Disputes about the appearance of Satan. Who are demons? Evil spirits or soulless creatures
No longer hoping to win his lost position in heaven, Satan cares about one thing: to remain the ruler of humanity and destroy from it traces of redemption, turning the earth into a second hell, and its history into a chronicle of sorrow, sin and crime. Deprived of general, “wholesale” power over humanity, he turned into a marauder. Unable to overturn the church, he shakes it, pulling out stones from its walls, sometimes very fundamental ones. Let the good shepherd be awake and his dogs not sleep, Satan, walking around the flock like a hungry wolf or a roaring lion, as the apostle compared him, drags the sheep with such dexterity that out of ten barely one will survive.
Satan cannot take possession of a soul unless he has first soiled and corrupted it with sin—but human nature, though redeemed, is inclined and inclined toward sin. Satan does not have the power to force free will, but he is able to lay nets for its inevitable fall. He is a great, tireless tempter. Starting with Eve, he did not stop even before Christ. Both the masses and individuals become victims of this most important art, and the better and holier a person is, the more fiercely and cunningly the devil the tempter attacks him. “Do not open the way for the devil,” the apostle admonishes. Paul. “Resist the devil and he will run away from you!” But, before putting the devil to flight, what torments and trials the winner had to endure from him! There is nothing to say about the people who lived in the world: light, secular people, secular interests, secularism - the natural kingdom of Satan, and whoever lives in it, lives in Satan, and it is as difficult for him not to come into contact with him as to plunge into the in the sea and not get wet. But even when leaving the world, fleeing from cities into deserts and wilds, or separating themselves from the world by monastery walls, pious soul savers met Satan there, and even more crafty and cruel. In the world, he was overcome by temptation over little things - insinuating, constant, every minute of everyday life. In the desert temptation comes in a stormy onslaught, like a feverish paroxysm. In the world it was more external, in the desert or retreat it made the person himself - the living energy of the organism, requiring normal functioning - its instrument physiological needs and, upon refusal, yearning, languishing, drawn to sin.
"St. Anthony says: “Whoever lives in the desert and in silence is free from three temptations: from the temptation of hearing, tongue and sight; He has only one temptation - in his heart” (Tarnovsky).
Satan vigilantly watches every, even the slightest, reason for the fall and quickly took advantage of it. If God assigned a guardian angel to each person, then Satan assigned a tempter demon in the same way. The angel is on the right, the devil is on the left.
“Vasily Borisych even spat out of frustration. Yes, having forgotten, he spat on sin in the wrong direction. Virinea ate at him.
Why are you spitting?.. What?.. You damned one! - she shouted to the whole cellar, hitting the table with all her might with a rolling pin... - Where did you spit?.. Who did you hit?.. Are you not wearing a cross?.. If you decide to spit, spit on the left side - on the enemy about the devil, and look what!.. I don’t give a damn about the angel of God... But you don’t know that every person has an angel from God, and a demon from Satan... The angel sits on the right shoulder, and the demon on the left... So you spit to the left, and if you spit to the right, you’ll hit an angel... Oh, you foolish one!.. (P.I. Melnikov. “In the Woods,” part II, chapter 13).
All people, at all ages and positions, are subject to temptation, and Satan accordingly changes the character and energy and means of temptation, showing himself to be a subtle psychologist and a witty logician in adapting to his victims. He attacks the saints with particular force for the same reasoning, according to which God rejoices more in one repentant sinner than in nine righteous people. Conversely, the temptation of a monk in the demon world is valued much higher than the greatest evil produced in the society of worldly people. The following legend eloquently testifies to this. “One of the Thebean elders said: I was the son of an idol priest, and when I was still small, I sat on the temple and repeatedly saw my father entering the temple and making sacrifices to the idol. One day I secretly entered behind him and saw Satan sitting and all the army standing before him. And then one demonic prince approached him and bowed to him. Satan says to him: “Where have you come from?” “I was,” he answers, “in such and such a village, I stirred up fights and a great rebellion there, and, having caused bloodshed, I came to tell you.” Satan asked him, “What time did you do this?” “In 30 days,” he answered. Satan ordered to punish him, saying: “In so much time you did only this!..” - Then two more demons came, who in a relatively short time also caused quite a lot of troubles in the world, but Satan was dissatisfied with their slowness. - Another one came up demon and bowed to Satan. Satan asks: “Where did you come from?” “I was,” he answers, “in the desert; for forty years now I had been at war against a certain monk, and that night I cast him into fornication.” Having heard this, Satan stood up and kissed him, took the crown that he himself wore, put it on his head, seated him on the throne with him and said to him: “ You have done a great thing!” (Tarnovsky)
Not every time and not every place is equally convenient for demons to be tempted. Their favorite time is, of course, the night, when the devil’s zealous ally, sleep, creeps up on people and weakens their will and mind under the influence of the impressions and memories of the day that have not yet faded in their memory. The hermits were afraid of sleep as a demonic manifestation, and considered it necessary to sleep as little as possible.
The “Life” of St. dedicates very instructive pages to the fight against sleep, as the destructive charm of the devil. Theodosius of Pechersk in the Nestor Chronicle, under the year 1074: “There was also an old man - but they had Matvey, also perspicacious. Once, when he was standing in his place in the church, he raised his eyes upward and looked at the brothers who stood and sang on both sides (choirs). He saw an evil spirit in the form of a Pole in a bandage. He walked around the church and, lifting the floor, held flowers in it, called sculpting Walking near the brothers, he took a flower from the floor and threw it at anyone. If a flower stuck to one of the singing brothers, he, after standing for a while and relaxing his thoughts, would leave the church under some pretext, go to his cell, fall asleep there and not return to the church until the service was over, but he would throw it at such a monk as well. that the flower did not stick, and he stood firmly and sang until the end of matins and then went out to his cell. Seeing this, the elder told his brothers. The old man also saw the following: he usually stood throughout matins until dawn, and when the monks went to their cells, then this old man also left the church. Once he went and sat down to rest under the beater, since his cell was far from the church, from here he watched as the crowd (of demons) walked from the gate. Looking up, he saw that one was sitting on a pig, and the others were walking around him. And the elder asked them: “Where are you going?” and the evil spirit (demon) sitting on the pig answered: for Mikhail, for Tolbekovich; the old man dawned on himself sign of the cross and came to his cell. When it dawned, the elder understood what was happening and said to the cell attendant: “Go and ask what is Mikhailo doing in his cell?” and they told him: “He left a long time ago, straight from the choir at the end of Matins.” The elder told this vision to the abbot and the brethren. At this elder, he introduced himself to Theodosius and Stefan became abbot, and when Nikon took Stefan’s place, this elder was still alive. Once he stood at Matins and, looking up, wanted the abbot Nikon, but in the abbot’s place he saw a donkey and realized that the abbot had not risen from sleep.”
St. Pachomius slept only sitting and prayed to God to grant him insomnia.
In the endless multitude and variety of temptations, the devil sometimes does not shy away from simple and crude means, acting on the psychology of the moment. A former rich man like St. Anthony, whose temptations have given food to so many poets and artists and become a proverb, Satan throws a bar of silver at his feet to remind him of abandoned riches. To the hungry St. He offers Hilarion delicious food. St. Pelageya, a former Antioch actress and courtesan, was teased by the devil with her previously beloved jewelry: rings, necklaces, wrists. These false signs things disappeared just as they appeared. If simple remedies did not act, the devil moved on to more and more complex ones, turning the succession of hallucinations into magnificent performances of horror, luxury, laughter, and voluptuousness. Who is familiar with the magnificent poem by G. Flaubert “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” there is no need to look for other pictures and examples in the “Lives”: the great French writer squeezed all the juice out of ideas and from the phenomena of temptation. The demon frightened St. Hilarion with the howling of wolves, the screeching of foxes, the animals galloped and jumped around him, they were replaced by fighting gladiators, or the dying, who writhing at the feet of the saint, begged him for burial. One night, he was deafened by the crying of children, the lowing of bulls, the roaring of lions, the screaming of women - a great noise, as if from a military camp. As soon as he drove away this miracle with a cross, here is a new one: in the moonlight, a war chariot drawn by mad horses is flying towards him. The saint pronounces the name of Christ. The chariot falls through the ground.
The most severe types of demonic temptation were the attraction of love, the desire for the world, spiritual pride and doubt in faith. “Satan does not know,” the ascetics reasoned, “by what passion the soul is conquered. He sows, but does not know whether he will reap, he sows thoughts of fornication, slander, and also other passions - and depending on what passion the soul shows itself to be inclined to, he puts it in.”
In the confusion and struggle of thoughts, in the ignition of old worldly attachments, the ascetic, of course, himself did not clearly distinguish; what belongs to his own train of thought and what to the suggestion of the devil - and only by the severity of the internal struggle did he imply in it the presence of the power of demons.
“The common postulate of all the various passionate thoughts was that one must leave the desert and the cell and return to the world. The only salvation for a monk in such a struggle is to sit hopelessly in his solitude until the spiritual storm passes. “One brother,” we read in the Patericon, “was outraged by thoughts that he should leave the monastery... The brother revealed this to the Abba. He says to him: “Go, sit in your cell, give your body as a pledge to the walls of the cell and do not leave there; leave your thoughts, let him reason what he wants, just don’t let your body out of the cell.” In the "Life" of St. Macarius of Alexandria we read that this hermit, being excited by vainglorious thoughts to leave the desert and go to Rome, lay down on the threshold of his cell, putting his feet out and said: “Pull and drag the demons, if you can, but I won’t go with my own feet.” As everything happens in the world, so, of course, the demonic temptation had to pass, and the desired silence was established in the heart of the ascetic (Tarnovsky).
