A Demonic Electrostatic Photographic Replication Device

It was September of the year 2007 when Dantalion, the 71^st of the 72 Spirits of Solomon, appeared to me in a dream.  He appeared in a flash of sulphurous smoke and crash of thunder. “I have come to tell you of mystical things and of riddles and of secrets beyond your ken,” he said as wisps of smoke coiled around his legs.  I found it exceedingly difficult to look upon his face for his visage was constantly in flux.  Now he would have a long narrow face with pinched cheeks, now a pallid, fleshy face with sagging jowls, now the face of a highborn woman, and now the downy bearded face of a boy at the cusp of manhood.  Yet through all these variations his voice remained constant.  He spoke with the well enunciated cadences of a learned professor.

He carried with him in his right hand a large and heavy book, and from its pages he began to expound upon a great number of topics: Commercial Painting in Fifteenth Century Brussels, the Existential Phenomenology of Heidegger, a Brief History of African Calligraphy, Polyphonic Expressionism in Everyday Mathematics, Metamorphic Zoology, French Rhetoric, and Compulsory Bloodletting…to name a few. 

From these subjects the Great Duke of Hell was able to extemporize, but what was more astounding and most frightening to me was his ability to speak of my own secret counsels, of my hidden aspirations.  He broke from his lectures to whisper of these in my ear, lest any other demonic spirits be lurking about and by chance overhear. “I am,” he explained to me, “a most discrete demon.”

And in my dream, the demon Dantalion offered me a secret of his own.  From the book he carried in his right hand he withdrew a folded sheet of paper – and it was almost literally a sheet, as large as a bed cloth. He laid the large paper across a table and I saw that it was covered in many obscure (and as many obscene) markings.  These, he explained, were his own original design drawings for an Electrostatic Photographic Replication Device.  “Truly a marvelous invention, a machine for the age of business and technology, profitable as well to educators and entertainers and all,” he said with obvious pride.

“It’s an Electrostatic Photo…what?”  I asked.

“Yes! Yes! An Electrostatic Photographic Replication Device,” he repeated with some frustration.

“It’s a copy machine?”  I think I must have laughed and I saw his face (or rather his faces) fall, his ego wounded.  He snapped shut the covers of his large and heavy book and, with a thunderous crash and the whiff of sulphur he was gone again.  He departed in such an agitated hurry that he left behind his drawings. I still have them, though like the road maps shoved in the glove box of my car, I have not been able to refold them properly.