Al Basty: Daughters of Darkness Series - 1oz .999 Silver Coin - 1$ USA 2026
 
Daughters of Darkness from Royal Krakow Mint is a series of ten colored silver coins. Each coin is given to one female demon from the old sources: Mesopotamian incantation tablets, the Talmud and the Zohar, Greek poetry, Byzantine amulets, and the folklore of the Turkic steppe. Every coin is struck from 1 oz of .999 fine silver.
 
For thousands of years people blamed these ten for what they feared most: a child dead in the cradle, a mother lost in labor, a man who went out at night and did not come back whole. They wrote the names on amulets and hung them over the bed. This series puts the names on silver.
 
Each design is limited to 100 pieces worldwide. The obverse carries the American Silver Eagle design. The reverse shows one of the ten demons in full color.
 
The ten Daughters of Darkness:
1. Abyzou
Abyzou cannot have children and she does not sleep. In the Testament of Solomon she stands before the king and explains her work: every night she travels the world looking for women in labor, and when she finds one she strangles the child as it is born. If she fails at one house she goes on to the next, because she cannot let a single night pass without a death.
 
The text gives her a woman’s face, a bright green stare, hair tossed like a serpent’s, and a body hidden in darkness. Solomon orders her bound with her own hair and hung at the front of the Temple, where everyone who passes can see her.
 
2. Agrat bat Mahlat
The Talmud gives Agrat bat Mahlat an army: 180,000 angels of destruction, each one free to do harm. She once went out every night of the week. Rabbi Hanina ben Dosa and later the sage Abaye forced her back, and what remains hers is the eve of Wednesday and the eve of the Sabbath. On those two nights the Talmud warns people not to walk alone. Kabbalistic writers made her a queen of demons and a consort of Samael. One legend says she came to King David in the desert and bore him Asmodeus, king of the demons.
 
3. Al Basty
From the Caucasus to Central Asia, a woman in labor was never left alone in the room, and Al Basty is the reason. She is a tall woman with long loose hair who lives near rivers and springs. She comes to the birthing bed, pulls the lungs or the liver out of the mother and carries them to the water. Once the organ touches the water, the woman dies.
 
She also sits on the chests of sleepers until they cannot breathe, and she takes horses from the stable and rides them through the night; in the morning they stand covered in sweat with their manes braided. The stories allow one defense. Whoever takes a hair from her head, or steals her comb, becomes her master.
 
4. Eisheth Zenunim
Her name is Hebrew for “woman of whoredom”, and the sources say little beyond it. Kabbalistic tradition counts her among the four demon queens who are consorts of Samael, with Lilith, Naamah and Agrat bat Mahlat. The other three go out at night to hunt the living. Later demonology gives Eisheth a different meal: the souls of the damned.
 
5. Empusa
Empusa serves Hecate, goddess of crossroads and witchcraft, and has no fixed shape. In Aristophanes’ Frogs she turns into an ox, a mule, a beautiful woman and a dog within a few lines. Her face burns with fire. One of her legs is bronze and the other is made of dung.
 
Later Greek writers describe the empusai as phantoms that wait on the roads at night, take the form of a young woman, and feed on the flesh and blood of the men they seduce. Philostratus records the only known remedy: shout insults at her, and she runs away shrieking.
 
6. Gello
Gello was a girl from the island of Lesbos who died young, before she had married or had a child. The islanders said she came back for the children of others. The poet Sappho knew the story around 600 BC, and a proverb tied to her verse says “fonder of children than Gello”.
 
By the Byzantine period the one ghost had become a whole class of demons, the gelloudes, blamed for barren marriages, miscarriages and babies found dead in the morning. The amulets written against her list her secret names, twelve and a half of them, because a demon whose every name is written on the wall cannot enter the house.
 
7. Lamashtu
Lamashtu is the oldest figure in the series. She is a daughter of Anu, the Mesopotamian sky god, and unlike other demons she does not act on a god’s orders. She kills because she wants to.
 
Babylonian tablets describe her in detail: the head of a lion, the teeth of a donkey, a hairy body, hands stained with blood, the talons of a bird of prey. She nurses a pig at one breast and a dog at the other and holds a snake in each hand. She slips into a house where a woman is pregnant and touches the belly seven times to kill the child, or she takes the newborn from its nurse, drinks its blood and gnaws its bones. Mothers wore bronze amulets of another demon, Pazuzu, to drive her off.
 
8. Lamia
Lamia was a queen of Libya, and Zeus loved her. Hera found out and destroyed Lamia’s children; in some versions she drove Lamia to kill them herself. After that Lamia took the children of other women and ate them.
 
Hera also took away her sleep, so that she would see her dead children without rest. Zeus gave her the one mercy in the story: eyes she could lift out of her head and set aside. Greek mothers used her name to frighten children into obedience. Later writers gave her a serpent’s body below the waist and turned her appetite toward young men.
 
9. Lilith
Her name goes back to the lilitu, the wind spirits of Mesopotamia, and it appears once in the Bible, in Isaiah’s vision of a ruined land where she settles among the wild animals.
 
The medieval Alphabet of Ben Sira tells the story that made her famous. She was the first woman, made from the same earth as Adam, and she refused to lie beneath him. She spoke the secret name of God, rose into the air and flew to the Red Sea. Three angels were sent to bring her back. She refused, and accepted the price: a hundred of her own demon children would die every day. In return she claimed power over human newborns, boys for their first eight days and girls for their first twenty, sparing only a child who wears an amulet with the three angels’ names.
 
10. Naamah
Naamah means “pleasant” in Hebrew. The Zohar says her beauty led astray the angels Uzza and Azael, and that she still goes about the world, comes to men in their sleep, takes their desire and bears demons from it.
 
She is named beside Lilith as a mother of demons, and the two are said to work together: Naamah visits the father in his dreams, Lilith visits the cradle. Later tradition also blames Naamah for epilepsy in children. Each coin is housed in a protective capsule and comes with a Certificate of Authenticity that confirms its purity, weight and limited mintage. Collect one Daughter of Darkness or all ten. The oldest of these stories was written on clay before the Bible existed, and people are still telling it.