![dictionnaire infernal demons dictionnaire infernal demons](https://the-public-domain-review.imgix.net/essays/defining-the-demonic/24054705548_a87ba6852f_c.jpg)
As with the many demonic chimeras that populate his dictionary, Collin de Plancy was a mélange of disparate parts. Like his uncle, Collin de Plancy was originally a partisan of liberty, equality, and fraternity, an enthused reader of Voltaire and a zealous rationalist and skeptic also like his uncle, he would ultimately see himself reconciled to that Church he had rejected, though with a detour through the darker corners of demonology. have come only from deserters of the faith.” The preface authoritatively claimed that Collin de Plancy had “reconfigured his labors, recognizing that superstitious, foolish beliefs, occult sects and practices. By the Dictionnaire’s final edition of 1863, the publishers could assure the reader that the “errors” previously highlighted had now been eliminated, the catalogue now fully congruent with Catholic theology. As he labored at subsequent editions, however, the secular folklorist found himself more and more pulled in by the lure of demonology, a passion which would eventually lead him, by the 1830s, to enthusiastically embrace Catholicism. When the Dictionnaire was first published in 1818, Collin de Plancy was a dutiful student of the new rationalism who set out to catalogue what he called “aberrations and germs or causes of errors”. Astaroth is a convenient symbol for the oddity of Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire, for the demon represents a muddle of cultural forces: rationalism and superstition, systematization and the occult, the Enlightenment and the Romantic movement.