Shedim

Shedim: The Shedim in Jewish Demonology

The Shedim are supernatural beings found throughout Jewish demonology and folklore whose nature is considerably more complex than the simple English translation “demons” suggests. The Hebrew word shedim is plural, while the singular form is shed or sheyd. Over time the term became broad enough to encompass spirits, ghosts and other supernatural entities, yet the older traditions surrounding the Shedim describe beings with a much more distinctive origin and character.

One particularly disturbing tradition identifies them as the supernatural offspring produced when a human man becomes connected sexually with a female demon such as Lilith or another succubus. Within this understanding the Shedim were effectively regarded as a man’s hidden demonic children, existing beyond his ordinary household but nevertheless possessing a supernatural claim upon him.

The same idea appears in legends concerning Adam. After the expulsion from Eden, Adam was believed in some traditions to have separated temporarily from Eve and to have reunited during that period with Lilith. Their union produced numerous spirit children who became identified with the Shedim. Another tradition traces them instead to Naamah, whose offspring were associated with the rebel angels Azazel and Shemhazai. These different accounts were never necessarily intended to form a single genealogy, but together they reveal how deeply the Shedim became entangled with Jewish legends concerning forbidden unions between human and supernatural beings.

The Demonic Children at the Grave

The belief that Shedim could be the supernatural offspring of human men gave rise to one of the strangest funerary traditions associated with them. When a man who had fathered such beings died, his Shedim were believed to appear at his burial because they too regarded themselves as his children. They came to mourn beside the grave and attempted to claim their share in their deceased father.

Their appearance was regarded as dangerous enough that a man’s legitimate children could be instructed to remain away from the graveside during burial. The concern was not merely that evil spirits might be present in the cemetery. The danger arose because two families were symbolically converging upon the same dead man: the recognised human descendants and the supernatural offspring generated through illicit or uncontrolled sexuality.

A seventeenth-century account describing beliefs among German Jews preserves the tradition in unusually vivid language:

They [Jews] firmly believe that if a man’s seed escapes him, it gives rise, with the help of mahlath [a female Demon] and Lilith, to evil spirits, which however die when the time comes. When a man dies and his children begin to weep and lament, these shedim, or evil spirits, come too, wishing, along with the other children, to have their part in the deceased as their father; they tug and pluck at him, so that he feels the pain, and God himself, when He sees this noxious offspring by the corpse, is reminded of the dead man’s sins.

The imagery is remarkable because the Shedim are not presented merely as spirits attracted to death. They arrive because they regard the corpse as belonging to their own father, and their appearance makes the man’s hidden sins visible at the very moment when his earthly life is being brought to its final conclusion.

Protecting the Dead from the Shedim

A protective burial custom developed around this fear. Before the corpse was lowered into the grave, ten men could dance around it in a circle seven times while reciting the 91st Psalm or other protective prayers. The movement created a ritual boundary around the deceased and was intended to prevent the Shedim from approaching him.

After the circling had been completed, a stone was placed upon the bier while Genesis 25:6 was recited: “But unto the sons of the concubines, which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away.”

Within this funerary context the biblical passage acquired a supernatural meaning. The Shedim were treated symbolically as children who possessed some relationship to the dead man but who nevertheless had to be dismissed before burial, much as Abraham had sent away the sons born outside his principal line of inheritance.

The Shedim of Later Folklore

As Jewish folklore developed, the Shedim acquired another identity that moved them away from the intimate and disturbing mythology of demonic offspring. Later stories sometimes imagined them as hairy, untamed beings haunting wooded places, where they gathered beyond ordinary human society and were believed to dance.

Their relationship with human beings remained unpredictable. Folklore credited them with malicious tricks when they were angered, and particularly severe stories claimed that a displeased Shed could leave a victim with grotesque physical deformities. Yet they were never universally regarded as beings of absolute evil. Individual Shedim could behave favourably towards humans and might even become helpful spirits under certain circumstances.

