January 8, 2025 • 69 mins
Explore the fascinating evolution of the concept of the Devil in Western civilization with medieval devil lore expert Dr. Richard Raiswell from the University of Prince Edward Island. Dr. Raiswell reveals how our modern understanding of the devil emerged not only from biblical texts, but through centuries of popular belief and cultural transformation.Discover why the devil has endured, reflecting society's deepest fears across eras - from ancient monasticism to witch hunts, Cold War politics, and contemporary debates. This episode challenges common misconceptions about the devil's biblical origins while tracing his powerful influence on Western thought, religion, and culture.
Keywords: devil, Satan, medieval history, theology, Western culture, witch hunts, Richard Raiswell, religious history, demonology, Christian theology
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(00:00):
And so when you unpack that garbage can that is the demonic,
you've got really quite an interesting index of the kind of
things that people are afraid ofat different times, the things
which are causing them to lose sleep.
Welcome to Witch Hunt Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
And I'm Sarah Jack. Today, we're looking into one of
(00:21):
history's most enduring and complex figures, the devil.
This is a topic that connects intimately with our ongoing
exploration of witch hunts, as beliefs about Satan played a
central role in many which persecution narratives.
To help us unravel the fascinating history of the
Devil, we're joined by Doctor Richard Raiswell, Professor of
(00:41):
History at the University of Prince Edward Island and expert
in medieval deviled lore. Doctor Raiswell brings years of
scholarly research to our discussion, including his work
on forthcoming Rutledge History of the Devil.
As we'll discover, much of what we think we know about the devil
isn't actually found in biblicaltexts, but emerged through
centuries of theological interpretation and cultural
(01:04):
evolution. From ancient monasteries to
modern political rhetoric, we'lltrace how Satan has remained a
powerful symbol of Western culture.
Serving is what Doctor Raiswell describes as the garbage can of
Western history, a repository for society's evolving fears and
anxieties. We cover a lot of ground today,
(01:24):
everything from the Devil's supposed involvement with
witches to his place in modern political discourse.
It's an episode you won't want to miss, so sit back, relax, and
prepare to have your mind expanded as we uncovered the
Devil's complex, multifaceted origins with Richard Racewell.
Thank you for coming on Witch Hunt Podcast.
(01:46):
Please introduce yourself and tell us about your expertise and
work. So my name is Richard Rizwell.
I'm a professor at the University of Prince Edward
Island, offering Eastern Canada.I work largely on aspects to do
with the history of the devil. I have translated and edited
with a colleague, David Winter, a collection of primary source
(02:07):
documents on the Middle Ages. I'm one of the editors with
David Winter again and the Michelle Brock of the
forthcoming Rutledge History of the Devil, which should be out
in May, I believe. And I've done various articles
and other books on devil relatedthemes and issues.
(02:28):
So I'm really glad that you're coming around to talking about
the devil. It's really exciting.
I mean, underneath so much of the Western conception of
witchcraft is the devil. And if these witches are going
to be anything more than what Reginald Scott describes as sort
of these weather beaten old Crohn's who are just sort of
(02:50):
deluded, you need the devil underneath all of that.
So the devil sort of underneath a lot of the stuff that you've
been talking about over the lastcouple of years.
So it's great to be here and to actually bring some devils to
this conversation. It's wonderful that you are
here. We're so thrilled to begin this
(03:11):
look into the devil, and this will be just our first episode
on him. So why is the Devil so
resilient? Yeah, that's an excellent
question, really, because we've had the scientific revolution,
we've had the Enlightenment. The devil is sort of the epitome
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of this sort of anti intellectualism.
You would have thought the sort of the light of reason would
have exposed the devil and just he would slowly have evaporated
away and people wouldn't talked about him anymore.
In fact that used to be the argument.
There's a quartet of books done by the great historian Jeffrey
(03:53):
Burton Russell which was done inthe 80s.
Very fine collection of books, but one of the things Russell
does, as he sort of says, after the Enlightenment, really the
devil isn't much of a problem. I mean, yeah, there's some
people at the butt lower end of society who started to talk
about him, but that's just not true.
(04:13):
He lingers on in sort of popularChristianity, but he's been very
much part of contemporary discourse, particularly in the
United States, since World War 2.
The idea of communism, godless communism.
In the end, who's the opposite of God?
If you're not godly, what are you?
