She Was Older Than God. So We Made Her a Demon.

Astaroth. Those who know this name may shudder upon hearing it. He is recognized as the 29th spirit of the Ars Goetia, a great Duke of Hell, and one of the oldest named demons in the Western tradition. Yet, the name itself predates any grimoire, predates Christianity, and indeed predates the very god of Abraham. To truly grasp what Astaroth is, we must journey far beyond the conventional concepts of hell and venture into the cradle of civilization itself.

We must look to Mesopotamia, the land between the rivers, where the Tigris and the Euphrates cut through what is now Iraq. This region created a fertile plain amidst one of the harshest landscapes on Earth, and it is here that written civilization was born. Writing, law, agriculture, and the concept of the city—all were first recorded here in the river valleys of ancient Sumer five thousand years ago. In these oldest cities, the people worshipped a singular, overwhelming goddess.

Her name was Inanna, the Queen of Heaven and Earth, goddess of love, war, fertility, justice, and the morning and evening star. She was neither a gentle deity nor a distant one. The Sumerians understood her as an immediate, present force that moved through the world like a storm, total in her presence and indifferent to what she destroyed. She could bring lovers together and tear armies apart with a single breath, having descended into the underworld and returned, always asserting her will.

Around 2285 BC, a woman named Enheduanna became the high priestess of the moon god Nanna at the city of Ur. As the daughter of Sargon of Akkad, the first empire builder in history, she composed hymns to Inanna that have survived to this day. Enheduanna stands as the first named author in human history, the first individual to sign their own written work. Thousands of years before Homer or the Hebrew prophets, she chose to immortalize Inanna.

Her hymns describe the goddess in terms that leave nothing soft or distant about her character. She is the one who makes the heavens tremble, who turns light into darkness, whose roar is like thunder, and who stands tall at the front of battle. Temples to Inanna stood across Mesopotamia, from Uruk to Nippur, and dozens of other cities. Men and women alike served as her priests, worshipping her as the central deity of the most important civilization in the ancient world.

She did not remain confined to Mesopotamia. As civilizations rose and fell and trade routes expanded, this goddess traveled with them, appearing under different names but remaining recognizably the same essential presence. When the Akkadians absorbed Sumerian culture, they inherited Inanna and renamed her Ishtar. The name changed, but her domain remained absolute. Ishtar became a supreme deity of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires.

The Ishtar Gate, one of the greatest architectural achievements of the ancient world, was built in her honor in Babylon around 575 BC. Adorned in glazed blue tiles depicting lions and dragons, it served as the grand entrance to the city of the most powerful empire on Earth. She was literally built into the threshold of power. Moving west into Canaan and Phoenicia, she was transformed into Astarte, worshipped by the seafaring Phoenicians who carried her influence across the Mediterranean.

Cyprus became one of her great centers of worship, and her temples spread across the coasts of modern-day Lebanon, Israel, and Syria. She was the divine patron of Sidon and Tyre, the greatest Phoenician cities. The Old Testament records her worship repeatedly as a living, competing religion that the Israelites kept returning to despite the persistent warnings of their prophets and leaders.

The Greeks encountered her through the Phoenicians, particularly in Cyprus, where elements of her worship and symbolism began to merge into the figure that became Aphrodite. Later, the Romans adopted her as Venus. Throughout these transitions, she maintained the same star, the same domains, and the same essential nature: love and violence, fertility and destruction. She represented the power that draws people together and tears them apart.

After 5,000 years of human history, she finally vanished as an object of formal worship between the 1st and 6th centuries AD, as Christianity spread across the known world. By this time, she had been worshipped continuously for far longer than Christianity had existed. She became known as Ashtoreth, appearing in the Old Testament more than forty times as an immediate, ongoing threat to the faith of Israel.

The God of the Bible returns to her again and again, warning against her and condemning her worship, yet the people persistently returned to her. The Book of Judges records it plainly: the people of Israel forsook the Lord and served Baal and the Ashtoreths. It is a pattern that runs through the entirety of the Old Testament like a fault line—warned, punished, returned, and warned again.

Modern scholars believe the name Ashtoreth is a calculated corruption of the original name, Astarte. In Hebrew, the word for shame is “boshet,” and the authors of the Old Testament likely took her name and embedded that shame into it. However, the most significant moment in the Bible’s relationship with her involves the wisest king who ever lived: Solomon.

