The seventh is a destroyer, captain of the Furies, causing wars, riots, upheavals and disturbances, mentioned in Revelation and called Abaddon. The eighth is the accusing or slandering devil whom the Greeks call diabolos, who drives people to despair. The ninth consists of tempters of various kinds, and their prince is Mammon.

Psellus distinguishes six kinds, though none above the moon. Weyer, in his False Monarchy of Demons, drawing on an old book, makes many more divisions and subordinate ranks, with their respective names, numbers, offices and so forth. But Gazaeus, quoted by Lipsius, maintains that every region is full of angels, spirits and devils, above and below the moon, in the ether and in the air, as Augustine reports from Varro in book 7, chapter 6 of the City of God.

Celestial spirits are above and aerial spirits below; or, as some have it, gods above and demigods below—lares, heroes and genii—which rise higher if they have lived well, as the Stoics held, but grovel on the ground, nearer the earth, if their lives were more base: these are manes, lemures, lamiae and so on.

They insist that no place is empty, but that everywhere is filled with spirits, devils or other inhabitants: “Heaven, air, water, earth and everything beneath the earth are full,” says Gazaeus. Although Antonio Rusca, in book 5, chapter 7 of On Hell, would confine them to the middle region of the air, these writers will have them everywhere: not so much as a hair’s breadth left empty in heaven, earth or water, above or below the earth.

The air is less full of flies in summer than it is of invisible devils at all times. Paracelsus firmly maintains this, and says that each has its own particular elemental realm. Others will have infinitely many worlds, each with its own spirits, gods, angels and devils to govern and punish it.

Some believe that every star may itself Be called a world; they call the earth a darkened star Over which the least of the gods presides—

Grégoire of Toulouse distinguishes seven kinds of ethereal spirits or angels, corresponding to the seven planets: Saturnian, Jovian, Martian and so on. Cardano discusses them in book 20 of On Subtlety, calling them “primary substances”; Trithemius calls them “Olympian spirits, who preside over the zodiac,” and so forth, and holds that they are good angels above the moon and devils below it.

He sets out their respective names and offices there, and, like Dionysius on angels, assigns different spirits to different countries, people, offices and so forth. They live around them and, as so many assisting powers, bring about their activities. In a word, he makes their number countless, as many as the stars in the sky.

Marsilio Ficino seems to support this view—whether from Plato or on his own authority, I do not know. These spirits continually rule their inferiors, who in turn rule those beneath them, all in a chain of subordination. Those nearest the earth rule us; we divide them into good and evil angels, call them gods or devils according to whether they help or harm us, and accordingly worship, love or hate them.

Most likely, though, he takes it from Plato, who, relying entirely on Socrates—“who, he writes, preferred death to falsehood”—distinguished nine kinds on Socrates’ authority alone. Presumably Socrates took this view from Pythagoras, Pythagoras from Trismegistus, and Trismegistus from Zoroaster: first God; second, Ideas; third, Intelligences; fourth, Archangels; fifth, Angels; sixth, Demons; seventh, Heroes; eighth, Principalities; ninth, Princes.

Some of these were absolutely good, such as gods; some evil; some neither, “between gods and humans,” such as heroes and daemons, which governed people and were called genii. Or, as Proclus and Iamblichus maintain, they are intermediaries between God and humans: Principalities and Princes that commanded and ruled kings and countries. Perhaps they had different places in the spheres, since the higher each sphere stands, the more excellent its inhabitants are.

Presumably this is what Galileo Galilei and Kepler are aiming at in the Starry Messenger, with its inhabitants of Saturn and Jupiter; and what Tycho Brahe touches on or hints at in one of his letters. But Zanchi rightly rejects these ideas, in book 4, chapter 3; so does Peter Martyr in his commentary on Samuel 28.

Thus, according to these men, the number of ethereal spirits must necessarily be infinite. For if what some of our mathematicians say is true—if a stone could fall from the starry heaven, or eighth sphere, travelling a hundred miles every hour, it would take sixty-five years or more to reach the ground,

because of the great distance between heaven and earth, which some put at 170,000,803 miles—then, besides the further heavens, whether crystalline or watery, which Magini adds and which perhaps contain as much space again, how many such spirits could it hold? Yet for all this, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus and most others hold that there are far more angels than devils.

But whether there are more or fewer, “What is above us is no concern of ours.” However, as Martianus foolishly supposes, “Ethereal spirits do not concern themselves with human affairs”: they do not care about us, attend to our actions or look after us. Presumably those ethereal spirits have other worlds to reign over or business to attend to.

For now we need speak only briefly of the spirits or devils beneath the moon. As for the rest, our theologians conclude that the devil has no power over the stars or heavens. “With spells they can draw the moon down from heaven,” and so on: these are poetic fictions. That they can “halt the water in rivers and turn the stars backwards,” as Canidia does in Horace—it is all false.

They are confined to this world beneath the moon until Judgement Day, and can act only within the four elements and as God permits. Therefore, although others classify these sublunary devils differently according to their respective places and offices, Psellus distinguishes six kinds: fiery, aerial, terrestrial, watery and subterranean devils, besides fairies, satyrs, nymphs and so forth.

Fiery spirits or devils commonly act through comets, fiery dragons or will-o’-the-wisps, which often lead people “into rivers or over precipices,” says Bodin, book 2 of his Theatre of Nature, folio 221.

“If travellers wish to ward them off,” he says, “they must call loudly upon God or worship lying face down with their face touching the ground; and for this protective charm we must give our ancestors credit,” and so on. They also counterfeit suns, moons and often stars, and settle on ships’ masts: “They are seen at the tops of ships,” and are called the Dioscuri.