Nicola writes today about the official exorcist of the Westminster diocese… Apparently, I am essentially a “rational satanist” and am going Straight To Hell without even a milkshake or anything.
From my perspective this priest is easy to dismiss: I’m not Christian and his threats of hell have no power over me. They are literally meaningless to me. And that’s when I got interested. Because I am curious about what demons mean to people who believe in them. I ask from genuine curiosity. Would anyone be willing to speak here about your understanding of demons? What are they, how do they manifest? Do they frighten you?
Interesting question!
I was raised in a fundamentalist roman catholic family. Although I fled that religion long ago, I am still recovering.
Speaking from my own personal experience, the Catholic faith is really skilled in the promotion of fear. So much so, that I’ve had to re-wire myself to not be afraid to dispel the notion of hell from my beliefs. I fight to separate myself from them…because there’s always the fear that I’m wrong. That demons really do exist and because I’m deciding to not put stock into that anymore, I really WILL go to hell now.
That, I believe, is the biggest demon of all: fear.
What I was raised to believe (and still have images of) is that demons can look like angels. Beautiful and alluring. Tempting and very sexy. They play with you in that form until you catch on and then they take on their true form of ugliness. I always had a hard time believing in possession, but they can inhabit you in your dreams…and ultimately take you over by making you afraid of everything.
This actually reminds me that for the first time in my life, I had a nightmare about 2 weeks ago that I was possessed by the devil. It was so weird. The imagery was ugly and scary; the room I was in was twisting about and the people I was with began saying things in languages I’ve never heard. Instinctively (I am SO not catholic), I thought maybe the sign of the cross would work. I started to make that sign and told the person next to me to try it, when an upside-down cross appeared as a raised welt on my right hand.
Freaky!! I’m only saying this to share that once that fear of demons is instilled, it’s really hard to escape. Though, I think this last dream was more about a reaction to previews I saw for an up-coming horror flick.
I think demons really are just fear embodied.
The demon is the person that wrtote the original article! I am not a believer either, but when I was young and impressionable I was interested in witchcraft and satanism. Some friends and I once drew a pentagram on my apartment floor, with black candles at the points and tried to raise the devil on All Hallows Eve. One friend stayed outside the pentagram and got to eat , drink booze and have fun. The draft from under the door made the candles flicker. It was weird, but I couldn’t quite believe enough to be scared. Needless to say, satan did not show. We were just lucky, I guess.
I asked my sweetie what she thought demons were, and she replied (in Spanish, because those things speak in tongues), “A demon is an unfortunate being, in the sense that it doesn’t have the ability to reflect on its impulses, it cannot think clearly and so it cannot evolve or learn. It merely operates by reacting to things on the basis of set parameters that have to do with its fears and hungers. These reactions bring the demon no relief or rest, but do cause much pain to those it reaches.”
So Barbara, I have to agree that the people from that article do fit the profile. What say you? In my personal hell, we are also the demons. Ourselves. Each other.
Like Gaiman and Pratchett wrote in Good Omens about Crowley, the demon:
“Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse.”
Or Shakespeare:
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”
And Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities (this includes advice on finding heaven):
âWe are living in hell. We have two choices: we can become a part of the hell around us, or we can find those things around us that are not hell, and give them a form that will allow them to endure.â
Karina, I agree. We are the demons too. There is a dark side and we deny it at our peril. To paraphrase , all it takes for evil to suceed is for well intentioned people to do nothing. It’s easy to demonize other people and deny the dark impulses in ourselves. I have not always been the nice well behaved middleaged woman I am most of the time now.
I agree we all carry our own demons with us. I think that’s where the impulse to horror stories comes from, a way of externalizing those fears so that we can try to confront them.
I remember seeing The Exorcist (movie) when I was quite young, maybe 13 or 14. I did not believe in literal demons, except for a few nights after that movie when I wondered… I have always been suggestible that way.
Two Candles brightly flickering
The used one first lights the room
The Christian’s thirst witnesses the message
Truth is the act that signifies life.
Dim and darkening shines the other
Standing equal only its brother
Low flame flicker arouses my rapture gives life’s dark side the strength to capture.