Demonology and Devil-Lore – Moncure Daniel
Conway (1879)
For
someone like me who loves to read older books the Project
Gutenberg website is a gold mine.
It allows me to discover thinkers and writers otherwise lost to me. Sometimes I have heard mention of the
authors or their works. Oftentimes I
have not. Either way I love digging
through their archives. This is how I
came across Moncure Daniel Conway’s “Demonology
and Devil-Lore,” an amazingly rich book that has captured my mind for the
past weeks. This book traces the
development of the demons and devils that have plagued human religious thought
since before the advent of writing. In
doing so, it explores much of our past, our collective fears, and the many ways
that gods become demons as one culture/religion usurps another.
Initially,
humanity feared everything. Mother
Nature was brutal, harsh, unsparing, and sought to destroy early man at every
turn. Humanity sought to placate Nature,
even before we invented gods. The tribe
reinforced personal rites and superstitions.
In this ancient estimation of Nature, there was no “Good” or “Evil” as
we think of them today. The earliest
revelation of humanity was the knowledge that to stay alive means killing other
living things. Primitive man saw
evidence of this constantly. There was
no favored species. All things suffered
the wrath of a hurricane, or a wildfire, or a volcano's eruption. All creatures had to kill to stay alive. Conway shows how this initial metaphysical
idea is found in the early passages of Genesis, in the parable of man gaining
the knowledge of Good and Evil. Before
humans had that knowledge, they existed in the state I described above. It was a huge metaphysical leap for early
humans to understand that some things can be seen as only Good and some seen as
only Evil. From there, it was a small
step to imagine that offerings or sacrifices would appease the Evil and please
the Good. It was in this stage of
humanity that we began to codify specific things as Demons.
Conway
describes Demons as initially being personifications of destructive force in
the world around us. They were the flip-side
of the wonder that humans felt when they looked at the beautiful Earth and the
heavens above. The very earliest
religious texts we have, the Vedas of Southeast Asia, speak in simple terms of
how the Creator brought forth all that is good and all that is evil. The Creator brought forth all that is joyful
as well as all that is painful. It took
a long time, and a period of intellectual maturation, for humanity to split
evil from the Creator, and to assign the source of evil to an entirely
malicious entity. Zoroastrian belief, a
very ancient religion, shows the next step.
In Zoroastrian thought, there are two equal and opposing forces created
at the beginning of time. Light
eternally battles Darkness. Good
eternally battles Evil. Only later did
these personifications receive proper names, and humans given their role in the
entire process, which is to strive for Good to defeat eventually the forces of
Evil in the world, creating everlasting peace and harmony. This is the next level of theological thought
humans achieved.
Once
humans saw the Universe around them as a battleground between the forces of Light
and the forces of Darkness, as stated in the text by Conway, “Man found that in
the earth good things came with difficulty, while thorns and weeds sprang up
everywhere. The Evil powers seemed to be
the strongest.” Even the greatest deity,
the Sun itself, could burn you, kill you, and wither your life away. The whole world was divided into realms
controlled by individual malicious entities, whence came storm gods, water
gods, mountain gods, etc. Early
sacrifices and offerings were not given to the “good” spirits” but to the “bad”
ones. It was the bad spirits that needed
placating, whether this was in the form of an offering meant to keep evil away,
or a sacrifice intended to send evil to an enemy instead of one’s
family/tribe. One tribe’s gods became
another tribe’s demons. This has continued
until the present day.
For
example, one of the earliest names for the glory of the Sun was Baal. Once sun-worship became outdated, and prayers
to the Sun forbidden, the god Baal was converted into the demon Baal-zebub, a
personification of the power of the Sun to rot things, and bring forth clouds
of maggots and flies. In the interim,
Baal-zebub combined both of these traits.
As most old religions, including the Hebrew faith, did not have a need
for an Evil One, their gods embodied both Good and Evil traits, such as the
Jehovah of the Old Testament who not only saves the Jews, but kills thousands
of first-born children, drowns Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, destroys whole
cities (Sodom, Gomorrah), etc. The Hebrew Jehovah is an old god, raised to
primacy by the Hebrews from a pantheon of pre-existing deities.