This ambiguity is important because the Jewish Shed does not always correspond neatly to the later Christian conception of a demon whose entire nature is defined by opposition to God. The Shedim inhabit a less stable supernatural category in which danger does not automatically exclude the possibility of cooperation.

Rashi and the Nature of the Shedim

The influential Jewish commentator Rashi, who lived from 1040 until 1105, also wrote about the Shedim and described them as possessing human form. According to his interpretation, they shared certain bodily habits with humanity because they consumed food and drink, despite belonging to the supernatural world.

Rashi also associated the Shedim with cemeteries, reinforcing an already powerful connection between these beings and places of burial. This is especially striking when considered alongside the traditions in which demonic children gathered around the graves of their deceased human fathers. The cemetery therefore became one of the places where the boundary separating ordinary human existence from the invisible population of spirits could become dangerously thin.

Shedim in the Yiddish Tradition

The Hebrew sheyd eventually passed into Yiddish, where it generated several expressions connected with supernatural behaviour. Something described as sheydish possesses a ghostly or uncanny character, while a sheydl is a small demonic being or imp.

The expression sheydim-tanz, literally the “dance of the Shedim,” developed a broader cultural life. It could evoke a supernatural dance comparable with the danse macabre and could also be associated with the wild nocturnal revelry imagined around Walpurgis Night. In a much more playful context, the same expression could be applied to children running around with such uncontrolled energy that their behaviour resembled a chaotic dance of spirits.

The survival of these expressions demonstrates that the Shedim did not remain confined to theological writing. They entered everyday Jewish language and imagination, where the ancient supernatural concept could become frightening in one situation and humorous in another.

Where Did the Shedim Come From?

The origin of the word itself remains uncertain. One possibility connects the Hebrew Shedim with the Sedim, supernatural guardian beings known from Assyrian tradition. If that relationship is genuine, the Jewish concept may preserve traces of a much older Near Eastern supernatural category whose character changed as it passed into another religious environment.

A different linguistic theory connects the term with Shaddai, one of the names of the Jewish God. Neither explanation has removed the uncertainty surrounding the word, and the question remains complicated by the enormous span of time through which the concept evolved.

Asmodeus and the Shedim

Later demonological tradition placed the Shedim under the authority of Asmodeus, one of the most famous demonic figures in Jewish lore. This gave them a ruler within an increasingly organised demonological world, but it never erased the older ambiguity surrounding their character.

The Shedim remained beings who could inspire genuine fear without becoming completely predictable embodiments of evil. Their connection with hidden sexuality made them dangerous, while their presence around graves transformed death into another point at which the consequences of human actions might become visible. Other traditions allowed individual Shedim to interact favourably with people, preserving a supernatural identity that was considerably more complicated than the modern word demon implies.

Spirits Between Two Worlds

The history of the Shedim shows how much disappears when an ancient supernatural term is translated too quickly.

Calling them simply “demons” conceals the extraordinary folklore surrounding their supposed relationship with human fathers. It also obscures the rituals developed to keep them away from the dead and the strange belief that a man’s unseen offspring might arrive at his funeral to claim him.

Behind the word lies an older supernatural world in which the boundary between humanity and spirit was dangerously permeable. Sexuality could produce invisible consequences, death could summon forgotten children, and the cemetery could become the meeting place between a family that everyone could see and another family that belonged entirely to the hidden world.

Do Not Settle for the Sanitised Occult

This is what disappears when demonology is reduced to recycled definitions and five-line summaries.

The Shedim are not interesting because somebody once labelled them “demons.” They are interesting because an entire world of belief surrounds that word, and that world becomes darker and stranger the deeper you enter it.

The Occult World Mystery School is for people who refuse to stop at the definition.

If you are satisfied with collecting demon names from social media, stay on the surface. If you want to penetrate the grimoires, folklore and forbidden traditions that created those names, then enter the Occult World Mystery School and start studying seriously.

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