Godless communism. You've got the sort of debate
(04:36):
about removing prayers from schools.
If you take God out of the schools, what's going to move
into that vacuum? You've got the growth of new
religious, new movements, neo paganism, Wicker than the Church
of Satan in the in 1966. And you've got sort of the
crisis in the family, which sortof results in the satanic panics
(04:58):
of the 80s that you talked aboutwith Scott Culpepper just a
couple of weeks ago. And you just had to watch your
recent election campaign to sortof see the way the devil is
deployed in political rhetoric these days after the attempted
(05:18):
shooting of Trump. It was just before the
Republican convention, wasn't it?
One of the senators said that the devil came down to
Pennsylvania today and tried to shoot the presidential
candidate. Very much part of political
discourse. So your question then, is a
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really important one. Why is he still here?
Why is he so resilient? Part of the reason for that, of
course, is that he's woven integrally into Christian belief
structures. But that said, most of what
people believe about the devil isn't biblical, right?
The word communist isn't in the Bible.
(06:02):
Jesus does advocate wealth redistribution in some level,
but Billy Graham labeled communism as demonic.
And in fact, in the wake of these sorts of arguments you had
in God We Trust printed on your money, IE we're not godless
communists, we're not on the side of demons.
(06:25):
The Bible takes no position on most of the hot button issues in
the contemporary culture wars, has nothing to say about
transsexuality, drug use, evolution, psychoanalysis, all
of these things. The Bible doesn't mention them.
It's nothing to say about black metal, Ouija boards, the occult,
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Dungeons and Dragons, these sorts of things.
It does, interestingly, have a bit to say about astrology.
But he quite likes astrology, right?
The three wise men, led by a star, they're astrologers.
They're able to use astrology towork out the birth of the Christ
child and define him. And if you ask many people to
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describe something like the Black Mass, it's not in the
Bible, but people would happily describe elements of it or what
they think to be elements of it.So much of what we take to be
demonic isn't biblical per SE. So the issue is where does it
come from? And that's an interesting
(07:31):
question. We got to spend some time
unpacking it. But at at this this point, I'd
just like to say that if you do look at this kind of things
which are labeled as demonic, ifyou take them apart and open up
this big folder of the demonic and think about what's there,
it's pretty ridiculous. Heretics, AIDS, witches, the EU,
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Jews, Freemasons, trans folk, black metal enthusiasts,
Scientologists, New Age religious practitioners, the
International Monetary Fund, Spiritualist, aggressive women,
the United Nations, homosexuals,Elvis Presley, tarot cards.
Put them all on the table and you've got things which have
nothing in common, right? There's absolutely nothing that
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links them beyond the fact that over time, over history,
somebody somewhere has labeled them as demonic, right.
In that sense, the demonic functions as like the garbage
can of Western history. It's where you put your fears,
your anxieties, the things that are causing a bit of angst and
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worry. And the demonic is just a fairly
easy receptacle for them. In the same way that your
kitchen garbage can has all sorts of different sorts of
stuff. Rotting vegetables, Well, they
should probably go new compost, but you've got all sorts of odds
and ends which have nothing in common with each other beyond
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the fact that you've decided to get rid of them.
So the devil functions a lot like that.
So the devil is very practical in that sense of of the term.
And so I think that's the most important thing to keep in mind.
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He's resilient because people find it useful here and that use
changes over time. And so when you unpack that
garbage can that is the demonic,you've got really quite an
interesting index of the kind ofthings that people are afraid of
at different times, the things which are causing them to lose
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sleep. How has that usefulness of the
devil? How What uses has he been put to
over time? So all sorts of different uses.
So he's a way of thinking about difference, right?
(10:04):
One of the things that the gospel says is that Christ what,
what agreement is there between Christ and burial which suggests
that there is no sort of middle ground, no sort of common
ground. So is a way of sort of dealing
with difference, right? We don't need to come up with
(10:26):
some sort of accommodation with Roman religious tradition.
And we'll probably unpack this in more detail down the road.
And we don't need to think aboutin too much detail magic or
about heresy or something like that.
We don't need to think about them in that much detail.
We can just sort of demonize them, and then that's enough to
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explain them. Because when you can't say
something is demonic, Scientology is demonic, what
you're doing is linking them together with all these other
things which are demonic. And it's all just part of the
same story. The death, the devil has many,
many different tricks, and in the end they're all the same.
