The charm it exercised over this Parisian
Asmodeus can be explained by a comparison.
So entertaind those odorous sweets the Fiend Who came thir bane, though with them better pleas'd Then
ASMODEUS with the fishie fume, That drove him, though enamourd, from the Spouse Of TOBITS Son, and with a vengeance sent From MEDIA post to AEGYPT, there fast bound.
But go a little way from France -- go either to Aleppo or Cairo, or only to Naples or Rome, and you will see people passing by you in the streets -- people erect, smiling, and fresh-colored, of whom
Asmodeus, if you were holding on by the skirt of his mantle, would say, `That man was poisoned three weeks ago; he will be a dead man in a month.'"
Based on a popular folk legend in which animals, demons and humans meet, the film follows the adventures of the young King Solomon, the Arab Princess Nama and the African Queen of Sheba, as they struggle together against the King of Demons,
Asmodeus, who is trying to seize their kingdoms.
Her interest in project Ganymede, a project that, as
Asmodeus explains, seeks to replicate "the process by which a human being is brought bodily into heaven, without dying, and accorded some measure of divine status" (Grossman 2011, 317), thus presents her with a unique way out.
7 In 1589 a German bishop claimed there were actually seven 'princes' of hell: Lucifer, Mammon,
Asmodeus, Leviathan, Beelzebub, Satan and Belphegor
In the first four books of Paradise Lost, "Satan is likened to a Titan, to Leviathan, to the sun in eclipse to a fleet, to a comet, to a gryphon, to the ship of the Argonauts, to the ship of Ulysses, to a weather-beaten vessel, to a vulture, to a scout, to
Asmodeus, to a wolf, to a burglar, to a church hireling, to a heap of gunpowder, to a proud steed" (James Whaler, Four Studies in the Miltonic Simile).
Eco may have embellished the Diana Vaughan narratives, yet as a skeptical Catholic critic pointed out in a letter to The Tablet in 1897, they were already a "preposterous extravagance," with tales of "the embracing of the chaste Diana by the beautiful demon
Asmodeus, the flying through the air on the back of monster eagles down the mouths of volcanoes in full eruption, the profanation of hosts, the blasphemous parodies of Masses and devotions ...