Christianity has cursed the flesh and covered love with shame. The act of love, personified in Hellenism by the brightest and most beautiful deities of Olympus, was declared by Christianity to be a harmful vileness, Adam’s sin, whose destructive influence on man is paralyzed only by atonement and the sacraments emanating from it. Celibacy, for a Christian, is a state much higher than marriage, and chaste abstinence is one of the main virtues. For Lactantius, virginity is the pinnacle of all virtues. Origen, nicknamed Adamant, so as not to fall from this peak, with his own hand deprived himself of the opportunity to commit sexual sin. Standing on this point of view, ascetics spent their best strength on the desperate work of fighting carnal lust, hastening to extinguish in themselves - often with inhuman efforts - even the slightest spark of love fire, to stifle even the ghost, even the dark hint of passionate excitement. According to Voltaire, with equal success a person can ensure that his hair does not grow and the blood does not circulate in his veins. In the wonderful novel "Thais", written by Anatole France, one of the most typical Voltaireans on the threshold of the 19th - 20th centuries, this terrible struggle with feeling, which so characteristically determined the movement of thought in the 4th - 6th centuries AD, is depicted powerfully, although somewhat theatrically. which set the tone for the worldview of the Middle Ages. A. France took as the plot for his novel a case that the Lives of the Saints avoid, not hushing it up, but also not wanting to talk about it in detail - the case of the complete triumph of temptations, the complete victory of a love demon over a person who was striving for holiness. There is no need to give many specific examples - the historical fate of asceticism and, in particular, Christian monasticism, a great mass example of how frequent human defeats and rare victories were in this struggle. Fear of carnal temptation turns into horror and hatred of women. For fear of the love contagion, the hermits, after many years of separation, refused to see their mothers and sisters. Did such a sharp renunciation of the bisexual world, such a decisive conclusion in their same-sexness, which they tried to make asexual, save them? Alas! The hair did not stop growing, the blood circulated in the veins, and the idea of a woman burst into the ascetic world with such violent force that even its winners emerged from the struggle exhausted and crippled, limping, like Jacob after a struggle with a night vision whose name is “wonderful.” “Oh, how many times,” exclaims Blessed Jerome in a letter to the virgin Eustachia about maintaining virginity, “already being a hermit and being in a vast desert, burned by the rays of the sun and serving as a gloomy dwelling for monks, I imagined myself among the pleasures of Rome. I was in solitude because I was filled with grief. The emaciated limbs were covered with sackcloth and the soiled skin resembled that of the Ethiopians. Every day there were tears, every day there was groaning, and when sleep threatened to overtake me during my struggle, I laid my bones, barely holding their joints, on the bare ground. I am silent about food and drink, because even sick monks consume cold water, and having something boiled would be a luxury. And yet I, the same one who, for the fear of Gehenna, condemned himself to such imprisonment in a community of only animals and scorpions, I was often mentally in a round dance of maidens. The face became pale from fasting, and the thought seethed with passionate desires in the chilled body, and the fire of lust burned in a man who had previously died in his flesh. Deprived of all help, I fell at the feet of Jesus, watered them with tears, wiped them with my hair and tamed the hostile flesh by not eating for whole weeks. I am not ashamed to tell the story of my plight; on the contrary, I lament that I am no longer like that. I remember that I often cried out to God day and night and not before I stopped beating myself on the chest, as if by the voice of the Lord, silence fell, I was afraid even of my cell, as an accomplice of my thoughts. Angry and annoyed with myself, I wandered alone through the deserts. Where did I see mountain caves, inaccessible cliffs, cliffs - there was a place for my prayer, there was a prison for my most damned flesh. Meyerbeer tried to convey this difficult situation with beautiful and rather strong music for the ballad “La Tentation”... after all, it was too thin in the depth of the plot, which the composer decided to touch on! What was needed here was Wagner, not Meyerbeer.
Quite often, for the purpose of carnal temptation, the devil himself took the form of a woman and appeared in the desert as either a lost beauty, or a sinner seeking repentance, or a pious maiden, also eager to join in ascetic deeds. Out of love for mankind or too firm confidence in his virtue, the desert dweller received a deceitful maiden in his cramped cell and, usually in a very short time, became mired in the fall. Stories of this kind are countless. In one of them, the narrator, Rufinus of Aquileia, notes that it is not enough for the demon to let the monk fall into the most forbidden of sins - he still needs to laugh. In his story, the hermit was seduced by a lost beauty, but as soon as he took the beauty into his arms, he tried to take possession of her, “like senseless cattle.” But as soon as he took the beauty into his arms, the demon disappeared, and the hermit remained in a funny and obscene pose, which Rufinus; Of course, has the good faith to describe in detail. In addition to the shame, the demons gathered in large numbers in the air to be eyewitnesses of the scandal, crying out to the disgraced hermit: “Hey, you who exalted yourself to the skies! Did you tumble well into hell? Now you understand what it means - “whoever exalts himself will be humiliated?...” This sad adventure had such a hard effect on the hermit that, despairing of his salvation, he returned to the world, went on a spree, indulged in all sorts of atrocities and finally became the prey of Satan. Rufinus regrets his haste, noting that he could have washed away the sin he committed with tears of repentance and restored himself to his former holiness through prayer and fasting. Indeed, St. Victorinus, Bishop of Amiterna, had the misfortune of falling into the same sin, but terrible repentance saved him from the clutches of a triumphant enemy. It hardly needs to be said that when it came to seducing holy women, the devil resorted to the opposite transformation, that is, he took the form of a beautiful young man. Such a werewolf he came to St. Francesca the Roman and she was very bored.
Much more often, the demon acted more simply and effectively, sending visits to the hermits not from ghosts, but from real women, seized by a lustful prank - to seduce the righteous. One of these legends came from the 4th century to the 20th century, in order to turn into Tolstoy’s “Father Sergius” in the Russian version.
“There was one hermit in the lower countries of Egypt, and he was famous, for he stayed in a solitary cell, in a deserted place. And so, according to the action of Satan, one dishonest woman, having heard about him, says to the young men: “What will you give me? I will depose your ascetic.” They appointed her a well-known reward, and in the evening she approached his cell, as if lost. When she knocked on the door, the elder came out, and when he saw her, he was embarrassed and said: “How did you come here?”“I came here lost,” she said with tears. Taking pity on her, the elder led her into his courtyard and, entering the cell himself, locked it. And then the accursed woman screamed, saying: “Abba, animals are eating me here!” He, again indignant, but at the same time fearing God’s judgment, said: “Where did this anger come against me?” And he opened the door, letting her inside. Then the devil began to shoot arrows at him, inciting lust for her. But he, seeing the attack of the enemy, said to himself: “The machinations of the enemy are darkness, but the son of God is light.” And getting up, he lit a candle. But again fueled by lust, he said “Those who create such things go to torment. So, test yourself here: can you bear it? Eternal flame?» And placing his finger on the candle, he burned it, and did not feel pain due to the strong burning of the flesh. Continuing to do this until the morning, he burned all his fingers. The harlot, seeing what he was doing, was petrified with fear. In the morning young men , Having come to the ascetic, they asked:
“Did a woman come here yesterday?..” Then he opened his hands and showed them, saying: “This is what this daughter of the devil did to me! She ruined my fingers."(Tarnovsky).
It is curious that, according to Archpriest Avvakum, he once subjected himself to similar torture, having felt attracted to a woman who came to him for confession.
In the ancient printed Prologue, not yet edited by St. Demetrius of Rostov, there were too many similar stories, which Feofan Prokopovich later classified as “empty and laughter-worthy fables. N.S. Leskov slyly processed some of them in his “Legendary Characters.” One, under June 20, somewhat resembles an adventure told by Rufinus of Aquileia. A certain old man “broke his vow of chastity” with his relative who came to visit him in the desert.
"This immediately became known as an extraordinary incident. In this same desert, at some distance, lived another old man, who was not at all interested in what happened to the neighboring old man, but he went to draw water, and only immersed his cup in the water, like “the cup turned over." The elder was surprised: because before this incident his cup had never turned over. He scooped up the cup a second time, but as soon as he put it down, it turned over.
Then the hermit thought:
“This is true at God’s discretion.”
And since he, alone, could not explain to himself why such a sign was given to him, he, without wasting time, went to another hermit, but one day he did not get there, but spent the night on the way under the walls of an idol temple and then he learned about everything . It so happened that in this temple that very night demons gathered and, in extreme joy, started a noisy celebration, and began to boast that they had seduced one famous and experienced hermit, and more than once called the seduced one by name.
This was exactly the one the traveler was going to. But although the traveler was embarrassed by this, he nevertheless came to the one who had fallen into sin with a relative, and, having greeted him, asked him: “What will I do, father, when I fill my cup with water and it turns into a ?
And he looked at him, and instead of answering, he offered a question:
And what will I do, because I fell into fornication? “Yes, I already know that,” the guest answered, “I heard about it “in the church of idolaters.”
Then the old man, who had broken his vow of chastity, as soon as he heard that even the devils were talking about him, jumped up and desperately shouted:
Well, if this is so, then it doesn’t matter - I’ll leave the desert and go into the world. But the brother whose cup was overturning dissuaded him from this, and only advised him to drive away his relative.
The elder obeyed and corrected his life.”
Not always, however, demons, having brought the ascetic to a fall, plunged him into self-despair: there were strong people who knew how to console themselves in the sense that “this is not a sin, but only a fall.” In the “Prologue”, on May 21, it is told how one “brother went out of the monastery to the river to draw water, and suddenly noticed on the shore “a wife wearing a robe,” that is, a washerwoman washing clothes, and “it happened to be a brother graze with her." After committing this sin, the brother scooped up water and carried the waterpot to his skete, but demons surrounded him and began shouting in his ears: “Why are you going to the skete! There’s no place for you there now, stay with the laundress now!”
The brother was very embarrassed by this, but immediately realized that the demons wanted to completely discourage him from the path of salvation, and said: “Why are you bothering me and why are you bothering me!” I don’t want to despair!”
It goes without saying that as fanatical asceticism, over the centuries, degenerated into hypocritical asceticism, the trickster theories that “this is not a sin, but only a “fall”” took on more and more strength and found the most zealous application. But even in the most recent centuries of asceticism (for example, in the Russian Old Believers of the 17th and 18th centuries) there was never a shortage of fanatics who took the temptations of the demon, in the form of a wife, quite seriously and beat, mutilated or even killed their overzealous fans, imagining them dressed as demons. Such an incident is recounted with ridicule in his novel “In the Woods” by the famous dissenter P.I. Melnikov - Pechersky, the author, thanks to whom the very word “temptation” now brings a smile to the reader: this is how this writer succeeded in the type of young singer and reciter, pious womanizer, Vasily Borisovich, with a constant saying on his lips: - Oh, temptation!..
But funny anecdotes do not destroy the reality, which on this basis gave rise to crimes without the guilt of guilty criminals who dealt with women guilty only of inappropriate falling in love, with all the terrible ferocity that many years of pent-up anger against the crafty demon, the elusive eternal enemy, could accumulate.
Most often, the demon, tempting the hermit, did not go as far as such vivid realism in his temptations as sending women or his own incarnation as a woman, but was content with awakening and irritating desires that did not find satisfaction. According to the story of Gregory the Great, the devil once seized St. Benedict, but the stern ascetic controlled himself: he stripped naked, lay down in a thorn bush and rolled in it until the prickly thorns drove the influx of hellish passion out of his body. Another monk cured himself even more formidably in the 4th century.