And do you really need to know any more than that?
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So it's a really useful way of dealing with different, so a
really useful way of dealing with forces which are
potentially destabilizing, like progressive forces, feminism or
the civil rights movement or something.
In the course of U.S. history, the civil rights movement
suggests that America was founded on an original sin,
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right? It wasn't this sort of paradise
in the woods, as it were. There is a deep original sin in
there, and coming to terms with that is awkward and is
difficult. Equally, feminism seeks to
destabilize patriarchal, masculine, biblical masculinity,
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to use some of the sort of phrases.
And so it's a challenge that just demonize it.
It's destabilizing and we can get rid of it.
We don't need to deal with it. It's up there with Roman
idolatry, feminism, Roman idolatry.
Again, they've got nothing in common beyond the fact that
people at different times have labeled them as demonic.
(12:19):
So I think that's quite a usefulway of thinking about some of
these things. Thank you for opening up the
discussion talking about the demonization in our world.
What is the back story to the Devil?
Yeah, this is really interesting.
It's really contrived. It's really complicated and it's
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doesn't really have an awful lotdirectly to do with the the the
devil. The story most people know,
Lucifer is a puffed up Angel, puffed up with pride, rebels
against God and his rebellion isunsuccessful and so he gets cast
down to earth, maybe into the pit as well.
(13:05):
That's certain Bible. I mean, there's no narrative in
the Bible for that. The story that Satan took on the
form of a snake, entered the Garden of Eden and tempted Eve.
Yeah, that's not actually what the Bible says either.
So what does the Bible actually tell us about the devil?
(13:26):
Well, what I'm going to do now is give you sort of a greatest
hits. Now, I don't have every biblical
verse to hand and you don't havethree hours for this podcast, so
we we just go with some of the greatest hits.
So if you turn to the Gospels inthe New Testament, the Gospels
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of Mark, Matthew and Luke, they all record early on the story of
Christ going into the wildernesswhere he's tempted by the devil.
And at one point the devil says to Christ, I will show you, he
shows Christ all the kingdoms inthe world, and he says, I will
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give you all the power over these kingdoms.
Christ, of course, says, no, yeah, I'm, I'm not having it.
But this is the story of Christ's temptation.
Very famous, but it's more interesting for what it doesn't
say in many respects, because Christ does not say devil, this,
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these kingdoms are not yours. He doesn't say devil.
You're lying to me. Christ keeps the devil at face
value. This is an offer.
This is a genuine offer and I'm refusing it.
In fact, it needs to be a genuine offer.
Because if it's not a genuine offer, Christ hasn't actually
refused anything. He hasn't really been tempted,
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right? So it's got to be a genuine
offer. So Devil's has that power and
Christ doesn't deny it. So he doesn't do anything about
that. And then he also does nothing
about the devil. He doesn't.
The story doesn't conclude with Christ beating up the devil or
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expelling the devil out of the wilderness or off earth or
anything like that. He doesn't do anything about it.
So that's quite interesting. There's a couple of problems
there right away, but this is the first Gospel story which
deals with the devil. The Gospel of John has quite a
lot more to say about the devil.John 844 famously says that the
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devil was a murderer from the beginning and that he is a liar.
Well, OK, Christ in the wilderness story didn't say that
the devil was a liar. In fact, he seems to have
accepted devil was telling the truth.
OK, so that's problematic, but the devil was a murderer from
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the beginning. OK, who did he kill?
Because that's news to us. Who did he kill?
And the beginning of what? The beginning of creation.
OK, flip back to your Old Testament.
When was the devil created? I mean, we've got Genesis 1,
which details the creation story, and there is no story in
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there about the creation of the devil.
It's just not there. Some of these, these lines from
the Gospel of John are problematic.
Who did he kill and when did he kill it and why?
We're only finding out about this now.
We've got the Old Testament and it's four times the length of
the New Testament and just doesn't mention it.
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But if we turn to the letters ofSaint Paul to the Corinthians,
there's a section in the First Corinthians where Paul is
complaining to the community of Corinth about fornicators in
their presence. But what he says about the
fornicators is interesting, because he says that the
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community should deliver the fornicators to Satan for the
destruction of the flesh, so that their spirit may be saved.
It suggests actually that the role of Satan here is to punish
fornicators, to punish their bodies so that their spirits may
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be saved, that in the end Satan is doing, fulfilling the role of
a parent disciplining a bad child.
