Demonology, the doctrine that relates to demons, a body of spiritual beings inferior in rank to deities proper, but yet capable of influencing human affairs. The earlier and more widely-spread conception of the demon was merely that of a more or less powerful and intermediate agent between gods and men, at one time resolving himself into a kind of special guardian or patron-spirit, at another acting as the minister of the divine displeasure. The gradual differentiation between the beneficent and the malignant qualities of demons resulted in the division into good spirits or guardian-angels and evil spirits or devils; and Christian theology, developing earlier Jewish ideas—themselves powerfully modified by the influence of Persian dualism—worked up the one class into an elaborate hierarchy of angels and arch-angels, the other into a formidable host of fallen angels or devils, considered as continually employed in frustrating the good purposes of God, and marshalled under one master-spirit, the devil proper or Satan, the supreme impersonation of the spirit of evil. The guardian-angel corresponds closely to such conceptions as the Roman genius and even the famous daimôn of Socrates. To primitive man the demon was but one of the thousand spiritual beings who controlled every one of the causes of nature, and whose favour must be purchased by constant tributes of respect and worship. It was perfectly consistent with primitive philosophy that the manes or ghosts of the dead should continue after death the influence they enjoyed in life, and thus should pass into the higher class of deities. The essential distinctions between the divine and the human that seem so fundamental to modern minds did not occur to those whose notions of the visible and invisible universe alike were entirely animistic; and thus we find that the savage makes no clear distinction between ghosts and demons, and that his conception of the demon is constructed on the model of the human soul, of course with any number of terrible and superhuman qualities superinduced. It is not merely family affection, but actual fear and considerations of prudence, that lead to the worship of ancestors and of the dead; and the good or bad fortune of living men is attributed to the direct interference of the invisible spirits with which the whole air around is swarming. These spirits may not only affect the fortune of the individual, but may even enter into his body, and cause internal diseases and such other inexplicable phenomena as frenzy, wild ravings, hysterical epilepsy, and the like. The very etymology of such words as catalepsy and ecstacy points plainly to a time when there was no metaphor in their meaning. Such is the explanation of disease offered at the present day by savage man all over the world, and such was also the belief of the semi-civilised ancient Egyptians and Babylonians. Indeed, it disappeared but slowly before the progress of scientific medicine, and continued to reappear in survivals strangely perplexing on any other explanation. Hence the function of the exorcist arises naturally as a means of effecting a cure by expelling the demon, and we find him daily exercising his skill in Africa, and even in China and India. A careful distinction is made by sorcerers as to whether the infesting demon possesses or obsesses his victim—i.e. controls him from the inside or the outside. In early Christian times those demoniacally possessed, or enerquimens, were grouped into a class under the care of a special order of clerical exorcists, and after the time of St Augustine the rite of exorcism came to be applied to all infants before baptism. Indeed, exorcists still form one of the 'minor orders' of the Catholic Church.
Reverting to the animistic theory of demonology, we find how well it harmonises with widely-spread notions in folklore of phantom-dreams—nightmare (A.S. mara, 'a crusher'); the Slavonic vampires, or witch-ghosts, who suck the blood of living victims; incubi and succubi, like Adam's wife Lilith in the rabbinical story (Assyrian lilit, 'a snecbus'), demons who consort with women and men in their sleep and by whose means children may be engendered between demons and women; the Hindu rakshas, malignant and gigantic demoniacal ogres who can at will assume any shape; and witches, who have confessed a thousand times to being possessed with a familiar spirit, and who own allegiance in particular to the master-demon, Satan. Other embodiments of the spirit of evil are the Celtic and Teutonic Giants, and the Ogres of southern romance, who destroy men and devour their flesh; the Norse Trolls, one-eyed, malignant but stupid monsters; the Drakos and Lamias of modern Greece; the Lithuanian Laume; the Russian fiery and flying snakes, Koschei the Deathless, Baba Yaga, a hideous old hag who flies through the air in a fiery mortar, propelled with a pestle, and the Morskoï Tsar, or king of the waters, with his daughters, the ubiquitous swan-maidens of romance. No mythology is richer than the Slavonic in malignant male and female demons and fiends (chorti, 'devils'), gloomy shadows of old nature myths and degraded forms of the great deities of an earlier religion, a combination of the most heterogeneous elements flung together in the most perplexing confusion. Traces remain of an original dualism between a great black and a white god (Byelun); but besides this and those fiendish forms already mentioned, Mr Ralston enumerates the karliki, or fiendish dwarfs; lycschuic, silvan demons resembling the fauns and satyrs of Greek mythology; vodyannic, or water-sprites; vozdushnuic, demons who ride the whirlwinds; domovnic, or domestic spirits like the Scotch brownies and the Lithuanian kaukas; and the rusalka, a kind of Naiad or Undine.