“There was,” we read in the Patericon, one ascetic in the monastery. The enemy brought to his memory one woman, very beautiful, and greatly outraged him. By God's will, another brother from Egypt came to the monastery: between conversations he said that so-and-so's wife had died. And this was the same woman whose brother was indignant. Hearing about this, the brother took his tunic at night and went to Egypt; opened the coffin of the deceased, wiped her rotting corpse with a tunic and returned with it to his cell; He placed this stench near himself, and, fighting with the thought, said: “This is the object for which you have a lust - it is in front of you, be satisfied!” Thus, he tormented himself with this stench until his struggle ended” (Tarnovsky).
Those to whom the devil could not cause any other harm, he tormented with voluptuous dreams and nocturnal hallucinations. An unconscious and, therefore, irresponsible sin of this kind could not be dangerous in itself, but caused despondency, as a symptom of bad things. general condition, a poisoned soul, and corrupted the mind with the memory of a depraved vision. In a word, says Tarnovsky, it was impossible to escape passionate thoughts even in the desert, and they - to surprise - broke through even where all paths were apparently blocked for them. In this regard, the following story of Paterik is interesting. “A certain monk came to the monastery with his little son, who was still eating milk and did not know what a woman was. When this son came to manhood, the demons presented female images to him at night. He opened it to his father. The old man marveled. It happened one day that a son was with his father in Egypt; Seeing women there, he said to his father: “These are the same ones who came to my monastery at night.” The elder answered him: “These are the monks of populated areas, my son; They have a different appearance, and another are the hermits.” At the same time, the elder was surprised: how could the demons in the monastery show him female images?
The third favorite temptation of the devil - the excitement of pride and self-satisfaction - is the reason for those of his appearances when he dares to take on the appearance of saints, angels, the Virgin Mary, Christ, God the Father. In the previous chapter it was told how demons caught Isaac, the recluse of Pechersk, in similar nets. Monasteries are well aware of this temptation and warn newcomers not to fall for its deception. Through such visions, Satan usually extracts from his victims a terrible sin - suicide, to which he once so unsuccessfully convinced Jesus, inviting Him to throw himself from the roof of the Temple of Jerusalem. They tell about one monk named Eron, who, having lived in a desert monastery for fifty years, tortured his flesh so severely that he did not relax his fast even on Easter. One day the devil appeared to him in the form of an angel and ordered him to throw himself headfirst into a well, which Eron immediately did, hoping that he would remain unharmed, and this miracle would reveal his great holiness to everyone. But, instead, he crashed terribly, the monks could hardly pull him out, and, three days later, he died in the most pitiful way. The legend dates back to 1124. Hubert of Nozhansky, who died in the same year, tells the deplorable story of a young man who, having fallen into the sin of adultery, went to beg him to St. Iacon of Galicia. The devil appeared to him under the guise of this saint and ordered him - in the form of penance - to first castrate himself and then cut his throat. The pious young man obeyed and he would have been, as they say about suicides, “a damn ram,” if the Holy Virgin had not had mercy on him and brought him back to life. So he paid for his gullibility, like King Rodrigue in the snake cave, giving away only what he had sinned with.
Sometimes the suicidal suggestions of the devil do not affect individuals, but spread epidemically to entire countries and peoples. In Euphrosyne’s “Reflective Scripture” against self-immolation, which was rampant among people of the old faith at the end of the 17th century, this supposedly godly deed is depicted with complete certainty as the work of angels of darkness, who took the form of angels of light in order to draw Christians to eternal destruction. “Within the boundaries of Nova Grad, 16 people were burned by self-immolation. A certain boy went to the river to give his cattle water to drink, and suddenly a black man and the boy’s meat came out of the water and carried him into the water. I am asking for the parents of his two births; The boy quickly set it up in the temple. And when I saw these people, sitting in different places, weaving their bast shoes, doing other things, they were all silent and no one said anything. Then the boy, by the will of God, again found himself out of the water and free; and asking your parents where you are; He learned the whole story, how the black one carried him into the water, and he told him to see those sitting there, and to know them, for they are the ones who burned themselves.”
But the devil’s blasphemous masquerades did not always achieve their goal. One day the devil appeared to St. Martin of Tours husband in a purple toga, with a crown on his head, in golden sandals and said:
Don't recognize me? I am Christ.
But the saint answered:
What kind of Christ are you! Christ wore neither purple nor a crown; I only know him naked, as he was on the cross. And you're just a devil.
The answer, as A. Graf notes, is worthy of thought for the “vicars of Christ” - the popes... And not just them.
Proud and a source of pride, the devil loses his power when he meets resistance in humility.
“St. admitted this. Macarius of Egypt is the devil himself. “Great is your strength, Macarius! - said the devil. -What you do, I do too. You fast, but I don’t eat at all. You are awake, but I am not sleeping at all. You alone defeat me - humility." Imbued with humility, the monk easily repelled the temptation of arrogance. “To one of the brothers,” we read in the Patericon, “the devil appeared, transformed into an angel of light, and said to him: “ I am the Archangel Gabriel and I have been sent to you.” The brother said to him: “See if you were sent to someone else; for I am not worthy to see an angel. And the devil immediately became invisible” (Tarnovsky).
Isaac of Pechersk, after his ill-fated vision, was seriously ill for a long time, and then through a long feat of fasting and humility he achieved that the same demons who mocked him crawled to him in their true form as reptiles and unclean animals and repented:
“You have defeated us,” the demons finally said.” “You defeated me before,” Isaac answered them, “when you came in the form of my Christ and the angels. Now, in your true form, you are not scary to me, you are truly disgusting and evil.”
It happened less often that the devil appeared to tempt in his own form. This is how he was, tempting Christ. Dozens, if not hundreds of artists have tried their hand at this subject, equally finding a stumbling block both in the face of Christ and in the face of Satan. The most famous picture- Ari Schaeffer is balletic, and our Repin’s fiery devil, although original, is artificially rude. St. Pachomius once saw a gang of devils who were dragging dry leaves and pretending that it was terribly difficult for them. It was they who hoped to make the hermit laugh. Laughter was, if not a sin, then the beginning of sin. “Seeing one laughing,” we read in the Patericon, “the elder said to him: “Before heaven and earth, we must give an account of our whole life, - and you laugh” (Tarnovsky). This gloomy look, not a red thread, of course, but a black thread, runs from the Egyptian deserts, through the Middle Ages, into the Byzantine and Russian Orthodoxy, matures in Moscow and casts a dark shadow over the 250-year history of ancient piety...
Well, here: the father is sitting with glasses reading,((Ostrovsky, “Comedian of the 17th century”))
And I stand at a distance, and, unfortunately
The evil one confused me and laughed.
Father takes off his glasses lightly.
“Why are you happy, fool! Al stole what?
Don't you know that we were born in sins
And should they be executed, not laugh?
If you don't know, I'll tell you.
Take out the two-tailed carnation there.
It is fitting to put away despondency,
Dejection, not stupid laughter,
Despondency, Despondency...” And hits
From shoulder to toe, like Sidorov's goat,
Without getting tired until you get tired."
As much as laughter is displeasing, tears are equally pleasing to God. Good monks never laughed, but often cried. St. Abraham of Syria did not spend a single day without tears.
The temptation of the devil was not always directed towards the goals of major sin. Quite often, the evil spirit seems to limit itself to simply breaking a person’s mood for prayer, preventing him from concentrating in pious meditation, or simply making him angry or losing patience. It is the devil who repeats with a booming echo the words of the prayers being read, makes the preacher sneeze in the most sensitive part of his sermon, it is he who, like an annoying fly, sits ten times on the face of the person falling asleep until he gets angry and curses. Leskov’s “The Enchanted Wanderer” has this charming:
“I overcame the temptations of the big demon, but I’ll tell you, although this is against the rule, but I’m more tired of the little devils’ dirty tricks than that.
Did the demons also pester you? - Of course, sir; Let’s assume that although they are the most insignificant in rank, they constantly interfere...
What are they doing to you?
But there are kids, and besides, there are a lot of them in hell, but they have nothing to do with ready-made grub, so they ask to come to earth to learn how to embarrass, and they play around, and the more a person wants to be more respectable in his rank, the more they annoy him .
What are they, for example... how can they annoy you?
For example, they will substitute something like that for you or slip it over, but you will knock it over, or you will break it and you will embarrass and anger someone, but for them this is their first pleasure, it’s fun: they clap their hands and run to their elder: they say, “we too have embarrassed, let Now we get a penny for it.” After all, this is what they fight from... Children.”
Soon the “children” almost brought the “Enchanted Wanderer” to trial:
“On the day of the Wet Savior, at the all-night vigil, during the blessing of the loaves, according to the order, the father abbot and hieromonk stand in the middle of the temple, and one old pilgrim gives me a candle and says:
Make it a holiday, Father.
I went up to the lectern where the icon of the Savior on the Waters was placed and began to sculpt this candle, but dropped the other one. He bent down, picked this one up, began to stick it on it, but dropped two. I started to adjust them, and, lo and behold, I dropped four. I just shook my head, well, I think, again the shooters are certainly annoying me and tearing them out of my hands... I bent down and hurriedly got up with the fallen candles, and when I waved the back of my head, I hit the bottom of the candlestick... and the candles just fell down; Well, then I got angry and took and knocked all the other candles with my hand. Well, I think, if this kind of impudence has started, it’s better that I quickly overthrow it all myself.
And what happened to you for this?
They wanted to put me on trial for this, but the schema-monk, the blind old man Sysoy, lives in an earthen prison with us, so he stood up for me.
“Why,” he says, “will you judge him, when it was Satan’s servants who embarrassed him?”
But such temptations of the devil are innocent only in appearance. The devil throws them into the soul like a small grain, from which a spreading tree of some major sin should grow. The devil came to one hermit with a reputation for great holiness, as a kind man, with such seemingly innocent advice: “You live too lonely.” Why would you like to get at least a rooster? After all, he is a living creature, and in the morning he will wake you up for prayer.
At first the hermit refused, then he listened and got a rooster. Well, what’s really bad? The devil isn't hidden in the rooster, is it?
But the rooster begins to get bored, languishes, and loses weight. Then the hermit, out of pity, buys him a chicken; It was then that the devil caught him. The spectacle of the love of a rooster and a hen awakened passions in the hermit that he had considered long ago extinguished forever. He fell in love with the daughter of a noble knight, lured her into sin, and then, in order to hide his guilt and avoid the revenge of his parents, he killed the young woman and hid her under the bed. But he was convicted, captured, tried, and sentenced to death. As he mounted the scaffold, he exclaimed:
This is what my rooster has brought me to!