First Kings 11 records that in his old age, Solomon turned toward Ashtoreth, the goddess of the Sidonians. He built her a high place—a temple on the hill just east of Jerusalem—that stood within sight of the temple of God. The Bible calls this his greatest sin, the act that fractured his relationship with the Almighty and led to the eventual division of his kingdom. Even the wisest man in history could not resist her.

King Josiah, three centuries later, had to specifically demolish the high places Solomon had built for her, meaning her influence persisted for three hundred years on a hill overlooking Jerusalem. The problem with Astarte was never that she was merely “foreign.” The ancient Near East was full of foreign gods; the issue was what she represented at the deepest level. She was female, and she was sovereign.

In a theology built around a single male god who demanded exclusive devotion, she embodied something fundamentally incompatible. She answered to no higher authority and needed no consort to legitimate her power. She was a goddess of sexuality who treated desire as sacred rather than shameful, and a goddess of war who was also a goddess of love. She held opposites together in ways the emerging monotheistic tradition could not accommodate.

She contradicted the kind of divine order that the worship of the God of the Bible demanded, yet the people kept choosing her anyway. This is what the Old Testament cannot stop recording and cannot fully explain. She was so deeply embedded in human experience and so woven into the way people understood love and war that even the chosen people of an omnipotent god could not stop reaching for her.

Religions often handle such dilemmas systematically. When a new faith encounters a deity that is too beloved or too persistent to be ignored, it does not erase the god; it corrupts it. It takes what was once worshipped and makes it dangerous. What was holy is reframed as shameful, and what was sacred is reassigned to the “other” side. The goddess of love becomes the demon of lust, and the goddess of war becomes the spirit of destruction.

The sacred feminine is transformed into the corrupting temptress. The power remains, but it is moved from the side you pray to, to the side from which you must protect yourself. The plural form of her name, Astaroth, was carried into Greek and Latin translations without its feminine context. In 1458, the Book of Abramelin assigned that sound to a demon. He was now a male, a great Duke of Hell.

The gender was reversed, and the divinity was inverted. The Queen of Heaven was reassigned to the hierarchy of hell, ranked, numbered, and bound by ritual, commanded by magicians who had to hold a protective ring to their faces to survive the encounter. Five thousand years of worship, of temples stretching from Mesopotamia to the Mediterranean, collapsed into a single entry in a list of demons. This is what they do to gods they cannot kill.

In the Kabbalah, there exists a map of divine reality called the Tree of Life, consisting of ten spheres known as the Sephiroth, each representing an aspect of God’s nature as it flows into creation. Wisdom, understanding, mercy, strength, and beauty—these emanate downward through ten stations into the material world. However, there is also the other tree: the Qliphoth, the shells or the husks.

The word “Qliphoth” refers to the outer rind of a fruit, the part that contains no light. Where the Sephiroth are luminous vessels of divine emanation, the Qliphoth are their shadow counterparts. The structure is identical, but inverted and distorted, with each attribute twisted into its most destructive form. The fourth sphere of the Tree of Life is Chesed, representing unconditional love and mercy.

Its shadow sphere is called Ga’ag Sheklah, the “breakers in pieces,” and its ruling archdemon is Astaroth. The goddess of love is thus positioned by Kabbalistic texts as the ruler of love’s shadow. While Chesed is mercy so vast it holds everything, some interpretations hold that Ga’ag Sheklah represents what happens when that love loses its boundaries—when mercy becomes suffocation, and devotion becomes obsession.

They took a domain and turned it into a punishment. She was the goddess of love, but they made her the archetype of what love becomes when it breaks and turns inward. The Qliphoth are not merely “evil” in the way Christianity understands evil as something external; they are the shadow side of the divine itself, parts of God that exist in imbalance. Astaroth was placed there as a distortion of the same power she always carried.

The grimoires that followed did not abandon her; they kept returning to her. Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, published in 1577, described him as a great and strong duke emerging in the shape of a foul angel sitting upon an infernal dragon, carrying a viper on his right hand. The language is designed to repel, yet the power is unmistakable.

In 1836, the French occultist Jacques Collin de Plancy published the illustrated edition of the Dictionnaire Infernal, which became the most influential work of demonology ever produced. The artist Louis Le Breton illustrated his Astaroth as a nude figure with claws, feathered wings, a crown, a serpent, and riding a lupine demon. Collin de Plancy described him as a “very ugly angel,” a phrase that sat in the dictionary right beside the entry for the Levantine goddess Astarte.