Demons with specialised functions exist in mythology everywhere, as the Japanese Oni, who bring on winds, themselves living at the centre of the storm; the Chinese air-dragons, whose battles bring on waterspouts; the demons of floods in old Egyptian and Akkadian mythology; the spectres and phantoms that infest the sea; the nixies of northern Europe, and the kelpies of Scotland, who haunt pools to drown unwary travellers, and naturally hate bridges, although elsewhere many bridges as well as other superhuman works have been erected, usually in miraculously short periods of time, by demons, often at the command of powerful magicians like Michael Scott. Sometimes the devil even consents to build a church for the reward of the soul of the first that enters it. Others again are those sirens who, by their unearthly beauty or the charm of their singing, draw on unwary youths to their ruin; most famous of these, the romantic Lorelei of the Rhine. Again, particular animals, chiefly those with power to harm man, are favourite hosts for demons to inhabit, especially the serpent, but also the cat, the hedgehog, the hare, the fox, the he-goat, the raven, the wolf—the old Norse Fenris, and the dog, especially if black in colour, like the dog in Faust. The madness of dogs, with its peculiar horror, itself opens up a strange chapter in the history of demonology.
One of the most systematic of demonologies is that elaborated by the Moslem theologians. The Jinn (sing, Jinnee) were created two thousand years before Adam, but sinned against God and were degraded from their original high estate. The greatest among them was Iblees (Eblis), who was cast out by Allah for refusing to worship Adam as made of earth, he himself having been formed of smokeless fire. The Sheytans form his host; other species of subordinate fiends are the Jánn, the least powerful, also Efreets (Afrits) and Márids, the last the most powerful. Eminent among the evil Jinn are the five sons of Iblees—Teer, who brings about calamities, losses, and injuries; El-Aawar, who encourages debauchery; Sót, who suggests lies; Dásim, who causes hatred between man and wife; and Zelemboor, who presides over places of traffic. Inferior demons are the Gloul, often in human form and devouring the bodies of the dead like the Russian werewolves; the Sealáh, found in forests; the Delhán, living in islands; and the Shikk, shaped like a human being halved lengthwise. The Jinn assume various shapes, sometimes as men of enormous size and portentous hideousness. They live chiefly on the mountains of Káf, which encompass the whole earth, and their evil influence may be averted by talismans and invocations, and pre-eminently wise magicians like Solomon may command their services. They consist of forty troops, each troop containing six hundred thousand. See chapter ii. of Lane's Arabian Society in the Middle Ages (edited by Stanley Lane-Poole, 1883).