In the ancient Russian “Tale of a foreigner who prayed to God, so that he might be like Job, or like Isaac,” the devil appeared to the monk, who had become proud of such arrogant prayers, in the form of a warrior and said: “I pray to your reverence, father, have mercy on me, persecuted from a certain the king, and take this two hundred liters of gold, and this maiden, and the youth, and keep it for yourself, where you weigh it; “I told the warrior a country where the king could not find me.” The monk, after some hesitation, agreed, “let’s scold the devil.” But some people put a thought (thought) on the young woman and corrupt her. Having repented of what had happened to him, he stood up and killed the young woman. The verb said to him the thought: having risen up, you and the youth, as if you should not tell your father what happened. Abiye and Oubi and the youth rose up. I spoke to him with a thought: I will take the gold given to you and flee to another country, where the warrior will not be able to find you. He went to a certain country and created a monastery for himself from its gold.” But the devil warrior came to demand his money, survived the monk from the monastery and forced him to flee to a distant city. There the sinful monk got married, entered into honor and even became a police chief (a private soldier), and revealed himself to be a terribly cruel person. But the demon warrior found him here too, inflamed the selfish prince in that city for the property of the “ryadnik” and, putting forward his previous demands against the latter, brought the monk-ryadnik to the gallows. “I lead him outside the city to the place of death, behold, the devil, who is in the form of a warrior, met him on the path led by the people, and said to him: Do you know, Abba, who I am? He said to him: you are a warrior. Speech without knowing him. The warrior said to him: I am, you heard him, Satan, who deceived the first-created Adam, the warrior of men, and I do not leave anyone to be saved or to be like Isaac or like Job, but I strive to create everything like Architochel, him or like Judas Skariotin, or Yako Cain, (and) the elders like those in Babylon, and the like; Believe, for you too were reproached by me, and were not aware of the secret warfare. This was said to the demon and to the other, which multiplied, and the aby became invisible; The damned one, especially the private soldier, who suffered mortal strangulation, will be scolded by the demon for his vain arrogance.”
Stories of this kind give an idea only of the easiest methods of temptation: the devil in them gives sin only the first impetus, and it will reach the end by the force of its own gravity. But sometimes the devil's plans are surprisingly complex, subtle and far-sighted, and then he deals with them with patience and diligence worthy of better use. Here is a story that was very popular in the Middle Ages and was later also written down by Bernard Dzhambullari. One day the devil, taking the form of a baby, achieved that he was taken to a monastery famous for its holiness. The abbot, a kind man, gave him an education. The boy studied with the greatest ease, had a wonderful disposition and behaved so well that the monastery could not praise him enough. When the boy came of age, to the great joy of all the brethren, he entered into the clergy, and when, a few years later, the old abbot died, then - by unanimous election - his adopted son became abbot. But very soon the monastery began to fall and weaken in its charter. The new abbot fed the brethren generously, easily granted leaves of absence from the monastery, and patronized the relations of his monks with the nuns of a nearby convent. Rumors about these temptations reached the pope, and he sent two monks, renowned for their holy lives, as auditors. Finding himself under trial and investigation, the devil chose to take off his many-year-old mask and one day, in front of all the honest people, he fell into the ground. In Denmark, Germany, England, the story of the devil-monk named Ruus, Rösch or Rausch (Ruus, Rusb, Rausch): having entered a monastery as a cook, he corrupted the abbot and brethren for seven years with desperate pandering, was accepted into the order, and who knows what other abominations he would have done if he had not been caught.
The devil is so cunning that sometimes he chooses a path for temptation that leads in a direction that seems to be completely opposite to the goals he achieves. It happened that, having designated some pious person as his victim, he not only did not bother him with his usual secular temptations, but, on the contrary, tried with all his might to strengthen him on the ascetic path, inspired him to pray exaggeratedly and mortify his flesh, and even enlightened him with perfect knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, an example of which can be seen in the life of St. Norbert, Bishop of Magdeburg. Here in Russia the Paterik of Pechersk tells the same thing about St. Nikita.
“Who appeared in the form of an angel gave him advice to abandon prayer and engage only in books, but took upon himself to pray for him and prayed in his sight. Nikita soon became perspicacious and teacher. He sent to tell Izyaslav: now Gleb Svyatoslavovich has been killed in Zavolochye, send your son Svyatopolk to the Novgorod throne as soon as possible.” As he said, it came true. Gleb was definitely killed in 1078 on May 30th. This justified insight drew everyone's attention to Nikita: princes and boyars began to come to him to listen to his instructions and predictions. No one could compare with him in knowledge of the books of the Old Testament; he knew them by heart, but he shunned the books of the New Testament. From this last oddity they realized that he was seduced. The love of fathers could not be indifferent to the misfortune of his brother. The abbot and the ascetics of Pechersk came to the seduced brother, prayed, and drove the demon away from him. They brought him out of seclusion and asked about the old law, wanting to hear something from him. But he swore that he had never read books. He, who previously knew all the Old Testament books by heart, now did not know a word, and his fathers barely taught him to read and write. From that time on, he devoted himself to fasting and a pure, humble, obedient life, so that he surpassed other ascetics in virtues” (M. Tolstoy).
St. Simeon of Trevira says that the devils forced him to say Mass, woke him up, lifted him out of bed, led him to the altar, and dressed him in vestments. But as a final result of these hypocritical rewards, the tempted one, imbued with the consciousness of his holiness, fell into the sin of pride, and then the demons set up for him some kind of trap that the imaginary saint left all his merits in it and, to his own amazement, turned out to be completely deserved the spoils of hell.
The devil has no power over free will, but has the omnipotent ability to excite the spirit with all kinds of emotions and poison a person’s memory with unforgettable impressions. A subtle connoisseur of everyone he approaches, he is always fully equipped to mold sin from that person's own psychic means. He is always on the hunt for souls. For this he is called a hunter, a fisherman, a corrupter, a thief, a killer of souls, and St. Jerome is even a pirate, robber on the sea of life. The entire gigantic and endless mass of temptations that hell is capable of is divided among a corresponding number of devils. Each vice had its own devil, who summoned it and taught it. These devil-instructors received orders from the prince of darkness and were obliged to report to him, and those who accomplished little received severe punishment from him. Above was a story (by Gregory the Great) about such a demonic meeting with reports of subordinate demons to the demonic prince. This grateful theme has more than once served as a canvas for artistic satire. In Russian literature, we have “Mail of the Spirits” by Iv. An. Krylov, “Satan’s Big Exit” by O.I., Senkovsky and others.
From this and other similar legends it follows that sometimes temptation was very difficult and wrong for demons. As for resisting temptation, theologians argue that temptation never exceeds the strength of the tempted one, and, therefore, the fall is the result of the negligence and laziness of our will. But it is curious that, while tempting, the devil himself sometimes lost patience and moved from temptation to violent actions, so it was not always safe to resist temptation. Caesarius tells a deplorable case about one young man whom the devil had long tempted to enter into a love affair with him, but since the honest fellow stubbornly refused, the angry devil grabbed him by the hair, lifted him into the air and hit him on the ground with such force that the poor fellow died later.
Highly typical in the torment endured by the God-fearing youth for his loyalty to chastity and divine religion is the final chord of torture: that a demon cast him down from a height. This motif is endlessly repeated in legends and confessions of hysterics and epileptics possessed by demonomania. The protocols of ancient witchcraft trials, the diaries of modern psychiatric institutions are full of it, and, from here, this impression of a deadly flight passed into folk literature, into fairy tales, mysteries, etc. In the recently published book of Louis Metterlinck “Peches primitifs”, which has as its subject essays on old Belgian art and folklore, tells, among other things, “Belle histoire, tres merveilleuse et veritable, de Mariken de Nimegue, que vecut plus de sept ans avec un demon qui la seduisit” (“Beautiful, extremely amazing, true story Mariken from Nimega, who lived for more than seven years with the demon who seduced her." This Mariken suffers from her demon, whose name is Menen, all sorts of ungodly compulsions, and when Mariken remains just as firm in her faith, the ferocious Menen lifts her into the air in exactly the same way, “higher than bell towers and houses,” and, from above, throws her onto the street, hoping she'll break her neck. But Mariquin falls right into the center of the church procession, at the feet of his uncle, a pious priest, and... etc., etc. In all likelihood, in the terrible destructive flights that almost certainly appear in the imagination of epileptics - demonomaniacs, the memory of their actual fall at the moment of the seizure is illusioned. A similar episode appears in our Russian “The Tale of Solomonia the Demoniac.”
When will this insidious, insinuating charm of sin finally cease its fatal power over man? We know one thing: the saint not only was not delivered from it, but, on the contrary, was subjected to its attacks even more than sinners. There was only one way out: when a person conquered all his instincts and suppressed all energy in himself, when, in the zeal of fasting, flagellation, vigils, prayers, he killed his flesh, darkened his memory, extinguished his imagination, numbed his mind, when inside himself he became silent alive and the immobility of death - then the temptation went out, like a flame that goes out because it has nothing left to burn. “Who, like St. Simeon the Stylite, who stood on the capital of a column for fifty years, has the right to laugh at all the tricks of the tempter” (A. Graf).
But how many have achieved this perfection - turning the body into stone and the will into flight, as if along one narrow ray, rectilinearly abutting the once designated point in the sky? More often there were cases that great ascetics, on their deathbeds, still asked women not to touch them, innocently explaining that it was dangerous to bring fire closer to straw.
Notes:
In the form of the great serpent Apepi, or more correctly Apapa, Egyptian mythology personified darkness, darkness, against which the sun, in the form of Ra or Horus, must fight and defeat it before rising in the east. The daily celestial battle against the giant Apapa and his defeat are a constant subject of images on the tombs and sarcophagi of the Eighteenth and subsequent dynasties. Chapter 29 Books of the Dead dedicated to this battle, the time for which is the seventh hour of the night, when the serpent Apap receives a mortal wound. This snake is also a symbol of drought and infertility. The role he played in the Egyptian cult must have been very large and complex, judging by the fact that on one wooden wall of the Florentine museum it is indicated that seven centuries before the birth of Christ there were 70 books written about the serpent Apapa. For the most part, the serpent Apap is depicted dying from numerous daggers stabbed into him, either bound in heavy chains, or threatened by various powerful deities of the light order from Tuma, personifying the night sun, that is, the set sun, supposed to live beyond the horizon (Lanzone).
Leskov processed it before Tolstoy.
Bernardo Giambullari, writer of the 15th–16th centuries, Florentine, patronized by Pope Leo X, alleged author of sonnets signed under the pseudonym Biagio del Capperone. His son Pier Francesco (1495–1564), was the keeper of the Florentine Medici Library (Laurenziana) and the author of the “History of Incidents in Europe from 800 to 1200”, which was, however, brought up to 913.
She's on everyone's lips. Let's say demons. Realists may laugh, but they still know what it is. And in the darkness of the night, when unnecessary thoughts creep into your head, willy-nilly you will also think: maybe they really do exist? Of course, you won’t be able to find a list of the demons of hell with a photo - and it won’t prove anything, but it’s still sometimes very useful to ask.
