The Names of Gello
Aramaic inscriptional evidence of a child-snatching demon appears on a silver lamella (metal-leaf sheet) from Palestine and two incantation bowls dating to the 5th or 6th century; on these she is called Sideros (Greek for iron, a traditional protection for women during childbirth). Under various names, she continues to appear in medieval Christian manuscripts written in Greek, Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Romanian, Slavonic, Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew. In literary texts and on amulets, the demon's adversaries are Solomon, saints, or angels.
Knowledge of a demon's name was required to control or compel it; a demon could act under an alias. Redundant naming is characteristic of magic charms, "stressing," as A.A. Barb noted in his classic essay "Antaura," "the well-known magic rule that the omission of a single one can give the demons a loophole through which they can work their harm."
In one Greek tale set in the time of “Trajan the King,” the demon under torture reveals her “twelve and a half names”:
| “ | My first and special name is called Gyllou; the second Amorphous; the third Abyzou; the fourth Karkhous; the fifth Brianê; the sixth Bardellous; the seventh Aigyptianê; the eighth Barna; the ninth Kharkhanistrea; the tenth Adikia; (…) the twelfth Myia; the half Petomene. | ” |
Elsewhere, the twelve-and-a-half names are given as Gylo, Morrha, Byzo, Marmaro, Petasia, Pelagia, Bordona, Apleto, Chomodracaena, Anabardalaea, Psychoanaspastria, Paedopniktria, and Strigla. Although magic words (voces magicae) have often been corrupted in transmission or deliberately exoticized, several of these names suggest recognizable Greek elements and can be deciphered as functional epithets: Petasia, "she who strikes"; Apleto, "boundless, limitless"; Paedopniktria, "child suffocator." Byzo is a form of Abyzou, abyssos, "the Deep," to which Pelagia ("she of the sea") is equivalent.
Gello is named also in works by the polymaths John of Damascus (7th–8th century) and Michael Psellos (11th century), the latter of whom notes that he has found her only in "an apocryphal Hebrew book" ascribed to Solomon and not in his usual sources for demonic names in antiquity. Psellos was one of the earliest scholars to identify Gello with the Hebrew Lilith, and says that these demons "suck blood and devour all the vital fluids which are in the little infant." The 17th-century Greek Catholic scholar Leo Allatios, however, criticizes Psellos and insists that the gello, Lilith and other demonic creatures should be regarded as separate and unrelated.
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Famous quotes containing the word names:
“No, no! I don’t, I don’t want to know your name. You don’t have a name, and I don’t have a name, either. No names here. Not one name.”
—Bernardo Bertolucci (b. 1940)