Bronze statuettes of him carry a first-person text, and it is worth quoting because it explains the whole strategy: I am Pazuzu, son of Hanbi, king of the evil wind demons. I ascended the mighty mountain that quaked. The winds I went against were headed west. One by one I broke their wings.
He is not claiming to be good. He is claiming to have beaten up the competition.
The face, and why it is on the bedpost
The standard image assembles him from a lion or dog's snarling head with bulging eyes and bared teeth, goat's horns, a scaly body, two pairs of wings — one pair raised, one lowered — birds' talons for feet, a scorpion's tail, and a serpent-headed erect phallus. He appears in three formats, and the format tells you the use. Full standing statuettes, sometimes with a ring at the back for hanging. Heads alone, cast with a suspension loop, made to hang over a bed or a doorway or to be worn at the neck. And a head peering over the top edge of a Lamashtu plaque, looking down at the demon depicted below it — the guard dog at the top of the frame.
He is a first-millennium arrival. There is no Sumerian Pazuzu, no myth about him, no temple and no priesthood; he belongs entirely to the practical, apotropaic end of Babylonian and Assyrian religion, and he is known from objects and incantations rather than from literature.
Fighting evil with a nastier evil
The logic is worth spelling out because it is genuinely different from how most people expect protective religion to work. A woman in childbirth, or a household with an infant in it, is threatened by Lamashtu, who cannot be reasoned with, has no cult and takes no offerings. Praying her away is not an available move. What is available is Pazuzu — a demon of the same order, stronger, and hostile to her.
So his head goes over the bed. The pregnant woman is not being blessed; she is being placed under the protection of something horrible on the grounds that it will drive off something worse. Mesopotamian ritual is comfortable with this: Anzu, Tiamat's monsters and other defeated or dangerous beings all turn up as figurines buried under thresholds for exactly the same reason. A proven predator makes a good doorman.
His own domain, when it is described, is the wind out of the west or south-west — the hot, dry, dust-carrying wind that brings fever. That is his threat and his qualification at once.
The Exorcist, and a reversal
His modern fame comes from one film. William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), from William Peter Blatty's novel, opens at an archaeological dig in northern Iraq where the priest uncovers a small Pazuzu amulet, and the presence that later possesses a child in Georgetown is that demon. The film's imagery — the statue silhouetted against a red sky, the face — is now vastly more widely known than anything Assyriology has published about him.
It also inverts him precisely. In the ancient material he is the thing you hang up to stop a demon attacking a child; in the film he is the demon that attacks the child. That reversal is a fair example of how the modern imagination handles ancient categories: an object that looks frightening is assumed to be malevolent, when its whole purpose was to face outward.
Questions the amulets raise
Was he worshipped?
Not in the sense that gods were. There is no evidence of offerings made to him, no festival, no temple, no theophoric personal names formed with his name — and those are the four standard indicators of a cult in this culture. He was used, which is a different relationship: an instrument invoked by an exorcist and hung on a wall, more like a lock than like a patron. The distinction between gods who receive worship and beings who are deployed runs right through Mesopotamian religious practice.
Where do the statuettes come from and how many are there?
Several hundred are known, in bronze, stone, clay and faience, from across Assyria and Babylonia and beyond — findspots range from Nimrud and Nineveh to sites in Iran, the Levant and Egypt, which shows the type travelling with trade and with people rather than with a state religion. The best-known full bronze figure is in the Louvre. Because they are small, portable and instantly recognisable, they are also among the most heavily faked and most frequently looted classes of Mesopotamian object, and provenance for anything acquired in the last century deserves scepticism.
Is he a devil, or the ancestor of one?
No, and the question imports a category the tradition does not have. Mesopotamian religion has no adversary of the gods, no cosmic rebellion and no hell — the land of no return is a destination, not a punishment. Demons in this system are a class of dangerous beings, some sent by gods and some acting independently, dealt with by technique rather than by moral conflict. Whether his imagery contributed anything to later European demon iconography, with its horns, wings and animal parts, is an open question that is usually answered too confidently in both directions; the Christian devil's visual vocabulary has traceable sources in classical satyr imagery and medieval art without needing a Babylonian ancestor, and a genuine chain of transmission from these amulets has never been demonstrated. What is documented is the compositional habit itself, which the hybrid beasts hub follows across the region.