You don't call the parent disciplining the child if the
discipline is, within reason, anevil parent.
It's something which is necessary for the child's
development in the same way thatit's necessary for the
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fornicators to be disciplined sothat they can be saved.
Again, that's problematic. What do we do with that story?
Finally, there's the book of Revelations in the Bible, and
this describes the Great War in heaven between forces led by the
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Archangel Michael and an army which is led by what Revelations
described as the old serpent whois called the Devil and Satan.
So this is important because it suggests that the Devil and
Satan are the same thing, and maybe that the snake in Genesis
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is also the same thing. That's useful.
It's the last book of the Bible,right?
We've read the whole thing up tothis point, and now finally
we've thought all of these characters are the same thing.
That's handy. But the problem with Revelations
is it's a book of prophecy. This hasn't happened yet.
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This war in heaven hasn't happened yet.
In fact, it happens at the end of time, and the situation
becomes so bad that Christ has to come back and sort everything
out. It's a prelige prelude to the
end times. So that story about the Great
War in heaven coming from the rebellion hasn't happened yet.
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So the New Testament stuff is confusing.
So let's turn to the Old Testament.
There is a character who looks through the Old Testament called
Satan or a Satan. Does this clarify things?
Well, not really. The most important book in this
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respect is the Book of Job. This is the story of how Satan
tests Job. Very pious worshipper of God.
Satan is described as destroyingall of Job's property, killing
his livestock, killing all of his children, destroying his
house, inflicting Job with all sorts of painful sores across
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his body. It goes on and on and on.
So far, so evil. But it's the beginning of that
book, which is so interesting and strange because we're told
that Satan is in heaven. That he is.
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Talking to God in heaven and he's giving God advice in heaven
he says God, you might want to test this guy's joke because
you've given him everything is why life is wonderful.
How deep is his conviction to worshipping you?
And God says, you know what Satan, that's not a bad idea.
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Go ahead and do it. So Satan is working for God,
which is interesting, silly if you're thinking historically,
Satan is still in heaven at the time the book of Job is meant to
have taken place. This again is a problem.
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And then there's one more section in the Old Testament
which is quite interesting, the beginning of Genesis 6.
It's one of the strangest littletexts in the Bible.
It's just 4 lines. You go put it in context.
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We've had the story of creation,the creation days, and then
we've had the story of Adam and Eve and the story of this
plantation of Eve, the story of Cain and Abel.
And then Genesis 5 is a long genealogy.
And then suddenly, out of nowhere, we've got this
introduction to Genesis 6, And it begins by talking about a
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group called the Sons of God. Hang on, who on earth are they?
Where did they come from? And these sons of God, they mate
with human women and have children with them.
Oh, and then there's another throwaway line in passing.
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By the way, there were also giants on the earth in those
days. And there's nothing else after
that. The story of Noah and the flood
begins, and it begins by saying that God's so concerned about
the level of evil across the whole world that he decides to
destroy everybody except for Noah and his family and start
again. So the sense is that this little
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4 lines beginning Genesis 6 is something which is linked to the
flood story. But what?
So this is a skeleton view of what the Bible sort of says
about the devil and Satan, equating the two reading
backwards the the Old Testament in the light of the New.
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But it's raises an awful lot of more questions than it solves.
When was the devil created? If he fell, when did he fall?
Because he seems to still be in heaven in the time of the book
of Job. So what's happening in the
Garden of Eden, which presumablyhappened before the story of
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Job? And what's his role?
He's working for God in the bookof Job.
He also seems to be working for God, or at least doing something
godly in Paul's letters to the Corinthians.
So theologians in the early church, trying to think about
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these sorts of things end up looking elsewhere to build a
back story. They realize that what they have
to do is interpret this text. They can't take it literally
because it doesn't work literally easily.
They've got to read some of it metaphorically or allegorically.
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And that's not a problem for many of these people, because
Jesus spent a lot of its time talking in parables.
They're clearly not meant to be read literally.
I'm in fact, Christ says I speakto you in parables sometimes
because it makes you think you've actually got to think
about these things. So if Christ talking in
parables, why wouldn't you expect to find parables
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elsewhere in the text? So there are people who've been
doing this for quite some time. There's a book attributed to a
an Old Testament patriarch called Enoch doesn't make it
into the Old Testament composed around about 170 BC.
