Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

The Demon-Haunted World
God has no contact with man,' she continues; 'only through the
demonic is there intercourse and conversation between man and
gods, whether in the waking state or during sleep.'
Plato, Socrates' 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 the 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 to 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, as 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, 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 'pagan' belief systems. They taught that all of
pagan religion consisted of the worship of demons and men, both
misconstrued as gods. When St Paul complained (Ephesians vi,
12) about wickedness in high places, he was referring not to
government corruption, but to demons, who 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.
From the beginning, much more was intended than demons as a
109