Conway
discusses how early humans saw the world as haunted by demons way before they
assigned specific moral qualities to those very demons. Early demons behaved like a ravenous tiger,
who kills and eats because it is in his nature, not because he is “bad.” They were not judged in the manner that
modern Christians seek to judge what they see as demons. Instead, these demons were appeased, praised,
and sacrificed to but never ignored. The
history of humanity shows evidence that one generation’s gods become degraded
until they are seen as the next generation’s demons.
For
example, In the Old Testament the Hebrews are spoken of as setting an offering
to a deity named Azazel (meaning “Strength of God”) as well as to Jehovah. Jehovah was just one of a pantheon of gods
back then. Only through endless
repetition and the “refinement” of religion by priests did Jehovah become THE
GOD, the one and only that exists (at least for the Hebrews.) As time passed, Azazel was seen as a powerful
Demon, an enemy of Jehovah. In fact, the
Hebrew myths mention four arch-demons, Azazel, Samael, Asael, and Maccathiel,
which originally represented four aspects of the divine Creator. As stated above, Azazel was the “strength of
god,” Samael meant “the left hand of god,” Asael was god’s reproductive force,
and Maccathiel was god’s retributive power.
For the past few thousand years, these four have been seen as some of
the mightiest of demons. This is how
gods, or the personifications of a god, degrade and eventually turn into
demons.
Conway
explores so much that it is difficult to discuss it all. One of the critical points he makes is the
difference between the idea of Demons, and the idea of a Devil. Demons are the personification of malevolent
forces that assail humans and animals alike.
They are not moral, and they are countered by proper sacrifice or
incantation. Conway details the earliest
demons, those of Hunger, Heat, Cold, the Elements, and Animals, as those were
the very first deep fears in early man.
As we developed socially and intellectually, the demons became more
specific, such as those of Illusion, Darkness, Disease, and Death itself. Conway explores each type and their
development in their own chapter. Very
cool.
The
Devil however, is a much later development in the theological life of
humanity. The Devil is specifically an
adversary to the Creator, who actively seeks to undermine and destroy the
Creator’s good work (i.e. the divine soul of humans). In many cases, humans ascribe the Devil more
power than that of the Creator, at least on Earth itself. Once the idea of a Devil was loosed upon the
world, humans began to imagine the world itself as a fully evil, sinful,
corrupt place. The Earth and everything
on it, ruled by the Devil himself, exists solely to test whether humans can
survive with their divine souls intact. If
successful, when they die, they end up joining all that is good in heaven and
leaving behind the carnal, sinful world of flesh and bone. Many humans today live in this theological
world. From this came the idea that
detachment from worldly pleasures is a good thing, instead of worldly pleasures
being something gifted to us by the Creator.
All the good and beautiful in the world, from food to sex to beauty
itself, is a temptation used by the devil to corrupt our souls. Once the Devil was in charge of the Earth, his
powers grew exponentially, until every manner of bad luck and evil was blamed
on Satan himself.
Moncure
Daniel Conway details everything he discusses.
He delves into the way that spiritual/religious beliefs of the populace
tend to help everyone get along, and provide them with purpose and meaning,
until a priest/sacerdotal group decides to take over and dictate what the
tribe/group is supposed to believe. This
has occurred through all of our time on this planet. Whether it was the shaman who relied on
handouts from the village to procure his services, the rabbi who dictated who
was Hebrew and worthy of Jehovah and who was not, or the priest that “explained”
exactly what the Bible stated whether or not the congregation felt or believed otherwise. Those same people gained incredible power,
luxury, and prestige from their subjugation of our collective human
beliefs. They still sit in the lap of
luxury, castigating us for being sinners; all the while, they commit the most
heinous acts of torture, sexual abuse, outright theft, and moral degradation
imaginable. They claim to know who the demons and the
Devils are, always hiding their own flawed humanity behind the veil of
organized religion. Conway hated those
bastards so much. I am eternally
thankful that I found this book and this author, another intellectual hero to add to my
ever-growing list. I highly recommend this
book to anyone seeking to understand how humans have created their gods and
demons, and how we continue to do so today.
(This book can be downloaded here: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40686 )