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And it expands in expands on that sons of God story and it
makes clear that the sons of Godare actually angels.
And these angels lust after human women, and they rape them
and they impregnate them. And these angels know that what
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they have done is wrong. So their leader gets them to
take an oath that they won't rateach other out, that they'll
stick together in all of this. And because they're angels, they
know the secrets of God. And so they also no all of the
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secrets of the universe, all of the secret powers in the
universe, things that we will later label as magic.
And they teach them to these human women they have mated
with. Obviously God is rather annoyed
at all of this. So the text has one of these
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angels passed into an opening made into the earth, and they
will not see the light until thecoming of Judgement, at which
point he'll be cast into the fire.
And the text then goes on to talk about these giants, who now
are the children of these women and angels.
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And these giants are identified as evil spirits, and they reside
on Earth, and their job is to afflict a press, destroy, and do
battle for the destruction of the earth.
So we're getting somewhere there.
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But the leader of these angels isn't called Satan or Lucifer is
called SEM Jazzer. And the Angel who's cast into
the earth is Azaro. But we've got an origin story
for magic as well. We've got skeleton of what's
going to become a full story. We're not quite there yet, but
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we've got the skeleton of it beginning.
And we've got an origin story for magic as well.
And it's a lot like the story ofPrometheus in Greek myths,
stealing the secrets of God, as it were, A generation after the
Book of Enoch is written. There's another one of these Old
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Testament apocryphal books circulating.
This is written round about between about 150 and 100 BC,
the book of Jubilees. And in many ways it's an attempt
to flesh out the story in Genesis.
It begins by giving the creationstory.
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But there are a few differences here.
Jubilees makes clear for the first time that angels and all
other types of spirits were created on the 4th creation day.
It was the 4th thing God did, and that was create angels and
spirits. And then it says that Adam and
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Eve lived in the Garden of Eden for seven years before the
incident with the snake. We're getting a chronology here,
and that that's handy. And then it repeats the story of
the angels lusting with women that comes from the Book of
Enoch. But then, and then it goes into
the story of knowing the flood. But after the flood, it gets a
(28:28):
bit interesting again. God sent out the flood because
human beings have become sinful.God wants to wipe one more out,
start all over again. So the earth should have been
pure purified as a result of this.
But where Jubilees picks up withNoah having a conversation with
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God, Noah's complaining to God about these things he calls
unclean demons who clearly haven't been destroyed by the
flood. They still seem to be around.
And these demons are a problem because they're leaving all of
his grandchildren astray. And it turns out, according to
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the book of Jubilees, that thesethese demons are actually the
ghosts or the spirits of these giants from the book of Enoch.
And now Noah says to God, can you do something with these
demons, please? They are annoying my family.
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They're leading my grandchildrenin a stray.
Can you do something with them? Can you confine them to a place
of judgement? He says, And God agrees.
And at that point the leader of these spirits come forward.
His name is Mastima. And this Mastima says to God,
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can you leave some of these evilspirits free?
Can you let some of these evil spirits be free and under my
control, let them roam around onthe earth because human beings
have the potential to go astray.And my job is to to lead these
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people astray, to lead the the faithless, to test the
faithless, to test how deep their faith is.
So God agrees to that. God agrees with Mastima to let
him keep a tenth of all of theseghost demon giant thingies
allowed to roam around on earth.And then Jubilees crucially says
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that Mastema may have a tenth ofthese demons so that they might
be subject to Satan on the earth, which is sort of Mastema
becoming Satan as the head of this force of demons which is
roaming the earth doing destruction.
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So we still don't don't have a full story yet.
This, the full story in the end,is largely the work of two
Christian theologians, Guy called Tertullian in the 2nd
century and a guy called Origin in the 3rd century.
(31:25):
Origin is from Alexandrian. And he sets about thinking at
one point about the various names and titles that are used
to denote the devil in the Bible.
This devil, the Satan, there's wicked one, there's enemy of
God. There's also Prince of the
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World. And that's what gets Origen
interested. He says there are lots of
Princess of the world described in the Old Testament, and their
power is described in the Old Testament as ultimately coming
to nothing. There's the story of the Prince
of Tyre in Ezekiel. The Prince of Tyre is enormously
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wealthy, very powerful, but he'sexceptionally proud, incredibly
arrogant. He even proclaims himself a God.
