User:Mac Davis/Demons
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness.
The Isa Upanishad (India, ca. 600 B.C.)
Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes (1651)
Belief in demons was widespread in the ancient world. They were thought of as natural rather than supernatural beings. Hesiod casually mentions them. Socrates described his philosophical inspiration as the work of a personal, benign demon. His teacher, Diotima of Mantineia, tells him (in Plato's Symposium) that "Everything demonic is intermediate between God and mortal. God has no contact with man," she continues; "only though the demonic is there intercourse and conversation between man and gods, whether in the waking state or during sleep."
Plato, Socrates's most celebrated student, assigned a high role to demons: "No human nature invested with supreme power is able to order human affairs," he said, "and not overflow with insolence and wrong..."
We do not appoint oxen to be Lords of oxen, or goats of goats, but we ourselves are a superior race and rule over them. In like manner God, in his love of mankind, placed over us the demons, who are a superior race, and they with great ease and pleasure to themselves and no less us, taking care of us and giving us peace and reverence and order and justice never failing, made the tribes of men happy and united.
He stoutly denied that demons were a source of evil, and represented Eros, the keeper of sexual passions ad a demon, not a god, "neither mortal nor immortal," "neither good nor bad." But all later Platonists, including the Neo-Platonists who powerfully influenced Christian philosophy and belief held that some demons were good and others evil. The pendulum was swinging. Aristotle, Plato's famous student, seriously considered the contention that dreams are scripted by demons. Plutarch and Porphyry proposed that the demons, who filled the upper air, came from the Moon.
The early Church Fathers, despite having imbibed Neo-Platonism from the culture they swam in, were anxious to separate themselves from the "pagan" belief systems. They taught that all of pagan religion consisted of hte worship of demons and men, both misconstrued as gods. When St. Paul complained (Ephesians G:14) about wickedness in high places, he was referring not to government corruption, but to demons, who they believed actually lived in high places.
For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.
Christians, at different (and same) times believed that demons and angels (and God) lived up in the sky. In the clouds. With the aid of science and technology, I've flown in many planes, and walked up many Towers of Babel. To this date I have never seen any horned beasts, any winged people, or any Gods. Myth busted. Copernicus proposed the radical idea that the Earth may revolve around the sun. Galileo, with his telescope, he looked up at the sky night after night. He saw four moons orbiting Jupiter, and proved that the cosmos does not all revolve around the sun. In 1633 he was accused of heresy, he was in house arrest for the rest of his life.
From the beginning, much more was intended than demons as a mere poetic metaphor for the evil in the hearts of men.
St. Augustine was much vexed with demons. He quotes the pagan thinking prevalent in his time: "The gods occupy the loftiest regions, men the lowest, the demons the middle region... They have immortality of body, but passions of the mind in common with men." In Book VIII of The City of God (started in 413 anno domini), Augustine assimilates this ancient tradition, replaces gods by God, and demonizes the demons—arguing that they are, without exception, malign. They have no redeeming virtues. They are fount of all spiritual and material evil. He calls them "aerial animals... most eager to inflict harm, utterly alien from righteousness, swollen with pride, pale with envy, subtle in deceit." They may profess to carry messages between God and man, disguising themselves as angels of the Lord, but this pose is a snare to lure us to our destruction. They can assume any form, and <demons know many things.> However intelligent, they are deficient in charity. They prey on "the captive and outwitted minds of men," wrote Tertullian. "They have their abode in the air, the stars are their neighbors, their commerce is with the clouds."
Demons, the "powers of the air," come down from the skies and have unlawful sexual congress with women. Augustine believed that witches were the offspring of these forbidden unions. In the Middle Ages, as in classical antiquity, nearly everyone believed such stories. The demons were also called devils, or fallen angels. The demonic seducers of women were labeled incubi' of men, succubi. There are cases in which nuns reported, in some befuddlement, a striking resemblance between the incubus and the priest-confesssor, or the bishop, and awoke next morning, as one fifteenth-century chronicler put it, to "find themselves polluted just as if they had commingled with a man." There are similar accounts, but in harems not convents, in ancient China. So many women reported incubi, argued the Presbyterian religious writer Richard Baxter "that 'tis impudence to deny it." He also said in the same work "The raising of storms by witches is attested by so many, that I think it needless to recite them." The theologian Meric Casaubon made a small error of logic in 1668's Of Credulity and Incredulity—that witches must exist, after all, everybody believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true.
In Pope Innocent VIII's Bull of 1484, he declared:
It has come to Our ears that members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi, and succubi, and that by their sorceress, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women.
Pope Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture, and execution of countless witches all over Europe. They were guilty of what Saint Augustine had described as "a criminal tampering with the unseen world." Sounds bad huh? Despite "members of both sexes" it was girls and women who were so persecuted.
Many leading Protestants of the following centuries, their differences with the Catholic Church notwithstanding, adopted nearly identical views. Even humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More believed in witches. "The giving up of witchcraft, is in effect giving up the bible," John Wesley, the founder of Methodism said. William Blackstone, jurist, wrote in Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765):
To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages of both the Old and New Testament.
The bible also says witches plague the Earth. The Bible says the Earth is flat, the Bible says demons and angels live in the sky, But do followers ever think twice of it? No.
