The Encyclopedia of World Religions

116 S devils and demons

the center of the Earth. There they not only plot their war against God waged through tempting humans on the world’s surface, but also receive the souls of those condemned to eternal torture and gleefully impose that punishment. This story is familiar to readers of Dante and Milton. In it evil in the world can be attributed both to perverse human will and human entanglement in the cos mic rebellion of Satan and his angels. The height of Christian demonism was the 15th to 17th cen turies, the period of the notorious witch-persecu tions and of related elaborate beliefs in the powers of demons, their pacts with humans, their signs and methods of operating ( see WITCHCRAFT ). But the horrible injustice and cruelty to which such beliefs could lead produced a reaction, and they went into decline with the 18th century and the “Age of Reason.” Since then, liberal theologians and psycholo gists have taken demons as allegorical personifica tions of the evil within the human consciousness. In conservative Christian circles belief in the Devil and his demons often remains strong; much that is bad is attributed to them, and there are RITUALS and services for exorcism or the driving of demons out of persons and places. In I SLAM , the opponent of God is Iblis or Shai tan, who first disobeyed God by refusing to bow before his greatest creation, human beings. While not always totally evil, he and his jinns (genies; spirits) and shaitans (demons) are ill-disposed toward humans and keep trying to lead them astray. Demon-doctrine is not a central feature of Islamic thought, but acknowledgment of the real ity of angels and demons is required of the ortho dox, and there is a large store of popular belief and folklore about the jinns and shaitans. Though not as strong as it once was, belief in devils and demons remains alive in the mod ern world. Some have contended that the horrors of the 20th century, such as the demonic Nazi regime, show that it is not outdated to speculate about the presence of such malevolent forces. It is as though some intelligent energy of more than merely human wickedness possessed a brief hold on an entire nation at that time, and has shown its

and men” alike. For in Buddhism as in Hinduism the ultimate source of evil is not in the will but in ignorance of the true nature of reality. The demons in Western religion, like the West ern Satan, are beings in rebellion against God out of evil will, though even here ambiguities may occur. An early example is Satan in the Hebrew scriptures’ book of J OB . Here Satan appears as an adversary to God in the sense of a prosecutor whose function is to present an opposing point of view to the Lord, in this case that Job should be unjustly afflicted to test him. Other demonic figures, probably influ enced by Babylonian examples, like Leviathan and Rahab representing chaos, Lilith the demoness of night, and Azazel the wilderness, also appear but only on the margins of the divine story ( see M ESO POTAMIAN RELIGIONS ). However, by the sixth century B . C . E . and prob ably under the influence of Z OROASTRIANISM from Persia, J UDAISM became much more prone to see the world in terms of an eternal cosmic war between two opposing forces of good and evil, led by two personal commanders, God and Satan. Zoroastrianism believed the universe was a battleground between the high god Ahura Mazda and the hosts of darkness under Angra Manyu or Ahriman. Hellenistic Judaism likewise saw Satan as the adversary of God from the begin ning and the world infested by demons under his rule. This is the world view carried over into the N EW T ESTAMENT and C HRISTIANITY . In mainstream rabbinical Judaism after the Diaspora of the Jews throughout the world, belief in Satan and demons became less of a central force and today has relatively little importance, although it lives on in Jewish folklore about Lilith, about magicians who had dealings with demons, about dibbuks or evil spirits, and about golems or artificial humans created by sorcery. Christianity in its traditional form perceived Satan as a fallen angel in age-long rebellion against God, who corrupted A DAM and E VE in the Garden of Eden and thus brought SIN to the world, and who continues to twist toward himself whom he can out of his hatred for the good. Cast down from heaven, Satan and his minions landed in hell at