Even in a dictionary of hell, the two versions of her could not be fully separated. But there is a detail in the lore that is more extraordinary than any illustration. Arthur Edward Waite, a rigorous 19th-century occult scholar, documented a claim appearing across multiple sources: before his fall, Astaroth was a prince of the order of Thrones. The Thrones are among the highest orders of angels, beings of pure contemplation and carriers of divine justice.

He fell from the highest reaches of order to an entry in a list of demons. In 1634, a series of possessions occurred at a convent in Loudun, France, where a group of Ursuline nuns was subjected to a documented exorcism. The abbess, Jeanne des Anges, was said to be possessed by multiple demons, including Astaroth. Aldous Huxley later wrote about the case in The Devils of Loudun, one of the most precise accounts of institutional hysteria ever written.

The demon who grants knowledge of all things spoke through the body of an abbess, proving that the goddess of love and war had been reduced to a voice emanating from a woman who had dedicated her life to God. The Ars Goetia, the most influential grimoire in Western occultism, describes what Astaroth gives to those who summon him: true answers regarding things past, present, and to come.

He offers the discovery of all secrets and the ability to make men remarkably knowledgeable in all liberal sciences. This is the language of a teacher. The grimoire built an entire apparatus of protection around him—the ring, the distance, the ritual circle—and described the figure who, once safely contained, would sit with the practitioner and answer questions.

People continued asking these questions throughout the medieval period, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and into the modern era. Serious practitioners sought him out specifically for what he knew, to understand hidden things and the secrets of creation. Aleister Crowley, the most influential occultist of the 20th century, incorporated him into his system of cabalistic correspondences, mapping him as a force that existed whether one acknowledged it or not.

There is one line in the Ars Goetia description that has always drawn seekers back. It states that he will declare, if desired, how the spirits fell and the reason for his own fall. He knows what she was. He will tell you if you ask. She is still here, not in temples or hymns, but as Astaroth.

They changed her name, they reversed her gender, they embedded shame into her identity, they stripped her of her divinity, they made her breath poisonous, and they gave her a rank in hell, telling us to hold a ring to our faces if we dared to get too close. And yet, when we want comfort, we pray; when we want salvation, we go to church; when we want moral instruction, we open scripture.

But when we want to understand—really understand—the hidden things, the nature of the fall, and the secrets that sit underneath everything that official religion has built, we do not go to God. We go to the demon.

The persistence of this figure across millennia suggests that Astaroth is not merely a name in a book, but a reflection of a fundamental human experience. Throughout the ancient world, from the Sumerian plains to the bustling ports of the Phoenician coast, people recognized something in the goddess that spoke to the duality of their own lives. They saw in her the intersection of the domestic and the devastating.

It is a profound realization that the same force which governs the warmth of love also governs the coldness of war. This duality is often too much for organized belief systems to process, which is why they seek to divide it. By taking the feminine, sovereign, and multifaceted nature of the goddess and fracturing it into “demon” and “divine,” they attempt to control the chaos of the human experience.

But the history of the grimoires tells a different story. It shows that even those who sought to bind the demon were ultimately looking for truth. They feared the entity, yet they were drawn to the wisdom that only such an ancient presence could provide. The ritual circles, the elaborate seals, and the protective rings were not just tools of command; they were barriers against the overwhelming nature of the truth she represented.

The case of Loudun remains a testament to this, showing how the fears and desires of the institutional mind can manifest as possession. The demon is not just an external entity; it is the embodiment of everything that the structure of the church had to suppress to survive. When Astaroth speaks, she speaks the repressed history of the divine, the memories of the time before the division of the world into good and evil.

As we look at the modern world, the shadow of Astaroth remains. We still live in a world that tries to categorize and contain the forces of human nature. We build structures of order to hide the wildness of existence, yet the desire to understand the “hidden things” persists. The attraction to the occult, to the dark, and to the forbidden is often simply an attraction to the suppressed parts of ourselves.

The grimoires promised that if you held the ring to your face, you would be safe. Perhaps that ring represents the boundaries we set for ourselves, the intellectual or moral constraints we adopt to avoid being consumed by the depths of our own inquiries. But even with the ring, the encounter is real. The demon answers.

