Collin_de_Plancy

Jacques Collin de Plancy

Jacques Collin de Plancy

French demonologist and writer (1793–1881)


Jacques Albin Simon Collin de Plancy (28 January 1793 in Plancy-l'Abbaye – 1881 in Paris) was a French occultist, demonologist and writer. He published several works on occultism and demonology.[1]

Quick Facts Born, Died ...

Biography

Cover of Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal (1826).

He was born Jacques Albin Simon Collin on 28 (in some sources 30) January 1793 in Plancy (presently Plancy-l'Abbaye), the son of Edme-Aubin Collin and Marie-Anne Danton, the sister of Georges-Jacques Danton who was executed the year after Jacques was born.[2] He later added the aristocratic de Plancy himself – an addition which later caused accusations against his son in his career as a diplomat. He was a free-thinker influenced by Voltaire. He worked as a printer and publisher in Plancy-l'Abbaye and Paris. Between 1830 and 1837, he resided in Brussels, and then in the Netherlands, before he returned to France after having converted to the Catholic religion.

Collin de Plancy followed the tradition of many previous demonologists of cataloguing demons by name and title of nobility, as it happened with grimoires like Pseudomonarchia Daemonum and The Lesser Key of Solomon. In 1818, his best known work, Dictionnaire Infernal, was published. In 1863, some images were added that made it famous: imaginative drawings concerning the appearance of certain demons. In 1822, it was advertised as:

"Anecdotes of the nineteenth new century or historiettes, recent anecdotes, features and words little known, singular adventures, various quotations, bringings together and curious parts, to be used for the history of customs and the spirit of the century when we live compared with the last centuries."

It is considered a major work documenting beings, characters, books, deeds and causes which pertain to the manifestations and magic of trafficking with Hell; divinations, occult sciences, grimoires, marvels, errors, prejudices, traditions, folktales, the various superstitions, and generally all manner of marvellous, surprising, mysterious, and supernatural beliefs.

By the end of 1830, he ostensibly became an enthusiastic Catholic, much to the confusion of his former admirers and detractors. In 1846, he published a two-volume work entitled Dictionnaire Sciences Occultes et des Idées superstitieuses,[3] another listing of demons. The set cost 16 francs.

Jacques Collin de Plancy was the father of Victor Collin de Plancy (1853–1924), who, for nearly a decade, starting in 1884, was French Minister to Korea and whose collected art works and books became part of the core of the Korean collections of the French Bibliothèque Nationale and the Musée Guimet in Paris.[4]

Bibliography

More information Original name, Translated ...

References

  1. J Stouff, Les Mille et un jours (2010) biblioweb.hypotheses.org "C'est sans doute la raison pour laquelle, il fut demandé à Jacques Collin de Plancy (1793-1881) qui ne connaissait par l'Orient, mais était expert en esprits et démons de toute sorte, d'en rédiger une introduction."
    - Françoise Lavocat, Pierre Kapitaniak, and Marianne Closson, eds. "Fictions du diable: Littérature et démonologie de saint Augustin à Léo Taxil". Françoise Lavocat, H Kallendorf - Renaissance Quarterly, 2008 - JSTOR "... Finally, Jean Céard examines the lingering hold that the demonology of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries exerted upon the imaginations of the later Romantics, as exemplified by authors such as Jacques Collin de Plancy, who "rediscovered" earlier demonologists. ..."
  2. Léon Frémont, Revue de Champagne et de Brie: Histoire, biographie, archaéologie. Georges Hérelle, 1880: "Jacques Collin, connu en littérature sous le nom de Collin de Plancy, naquit à Plancy, le 30 janvier 1794. Il était fils de Edme-Aubin Collin et de Marie-Anne Danton, et par cette dernière neveu du fameux Danton. Il commença ses études chez…"
  3. "Téléchargements". Esoterika.org. Archived from the original on 4 February 2012. Retrieved 19 June 2012.
  4. François Roudaut: Le Fonds Collin de Plancy à la Bibliothèque de Troyes. Slatkine, 1994; Max Milner: Romantisme, 1995 (persee.fr): "Le fonds Collin de Plancy est constitué par les livres et documents donnés en 1923 à la Bibliothèque municipale de Troyes, en exécution du legs de Victor Collin de Plancy, orientaliste et diplomate, fils du polygraphe Jacques Collin de Plancy, qui est surtout connu comme…"

Further reading


Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Collin_de_Plancy, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.