Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World
Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World
THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD 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 (begun in 413), 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 the 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 know many things - 'demon' means 'knowledge' in Greek* - especially about the material world. 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 neighbours, their commerce is with the clouds.' In the eleventh century, the influential Byzantine theologian, philosopher and shady politician, Michael Psellus, described demons in these words: These animals exist in our own life, which is full of passions, for they are present abundantly in the passions, and their dwellingplace is that of matter, as is their rank and degree. For this reason they are also subject to passions and fettered to them. One Richalmus, abbot of Schonthal, around 1270 penned an entire treatise on demons, rich in first-hand experience: he sees (but only when his eyes are shut) countless malevolent demons, like motes of dust, buzzing around his head - and everyone else's. Despite successive waves of rationalist, Persian, Jewish, Christian and Muslim world views, despite revolutionary social, political * 'Science' means 'knowledge' in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even if we look no further. 110
The Demon-Haunted World and philosophical ferment, the existence, much of the character, and even the name of demons remained unchanged from Hesiod to the Crusades. 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 labelled incubi; of men, succubi. There are cases in which nuns reported, in some befuddlement, a striking resemblance between the incubus and the priest-confessor, or the bishop, and awoke the 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 (in his Certainty of the World of Spirits, 1691), 'that 'tis impudence to deny it'.* As they seduced, the incubi and succubi were perceived as a weight bearing down on the chest of the dreamer. Mare, despite its Latin meaning, is the Old English word for incubus, and nightmare meant originally the demon that sits on the chests of sleepers, tormenting them with dreams. In Athanasius' Life of St Anthony (written around 360) demons are described as coming and going at will in locked rooms; 1400 years later, in his work De Daemonialitae, the Franciscan scholar Ludovico Sinistrari assures us that demons pass through walls. The external reality of demons was almost entirely unquestioned from antiquity through late medieval times. Maimonides denied their reality, but the overwhelming majority of rabbis believed in dybbuks. One of the few cases I can find where it is even hinted that demons might be internal, generated in our * Likewise, 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 argued - in his 1668 book. Of Credulity and Incredulity, that witches must exist because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true. 111
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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD<br />
mere poetic metaphor for the evil in the hearts of men.<br />
St Augustine was much vexed with demons. He quotes the<br />
pagan thinking prevalent in his time: 'The gods occupy the loftiest<br />
regions, men the lowest, the demons the middle region . . . They<br />
have immortality of body, but passions of the mind in common<br />
with men.' In Book VIII of The City of God (begun in 413),<br />
Augustine assimilates this ancient tradition, replaces gods by<br />
God, and demonizes the demons, arguing that they are, without<br />
exception, malign. They have no redeeming virtues. They are the<br />
fount of all spiritual and material evil. He calls them 'aerial<br />
animals . . . most eager to inflict harm, utterly alien from righteousness,<br />
swollen with pride, pale with envy, subtle in deceit.'<br />
They may profess to carry messages between God and man,<br />
disguising themselves as angels of the Lord, but this pose is a snare<br />
to lure us to our destruction. They can assume any form, and<br />
know many things - 'demon' means 'knowledge' in Greek* -<br />
especially about the material world. However intelligent, they are<br />
deficient in charity. They prey on 'the captive and outwitted minds<br />
of men,' wrote Tertullian. 'They have their abode in the air, the<br />
stars are their neighbours, their commerce is with the clouds.'<br />
In the eleventh century, the influential Byzantine theologian,<br />
philosopher and shady politician, Michael Psellus, described<br />
demons in these words:<br />
These animals exist in our own life, which is full of passions, for<br />
they are present abundantly in the passions, and their dwellingplace<br />
is that of matter, as is their rank and degree. For this<br />
reason they are also subject to passions and fettered to them.<br />
One Richalmus, abbot of Schonthal, around 1270 penned an<br />
entire treatise on demons, rich in first-hand experience: he sees<br />
(but only when his eyes are shut) countless malevolent demons,<br />
like motes of dust, buzzing around his head - and everyone else's.<br />
Despite successive waves of rationalist, Persian, Jewish, Christian<br />
and Muslim world views, despite revolutionary social, political<br />
* 'Science' means 'knowledge' in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even<br />
if we look no further.<br />
110
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