Pope Innocent commended "Our dear sons Henry Kramer and James Sprenger" who "have been by Letters Apostolic delegated as Inquisitors of these heretical [de]pravities." If "the abominations and enormities in question remain unpunished," the souls of multitudes face eternal damnation.
Innocent appointed Kramer and Sprenger to write a comprehensive analysis, suing the full academic armory of the late fifteenth century. They produced Malleus Maleficarum, the "Hammer of Witches"—which is probably the most terrifying document produced in human history.
It became an expense account scam. All costs of her investigation, trial, and execution were paid for by the accused or her relatives. The money went to her guards, banquets for her judges, the travel expenses of a messenger sent to fetch a more experienced torturer, wood, tar, hangman's rope. There was also a bonus to the members of the tribunal for each witch burned. The convicted witch's remaining property was divided between Church and State. As this legally and morally sanctioned mass murder and theft became institutionalized, as a vast bureaucracy arose to serve it, attention was turned to the middle class and well-to-do of both sexes.
The more who, under torture confessed to witchcraft, the harder it was to maintain that he whole business was mere fantasy. Since each witch was made to implicate others, the numbers grew exponentially. These constituted "frightful proofs that the Devil is still alive," as it was later put in America in the Salem witch trials. In a credulous age, the most fantastic testimony was soberly accepted—that tens of thousands of witches had gathered for a Sabbath in public squares in France, or that 12,000 of them darkened the skies as they flew to Newfoundland. The Bible had counseled, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Legions of women were burnt to death. This method of execution was adopted by the Holy Inquisition to guarantee literal accord with a well-intentioned sentence of law "The Church abhors bloodshed." The most horrendous tortures were routinely applied to every defendant, young or old, after the instruments of torture were first blessed by the priests. Innocent himself died in 1492, following unsuccessful attempts to keep him alive by transfusion which resulted in the deaths of three boys, and by suckling breasts.
In Britain, witch-finders, "prickers," were employed, receiving a handsome bounty for each witch found. Typically they looked for "devils marks," scars or birthmarks, or nevi, that when pricked with a pin neither hurt nor bled. A simple slight of hand often gave the appearance that the pin penetrated deeply into the witch's flesh. Upon the gallows, one mid seventeenth-century pricker "confessed he had been the death of above 220 women in England and Scotland, for the gain of twenty shillings apiece."
In Salem witch-dunkings were one of the tests. They would drop the women in a vat of water. If she floated she was a witch. You can see the problem here.
There were strong erotic and misogynistic elements—as might be expected in a sexually repressed, male-dominated society with inquistors drawn form the class of nominally celibate priests. The trials paid close attention to the quality and quantity of orgasm in the supposed copulations of defendants with demons or the Devil. Just like Saint Augustine once said "we cannot call the Devil a fornicator." "Devil's marks" were found "generally on the breasts or private parts" according to Ludovico Sinistrari's 1700 book. As a result, pubic hair was shaved, and the genitalia were carefully inspected. In the immolation of 20-year-old Joan of Arc, after her dress had caught fire the Hangman of Rouen slaked the flames so onlookers could view "all the secrets which can or should be in a women."
The chronicle of those who were consumed by fire in the single German city of Würzburg in the single year of 1598 penetrates statistics and lets us confront a little of the human reality:
The steward of the senate, named Gering; old Mrs. Kanzler; the tailor's fat wife; the women cook of Mr. Mengerdorf; a stranger; a strange women; Baunach, a senator, the fattest citizen in Würtzburg; the old smith of the court; an old women; a little girl, nine or ten years old; a younger girl, her little sister; the mother of the two little aforementioned girls; Liebler's daughters; Goebel's child, the most beautiful girl in Wützburg; a student who knew many languages; two boys from the Minister, each twelve years old; Stepper's little daughter; the women who kept the bridge gate; an old woman; the little son of the town council bailiff; the wife of Knertz, the butcher; the infant daughter of Dr, Schulz; a blind girl; Schwartz...
On and on it goes. Some were given human attention: "The little daughter of Valkenberger was privately executed and burnt." There were 28 public immolations, each with 4 to 6 victims on average, in the small city in a single year. This is just a small part of what was happening all across Europe. No one knows quite haw many were killed altogether. Guesses range from hundreds of thousands to millions.
Those who raise possibilities, are attacking the Catholic Church, and ipso facto committing a mortal sin. Critics of witch-burning were punished and sometimes themselves burnt. The inquisitors and torturers were doing God's work. They were saving souls. They were foiling demons.
Witchcraft was not the only offense that merited torture and a holy burning. Heresy was a much more serious crime, and heretics were punished ruthlessly.
In the sixteenth century scholar William Tyndale thought about translating the New Testament into English. But if people could actually read the Bible in their own language, themselves, instead of arcane Latin, they could form their own independent religious views. They might conceive of their own private unintermediated line to God. When Tyndale tried to publish his translation, he was hounded and pursued all over Europe. Eventually he was captured, garroted, and for good measure burned at the stake. His copies of the New Testament later became the basis of the exquisite King James translation of the Holy Bible.
[...]
— [Mac Davis] (talk)
