Happy Spooky Season, everyone! As always, I want to dedicate my posts in the month of October to a scarier-than-usual topic. A while back, I wrote about our collective fear of demons as an embodiment of guilt and fear of punishment. This October, I want to expand on that a little, so join me for [imagine some dramatic intro music here] Bar Chaplain’s Guide to Demonology! Right out of the gate, there’s a big question we need to address, so for starters…
Where Does Our Modern Depiction of Demons Come From?
This question is way harder to answer than it would first seem, and I am about to paint a few millennia of history with a very broad brush, so here goes nothing.
The Bible (normally a go-to source for a lot of Christian doctrine) doesn’t get into many specifics about how demons operate and where they come from, so a lot of Christian understanding of demons draws on extra-biblical sources and on other traditions. When you think about it, this kind of tracks with how Christianity has functioned in other areas. The bulk of our holidays (Christmas, Easter, Halloween, etc.) involve fusions with other traditions. Part of Christianity’s theological diversity comes from the many different contexts where the faith is practiced. Why wouldn’t beliefs around demons follow a similar trajectory? In fact, the word “demon” even comes from a Greek word for spirit— further emblematic of this lore drawing on a range of sources.
References to demons in the Hebrew bible are sparse and often highly ambiguous. An “evil spirit” or “the spirit of Satan” (varying by translation) guides the snake in the Garden of Eden. The Flood narrative contains a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it mention of corrupt angels. God sends an evil spirit to torment King Saul. The Accuser in the book of Job may or may not be the devil (it’s complicated). A section of Isaiah may refer to the fallen angel Lucifer or may be referencing the very human King of Tyre. And then there’s the Levitical origin of the term “scapegoat,” which has to do with sending a goat out to Azazel, which could either be the name of a very desolate region or some sort of demonic figure. And of course, all this is further complicated by the ambiguousness of Hell at this point (Gehenna and/or Sheol— maybe this is its own separate post some day). But yeah, there are a few more references here and there, but it doesn’t seem like enough to build a whole demonic lore around.
Enter the Apocrypha— specifically the Book of Enoch. While not a part of the Hebrew Bible proper, Enoch (especially a section known as “The Book of Watchers”) goes into significant detail about the various angelic and demonic entities which plagued ancient Israel, but even this is difficult to decipher due to the book’s apocalyptic style. Enoch does provide a much more detailed account of the fall of Lucifer than Isaiah, with the former explicitly describing him as a fallen angel now bent on causing chaos. Both Enoch and the Hebrew Bible pull the maneuver of taking other culture’s deities and remaking them into demons —Moloch, Beelzebub, Azazel (who is definitely an entity and not a place this time around), and so on. Thanks to the interplay between the Hebrew Bible, Talmud, Apocrypha, and local legend, by the time Jesus arrives on the scene, the Jewish people are working with a much more structured demonology with named characters, hierarchies, and rules.
The New Testament’s demons have a clear objective: tempting, tormenting, and/or possessing people in order to sow chaos and suffering. Lucifer/Satan is firmly established as their prince, and they also have a more definite base of operations and place of eventual confinement: Hell (a modified version of Gehenna with some likely influences from the Greek Tartarus). New Testament demons show up in a variety of forms— the possessing demons cast out by Jesus and the Apostles, the manipulative “powers of the air” in Paul’s letters, the warlike demons and fallen angels of Revelation, and so on. These demons are also more akin to what we see in modern popular culture (with Revelation in particular providing a lot of serpentine and bestial imagery), but in truth, there’s still a pretty lengthy evolution ahead over the next two millennia.
Time for the lightning round:
Tertullian and Basil of Caesarea wrote about demons as winged creatures, with the latter theologian specifically referencing bat wings. Early Christian monastic communities used demon classification as a way of teaching about and resisting sin, and the 16th Century German Bishop Peter Binsfeld later tapped into this tradition with his influential list of demons which he classified around the seven deadly sins. Speaking of the seven deadly sins, Dante and John Milton composed two of the most epic and influential works of fan-fiction ever (The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, respectively) which would further cement demons in their punisher/tempter/possessor roles and confirm Hell as their place of residence. Medieval morality plays would prominently feature demonic characters, and later playwrights like Marlowe and Goethe would pull from this tradition in their own infernal Faust tales (more on this in a future post). Martin Luther famously felt the presence of demons during his time in exile and even supposedly hurled an inkwell at one. The list goes on.
Of course, the evolution of demons from Eden’s serpent to the CW’s Supernatural is anything but linear. As Christianity encountered Northern European, Subsaharan African, and farther Eastern traditions, characteristics of many of these cultures and their deities would be worked into Christian demonology. For example, while we’ll touch on this a little more later, “selling your soul at the crossroads” was an Ancient Greek and later Haitian legend long before it was associated with the demons of Christianity. The goat-like features in many depictions of demons (most notably Baphomet) may stem from parody of the Greek god Pan. The traditional weaknesses of demons (salt, iron, incantations) stem from a variety of folk legends. Even the practice of painting church buildings white and blue comes from Caribbean beliefs about the colors’ power to ward off evil spirits.
So basically, while there’s a little nugget of Christian Scripture at the core of our modern depictions of demons, in truth, these figures represent an incredible grab-bag of traditions along with the Christian religion’s own evolution over time. As we look at demons in the weeks ahead, it’s best to keep an open mind and to acknowledge that we’re looking at the intersection of many conflicting traditions (many of which were forcibly overwritten or assimilated by European Christianity). As we tease apart different attributes and beliefs around demons, I’ll do my best to be respectful of this and call out where other cultural influences come into play. What we don’t want to do is be prideful about this, and in that spirit, I’m going to close this already-too-long post with a quick story.
While I regularly got in trouble for my beliefs in the Evangelical spaces where I grew up, I was about fifteen years old the first time I was explicitly told I was going to Hell. I was in the company of a few youth camp leaders when an odd topic came up. One of these leaders (a 20-something named James who liked to speak with an air of theological authority) was asked about the origin of Satan. James launched into a dramatic retelling of Satan’s pride, jealousy toward humanity, and fall from grace, and then I posed what seemed like a simple question at the time: Hey, where is that in the Bible? Having just read Paradise Lost for school, I thought I detected some Milton in James’s account, and I was curious what scriptures he was pulling from. Well, James didn’t exactly respond well. He got angry. His face flushed, and he raised his voice. He accused me of questioning the Bible and doubting God, and he said I was going to Hell because of it.
It’s been twenty years since this incident, and the part that sticks with me is this: James never answered my question. Sure, he ranted at me for a while, but he never cited a single Bible verse. Rather than explain his beliefs about Satan and demons, rather than acknowledge he might be leaning on some extra-biblical sources, rather than consider for a second that he might even be wrong [gasp], he lashed out at someone a decade younger who had asked him a totally appropriate question.
As we dive deeper into this topic, please don’t be a James. Let’s all of us admit the limits of our knowledge. Ask questions. Explore. Disagree when called for, but maintain an attitude of growth and curiosity. I freely admit that I’m not a credentialed expert on this topic (something which will be very clear when we talk about possession and exorcism in a future post). Sure, I’ve had some theological and classical education. I am an ordained minister and a board certified chaplain. But I’ve also had to google plenty of stuff along the way and will probably continue to do so as this series continues.
I look forward to seeing the questions that arise as we dive into this subject.
Let’s grow together.