Asmodeus

The Book of Tobit tells a domestic, almost fairy tale story: a demon named Asmodeus loves a woman named Sarah so possessively that he kills each man she marries on the wedding night, seven husbands in a row, until the hero Tobias is instructed by the angel Raphael to burn the heart and liver of a fish on the bridal night, whose smoke drives Asmodeus off in flight to be bound in upper Egypt. He behaves here like a single obsessive spirit, dangerous but narrow in scope, not a king with a court. The Talmud, centuries later, tells an entirely different story about a figure it calls Ashmedai, almost certainly the same name reaching Aramaic through a different route. Here he is king of the demons, tricked by King Solomon into revealing the location of the shamir, the legendary worm or substance said to cut stone without iron tools, needed because the Temple was to be built in silence. Ashmedai later gets hold of Solomon's ring, throws the king hundreds of miles away, and rules in his place, impersonating him so convincingly that even Solomon's wives notice nothing, until Solomon reclaims the ring and his throne. These two demons share a name and little else in temperament, and later Christian ceremonial magic, above all the Renaissance grimoire tradition that produced texts like the Testament of Solomon and later demonological catalogues, absorbed the royal Talmudic Asmodeus into its own hierarchies of ranked infernal princes, adding a fixed iconography, a court and a rank that neither the Book of Tobit nor the Talmud itself describes. The figure a modern reader meets in popular demonology is mostly this third, latest layer, built on two much older and quite different Jewish stories.