The allure of Astaroth lies in the promise of total knowledge. In a world of filtered truths and controlled narratives, the idea of a figure who can explain the reason for the fall is incredibly powerful. It offers a perspective that is not bounded by the morality of the victor, but by the perspective of one who was there from the beginning.

She was the Queen of Heaven long before she was a Duke of Hell. Her story is a reminder that what we label as evil is often simply that which we have forgotten how to honor. The transition from goddess to demon is a historical process, not an ontological one. It is a change in the perception of the observer, not the nature of the observed.

To understand Astaroth is to understand the history of our own consciousness. It is to recognize the power of names, the influence of stories, and the capacity of the human mind to reframe the divine into the demonic. We are still the same people who stood in the temples of Uruk five thousand years ago, looking for meaning in the stars and in the cycles of love and war.

The temples have fallen, and the prayers have changed, but the question remains the same. Why do we love? Why do we destroy? What is the meaning of our fall? These are the questions that Astaroth answers, and as long as we continue to ask them, she will remain. She is the shadow of our devotion, the echo of our ancient past, and the silent teacher of the things that exist underneath our official realities.

The legacy of Enheduanna, the first author, lives on through the myths that refused to die. Every time we encounter the name Astaroth, we are participating in a dialogue that has lasted for fifty centuries. We are listening to a voice that has been silenced, suppressed, and demonized, yet remains persistently capable of teaching us about the complexity of the world.

Whether we view her as a goddess or a demon, the entity remains a mirror. She reflects our own desire for sovereignty, our own struggles with the intensity of our emotions, and our own need to grasp the secrets that lie beyond the reach of conventional understanding. In the silence of the ritual, in the study of the old books, and in the quiet moments of contemplation, the truth is always there.

The transition of the goddess into the demon is one of the most fascinating aspects of human history, and it tells us more about ourselves than it does about the entities we worship. It reveals our need to simplify, our need to blame, and our need to protect ourselves from the overwhelming realities of the human condition. Yet, the persistence of the original power, the “essential presence” that defined Inanna and Astarte, cannot be fully contained.

It is a power that is, by its very nature, both creative and destructive, both divine and demonic, depending on the context in which it is viewed. It is the power that makes life possible and, at the same time, makes it so incredibly difficult to navigate. Astaroth is the reminder that we cannot have one without the other, that the light and the shadow are part of the same whole.

The grimoires were not just lists of names; they were attempts to map the landscape of the human soul. They were attempts to find order in the chaos, to bind the forces that seemed too large to handle. But the fact that Astaroth persists suggests that the forces are not meant to be bound. They are meant to be understood, to be integrated, and to be respected.

The story of Astaroth is the story of us—our rise to civilization, our search for meaning, our struggles with faith, and our refusal to let go of the things that define us, even when we are told they are dangerous. She is the witness to our history, the holder of our secrets, and the enduring reminder that the divine and the demonic are often just two sides of the same truth.

As we look toward the future, it is worth considering what other gods we are turning into demons, and what other truths we are currently suppressing in the name of our modern “official” beliefs. The lessons of history are clear: nothing truly disappears, and the things we try to hide are often the things we most desperately need to understand. Astaroth waits in the silence, ready to answer, for those who are brave enough to ask.

In the end, it is not about the hierarchy of hell or the ranking of demons; it is about the persistence of the human spirit. It is about our need to find the truth, even if it resides in the shadow. It is about the power of a name that has traveled across time, surviving empires, religions, and ideologies, only to emerge, time and again, as a source of hidden knowledge.

The goddess of love and war is still the Queen of Heaven, regardless of the names she is given. She is the reality that lies beneath the surface of our perceptions, the force that moved the ancients and that continues to move us today. She is the mystery that refuses to be solved, the question that refuses to be answered by anything less than the truth.

To walk the path of understanding is to acknowledge the duality, to respect the power, and to engage with the mystery. It is to recognize that the demon is not just an entity, but a part of the world that we have forgotten how to embrace. And in that embrace, we might find not only the answers to our questions but also a greater understanding of ourselves.

The journey from the river valleys of Sumer to the pages of the Dictionnaire Infernal is long, but it is a single, continuous journey. It is a journey of discovery, of transformation, and of the enduring search for truth. And as long as the story of Astaroth is told, that journey continues.

What aspect of the transformation from divine goddess to demonic entity do you find most revealing about the evolution of human belief systems?