Demonology - the cultural heritage of the peoples of the world
Of course, this is all lyrics, and besides, it’s everyone’s personal matter. But such stories and myths, legends passed down from generation to generation, scary tales, are often similar in some interpretations. They all come down to one name - demonology. The myths of demonology are very ancient. Some demon names that can be gleaned from it have evolved into others - providing inspiration for characters in literature, visual arts and theater.
Mysticism has always inspired creators. This is a huge layer in which the old can be shown in a new light as much as you like and surprise each time.
In addition, demonology in its usual sense can be considered a cultural heritage to the same extent as other myths.
Demonology, among other things, includes a list of the demons of hell. Names are usually arranged alphabetically or according to demonic hierarchy.
Christian demonology
Christianity presents demons as fallen angels. The first, and most important of them, of course, is Lucifer - a former angel, the most beautiful of them, who dared to imagine himself as God himself. Further, Christian demonology is divided into two branches: the first tells that Lucifer is responsible for the creation of other evil spirits, the second denies the Devil’s ability to create, leaving this process only to God, which means that other demons are also fallen angels, only of a lower rank, those who bowed before Lucifer themselves.
In general, Lucifer is the most famous and most controversial image in demonology. The names of the Devil and Satan are attributed to him, he is also the Ruler of Hell, although at the same time it is indicated that he is locked in his kingdom, and his own servants inflame the heat in which he burns. In any case, if we consider the list of demons of Hell, whose names are arranged in hierarchy, Lucifer will be in first place.
Evil spirits or soulless creatures?
An interesting dilemma about the presence of a soul in demons: according to Christian demonology, the name itself undoubtedly indicates that, of course, they do. Other sources differ somewhat in their opinions on this issue.
So, for example, there is a theory that fallen angels are the highest rank of demons, the most important and strongest of them. The rest are the souls of people who fell into hell and turned into evil spirits. According to this theory, it turns out that demons still have a soul.
Another theory comes from the fact that a demon is a demon because he is soulless. That is why they have black eyes - a mirror of the soul that does not reflect anything. The theory's explanation is that demons cannot feel. As a result of all this, a person who has fallen into hell for his sinfulness suffers there forever, and it is not possible for him to get out even in the form of a demon.
Hell Demons: List of Names
As you can see, there are many questions about demonology. Almost all of them have mixed answers. Is there anything definitive about this pseudoscience? Oddly enough, these are names. Thus, the famous demons of hell, a list of whose names were compiled by demonologists: among them there are those that are known from literature even to those who are generally far from mysticism in their lives, there are those that are directly related to biblical events, and there are also those , which can be very surprising with their extraordinaryness and at the same time detailed history. Below is a hierarchical list of demons in demonology.
- Lucifer (Hebrew לוציפר; lat. Lucifer) (bringer of light) - Ruler of Hell. After Lucifer was cast out of heaven, his appearance changed from a beautiful angel to an ugly one: red skin, horns and dark hair. Behind his shoulders are huge wings, and each finger is crowned with a pointed claw. The power of the devil is enormous, everything in Hell is subject to him, and everything in it worships him. Characteristics associated with the image of Lucifer include freedom (rebellion), pride and knowledge. After falling from heaven he acquired the name of Satan. The sins of this demon are primarily attributed to an attempt to gain God's throne, but also to the fact that it was Lucifer who gave knowledge to people. In Christian demonology, his name is also the Devil.
- Casicandriera - wife of Lucifer. Lady of Hell. Mentioned in a small number of sources.
- Astaroth (Latin: Astaroth; Hebrew: עשתרות) - the first in Hell after the Devil. He is one of those fallen angels who followed Lucifer and therefore were cast out of heaven with him. Possesses remarkable strength. Very talented, smart and charming. He is handsome, and it is not difficult for him to attract love with his charm. However, there is as much beauty in it as there is cruelty. Astaroth is more often than other demons depicted in human form. In the grimoires, on the contrary, he is ugly, but not a single source diminishes his strength. Popularization of the image of this demon comes down to its use in literature and other art. The famous Woland, for example, is in many ways similar to Astaroth. To the characteristics right hand Satan himself is credited with the ability to make a person invisible, give power over snakes, and also answer any question.
- Astarte (Hebrew: עשתורת) - wife of Astaroth. In some sources, the images of a demonic husband and wife merge into one fallen angel under the name Astarte. The spelling of both names in Hebrew is identical. The ancient Phoenicians called war and motherhood.
- Beelzebub (Hebrew: בעל זבוב, Beelzebub) - Lord of the Flies, demon of Power, commands the legions of Hell. The name Beelzebub is also not unknown: it is sometimes also called as another name of the Devil. This demon is extremely powerful and is considered a co-ruler of Lucifer. Beelzebub is sometimes identified with the sin of gluttony, confusing him with another demon - Behemoth. Perhaps this is because the forms the Lord of the Flies takes are varied: from a three-headed demon to a huge white fly. This nickname, in turn, has two possible stories: it is believed that Beelzebub sent a plague to Canaan with flies, and the reason may also be that flies are associated with dead flesh.
- Bufovirt is the wife of Beelzebub.
- Lilith (Hebrew: לילית, lat: Lamia) is the first wife of Adam. The legends about her are different: she is also called the first woman before Eve, who was created after Lilith, due to her appearance, but with a submissive disposition. According to this theory, Lilith was created from fire and therefore was freedom-loving and obstinate. Another legend calls the first demoness a snake, who was also in league with Adam and, jealous of him for Eve, seduced her with the Forbidden Fruit. Lilith was called the Spirit of the Night, and she could appear either in the form of an angel or a demon. In some sources, this demoness is the wife of Satan; she is respected and honored by many demons. The list of female names would start with Lilith.
- Abbadon (Hebrew אבאדון; Latin Abaddon) (destruction) is another name for Apollyon. Lord of the Abyss. Demon of death and destruction. His name is also sometimes used as another name for the Devil. A fallen angel who destroys everything around him.
The main demons are listed, occupying the highest positions in Hell and often taking human form. Most of them are fallen angels. These are very powerful demons. The list of names in Latin is duplicated by Russian and Hebrew (in Hebrew) names.
Demon creatures
In addition to fallen angels, there are also demons of animal form. The main ones are Behemoth and Leviathan - huge monsters created by God. According to legend, they must eventually fight and kill each other.
- Hippopotamus (Latin: Behemoth; Hebrew: בהמות) is a demon of animal form that can take the forms of all large animals, as well as foxes, wolves, dogs, and cats. In Jewish traditions, Hippopotamus is called Symbolizes carnal sins - gluttony and gluttony. In addition to them, this demon brings out their worst traits in people, inclines them to animal behavior and appearance. The hippopotamus is very cruel and incredibly strong - its very appearance reflects this fact, but it can also influence a person indirectly, not through direct violence - awakening in him a passion for sinfulness. In Hell he is the Watchman in the Night. The image of a demon has been used in literature: the most famous example is Bulgakov's cat Behemoth. Woland's favorite jester from The Master and Margarita contains more characteristics from the author than from legends, and yet bears his name. Also, Bulgakov's cat has the property of a werewolf.
- Leviathan (Hebrew: לִוְיָתָן) is a huge monster about which there are many legends. In some sources, Leviathan is a demon, one of the angels, cast out of heaven along with Lucifer. In others, Leviathan is called the same biblical serpent-tempter; he is accused of being the one who gave Eve the idea of tasting the forbidden fruit. Still others argue that Leviathan is neither an angel nor a demon, but a completely different creature, a monstrous creation of God, created earlier than all life on Earth and in Heaven. All these sources agree on one thing, calling the monster a huge snake. This makes it possible to question the first theory about fallen angel. The many-headed snake, whose name translates as “writhing beast,” is mentioned in the Old Testament. It is assumed that God's creation was such in the name of the personification of all the forces of evil, and that the Creator himself destroyed Leviathan in prehistoric times. However, there is another legend, already mentioned above: about Leviathan and Behemoth, whose fight and death is still to come.
Behemoth and Leviathan are creatures that are often called monsters rather than demons, and which are proof of the incomprehensibility of God's creations.
Seven deadly sins
A little earlier, the main demons were presented: a list of names and descriptions. For some of them, associations with mortal sins were indicated. However, there is a more detailed classification of this phenomenon:
- Lucifer - Pride (lat. Superbia). Proud of himself, Lucifer tried to take the place of God, for which he was expelled from Heaven.
- Beelzebub - Gluttony (lat. Gula).
- Leviathan - Envy (lat. Invidia). An interesting parallel with the serpentine appearance of Leviathan and green Envy.
- Asmodeus - Lust (lat. Luxuria). Latin name This sin is similar to the English word luxury - luxury.
- Mammon - Greed (lat. Avaritia).
- Belphegor - Laziness (lat. Acedia).
- Satan - Anger (lat. Ira).
The division is of great interest: it turns out that Lucifer and Satan are not the same thing. Why is that?
Devil, Satan, Lucifer - different names for the same evil?
Are these different demons of hell? The list, like the Russians, does not fully answer this question, although it does give a little background. Let's dive into it.
The devil translated into Latin sounds like Satan and means “enemy”, Satan is Diaboli, whose meaning is “slanderer”, therefore, the Devil and Satan are synonymous with each other. The devil's image is the opposite of God's. It is assumed that Satan is the creator and ruler of the forces of evil, which contradicts the point of view that God created everything in the world. Therefore, another legend arises - about the Devil as Lucifer.
The legend has already been described here - the expulsion of a beautiful angel and the reason for his fall from heaven. The translation of the name Lucifer comes from the Latin roots lux - “light” and fero - “I carry”. After imprisonment in Hell, he took a different name for himself. And Satan appeared to the world.
In Hebrew, Satan is translated as Zabulus, from which came the opinion that Beelzebub can be interpreted as Baal - the devil, and this is another name for the Lord of Hell. But this is the most unpopular theory - since there are many legends about the Lord of the Flies as an independent character. At the same time, in the Jewish environment this demon has greater power than in traditional demonology.
What about Lucifer and the Devil? Despite the fact that there is an exact cause-and-effect relationship and explanation for two (or even three) names at once, there is still another interpretation, where these are different demons, and they are attributed different properties.
Samael - the mystery of demonology
In addition to the previous question, it is worth mentioning Samael. When the demons, list and description were presented, he was not included in it. It has not yet been definitely decided whether Samael is an angel or a demon.
By common definition, Samael is described as the angel of death. In fact, these creatures do not belong to either good or evil, just as death itself does not belong to these concepts. This is a natural process, and therefore shinigami, as the Japanese call them, just make sure that everything goes as usual. But Samael is not such a clear-cut personality, otherwise he would not raise questions.
