Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to officially present my new photographic project: The Infernal Lords Series.

I’ve been thinking for some time about a long term project to develop, and finally I got the right idea. This is not a series of random photos about Demons, but it has a general idea behind: Evil must look attractive. Most of the representations of Demons in the Christian imagery (such as the illustrations of De Plancy’s Dictionnaire Infernel) are monstrous and grotesque, although occasionally some of them can assume a beautiful look to lure humans. In my opinion, this is mostly wrong because, in order to exist, Evil must have a beautiful appearance. Evil is attraction, and has to compensate the abandon of a correct path with some kind of pleasure, which includes that of senses and, thus, sight. Consequently, Beauty must be the exterior essence of a Demon, not only his camouflage. Besides, Demons are basically Fallen Angels, who followed Lucifer’s riot and were banished from Heaven: their corruption must be something which remains on the inside, without affecting drastically their beautiful look, which was created by God himself. Consequently, each one of my Demons will have to be a beautiful impoverished nobleman, who joined Lucifer's court.
Naturally, I am an agnostic and this is just my own interpretation of what I consider just a myth, so firstly I’m far from making any theological statement, secondly I don’t really believe in Demons nor I am a Satanist, third I don’t want to offend anyone’s beliefs.

The idea of a series about the Demons came out mainly because the music of Draconian (which is often about Lucifer and the Fall) and Angel Sanctuary by Kaori Yuki are an intoxicating mixture. Apart from the guidelines above, I don’t have any rule about how many Demons I want to do, how often I have to upload something and such, so I’ll do it whenever I feel like it. The only rule is that each subject will have to be different: I won’t pose again for this series and I’ll try to use many different models.
For the physical appearance of my Demons, I’ll draw from the popular imagery, the illustrations of the Dictionnaire Infernel and, inevitably, from Kaori Yuki’s manga, but I’ll try to give it all a more personal interpretation. Some of them may have animal or monster features, but those traits won’t spoil their beauty anyhow. They will all have common traits such as the Seal with their symbol.
Working with Christian mythology is very difficult, though: the Bible doesn’t provide much information about the Demons, and the only reliable sources, the Dictionnaire Infernel and the Lesser Key of Solomon, only say how many legions of spirits they command, what position they are given in Hell and what kind of things they can perform under a human’s spell, which are extremely useless things to me. Differently from Greek or Egyptian myths, no psychological traits are given, nor is stated what relationships they indulge in or what they do that would help make a mental image of them, so I have to add a lot of details on my own. By now, I have two Demons ready and ideas for another five.
I’m very excited about this series because I know it will be a challenge: most of the Demons are male, while I have mostly female friends, so I’ll really have to search for models (read: I’ll finally start using ModelMayhem). Differently from the other series I’ve released so far, which were already done when I started the submission, this time I won’t present a finished product: it will take a much longer time and will grow step by step, which is the idea that thrills me the most.

And that’s all. By now, you can enjoy the first entry of this series, Astaroth:



I really hope you’ll like it as much as I do. Thank you for all the support you’re showing me, I really appreciate all your comments and fav, you really make it worthwile!

A.





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