Where do demons come from? In the Western tradition the usual answer is that they are angels who fell. But there are really two different stories of the fall, with different villains and different morals. One is about forbidden knowledge, the other about pride. The grimoires draw on both, and you cannot understand the demons of the Goetia without them.
The sons of God and the daughters of men
A strange, brief passage in Genesis 6 begins it all: "the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose." It adds that "there were giants in the earth in those days" — in Hebrew, the Nephilim. Genesis says no more, but a much longer book does.
The Book of the Watchers
The Book of Enoch (usually called 1 Enoch) is a collection of Jewish visionary writings from the last centuries BCE, written in the name of Enoch, Noah's great-grandfather who "walked with God". Its first part, the Book of the Watchers, was widely read: the New Testament Letter of Jude quotes it, and Aramaic fragments were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. In the West it was then lost for over a thousand years. Only the Ethiopian Orthodox Church kept it complete, in the ancient language Ge'ez. The traveller James Bruce brought copies to Europe in 1773, and R.H. Charles' translation of 1912 is still the standard public-domain English text.
The story runs like this. Two hundred angels called Watchers, led by Semjaza, desire human women. Knowing it is forbidden, they bind themselves by a mutual oath and come down on Mount Hermon. They take wives, who bear giants; the giants devour the world's food, and then its people. Worse, the Watchers teach:
| Watcher | Taught |
|---|
| Azazel | Making swords, knives and armour; working metals; bracelets, ornaments, cosmetics and precious stones |
| Semjaza | Enchantments and root-cuttings |
| Armaros | The resolving of enchantments |
| Baraqijal | Astrology |
| Kokabel | The constellations |
| Ezeqeel | The knowledge of the clouds |
| Araqiel | The signs of the earth |
| Shamsiel | The signs of the sun |
| Sariel | The course of the moon |
The earth cries out. The archangels Michael, Uriel, Raphael and Gabriel bring the complaint to God, and judgement follows: Raphael binds Azazel hand and foot and buries him under rough stones in the desert of Dudael; Michael binds Semjaza and his companions beneath the earth for seventy generations; the giants are set against one another and destroy themselves.
Then comes the detail that matters most for demonology. The giants were born of spirit and flesh, so when their bodies die their spirits remain on earth as evil spirits, which "afflict, oppress, destroy" and cause trouble among humans (1 Enoch 15). In this story, that is where demons come from.
Why magicians should care
Look again at what the Watchers taught: herb lore, enchantment and its undoing, astrology, the stars, the weather, the sun and moon. It is very nearly the syllabus of this school. The Enoch story is the ancient root of a lasting suspicion that magical and scientific knowledge is stolen from heaven — a suspicion the witch-hunters later turned into law. Every magician inherits that ambivalence, and it is worth deciding for yourself what you think of it.
Azazel has a second life in the Bible. On the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16), one goat is sacrificed and another, carrying the people's sins, is sent into the wilderness "for Azazel". This is the original scapegoat.
The adversary
The figure of Satan grew separately. In the Hebrew Bible ha-satan means "the adversary" or "the accuser", and in the Book of Job he is a member of God's own court, a kind of prosecutor who tests Job with God's permission. He is not yet a rebel against God, nor the ruler of a kingdom of evil. Those ideas developed in the centuries before and after Jesus, partly under the influence of Persian dualism.
The fall of Lucifer
The second fall story takes its name from Isaiah 14:12: "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!" In context, the prophet is mocking the king of Babylon, who wanted to set his throne above the stars and was brought low. The Hebrew calls him Helel ben Shahar, "shining one, son of the dawn" — the morning star, the planet Venus — and the Latin Bible translated this as Lucifer, "light-bringer".
Christian writers, beginning with Origen in the third century, read the passage as the story of the devil's own fall, joining it with Jesus' words "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:18) and the war in heaven of Revelation 12, where Michael and his angels cast out "that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan" with his angels. Here the sin is not lust or forbidden teaching but pride: the highest angel refusing to serve. Revelation's dragon sweeps down "the third part of the stars of heaven", which was read as a third of the angels falling with him.
Paradise Lost and after
John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) gave the pride story its definitive form. His Satan is magnificent and tragic, and declares that it is "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n." William Blake later remarked that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it". The Romantics, and many 19th-century occultists, turned Lucifer into a symbol of light, knowledge and rebellion against tyranny, a reading that still shapes modern Luciferian and Left-Hand Path movements.
How the grimoires use this
The Solomonic grimoires assume this cosmology. The spirits of the Goetia are fallen angels — some are even said to hope to return to their old thrones — and that is exactly why the magician commands them through divine names and the authority of the archangels who once bound the Watchers. Whether you take that literally, symbolically or historically, it is the logic of the whole system.
Exercise
Read 1 Enoch chapters 6–16 in R.H. Charles' translation (it is free online and takes about half an hour). Then answer in your journal: which of the Watchers' arts do you practise or want to learn? Does the story's view of knowledge as dangerous and stolen ring true to you, or not? Write a short reply to the Watchers from the point of view of a magician today.