Samael's name is often confused with God's chief Archangel. Or they are called among the seven archangels. They also say that Samael is the Demiurge, that is, the creator of all living things, which means God.
It is interesting that at the same time he is often ranked among the demons of Hell - moreover, according to some statements, Samael is the true name of the Devil, angelic, before his fall from heaven. True, in this situation it is not clear what Lucifer is.
The legend about the snake-tempter of Eve also reached the riddle of demonology - there are sources that it was Samael.
The most popular description has already been given: Samael is the angel of death, with only one clarification: the same angel of death that came for Moses.
Antichrist
It is a mistake to confuse Antichrist with the Devil. The key to unraveling this person lies in his name: Antichrist is the enemy of Christ, his antipode. He, in turn, as is known, was the son of God, in no way his prototype. The name Antichrist is sometimes used to call anyone who does not confess Jesus Christ, but in reality this is not entirely true. "Anti" means "against" . The Antichrist must be precisely the enemy of Jesus, go against him, be equal to him in strength.
Incubi and succubi
Speaking of demons, it is worth mentioning the smaller employees who have nevertheless become quite famous in the human ranks. These, of course, are demons-tempters of carnal pleasures, lust and passion.
The female demonic hypostasis of depravity is a succubus (otherwise succubus), contrary to the ideas of a beautiful she-devil, an ugly monster. A lower demon, appearing in dreams of a certain content with a much more attractive appearance, devours the vital forces of a person, devastating him. Succubi, of course, specialize in men.
An equally unpleasant entity and male hypostasis is the incubus, whose target is women. He operates using the same method as his “colleague”. Succubi and incubi hunt sinners, their attack zone is the mind and subconscious.
Finally
The article lists only the most famous and influential demons. The list, the images in which illustrate evil spirits, can be supplemented with the following names:
- Alastor is a demon herald.
- Azazel is a demon standard-bearer whose name is known to Bulgakov's admirers.
- Asmodeus is the demon of divorce.
- Barbas is a demon of dreams.
- Velizar is the demon of lies.
- Mammon is the demon of wealth.
- Marbas is the demon of disease.
- Mephistopheles is a famous demon who served Faust for 24 years.
- Olivier is a demon of cruelty.
If we go into the details of each mythology and religion, the list may contain more than a thousand names and is not limited to this. As can be seen from the article, some names ask more questions than they give answers: different faiths interpret them differently, sometimes it is even difficult to understand whether it is an angel or a demon, which side it is on. There are many ambiguities with the description of the Prince of Darkness himself, his name, his possessions, his abilities.
There are legends according to which even the demons themselves are not evil spirits, but intermediate states between people and gods, neither good nor evil. Demonology holds many secrets. Do we want to reveal them?
When translating a word from one language into another, its root or stem is different from the root and stem of the word in the target language. An example is the word “love,” which is a translation of the Greek word agape. There is no similarity between the stems or roots of the words agape and love, but they mean the same thing.
Word " Satan" This satan in the Greek New Testament (the word is of Hebrew origin). The meaning of this word is “enemy; rival", "enemy; enemy".
Word " devil" comes from Greek diabolos, which means "slanderer"; "calumniator"; "traitor".
In Matthew 4:3 Satan is called " tempter" This is a translation of the Greek word peirazon (initial form– peirazo), which means “to test”; “to be tested” with good or bad intentions.
Satan, or the devil, is a very bad creature. The devil was testing Jesus! The devil failed. Jesus answered him three times with passages of Scripture, and the ancient tempter retreated from Him.
When the devil came to test Jesus, our Lord was filled with the Holy Spirit. Jesus could have said, “Get behind Me, Satan, I am full of the Holy Spirit!” Instead, Jesus turned to the Bible and the devil left Him!
1 Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil,
2 And having fasted forty days and forty nights, he was finally hungry.
3 And the tempter came to Him and said, If You are the Son of God, command that these stones become bread.
4 And he answered and said unto him, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.
5 Then the devil takes Him to the holy city and places Him on the pinnacle of the temple,
6 And he says to Him: If You are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written: He will command His angels concerning You, and in their hands they will bear You up, lest You dash Your foot against a stone.
7 Jesus said to him, “It is also written, ‘Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.
8 Again the devil takes Him to great lengths high mountain and shows Him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory,
9 And he saith unto him, I will give all this unto thee, if thou shalt fall down and worship me.
10 Then Jesus saith unto him, Get thee behind me, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him alone shalt thou serve.
11 Then the devil left Him, and behold, the angels came and ministered to Him.
(Matthew 4:1-11).
Satan has his ways, and he doesn't want us to know about them. The most effective trick the devil uses is to make people think he doesn't exist!
Paul was expressing his fears that Satan would gain victory over him or other Christians. At the same time, the apostle said: “for we are not unaware of his devices” (2 Cor 2:11). " Intentions"in this text this is a translation of the Greek word noemata(initial form - noema), which refers to reasonable ideas, goals, plans, intentions, etc.
Satan is fighting against us. He will take advantage of our weakness if we let him. This is a struggle for life and death! We can have victory if we stay with the Lord and His word! After all, the devil uses “wiles” against us:
11 Put on the whole armor of God, so that you can stand against the wiles of the devil.
(Eph 6:11).
These words are addressed to Christians. “Pilots” in this context means the intrigues and deceptions that the devil resorts to. He uses miracles of ingenuity to deceive us.
Word " intrigues", this is the translation of the Greek word methodeia(meta – “for, through, with”; hodos – “way, means, way”), from which the word “method” comes.
And, I must say, Satan has not one method, but many methods! If you are not careful and “shut the front door on him”, he will try to get in through a window or even a chimney! Therefore, James in his letter says words that need to be remembered:
7 Submit yourselves therefore to God; resist the devil, and he will flee from you.
(James 4:7).
MY NAME IS LEGION.
Completed: 4th year student
Gothamford faculty
Rainer Speyer
Scientific adviser:
Head of the Department of MIIT
Potions Professor
Professor of Alchemical Sciences
Valentine Ignus Prince
Buyan 2013
1. Introduction. The Devil and his minions…………………………..3
2. Who are demons?................................................... ..................4
3. Army of Darkness…………………………………………………….5
4. Disputes about appearance Satan…………………………….8
5. Devil-tempter…………………………………………….10
6. Possession by demons……………………………………………..12
7. Incubi and succubi……………………………………………..14
8. Sorcerers and witches are followers of the Devil…………………...16
9. Conclusion……………………………………………………..22
10. Bibliography……………………………………..23
Introduction. The Devil and his minions.
The devil is the first culprit of sin and the founder of all evil. No one had sinned before him. “The seal of perfection, the fullness of wisdom and the crown of beauty, he was perfect in his ways from the day of creation, until iniquity was found in him.” The devil fell and took many with him into retreat.
No longer hoping to win his lost position in heaven, Satan cares about one thing: to remain the ruler of humanity and to destroy traces of redemption from it, turning the Earth into a second Hell, and its history into a chronicle of sorrow, sin and crime. Deprived of his overall power over humanity, he turned into a marauder. Unable to overturn the church, he shakes it, pulling out stones from its walls, sometimes very fundamental ones.
The purpose of this scientific work is to show the influence of the Devil and his army on the human mind, to draw the line between angels and demons, to prove that Satan is the tireless organizer of all the troubles and misfortunes of mankind: wars, diseases, famines, disasters of all kinds, a troublemaker and poisoner of private life, professional torturer of people.
Who are demons?
Demons are all kinds of intermediary spirits between the otherworldly and earthly worlds. People associate demons with evil. But in pre- and non-Christian cultures, demons were (and remain) not only evil and good. There are good and bad demons, as well as those who do both good and evil. The science of demons is called demonology.
Throughout history, magicians and sorcerers have had power over demons. Demons were often recognized as the culprits of illness, misfortune and possession. IN ancient Egypt there was a belief that if a sorcerer expelled a demon, he automatically gained power over it.
Jewish demonology divides all demons into classes. According to KABBALA, the power of darkness comes from the left trunk of the Tree of Life and especially from Geburah - the sephira of divine wrath. According to another version, demons were born from nightmares. Some sources believe that demons fill the space between the Earth and the Moon.
There are demons who, like angels, act at night, or evil spirits who cause illness. Some demons have a seal that can be used by a person calling upon dark forces.
In Old Slavic pagan religious and mythological ideas, evil spirits and demons were called demons.
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, demons, as agents of the devil, became associated with witches and sorcerers.
In Christian demonology, two main directions can be distinguished, the difference between which lies in the main question for demonology about the capabilities of the devil and his status in the world. The first direction, which inherited the ideas of early Christian dualistic heresies, significantly expands the rights and capabilities of the devil; the second arises as a reaction to heretical paradoxes and is driven by the need to explain the place of the devil in the world so as not to diminish the absolute competence of God in all matters of existence; the first one way or another distinguishes between the creations of God and the devil (or good and evil principles, etc.), however, allowing their coexistence, while the second completely denies the devil the ability to create any kind of creation, limiting his activity to the area of imaginaryness, confusion, and illusion.
With the development of Christian demonology, demons began to be associated exclusively with evil, already by their origin being proxies of the devil.
Demons find pleasure in all types of sin and revolve constantly in it. Some of them delight in “unclean and shameful lusts,” others love blasphemy, others anger and rage, others are consoled by sadness, others by vanity and pride—and each instills that passion in human hearts that he himself enjoys. They live by this passion, through it they gain access to the soul and body of a person.
Demons gain strength through a person, adapting his “energy” for their nutrition. To do this, they must first liken a person to myself, through then gaining access to his soul.
A passionate and sin-loving person is an excellent breeding ground for fallen spirits. Inflating in him the energy of passions that devour him
vital forces, the demon feeds and strengthens in such an environment.
Another type of food for demons is sacrifice.
Demons greedily devour the spirit coming from the burning of victims, the smoke of smoking incense, feed on the smell and decomposition of the blood of sacrifices, fly around the altars and statues dedicated to them...
Dark army.
How are all these demons organized? Who dominates whom? Who orders and who carries out orders?
There has been a lot of debate on this issue, but unanimity has not been achieved for several centuries. And only one statement raised almost no objections: Satan (Lucifer)- “bringer of light”, originally associated with the morning star. In the hierarchy of demons, Lucifer is the emperor of hell.
According to legend, one of God's bright angels named Lucifer became proud of his power and set out to occupy the Lord's throne. He stirred up a rebellion in heaven and carried away a third of the angelic army. Archangel Michael came out against the rebels with the heavenly armies faithful to God. As a result of the battle, the rebel angels led by Lucifer (Satan) were thrown from heaven to the underworld and turned into demons, whose only goal from now on is to sow evil.
