Demon

• 1. Introduction

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  Demons haunt nearly every culture on earth, from the wandering nightmare spirits of ancient Egypt to the fox demons of Tang dynasty China, from the galla dragging souls into the Mesopotamian underworld to the wendigo of Algonquian tradition. The word itself traces back to the ancient Greek daimōn, a neutral term for a divine power or inspiring spirit. The philosopher Plato used it to describe the guiding inner voice of Socrates. Nothing sinister there. So how did a word for divine inspiration become the name for humanity's most feared supernatural adversaries? And why did practically every civilization in history arrive, independently, at the same creature: a malevolent, invisible being that causes disease, madness, misfortune, and death? The answers cut across thousands of years of religious history, cross-cultural exchange, and the deepest anxieties of the human mind.

• 2. From Daimōn to Devil

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  The ancient Greek daimōn carried no negative weight. It described any spirit or divine power, much like the Latin genius or numen. The Greek verb daiesthai is its most likely root. Plato deployed the concept to explain the divine inspiration that Socrates experienced as a kind of personal guiding spirit. It was only when Greek-speaking Jews translated the Hebrew Bible into the Septuagint that the shift began. Drawing on the mythology of ancient Semitic religions, the Jewish translators rendered the gods of foreign nations as daimones, loading the word with implied negativity for the first time. This translation choice was then inherited by the Koine text of the New Testament.

  Early Christians accelerated the transformation. By the early centuries of the Roman Empire, pagans and Christians alike perceived the old cult statues as inhabited by numinous powers. Christians made a simple but consequential move: they turned those perceived powers into demons, the troupe of Satan. Ancient pagan statuary, once celebrated for its beauty, came to be described as infested. Far into the Byzantine period, Christians viewed their cities' old sculptures with suspicion. The English word demon, used as a synonym for devil, appears in the written record at least as far back as around 825.

• 3. Ancient Fears, Ancient Spirits

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  King Gudea of Lagash, who reigned roughly 2144-2124 BCE, left behind a hymn that names a minor god called Ig-alima as "the great galla of Girsu." That single reference from ancient Sumer illustrates how old and how specific the category of demonic being really is. In Mesopotamia, demons were generally hostile spirits of lesser power than a deity. According to the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elis, both gods and demons were children of Tiamat, goddess of primordial chaos. Tiamat created the demons as an act of revenge after the gods slew her primordial partner Abzu.

  Some Mesopotamian demons were the evil spirits of those who died in misery. Others were nature demons carrying plagues, nightmares, headaches, and storms. A class known as galla had the primary purpose of dragging mortals down to Kur, the underworld. Some texts describe them as seven in number. Extant poems portray the galla dragging the god Dumuzid himself into the underworld. Yet the galla could also fulfill protective roles, a sign that the boundary between harmful and helpful spirits was never fully settled. People protected themselves through amulets, magic, and by seeking the shelter of another demon or deity. The mythical mace Sharur was said to hold the power to slay the legendary demon Asag, described as a gallu or edimmu of hideous strength.

  Ancient Egypt developed its own taxonomy. Egyptian magical writings identified malevolent demons by marking their names in red ink. Egyptian demons divided into two types: guardians, tied to specific sacred places, and wanderers, associated with possession, plague, mental illness, and death. A guardian's aggression served a purpose: protecting the gates to the netherworld. Only those who knew the correct charms could enter the Halls of Osiris. Wanderer demons, by contrast, could arise from beyond creation purely on evil impulse, bringing suffering without divine sanction. They could be warded off but never destroyed. A sub-class of wanderers were nightmare demons, believed to enter the body to cause bad dreams.

• 4. Zoroastrianism's Lasting Imprint

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  Zoroaster made a decision that would reshape the demonology of half the world. By elevating Ahura Mazda to the status of a single supreme God, he effectively demoted the old daevas to the rank of demons. Large portions of Jewish demonology, which in turn became a key influence on Christianity and Islam, originated from this later form of Zoroastrianism and passed into Judaism during the Persian era.

  Zoroaster taught that the daevas became evil not by design but by their own free will, choosing falsehood over truth. At a later stage of Mazdaism, Ahriman, the principle of Evil, became the creator of demons and the leader of the daevas. The battle between deities and the hosts of evil demons known as dīv and druz is described in the Bundahishn. In Zoroastrian cosmology, humans occupy a world contested between Ahura Mazda and Ahriman, and are composed of three natures: divine, animalistic, and demonic. Humans are therefore obligated to fight their own demonic traits throughout life. Those who chose evil must cross the Chinvat Bridge after death, and those found wanting fall into a hell where the demons torment the damned. In the Younger Avesta, demons cause diseases and death and can be warded off through ritual purification and sacred prayer.

• 5. The Jewish Tradition's Many Demons

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  The Hebrew Bible names two classes of demonic spirits: the se'irim and the shedim. The word shedim appears in only two places in the entire text. The se'irim, mentioned once in Leviticus 17:7, are probably a memory of Assyrian demons shaped like goats, and may even be a metaphorical stand-in for real dangerous animals such as hyenas, ostriches, and jackals. Diseases ascribed to demons included catalepsy, headache, epilepsy, and nightmares. A demon of blindness named Shabriri was said to rest on uncovered water at night, blinding those who drank from it.

  The historian Josephus described demons as spirits of the wicked that enter the living and kill them, but can be driven out by a certain root. He witnessed such a performance in the presence of the Emperor Vespasian and attributed its origin to King Solomon. In the Babylonian Talmud, references to shedim and magical incantations are plentiful, and most Babylonian Talmudists accepted their existence as fact. But rationalists pushed back. Maimonides and Saadia Gaon explicitly denied the existence of demons and rejected the concept of possessing spirits entirely. Their view eventually became the mainstream Jewish understanding.

