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.
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