WIP: Demonesses

I’m delighted to share that my study of Byzantine demonology focused on Mediterranean female demons and dark womanhood, is under contract with Scarlet Imprint and in progress.

This book brings together my work on Greek and Byzantine demonology, womanhood, ritual practice, and the long continuity of protective and dangerous female figures across antiquity, Byzantium, and later Greek tradition. Its focus is the wider world from which the demonesses emerge: the Greek understanding of the daimōn, the social and symbolic place of women, the management of birth and danger, the ritual technologies of protection, and the darker forms taken by grief, envy, and blocked fulfilment.

It explores Greek womanhood through Byzantium, establishing the familial, communal, and symbolic order within which female life was shaped, valued, protected, and judged. Central to this are midwives, healing, and protection, exploring women’s agency, ritual authority, practical and magical care, and apotropaic magic practiced to this day.

Among the supernatural figures encountered are Tyche and the Moirai, rulers of birth, allotment, fate, and the inscription of life throughout the ancient and medieval periods. We look at apotropaic magic, with protective images, devices, formulae, and ritual acts.

The darker female figures emerge through the aoroi and darkened womanhood: the woman cut off before fulfilment, dangerous return, destructive grief, envy, and the reversal of female centrality into threat. From there, the individual chapters successively examine Gyllou or Gello, Lamia, Abyzou, Empousa, Mormo, and Strigla. Each carries her own provenance, textual life, powers, and afterlives, while also belonging to a wider eastern Mediterranean field shaped by Greek, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Jewish, and Byzantine exchanges.

Throughout, I work closely with the practical record: exorcisms, protective formulae, folktales, and related materials that show the demonesses within household practice, healing, prayer, storytelling, and inherited assumptions about womanhood, danger, and protection.

DAIMONISSES is a study of female powers in their protective, fateful, and destructive forms, and of the worlds that produced, feared, and managed them. It will also feature my own original illustrations produced exclusively for this book.

I have already written summary essays on the topic, accessible through the following links:

• Why Demons are Real and Necessary: An Introduction to Byzantine Demonology
• Binding Spells and Exorcising Demons: Two Byzantine Spells in their First Translation
• By the Circuit of the Sun and the Horn of the Moon: The she-demon with hairy heels and eyes of flame

I’ll share more as the manuscript develops; subscribe and follow for updates.