The subject of dualism, or the division of all the invisible powers into two great armies of good and evil demons, ranged under the supreme impersonations of good and evil, will be discussed under ZOROASTER, and here it is sufficient to say that it modified the whole later Jewish and Talmudic demonology, and reappeared in the Manichæan heresy. To it is due the distinction between the demon and the devil, a notion which seems fundamental to the modern moral sense, but was foreign to the earlier demonology, according to which all the specially malignant qualities and the love of evil for its own sake become characteristic of the latter. The Vritra and the other night-powers, the Panis, of the Vedic hymns, are as yet hardly more than personifications of merely physical evil, not inherently and absolutely wicked; while the
Loki of the ancient Scandinavians, their nearest approximation to a personification of evil, was rather a demigod than a devil, not essentially hostile to the other deities, although he works them mischief enough; and the four archdemons of the Rabbins, Samaël, Azazel, Asaël, and Mac-cathiel, seem to have been originally nothing more than personifications of the elements as energies of the deity. Even the name Lucifer ('the light-bearer'), the fallen angel of the morning star, fits ill with a conception of a devil utterly and hopelessly evil. The widely-spread belief that demons are lame accords well with a supposed fall from heaven and an original state of innocence. It is not a little striking at any rate to find the same characteristic in Hephaistos, Wayland the Smith, and the Persian Æshma—the Asmodeus of the Book of Tobit, the 'Diabole Boiteux' of Le Sage. The sootiness of his abode and his blackness of colour are persistent characteristics, although, indeed, some West African negroes have a white devil. The usual cloven feet of the devil in European folk-tales, often the last mark of identification, when even the horns and the tail are hidden, is a reminiscence of the Greek satyr and the forest-sprites of old Teutonic and other folklore. The ugliness of the medieval representations of the devil in religious art, may be seen in the fantastic gargoyles of many churches, was but a part of the early church's policy of degradation to which the native deities were subjected, and from which sprung the medieval belief that the various gods of the old heathen world were the devils or degraded angels of Scripture. This notion is familiar to readers of Paradise Lost, although Milton makes an ingenious poetic use of it that is all his own. And even the medieval devil, with all his terror, had strange limitations to his power, especially perhaps in the folklore of the north. He is often ludicrously outwitted, and his machinations foiled by some obvious enough device or verbal quibble. It is not merely the weakest saint upon his knees that can baffle his infernal schemes, but some country-fellow who beats him at his own weapons, and whom afterwards he will have in hell at no price. The old Scotch notion of Satan as grown so much the more dangerous from the accumulated wickedness and wisdom of six thousand years is hopelessly inconsistent with the archfiend of Norse folklore.
The early Christian idea of hell, the abode of the demons, owed many of its features to the Jewish Gehenna, with its perpetual fire, the horror of its sacrifices, and its loathsome worm; and the characteristics of Moloch and other primitive fire-gods became associated with the devil, degraded from a fire-god to a mere powerful spirit. The Jinn of Arabian mythology, who are slaves of the lamp and ascend as clouds of smoke, serve also to show how fundamental was the notion of a firefiend which passed, though under degraded form, into Christian theology. Consistent with this is the widespread belief in Europe that the devil cannot touch or cross running water, of which poetic use is admirably made in the magnificent phantasy of Tum o' Shanter. Again, the struggle between Balder and the deadly powers of winter in the Norse mythology was spiritualised and amplified into Christ conquering Death and Hell and releasing the spirits from prison; and the old northern ideas of wintry cold personified into a powerful and malignant demon, under new influences passed to swell the attributes of the Christian devil, whose dreary abode provided those torments of frost as well as fire familiar to readers of Dante. Herein is the origin of the folklore notion that the home of the demons was the north, and hence the inveterate
English preference for burial on the south side of a church. No stories are more common than those of compacts with the devil, sometimes written in blood, by which a man gave away his soul for wisdom, wealth, power, or other gratifications to be enjoyed for a certain number of years. The classical story in this kind is that of Faust, which the genius of Goethe has made an imperishable part of the intellectual birthright of Europe.
Raising the devil or his inferior demons was a feat within the power of the medieval sorcerers and masters of the black art, and elaborate formulas for the purpose are gravely given in the books of magic. This unholy art was made punishable by death by James I., and his law remained upon the statute-book of England till the reign of George II. The worship of the devil was a usual feature of the witches' sabbath, and the name is often applied still to the strange dances and other religious rites by which many tribes in India and elsewhere avert the anger of malignant deities. It must be understood that there is no conscious homage to the principle of evil as opposed to good, as the objects of worship are merely deities powerful for harm as well as for help, considered almost as entirely outside any moral considerations, like the demons of unmixed primitive religion everywhere.
See the articles ANGEL, ANIMISM, DEVIL, EVIL, EXORCISM, HELL, SERPENT-WORSHIP, WEREWOLF, WITCHCRAFT, ZOROASTER; also Horst, Demonomachie (2 vols. 1818), and Zauberbibliothek (6 vols. 1821-26); Ukert, Ueber Dämonen, Heroen, und Genien (1850); Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte (3 vols. 1860); Tylor's Primitive Culture (2 vols. 1871); Roskoff's admirably learned Geschichte des Teufels (2 vols. 1869); and for its facts, Moncure D. Conway's Demonology and Devil-lore (2 vols. 1879); also some of the older books, as Bodin, De Magorum Demonomania (1581), and the like.