main criticism for my criticism here is what did I expect? Maybe better used as a reference book, but even then it doesn't quite fit the use. A book I would find hard to recommend people specifically, but worth the read if you're really into the area.

[Δημήτριος Καραγιάννης · Rating 3 out of 5]

To my great disappointment, this book was not something groundbreaking. Most of the stories inserted here will be already known or heard of to the advanced reader. If you were already a person interested in demons, good and evil, mythology and religion, most likely you will already be acquainted with 50% or more of these stories. Still, it is a nice collection, easily read, and it helps to have these tales gathered together in one volume.

[Stephen Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Then whilst our host was asleep we crept into his library to investigate further. There were many serious works of occult study that we observed within... the infamous Necronomicon, the De Vermis Mysteriis by Ludvig Prinn, and of course The Penguin Book of Demons..."

- from ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward 2’, The Lost Tales of HP Lovecraft.

[James Carrigy · Rating 3 out of 5]

6/10

A lot of recycled bits and pieces from other Penguin Classics, even by the standards of these collections, but still a nifty primer with some occasionally choice extracts.

[Hollie Toft · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5⭐️

Struggled through the audiobook of this. It just wasn’t engaging and was too ancient for me.

[Goe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intriguing, educational, thorough.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 some parts were hard to read since they were old English or from the bible but interesting to see where demons come from in different religions and parts of the world