Lucifer, summoned by spells, appears in the form of a beautiful child, girl or boy.
Under his command there was a huge and terrible army of demons and other creatures that brought disaster, injury and destruction. But keeping such a horde in obedience would be an enormous task even for Satan himself, and, like God, who had seraphim, cherubim and archan gels, Satan rallied around himself demonic aristocrats to help him in ruling the Kingdom of Darkness. These demons, in contrast to the nine levels of the angelic hierarchy, formed their own hellish nine-level structure. And everyone agrees that the first among the demons was one of Satan's Oldest friends - a powerful angel named Beelzebub.
When Satan first rebelled in heaven, he called into his ranks several very powerful seraphim, among whom was Beelzebub. Once in his new abode, he learned to seduce people with pride and ambition. When
Beelzebub summoned witches and sorcerers to himself, then appeared before them in the guise of a fly, since his military nickname was “Lord of the Flies.” He received this name because he sent a plague to Canaan with flies, or perhaps because flies were believed to be the product of dead flesh.
According to Sprenger and Institoris ("Hammer of the Witches"), "Beelzebub" is translated as "husband of flies." Flies mean sinful souls who have abandoned their true groom - Christ and became the “wives” of Beelzebub.
In the Middle Ages he was credited with enormous power. The sorcerers who called upon him risked death from apoplexy or suffocation. Having summoned Beelzebub, it was very difficult to drive him away.
He ruled witches' covens. They sang his praises during ritual dances.
Another great angel who fell from heaven with Lucifer was Leviathan, which was depicted in the Bible as “a twisting serpent... a sea monster” (Book of the Prophet Isaiah, Chapter 21, Art. 1). Leviathan is sometimes accused of being the same serpent who seduced Eve in the Garden of Eden. In hell, he is considered the secretary of maritime affairs, since Satan appointed him in charge of all water spaces.
Asmodeus- the demon of debauchery, jealousy, malice and vindictiveness. He seeks to create discord between husbands and wives, destroys young families, and inclines men to adultery.
He is one of the demons that most often possesses people. He is considered one of Satan's most evil demons. According to descriptions, he has three heads: a cannibal giant, a ram and a bull. These creatures have the greatest sexual promiscuity. He has the legs and wings of a rooster (the rooster is considered the most aggressive bird). He rides a fire-breathing dragon.
Asmodeus was one of the seraphim, the angels closest to the throne of God, but fell out of favor. According to other sources, he was the husband of Lilith, the demon of lust. The legend of Asmodeus speaks of him as the offspring of Lilith and Adam.
In the Middle Ages, it was believed that witches obeyed Asmodeus, and magicians called on him for help, trying to turn his power against their enemies.
Warlocks advised to approach him with his head uncovered out of respect for his power. Weier claimed that Asmodeus ran gambling houses.
Astaroth(or Ashtaroth) is a demon with masculine properties, but evolved from the fertility goddess Astarte. In his new incarnation, however, he weakly shows his masculine nature. He patronizes scientists and possesses the secrets of the past, present and future. Astaroth is invoked during necromantic rituals of predicting the future. He appears as an angel with human appearance.
According to some sources, he is ugly, according to others, on the contrary, he is beautiful. However, it has a terrible stench. Weyer says that Astaroth - Grand Duke hell, and under his command are 40 legions of demons. According to other sources, Astaroth is one of the three supreme demons of hell.
Baal- this was the name of minor deities in ancient Syria and Persia. However, the great Baal was a deity of fertility and agriculture. He was the son of El, the supreme deity of Canaan, and the ruler of life. He ruled the cycle of death and rebirth. The inhabitants of Canaan worshiped Baal and sacrificed children to him by throwing them into the fire. The Christian demon Baal was also three-headed: in the center he had a human head, and on the sides - a cat's and a toad's head. Baal could bestow wisdom and insight.
Belial(Belial, Belial, Belial) - “vanity”, “nothing”, “not god”, one of the most powerful and evil demons of Satan. Even before Satan was named in the New Testament as the head of the dark forces of the underworld, Belial had already achieved a high position.
Belial appears before people in a deceptively beautiful appearance. His speech is pleasant to the ear, but he is deceitful and treacherous. Belial incites people to sinful acts, especially sexual perversion, lust and adultery.
The ancient Jews believed that Belial was created immediately after Lucifer and had an evil essence from birth. He was one of the first to rise up against God. After he was cast out of heaven, he became the embodiment of evil.
Weyer believed that Belial commanded 88 legions of demons (6666 demons each) and was the representative of the devilish forces in Turkey. When summoning him, it was necessary to make a sacrifice. Belial often broke his promises, but if someone sought his favor, he was generously rewarded.
When Gilles de Rais, famous for his mass murders, tried to summon demons using parts of the dismembered body of a child he killed, Beelzebub and Belial appeared to him.
Disputes about the appearance of Satan.
Man creates his gods, good or bad, in his own image, the result depends on the degree of development of the individual and on the time in which he lives. The concept of the Christian devil was largely determined by the so-called Desert Fathers, hermits of the Egyptian deserts, who created from their visions and memories of debunked gods (such as the artiodactyl and horned Pan) a synthetic image of a grotesque humanoid Devil. The Devil as we imagine him - with horns and hooves, spewing sulfur and black as night - was described by Pope Gregory the Great (540 - 604). Christianity endowed the Source of Evil with the attributes of a variety of pagan gods, adding many sensational details both of an anatomical nature and concerning his habits (mostly sexual), which should have made him completely repulsive.
For the devil there was no simple, frozen form; instead there was a variety of iconographic types.
The early Middle Ages give an overly fantastic image of the demon, concocted from the features of many animals that inspire disgust and horror. The black angel's face is burnt and ugly, his body is dry and hairy, his wings are like those of a bat, his head has horns - and it's good, if only a couple, or even more, a hooked nose, long pointed ears. To make it even more beautiful, they also added pig fangs, claws on the hands and feet, and a tail with a snake sting or an arrow at the end. Terrible faces, like fantastic masks on fountains, opened their mouths on the knees, elbows, chest, belly and, especially, on the backside; the genital organ took on enormous dimensions and hideously sophisticated forms, reminiscent of shameless caricatures of ancient art. Sometimes it was also decorated with saggy female breasts. The legs are sometimes those of a goat, in memory of the satyrs of pagan antiquity, or one human, the other a horse, or feet armed with hawk claws, or like goose feet. Among the physical defects of the devil we must include his lameness - due to his fall from the sky. In this case, the sign of the ancient Hellenic deity Hephaestus was transferred to the Devil - and for the same reason: “annoyed Zeus grabbed him by the leg and quickly threw him from high Olympus to the ground, and as a result of this fall, Hephaestus injured his leg.”
Dante gave Lucifer three faces, imitating similar medieval depictions of a man with three faces.
Trinity of heaven: like a monkey of the deity and its eternal contrast.
Another frequent image of Satan is a tall, emaciated man, with a face black as soot, or deathly pale, unusually thin, with burning bulging eyes, with his entire gloomy figure inspiring the terrible impression of a ghost.
There was also an opinion that the true appearance of demons, like angels, is invisible to the human eye under normal conditions. Physical body serves as a kind of saving curtain that protects a person from direct vision of demons, which could lead to madness of those who see them. Magi, sorcerers, magicians, consciously entering into communication with evil spirits, remove this saving veil from themselves and directly see the demons.
Later developed appearance devil, combining the features of a man and a black goat. Human genes increasingly took over.
Already in the Middle Ages, there were suggestions that the terrible appearance of the Devil was a slander directed at him by his enemies.
This is how Fedeghigo Frezzi (d. 1416), Bishop of Foligno, describes Satan: “I thought to see an evil monster, I expected to see a lost and sad kingdom, but I found it triumphant and glorious. Satan turned out to be great, beautiful and had such a benevolent appearance, such a majestic posture that he seemed worthy of all respect. A magnificent triple crown shone on his head, l His face was cheerful, his eyes were laughing, and he held a scepter in his hands, as befits a great ruler. And, although he was three miles tall, one had to be amazed at how proportionate his members were and how well built he was. Behind his shoulders moved six wings made of such elegant and shiny feathers that neither Cupid nor the Kylenian god (i.e. Hermes) have anything similar."
Having his own individual image, the demon, in addition, had the ability to change his appearance at will into other images, and in this ability he is completely unlimited. Evil spirits, says Milton, "take one sex or another at will, or fuse them together. So soft, so simple is the incorporeal essence, that, being free from muscles and joints, and not attached, like a body, to the mortal support of bones, it can flow, following the plans of the aerial beings, into any form, clear or dark, liquid or solid, and thus brings about the intended results of its acts of love and malice.” Most often, the Devil changes his humanoid form to a human one, which in this case better suits their intentions. He comes to the hermit as a seductive woman, to the hermit as a handsome, obsessive young man.
Often the Devil appears to those whom he plots against, under the guise of their friends,
relatives, friends and acquaintances, which sometimes resulted in great misfortunes, sins and temptations.
Devil the tempter.
The devil has no power over free will, but has the omnipotent ability to excite the spirit with all kinds of emotions and poison a person’s memory with unforgettable impressions. A subtle connoisseur of everyone he approaches, he is always fully equipped to mold sin from a person’s own psychic resources.
Satan cannot take a soul unless he first stains and corrupts it with sin. Satan does not have the power to force free will, but he is able to lay nets for its inevitable fall. He is a great, tireless tempter. Having started with Eve, he did not stop even before Christ.
All people, at all ages and positions, are subject to temptation, and Satan accordingly changes the character, energy, and means of temptation, showing himself to be a subtle psychologist and a witty logician in adapting to his victims.
There is nothing to say about people who lived in the world: light, secular people, secular interests, secularism - the natural kingdom of Satan, and whoever lives in it, lives in Satan, and it is as difficult not to come into contact with him as to plunge into sea and not get wet.
But even when leaving the world, fleeing from cities into deserts and wilds, or separating themselves from the world by monastery walls, pious soul savers met Satan there too, and even more crafty and cruel. He attacked the saints with special force for the same reasoning, according to which God rejoices more in one repentant sinner than in nine righteous people. Conversely, the temptation of a monk in the demonic world is valued much higher than the greatest evil produced in the society of worldly people.
In the world, he was overcome by temptation over little things - insinuating, constant, every minute of everyday life. In the desert temptation came in a violent onslaught, like a feverish paroxysm. In the world it was more external, in the desert or retreat it made the person himself its instrument - the living energy of the body, demanding the normal fulfillment of physiological needs and, in case of refusal, yearning, languishing, drawn to sin.
