Evil spirits are ubiquitous in world literature as the invisible agents of all kinds of human maladies. This volume sets out to gather the most formative and influential stories about their origins and activities, primarily in the western tradition, but with frequent reference to the rich repositories of uncanny anecdotes preserved in Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American religions and folklore.
The English word “demon” is Greek in origin; its Latin cognate informed the same word in many European vernaculars (le demon, der Dämon, il demone, el demonio). In Greco-Roman antiquity, demons were not malevolent. Pagan poets and philosophers from Hesiod to Plato to Apuleius praised the activities of these incorporeal spirits as trustworthy guides of human decisions and as intermediaries who carried messages between mortals and the gods they worshipped. In ancient Judaism, however, questions about the origin of evil led to answers that implicated demons as nefarious actors in a cosmology informed by legends about a revolt against God in Heaven, disobedient angels who lusted after human women, and a great king named Solomon who mastered diabolical forces through the power of a magic ring. Whether they were understood as rebel spirits loyal to Satan or as the ghosts of the Nephilim, the illicit offspring of divine and mortal intercourse whom God destroyed with a global deluge, demons acquired a negative association far removed from their benign pagan origins. Demoted from their role as voices of conscience and couriers of prayer, they betrayed their sacred trusts, demeaned their divine status, and manufactured maladies to the detriment of humankind.
These traditions, both pagan and Jewish, informed the writings of the earliest Christians. Apostolic authors did not dispute the power of Satan and his minions, but struggled to overcome them in a world saturated by their evil influence. Christ’s denial of the Devil’s temptations in the desert provided a template for his followers to resist demonic forces at every turn and thereby earn their place as legitimate successors of his earthly mission. There was no systematic demonology in ancient Christian thought, but the Hebrew scriptures provided guiding principles for the early apologists. “For all the gods of the Gentiles are devils” (Psalm 95:5) was a rallying cry for Christian writers, who blackened the reputation of pagan gods with the claim that they were malevolent entities in disguise. Magic and idolatry were nothing more than deceptions that led the devotees of these gods to perdition. Augustine and other church fathers laid the foundations of medieval demonology in their refutation of the last generations of pagan philosophers, who clung tenaciously to their positive estimation of these aerial spirits. Adapting the legend of the rebel angels from ancient Judaism, Christian authors asserted that Satan and his minions were not evil in nature but fell from grace because of their own free will. Likewise, the influence of demons over mortals depended entirely on human consent, but their supernatural abilities gave them the upper hand in this contest of wills.
The late ancient world was a battleground between the soldiers of Christ and the armies of Satan. Spiritual combat was the primary motif in the hagiographical literature that extolled the virtues of desert saints like Antony and his western emulators like Martin and Guthlac. While diabolical influences dominated ordinary Christians, often through the possession of their bodies, the sign of the cross was the saint’s riposte that wrested control away from the demons and reaffirmed Christ’s victory over them. Early medieval authorities populated their edifying stories with garrulous devils in many shapes and sizes. These spirits of the air flitted easily between our world, where they lured the living into temptations, and their infernal homeland, where they tormented sinful souls in Hell. As Christianity made advances into the pagan countryside of western Europe, preachers extolled the protecting power of baptism against demonic incursions and warned their parishioners that the ancient gods were evil frauds, who were nothing less than malevolent spirits claiming the names of legendary villains and demanding worship due only to God.
After the turn of the first millennium, the currency of demons as tools for teaching the faithful remained undiminished. Founded on the authority of the New Testament and the church fathers, medieval demonology developed hand in hand with the valorization of the cults of powerful intercessory saints, especially the Virgin Mary. After the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) decreed a renewed responsibility among all Christians to make confession and celebrate the mass regularly, stories about demons increasingly called attention to the personal accountability of foolhardy people who initiated contact with them, notably necromancers and magicians, and the horrible fate that awaited them. Pacts with demons to achieve some worldly end bound hapless humans to diabolical masters. The manuals of late medieval inquisitors were replete with cautionary tales drawn from the testimony of condemned witches about the sexual demands that such contracts could entail. The question whether divine and mortal beings could mate and produce offspring was an old one, but it persisted in stories and songs about the allure of demon lovers, the preternatural powers of their children, and the dangerous costs of such unnatural congress.
While the appearance and activities of premodern European demons have dominated the western imagination for centuries, other cultures across the globe have nurtured stories about capricious spirits that play comparable roles in their respective societies. The unpredictable jinn of the Arabian Peninsula probably predated the advent of Islam in the seventh century, but they survived as a literary motif in renowned story cycles crafted by Muslim authors, in which King Solomon also played a prominent role. The Greek culture of medieval Byzantium feared a female child-eating demon known as the Gellou above all others. The legend of her depredations began on the island of Lesbos and have persisted in rural Greece down to the present day. Across Asia, stories about indigenous demons circulated long before the grip of great religious systems took hold. These tales traveled freely along the trade routes that connected the coast of the Mediterranean with the grasslands of eastern China and beyond. North America was also replete with oral traditions about malevolent spirits, many of which did not appear in writing until European settlers recorded them. In their manifold arts of depredation, all of these demons gave voice to the fears and anxieties of the cultures that created them.
While Protestants once cast aspersions on Catholic demonology as the aggregate of medieval superstition in the age of the Reformation, many Christian denominations in the present day still embrace habits of belief about the reality of demons that would have been legible to premodern Europeans. Popular preachers like the Evangelical televangelist Oral Roberts (1918–2009) and Southern Baptist minister Billy Graham (1918–2018) repeatedly evoked Christ’s mandate to the apostles to “cast out devils” (Matthew 10:8) during their ministries. It is not surprising that the practice of exorcism remains popular in modern Adventist and Pentecostal traditions throughout the world. The popularity of the film The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin, 1973) heightened the fear of demonic possession and increased the demand for this ritual, especially among Evangelical Christians. It also left its mark on popular culture. To take one example, a musical collaboration between Brian Eno and David Byrne in 1981 (My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) included a song called “The Jezebel Spirit,” which featured a vocal sample of a rite of exorcism performed in contemporary New York City played over looping rhythms influenced by African and Middle Eastern traditions. The industry of modern exorcists reminds us that many people throughout the world still blame their physical and spiritual maladies on the schemes of demons; the Devil’s work is never done.
Thriving on lies and false promises, demons have become even more insidious in an age when social media facilitates the rapid diffusion of misinformation. Accusing religious and political rivals of participation in diabolical plots is currently the most popular iteration of demonic activity in contemporary discourse. This strategy of defamation succeeds in two ways. It discredits one’s enemies as the nefarious agents in an indisputably harmful agenda, while simultaneously reducing complex problems in need of reasoned debate to an unequivocal judgment about an opponent’s moral standing. In their retreat from modern rationalism, demons have found a haven in the private thoughts of troubled minds. The belief in “inner demons”—invisible entities that whisper frenzied and destructive ideas in our heads—is the last vestige of the centuries-old traditions collected in this book about the form and function of evil spirits in human societies.
Scott G. Bruce