Asmodeus – the Posing Devil

Asmo Moonlighting as Artist Model

This hardly counts as literature, but a sharp-eyed reader spotted this painting at the National Gallery of the Afterlife. We dug deeper, and uncovered an interesting story.

In Binsfeld’s classification of demons, Asmodeus represents lust… and yet, as you have doubtless observed when confronting him in his intimidating role as the Boss of the Abyss, he has an endearing awkward shyness. You can see it in his gestures of self-conscious despair when we target his “boils,” and his dejected air of submission when presenting his wings in the second phase of battle is heartbreaking. The fact is, Asmo suffers from body-image problems, and no longer sees himself as the “Prince of Lechery.”

His therapist, Dr. Luis Velez de Guevara, has been helping Asmodeus rekindle his latent sense of mischief. As an experiment, he urged his patient to try posing for life-drawing classes at art schools. Asmo soon found that he enjoyed the work, and he takes it seriously enough to adopt statuesque poses on a dias of marble… frozen in one position for hours as students work to capture the unfamiliar details of his alien anatomy. His business card simply says “Le Diable Posant,” the posing devil.

Inevitably, this has moved beyond night classes at art schools, and Asmo is particularly proud of the installation shown in the photo above.

Update from late-2021: Asmodeus has apparently signed a contract for some kind of guerrilla marketing program. He cuts quite an imposing figure as a mural on a 12-story building… some pedestrians shudder and hurry past, while others stop and admire him. I asked him what it was about last night in the Abyss, and he threw a lava ball at me with a big wicked grin. I have been hearing rumors of an Asmo-branded health product leveraging the “Prince of Lechery” persona from his salad days, but they are keeping it under wraps until the start of the Christmas shopping season.

This is part of the In Death: Unchained literature collection by Steven K. Roberts.