St. Anthony says: “Whoever lives in the desert and in silence is free from three temptations: from the temptation of hearing, tongue and sight; he has only one temptation - in the heart.”
The hermit was not alone in the desert. The devil with all his temptations kept him company there. He vigilantly watched every, even the slightest, reason for the fall and quickly took advantage of it. If God assigned a guardian angel to each person, then Satan assigned a tempter demon in the same way. The angel is on the right, the devil is on the left.
Not every time and not every place is equally convenient for demons to be tempted. Their favorite time, of course, is the night, when the Devil’s zealous ally, sleep, creeps up on people and weakens their will and mind under the influence of the impressions and memories of the day that have not yet faded in their memory. The hermits were afraid of sleep as a devilish obsession, and considered it necessary to sleep as little as possible.
The very profession of seducer and tempter forced the unclean spirit to resort to changing its external form, choosing it according to the circumstances.
In the infinite variety and variety of temptations, the Devil never shuns simple and crude means, acting on the psychology of the moment. Satan throws a silver bar at St. Anthony's feet, a former rich man, to remind him of his abandoned wealth. He serves delicious food to the hungry St. Hilarion. These false signs of things disappeared as quickly as they appeared. If simple means did not work, the Devil moved on to more and more complex ones, turning the succession of hallucinations into magnificent performances of horror, luxury, laughter, and voluptuousness. The demon frightened St. Hilarion with the howling of wolves and the screeching of foxes; animals galloped and jumped around him, they were replaced by fighting gladiators, or dying people who, writhing at the feet of the saint, begged him for burial. One night he was deafened by the crying of children, the bleating of herds, the lowing of bulls, the roaring of lions, the scream of women - a great noise, as if from a military camp. As soon as he drove away this miracle with a cross, a new one was flying towards him, in the moonlight, a war chariot drawn by mad horses. The saint pronounces the name of Christ. The chariot falls through the ground.
The most severe types of demonic temptation were the attraction of love, the desire for the world, spiritual pride and doubt in faith.
Nature is raped, the church pushes away the woman with disgust, like an unclean animal, a satanic snake, like the embodiment of the eternal death of a man. Theologians declared that one must stay away from women, since the earth is quite populated and will soon die anyway, and Peter of Lombardy
establishes as a basic position that marriage is a sin, in extreme cases, permissible.
The Church prohibits the slightest manifestations of passion. Every passion has its demon; if one kills a passion, one kills a demon.
Cheerfulness was also the fruit of the Devil's activity. As much as laughter is displeasing, tears are equally pleasing to God. Good monks never laughed, but often cried. For man came into the world to suffer punishment, and not to rejoice.
Now the church still had to cope with reason. If earlier it was forbidden to explore the nature of God, now, in general and in everything, it was forbidden to resort to reason. There was not a single educated person who was not accused of magic. Victorious Christianity wanted and hoped to completely finish off the enemy. It is forbidden to invent anything new, to create something new. It is prohibited to introduce innovations into worship. A ban on inspiration is imposed.
Another favorite temptation of the Devil - the arousal of pride and self-satisfaction - is the reason for those of his appearances when he dares to take on the appearance of saints, angels, the Virgin Mary, Christ, God the Father.
Thousands of thousands of Christians experience, when dying, a torture unfamiliar to the people of the ancient world. After all, a dead person is a slave, condemned to torture, a pitiful animal that has fallen into the clutches of a hellish cat. At the hour of death, the patient's room is filled with threatening devils, who reach for the bed with their greedy claws. Dying people often not only see devils, but also engage in physical combat with them.
The Devil’s system included instilling in the dying that their sins exceeded the measure of heavenly forbearance, that it was too late to repent and that it was not worth it - God would not forgive anyway, because it was impossible to forgive. Awakening in the memory of the dying man all the sins he had committed, the Devil easily drove him to despair and in such a state, tantamount to eternal condemnation, he went into eternity.
Demon possession.
The possessed or possessed person is completely deprived of his will. He does the will of the demon sitting in him, who has permeated both his body and soul, so that the latter, if the spells of the church do not free it from demonic power, must certainly go to hell.
To break into a weakly protected soul, the devils used not only the slightest voluntary sin, but any inattention that led to involuntary sin: The child is thirsty. The devil slips him a mug of water and dives into it himself. The poor child drinks, forgetting to cross himself, and now the demon is already in him.
And if a person lived in sin, no holy refuges or shelters could save him from demon possession. Possession always follows the demons' successful corruption of the victim.
This is how a certain Orthodox priest Radion describes the process of invading demons: “Having stripped their minds of the clothing of the fear of God, by introducing into them various sinful thoughts, which an individual who does not lead a spiritual life accepts as his own, evil spirits attack them as disarmed and deprived of God. help, and set up dwellings in them. Demons have the property that many of them can be housed in one person. Having entered a person, they do not mix with the soul, but remain in the body, possessing by force the soul and body."
All unbaptized people were assumed to be possessed by a demon from the moment of birth. The demon came out of their mouths at the moment when they were immersed in the font or consecrated water was poured on them. Therefore, incomplete or incorrectly performed baptism was a serious crime, because it entailed terrible consequences for the baptized person, leaving him at the mercy of the Devil.
Obsession was manifested by the complexity of phenomena that strangely and miraculously filled and changed both the physical and mental structure of a person.
The devil plays with the sick as if he were his doll. Sometimes it increases his strength a hundred times, sometimes it makes him faint and catalepsy, sometimes he lifts him above the ground and swings him in the air, sometimes he throws him to the ground; bends it in half, puts it upside down, twists it into a ball, makes it spin like a top, roll with a hoop, somersault, wriggle, perform thousands of strange, wild, funny and scary movements, which the 19th century explains by hysterical epilepsy and a painful condition of the nerve centers.
Monstrous perversions of physiological functions were noticed, starting with nutrition. Some possessed people were attacked by supernatural gluttony. Others suffered from a perversion of appetite and devoured abominations that, indeed, the Devil could not have liked. Still others, finally, in contrast to the first, express a deep aversion to any kind of food and, without the slightest visible harm to themselves, remain without any food for many days.
The patient’s psyche changed even more sharply. He completely lost his personality and found it only occasionally, in bright intervals, and even then very weakly, weak-willed. Instead of one soul, there were now several souls sitting in it: its own plus the number of demons that fit in it. Instead of a whole strong-willed personality, the result was a fusion of two, three, tens, hundreds, thousands, almost millions of wills, in the flood of which the patient’s will was dispersed like a fraction with an overwhelmingly huge denominator.
Those possessed by demons usually showed deep moral corruption, which in the Middle Ages was determined primarily by disrespect for religion. They blasphemed God, the Holy Virgin and the saints, laughed at the dogmas of faith and rites of worship, expressed disgust for the sacraments, the church, and priests. Being in the power of the father of lies, the possessed usually lied desperately, and sometimes, on the contrary, suddenly, out of the blue, they began to tell the truth, which no one asked them about. For example, their unceremonious manner of exposing the sins of their spellcasters is noted.
So, here are the essential signs by which obsession was exposed.
A person can be considered possessed:
*When he himself claims that he is possessed by the devil.
*When he leads a bad life.
*When he shuns people and spends his life in strict solitude.
*When he suffers from a long-term illness with unusual symptoms and attacks such as restless sleep, eruption with vomiting various items, not included in food, etc.
*When he spews blasphemy against God and often mentions the devil.
*When he made a pact with the devil.
*When he is tormented by evil spirits.
*When he has a special terrible expression on his face that makes people tremble.
*When he complains about the boredom and emptiness of life, when he is overcome by despair.
*When he gets mad, he rages and fights.
*When he makes screams, whistles and growls like a wild beast, bird or reptile.
The possessed person could not free himself from this obsession of his own; it was necessary for someone else to come to his aid. The operation of liberation from the Devil was called a spell, an exorcism. This is a very complex ritual that lasts several days. The Church encouraged her by turning the practice of exorcism into a kind of clerical profession and establishing for it a special order of exorcists, exorcists. This profession was difficult and associated with great dangers. Often the Devil, emerging from the demoniac, entered the exorcist who expelled him.
Incubi and succubi.
The most serious and at the same time the most famous phenomenon of obsession was the union of the Devil with men and women of the human race in a carnal relationship and the birth through this of a special breed of satanic creatures, who by the very act of their birth were doomed to hell, and during their earthly life usually managed to inflict severe harm to humanity.
Incubi and succubi in those days were no less popular than angels.
An incubus is an angel who fell due to passion for a woman.
Essentially, an incubus is a lecherous demon or goblin who seeks sexual relations with women.
Nuns were especially susceptible to attacks by depraved demons. An incubus can take on both male and female guise; in the latter case, the same demon is a succubus. The incubus sometimes appears as a man in the prime of life, sometimes as a satyr; in front of a woman who is known as a witch, he usually takes the form of a lustful goat. These demons everywhere practice all sorts of obscenities, such as using a forked penis to simultaneously debauch with two organs. Some women submit to incubi voluntarily, such as witches; others are forced to sleep with an incubus against their will; and some were raped by the incubus. According to Christian doctrine, sexual intercourse with demons was regarded as bestiality because the demon was not human.
The preoccupation of celibate priests with the delights of sexual intercourse was insatiable, and their fantasy was sophisticated.
At first it was believed that intercourse with an incubus was more pleasurable than with a human. This happens for several reasons: firstly, because evil spirits take on an unusually beautiful and attractive appearance; secondly, due to the extraordinary size of their members. In addition, demons pretend that they are deeply in love with witches, which is the most precious thing in the world for them. All of the above also applies to men who use demons as their lovers.
However, later demonologists, apparently envious of the witches, changed their minds and began to assert that intercourse with the devil is extremely painful and devoid of any pleasure, that his penis is hard as bone and cold as ice.
The reason for the transformation of demons into incubi and succubi is not a feeling of pleasure. As spirits, they have neither flesh nor bones. The reason lies in the fact that through the vice of voluptuousness they spoil both the human soul and body and thereby make them more susceptible to all vices. There is no doubt that they know about the growth of the seed under certain celestial constellations. People conceived under these constellations are easily corrupted by the spell.
Women pregnant with devils gave birth to many monsters, sometimes in human form, and sometimes in “unknown little animals.” During the Middle Ages there was a strong tendency to consider everyone as children of the Devil.
newborn monsters, who were therefore destroyed without the slightest remorse.
In addition to their natural children, devils loved to take foster children. They got children either through abduction, or through a curse or careless promise of parents, or through an incorrect baptismal ritual.
The most powerful of the Devil's children, the Antichrist, will appear in the future when the outcome of the universe will be decided by the final battle, the most terrible of all, in which the forces of good and evil will meet face to face.
