Pazuzu, the Wind Demon Who Protected Mothers and Newborns
Pazuzu in first-millennium BC Mesopotamia: iconography, inscriptions, amulet heads used against Lamashtu and his modern fame through cinema.
Pazuzu is one of the most interesting cases of protection through danger. This Mesopotamian demon, depicted with anything but a reassuring appearance, was employed in the first millennium BC as a defender against an even worse evil. His heads in bronze, stone or terracotta hung at the neck, on beds and on the walls of houses in Assyria and Babylonia, and his image appeared on plaques and statuettes meant to watch over the family.
A composite iconography
Images of Pazuzu combine parts of different animals. The face has canine or leonine features, with bulging eyes, furrowed brows and a snarling mouth; the human body carries four wings, clawed hands, the feet of a bird of prey and a scorpion's tail. The most typical pose shows the right arm raised and the left lowered. The frightening appearance was not a flaw but the very reason for his effectiveness in ancient belief: only a fearsome being could frighten other demons.
The Louvre holds a Neo-Assyrian bronze statuette with an inscription engraved on the back of the wings. In it the demon introduces himself with these words: “I am Pazuzu, son of Hanbi, king of the evil lil spirits”. The lil spirits were linked to the air and the winds, and the text goes on to describe his ascent of the mountains and his strength against hostile winds.
The wind that drives away
Pazuzu was associated with the winds, in particular those that brought disease and calamity. For this very reason he could drive away other evil forces arriving through the air. His main adversary was the demoness Lamashtu, feared as a killer of newborns and a threat to women in childbirth. Pazuzu heads, often with a suspension loop on top, were worn by pregnant women or placed near the bed, and examples are known in materials ranging from gold to simple clay.
Plaques and incantations
Pazuzu also appears on the so-called Lamashtu plaques, small tablets of bronze or stone in which his face peers over the upper edge while his body, seen from behind, embraces the whole scene. On these plaques registers follow one another with divine symbols, figures of exorcists and the image of Lamashtu being driven away. Pazuzu's presence gave the composition a powerful guarantor, literally framing everything. Babylonian incantations show that these images belonged to a broader system entrusted to specialists called āšipu.
A modern fame
Pazuzu's present-day notoriety depends largely on cinema. The film The Exorcist, released in 1973 and based on the novel by William Peter Blatty, opens with the discovery of a statuette of the demon during an excavation in Iraq. The film turned Pazuzu into an icon of horror, reversing his ancient role: in the Mesopotamian imagination he was indeed a demon, but a useful one, called upon to fight on the side of human beings and of families in particular.
The figure of Pazuzu is a reminder that, for ancient cultures, the boundary between good and evil did not coincide with that between beautiful and ugly. A terrible creature could become an ally, and its very ferocity was put at the service of the house, the mother and the child, in a world in which birth remained a passage fraught with danger.