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...Really, Tarl? This? This crossdressing icon of cartoon furfaggotry is what Big Bad Pirate Warlocks worship?
I mean, I understand that Medrano's art looks more like something a college freshman doodled on a Wacom back in 2011 for a $20 Furry commission than anything you'd expect to see in a serious commercial series, but with Stolas in particular, this is...kind of as good as it gets, actually? He's at least as non-retarded as it gets when it comes to well-known depictions, which is saying a lot.
The earliest surviving mention of Stolas shows up in the
Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, a text by 16th century author and Christian Demonologist Johannes Weyer. Cryptic and sinister as the name might sound, our modern association between Latin and the occult is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The
Pseudomonarchia was a short addendum to a book called
De Praestigiis Daemonum - again, scary Latin name, but it basically translates to
On Demon Tricks. The core theme of Weyer's actually-quite-progressive work can be summed up as, "Witches ain't shit but crazies and torture victims, so why the fuck are we burning them, again?". The whole intent behind the "False Monarchy of the Demons" segment was to showcase the ridiculous claims made by self-professed Demonologists, even if some of them went on to copy Weyer's list in actual grimoires because they were too dumb to grasp the concept of irony. In this version, he's a nightraven who takes on a human form and knows a shitload about gems and plants. Later grimoires changed the bird to an owl, but never really depicted him visually because he was a mid-level figure with no serious claim to fame. The earliest known
visual depiction of Stolas shows up hundreds of years later because nobody, again, nobody gave a shit about Stolas. The
Dictionairie Infernal, though, written in early 19th century France, was all about illustrations.
Its art is generally beautiful and haunting, to the point that many of its prints are still well-known. Stolas...Stolas did not get a good print. The illustrator just ate the description and shit out a long-legged owl with a crown on its head, because he couldn't be assed to try with this one.
Behold, the Great and Terrible Stolas, Prince of Hell and sniffer of oregano: