Heavenly Hosts

The Fallen

The angels who kept not their first estate — named, and no more than named.

The Church has never taught that evil is a power set opposite God. The fallen are creatures — angels who were made good and turned, who retain their intelligence and their freedom and misuse both, and who remain at every moment wholly subject to the God they refused. Scripture names a few of them; the Jewish writings outside the canon name a great many more. They are gathered here so that a reader who meets a name in the Gospels, in the Apocalypse, or in the Book of Enoch can be told plainly where it comes from and what standing it has.

These records are catalogued for study and never for veneration. They carry no feast, no hymn, no icon, and no prayer. Nothing on these pages is an address to the beings described.

Named in Scripture

Adversaries the canonical Scriptures name outright.

Abaddon / ApollyonFallenAbaddon (Hebrew, “Destruction”), called Apollyon in Greek (“Destroyer”), named in Revelation 9:11 as “the angel of the bottomless pit” — the king of the demonic locusts loosed from the abyss at the fifth trumpet. He is presented not as a faithful minister but as a ruler of destructive powers; yet even his authority is not his own. The abyss is opened only when the fallen star is “given” the key, the locusts may torment only those who lack the seal of God, and only for five months — every limit set by God. Orthodox Christianity reads the passage above all as a witness to God’s sovereignty: even the powers of destruction cannot act apart from His permission. Scripture does not identify Abaddon with Satan, nor with any other named demon, and the Church declines to add what the text withholds. The Hebrew word abaddon appears in the Old Testament as a name for the realm of destruction and the grave — an impersonal place; Revelation alone makes it the title of a personal spirit. A fallen being, catalogued here for study, not venerated.BeelzebulFallenThe name the scribes used when they accused Christ of casting out demons by “the prince of the demons” — an accusation He answered by asking how Satan could cast out Satan, and how a kingdom divided against itself could stand. Behind the name lies Baal-Zebub, the god of Ekron whom Ahaziah sent to consult in the Second Book of Kings. The Gospels do not tell us whether Beelzebul is Satan under another name or a distinct spirit, and the Church has not settled what the text leaves open. What the passage is actually about is the warning that follows it — that to call the work of the Holy Spirit the work of a demon is the blasphemy that is not forgiven, because it is the refusal of the only healing there is.BelialFallenA name the Apostle Paul sets opposite Christ in a single line — “what concord hath Christ with Belial?” — and the only place in the received Scriptures where the word is used of a person at all. In the Old Testament beliyya‘al is an ordinary Hebrew noun meaning worthlessness or ruin, and the phrase “sons of Belial” means simply worthless men; it is the literature between the Testaments, above all the Dead Sea Scrolls, that turns it into the proper name of the prince of darkness who commands the sons of the pit. Paul writes in a world where that usage was current, and uses it once, as a figure for everything that cannot be joined to Christ. The Church has not built a demonology on the name, and this record does not either.LegionFallenThe unclean spirits who possessed the man among the tombs in the country of the Gerasenes, and who answered Christ’s question with the only name they gave: “My name is Legion: for we are many.” It is a Roman military word — some six thousand men — and the Gospel uses it to say that a single soul was held by a multitude. They could not resist a word from Christ; they could not even choose their own destination, but begged not to be sent into the abyss, and were permitted the swine. The account is read in the Orthodox tradition as a plain demonstration of the limits of demonic power: what a whole legion held, one word of the Lord freed, and the man was found afterward sitting at His feet, clothed and in his right mind.Satan / the DevilFallenThe chief of the fallen angels — called Satan (Hebrew, “the adversary”) and diabolos (Greek, “the slanderer”), and named in Scripture as the tempter, the accuser, the father of lies, the ancient serpent and the great dragon. Orthodox teaching holds that he was created good, as an angel, and fell by the free misuse of his own will; evil is not a second principle set against God but a turning away, a privation, having no nature of its own. He tempts, accuses and deceives, but he compels no one and can do nothing God does not permit — the Church has always refused the dualism that would make him God’s opposite. Christ has already defeated him at the Cross and in the harrowing of Hades; the Christian’s renunciation of him at baptism is the form that victory takes in each life. A fallen being, catalogued here for study and never venerated.

Named in the Deuterocanon

Named in the books Orthodoxy reads as Scripture but the Hebrew canon does not.

AsmodeusFallenThe evil spirit of the Book of Tobit, who loved Sarah the daughter of Raguel and killed seven husbands in turn on their wedding night, until the Archangel Raphael was sent to her and to the blind Tobit. At Raphael’s word Tobias burned the heart and liver of a fish upon the coals, and the spirit fled to the utmost parts of Egypt, where the angel bound him. Because Orthodoxy reads Tobit as Scripture, Asmodeus is the one named demon whose whole account the Church receives as a scriptural book — and the account is not about him. He is defeated by an angel who is sent, at the prayer of two people who prayed on the same day, and the story ends in a marriage and a healing.

From Second Temple Literature

Known from Jewish writings outside the canon, which the Church never received as Scripture.

The WatchersFallenThe angels of the Book of Enoch who “kept not their first estate” — two hundred of them, who descended upon Mount Hermon, bound themselves by an oath, took human wives, taught humankind arts they had no leave to teach, and fathered the giants whose violence filled the earth before the Flood. The Church does not receive the Book of Enoch as Scripture, and the Fathers divide over whether Genesis 6’s “sons of God” are angels at all or the righteous line of Seth. What Scripture does say plainly is briefer and firmer: angels sinned, and are held in chains of darkness until the judgment. They are recorded here because the Enochic account shaped the language of the New Testament world, and a reader who meets the name deserves to know exactly where it comes from.

The twenty Watcher chiefs, the giants, and the rest of the Enochic material are catalogued on the Book of Enoch page, with the same caution.