  In the Kabbalah, demons occupy a different conceptual space entirely. They are regarded as a necessary byproduct of human sin and of the divine emanation into the material world. Medieval Kabbalists characterized these demons as punishing angels of destruction, subject to divine will and not acting independently. The aggadic tradition from Persian sources populated the world with morning spirits, midday spirits, shade spirits, and night spirits, as well as demons that cause famine, storm, and earthquake. According to some aggadic stories, all of these were under the dominion of a king called Asmodai.

• 6. Islam, the Silk Road, and the Jinn

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  In Islamic beliefs, demons divide into two broad types: jinn and devils, the latter known as šayāṭīn. The jinn derive from pre-Islamic Arabian beliefs, and their presence is testified not only by the Quran but by pre-Islamic literature of the seventh century. The jinn are morally ambivalent beings, ephemeral and shadowy, primarily linked to magical practices. The šayāṭīn, by contrast, resemble the devils of the Judeo-Christian tradition, actively obstructing God's will. Unlike the jinn, who share mortality with humans, the šayāṭīn do not.

  Al-Ghazali, in The Alchemy of Happiness, outlined a neat division of labor between the two types: the šayāṭīn operate in barzakh, the intermediate realm where human mental processing occurs, while fiends encourage sensual desires. They form a symbiosis, with fiends pulling attention toward the body and šayāṭīn pulling the distracted mind away from the heavenly planes. The philosopher al-Farabi identified the concept of a kingdom with the human body, which meant that a famous Quranic story about the prophet Solomon losing his kingdom to a fiend named Sakhr could be read as a fiend seizing control of Solomon himself.

  The concept of demons spread further still along the Silk Road. An Uighur Manichaean text fragment narrates a story about a prince and three demons quarreling over three magical items: a cap that turns people invisible, sandals that can transport the wearer anywhere, and a staff. The prince outwits the demons by shooting three arrows in different directions and promising each arrow to the demon who retrieves it first. While the demons chase the arrows, the prince puts on the cap and vanishes. Among Turks, the basmalah, the invocation of the name of Allah, was used to ward off demons. Among Armenians, the cross was the protective symbol. Middle Eastern demons of this tradition were said to be immortal, capable of turning invisible, active at night, and enslaved by legendary heroes: Solomon in the Quran and Jamshid in Persian legends.

• 7. Europe's Shifting Demonologies

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  John Cassian, a Christian missionary of the fifth century, made a move that would haunt European folk belief for centuries. Declaring the pagan gods to be demons and servants of Lucifer, he gave Christian authority to the idea that nature spirits, dwarfs, and elves were all demonic. Pre-Christian magical rites and beliefs did not disappear; they were absorbed. Non-Christian symbols were substituted with Christian ones, and the resulting mix was sanctioned from above.

  In Medieval Christianity, demons were generally understood as fallen angels. Fairies from Irish and Scandinavian folktales were explained as angels who remained neutral in the war of heaven and were cast down to inhabit whatever place they landed. Protestant thinkers of later centuries went further, associating these once-neutral spirits with Satan.

  Renaissance magic opened a different door. Under the influence of Islamic philosophy and an amalgamation of Greco-Roman magic, Jewish Aggadah, and Christian demonology, European thinkers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries increasingly viewed demons as beings that could be conjured and controlled. William of Conches, who lived around 1090 to 1091, distinguished clearly between demons and devils: demons, in his view, included both good and evil invisible rational beings, while only the lowest order deserved the label of cacodemon, meaning evil knower. Paracelsus, the most vocal proponent of ambivalent spirits in the sixteenth century, argued that these beings were spirit-like but possessed bodies and flesh, making them neither fully human nor angelic.

  Robert Kirk, who lived from 1644 to 1692, integrated fairies into his theories of intermediary spirits, describing them as intelligent beings structured like human societies, who ate, drank, and were invisible to most people. Demonologists and religious orthodoxy rejected his views, labeling them atheistic, and insisting that all such spirits were demons with the sole purpose of deceiving and harming humanity.

• 8. Psychology and the Inner Demon

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  Psychologist Wilhelm Wundt observed that, among all the activities myths worldwide attributed to demons, harmful ones predominated, and that in popular belief bad demons appear older than good ones. Sigmund Freud built on this, arguing that the concept of demons derived from the relation of the living to the dead. For Freud, the fact that demons are typically regarded as the spirits of those who recently died points to mourning as the psychological origin of demon belief.

  American psychiatrist M. Scott Peck took the question into clinical territory, writing two books on the subject: People of the Lie: The Hope For Healing Human Evil and Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption. Peck described several cases from his own practice. He initially investigated exorcism in order to debunk possession as a myth, but reported being convinced otherwise after encountering two cases that did not fit any category known to psychology or psychiatry. His conclusion was that possession was a rare phenomenon, and that those he considered genuinely possessed were doing battle with evil rather than being evil themselves. His work generated significant debate, not least because of his association with the controversial Malachi Martin, a Roman Catholic priest and former Jesuit, despite the fact that Peck himself consistently described Martin as a liar and a manipulator.

  In contemporary Western esoteric traditions, the metaphor has largely replaced the entity. Demons are now often understood as inner psychological processes, a way of naming addiction, compulsion, grief, or rage. The concept has, in this sense, come full circle: the original Greek daimōn was always a force acting on the mind. The anthropologist's explanation remains the foundation beneath all of this. Wilkinson Duran has noted that people who believe in demons are often marginalized in the United States, a sign that the Enlightenment's rejection of demonic causation has settled unevenly across society.