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Abaddon
Also
Apollyon, Appolyon and Appolion (Greek).
Abaddon — literally meaning destruction, ruin or perdition — is the Hebrew
name of the demon
identified as the 'angel' of the
bottomless pit, or the abyss, in
Revelation, 9:11, who ties up the
Devil for a millennium. Also known as
'The Destroyer', from his role as one of the destroying angels of the
Apocalypse.
In
Job 26:6, and
Proverbs 15:11, the word Abaddon
arises in conjunction with Sheol. He is further identified as the Devil
himself in the 3rd century
Acts of Thomas, as well as in
John Bunyan's
Puritan classic,
Pilgrim's Progress.
Abaddon/Apollyon is the chief of the demons of the seventh hierarchy, the
king of the grasshoppers, or demon locusts (described as having the bodies
of winged war-horses, the faces of humans, and the poisonous curved tails of
scorpions).
Cornelius Agrippa
was the one that equated Abaddon with Apollyon, and positioned him as the
monarch in the lower shadow of the sphere of the planet Venus, which is the
Sephirah of Netzach on the Kabbalistic Tree:
"The seventh mansion the Furies possess, which are
powers of evil, discords, war and devastations, whose prince in the
Revelations is called in Greek Apollyon, in Hebrew Abaddon, that is
destroying and wasting"
(Occult
Philosophy, Book 3, Chapter 18).
The biblical verse cited by Agrippa is Revelation 9:11, which reads:
"And they had a king over them, which is the angel of
the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the
Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon."
As described in Revelation, Apollyon opens the gates of the abyss and
unleashes upon the earth his swarms of demons locusts, who then proceed to
torture those of mankind who do not bear the seal of God upon their
forehead. After that, he is supposed to seize
Satan
himself, bind him and toss him into the bottomless pit for a thousand years.
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