This is the story of how a God became a demon– specifically, of how Baal became Belphegor.

The name Belphegor derives from the Baal of Peor, which means “Lord of the Opening.” We know very little about this Baal except for what is written in the Hebrew Bible, all of which is from the perspective of his enemies. 

Maybe this Baal Peor was an aspect of Baal Hadad, the supreme deity of the Canaanites. But since “Baal” just means “Lord,” we can’t be completely sure that the Lord of Peor is the same as Lord Hadad. 

There were many Baals, in fact– Baal Zephon, the lord residing on Mount Zephon; Baal Berith, the Lord of the Covenant who was briefly worshiped by the Israelites when they went astray from their God; Baal Zebul, Lord of the Heavenly Dwelling, who became Beelzebub, Lord of Flies; and the ram-horned Baal Hammon, also called Baal Karnaim, which means “The Lord of Two Horns.” How they all relate to each other is difficult to say. Our sources are few. History has been written by the victors, and in the battle for worshippers and reverence, Yahweh won and Baal lost.

We do have fragments of an Ugaritic epic known as the Baal cycle, which describes the exploits of Baal Hadad on his way to becoming king of the Gods. This Baal is a god of rain and storms. In the dry region of ancient Canaan, rain was crucial for agriculture. Without the rain, one did not eat. During the hot summer, Mot, God of Death, was considered to reign on Earth, while Baal retreated to the underworld. His return in the wet season heralded the defeat of death and restoration of the earth’s fertility. 

Baal was not merely a rain god. He was also a warrior. He did battle with many gods, including the Death God Mot. Describing his victory, one text says:

“Sun rules the Rephaim, Sun rules the divine ones: 

Your company are the gods, see, the dead are your company.”

The text is fragmentary, but these words are seemingly spoken to Baal by Shapsu, the sun goddess. She is granting Baal partial authority over her legions of the dead. But why should the sun be connected to the dead? It seems an odd association to us now, but the ancient Canaanites believed that every night, the sun sank beneath the earth and traveled through the underworld. That meant that the sun goddess Shapsu was a liminal figure, constantly traveling between the lands of the living and of the dead. 

This connection of Baal Hada to the dead brings us back specifically to Baal of Peor. Psalm 106 contains these lines: 

They joined themselves also unto Baal-peor,

And ate the sacrifices of the dead.

This is probably the most reliable description of the worship of Baal of Peor that we have. It seems that during rituals to him, food was offered to the mighty ancestors, the Rephaim. The living ones making the offering would then consume it themselves. To me this seems like a beautiful practice, and I plan to try “eating with the dead” in a manner inspired by this. 

But the worshippers of Yahweh bitterly resented the cult of Baal, and struggled against it for hearts and minds. In the Bible we read that Israelite men and women turned away from Yahweh and went “whoring” after Baal. Some have taken this to mean that the worship of Baal involved sexual rites, but there’s not really much evidence to support that. I personally would love to believe in ecstatic orgies in Baal honor, just because that seems fun– however, “whoring” after Baal was probably purely metaphorical. The idea is that Israel is “cheating” on Yahweh by worshiping Baal. It’s simply a comparison of religious infidelity to sexual infidelity. The other meaning of “whoring” after Baal is that Israelites were intermarrying with Canaanite Baal worshippers, and in some cases religiously converting to worship of Baal themselves. 

So the followers of Yahweh did everything they could to suppress the cult of Baal, mainly by smashing his idols wherever they found them. Yahweh’s faithful triumphed, and the worship of Baal faded away. The rest is well-known history. 

Long after Baal’s worship had become a thing of the past, Yahweh’s followers continued to demonize and slander him. I say with love that the Jewish sense of humor can be quite scathing, and on the topic of Baal of Peor, the Rabbis were merciless. A midrash was invented that “the opening” of which Baal was Lord was actually the anus. They claimed that Baal of Peor was worshiped by defecating in front of his statue. 

And so Belphegor was born. Woven together from all these threads of legend and slander, a unique and baffling demon was created– Belphegor, Lord of the Dead, a demon of the sun, and the patron of… feces. 

Belphegor’s association with shit can be off-putting. I know it was to me. But if we can set aside our disgust and contemplate the deeper meaning of excrement, we will realize that the scatalogical Belphegor we know today is not so very far from the agricultural fertility god of the Canaanites. After all, manure makes fertile. Eating and excreting are parts of the same process, and Belphegor is there at both ends. 

The element of earth itself, the soil from which all things grow and upon which our lives depend, is largely made of shit and corpses. Dead plant and animal matter, as well as feces, turns into rich compost from which new life can emerge. The sun provides the warmth which allows things to rot and fester and return in a new form. 

Baal himself was a god who died and was reborn. He was swallowed whole by Mot, god of Death. His younger sister Anat, and Shapsu, goddess of the sun, traveled through the bowels of the underworld to bring him back to life. His revival brought healing, nourishing rains after seven years of drought. One could even say that not only was Baal eaten, but also digested and excreted, returned to the earth in a new, fertilizing form. Without him, the people of the earth had been starving, wasting away in famine. Baal’s rains allowed their crops to grow again. The god himself, in this way, is synonymous with food. And what is eaten must be expelled. So we see that Belphegor’s fecal nature and his association with death are merely diabolic veils before his powers of nourishment and life. 

Belphegor as a solar demon is often connected to the concept of the Black Sun. The alchemical black sun has nothing to do with the Nazi symbol, which isn’t even actually called the black sun but rather the sonnenrad, or “sun wheel.” In alchemy, the black sun represents the phase of putrefaction, which allows what is not needed to disintegrate and fall away in order for purity to emerge. This association with the dark or inverse sun echoes Baal’s connection to the sun of the underworld, the sun of night. Also, a literal “black sun” in scientific terms would surely be a black hole, a very fitting thing for the Lord of the Opening to be associated with. The other natural occurrence of a black sun is a solar eclipse, and Baal’s legend also mentions the sun vanishing or going dark when he died. 

The concepts and images that surround demons can often seem negative, menacing or disgusting, but when we look deeply into demons, we find that they contain the bright sides of existence as well as the dark. Neither dying nor shitting is actually horrifying– at least not compared to a world without death or excretion. Our bodies must expel waste in order to live, and holding that all inside would be much more repulsive than getting it out. And while eternal life may seem like an appealing fantasy, and death and loss are frightening and painful, death makes way for new lives, and saves us from a monotonous world of the same fucking people doing the same things again and again for all of eternity. It is better to eat and shit, to live and die, than to do neither. These processes, the good and the bad, are merely parts of the mechanics of existence. 

Belphegor represents these processes, at once life-giving and death-dealing, rancid and beautiful. Not for nothing was Baal known as Lord of the Earth. The storm that makes fertile can also bring destruction, the feces that spread disease can also make plants grow. Belphegor stands for the ambiguous, double-edged nature of the earth and its cycles, and his repulsive aspects protect us from over-romanticizing or sentimentalizing nature.