The Smell of Mortal Man: When the Demonic Female Preys Upon the German Pietist

Abstract

Abstract In the esoteric writings of the Medieval German Pietists, nocturnal female demons, known as lilioth, preyed upon mortal men who crossed their paths or who laid down to sleep in their territory. These lilioth could smell the scent of a man, whose body carried with it the additional value of sexual allure, and would hunt them down with their finely attuned olfactory sense. Another odor discussed in these texts, the smell of flying ointment, guaranteed invisibility and offered invulnerability to night-time travelers of both sexes which mirrors the phenomenon known in contemporary Latin sources under the term cursus. In these texts, Jewish mystics, before the dawn of the Kabbalah, rewrote the widely known folklore traditions and fairy tales common to both Jewish and Christian cultures in the Middle Ages. The study presented here is therefore aimed to provide insight into a previously underestimated chapter in Jewish esoteric and kabbalistic sensorium, namely, the olfactory experience.