At one point. God declares that because of his
arrogance, he will fall. And then there's the story of
the king of Babylon in the book of Isaiah.
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Similar sorts of story, a proud ruler that God will cast down at
some point down the road. Both of these stories are
prophecies in the Old Testament,But there's a line in the story
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of the Kingdom king of Babylon which is quite suggestive to
origin because the prophecy saysafter the king of Babylon is
fallen, the Israelites is mocking him, saying how you have
fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who did rise in the morning, how
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you have fallen to earth, you who wounded nations.
And so Origin argues that these stories need to be read
allegorically. They're not about kings per SE.
They're actually allegorical tellings of the fall of an Angel
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called Lucifer. And he says if you look in the
Gospel of Luke, Christ says at one point that he saw Satan
folding like lightning from heaven.
So this is where you've got the back story of this proud Angel
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falling from Earth. It comes from these, the Enoch
Jubilees tradition, sort of trying to expand on the idea of
demons, developing the idea of demons and then Satan from
Mastema. But then Satan was read in on
the basis of identification withLucifer, read into the story of
(34:22):
the Prince of Tyre and the king of Babylon.
So it's not literally biblical, but that's how it develops over
time. It's really quite a lot of fun.
(34:43):
Yeah, it's really amazing to seethose things put together.
So thank you for explaining thatorigin.
Pleasure, Yeah. It sounds like there's multiple
origins to Satan, that he's Mustima and he's Lucifer.
(35:05):
Are those ever reconciled in anyof the literature or how?
How does that get resolved? Yeah, it just gets elided
together into one big story, thestory.
By the time after origin, nobody's really questioning that
sort of back story, but it's clearly something that people in
the first couple of centuries ofthe Christian tradition are
really trying very hard to explain.
(35:27):
Just the Gospels. Well, the New Testament is
really contradictory about this and it's obviously the kind of
thing that people are very interested in, in thinking
about. You've got to consider the early
Christianity like this in this point is it's not a top down
Christianity. They they'll read back and say,
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yeah, there is a Pope, but you've got no network of
communications beyond sort of letters crossing the
Mediterranean, which would take months at a time.
No centralized authority. Really what's happening is the
people are just asking their local Bishop or whatever.
OK, can you explain this to me? Can you explain that to me?
And because the people in again,different explanations to the
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people the other end of the the Christian world, you've got lots
of different sorts of traditions.
But with origin, you've got something which is becoming
accepted as you know. I mean, there's all sorts of
problems with origin story, but nevertheless it becomes almost
settled and nobody's really disputing it after that much.
(36:36):
What powers did early Christiansattribute to the devil, and what
were the limitations on those? This is really interesting and
very important point. So you've got to think about
things as divided. You've got theologians at one
point, very well educated men. They're all men, of course, and
(36:57):
they're reading books. They're in the early church.
They're reading books of Greek philosophy, Roman philosophy,
very learned men thinking about these problems from that angle.
But you've got ordinary people as well who are illiterate.
They know some of the basics of the faith, but they don't know
much more than that. What they do know is that this
(37:19):
world was apparently created perfectly.
But my baby died last week unexpectedly.
My crops are in danger of being wiped out by a freak weather
event. Their experiences of misfortune
in a perfect world are differentto what's going on with the
theologians. The theologians are very, very
(37:42):
clear that the devil ultimately is a natural thing.
What does that mean? Nature is the thing that God
uses to order and control the universe.
God created the universe, Yes, absolutely.
And then after that, he created this thing called nature, which
(38:02):
is what causes things to behave pretty much regularly.
The sun rises every day, not because God gets and moves the
sun around, but because nature causes it to move that way.
So nature is technically it's the secondary 'cause God is the
primary cause. Nature is the secondary 'cause
it's a thing which God uses to control the universe.
(38:23):
The theologians will argue that the devil is a natural thing.
So what that means is he's not supernatural.
The devil cannot do miracles. A miracle is something where God
intervenes directly in nature tomuck around with nature to cause
it to behave in a different, irregular way.
(38:46):
God could, and he does in the Old Testament, stop the sun from
moving, right? That's a miracle.
And he starts it up again when it's convenient, when it's
necessary. Devil doesn't have that kind of
parent. He has natural powers, but he
is, he's a spirit, so his powersare different from yours because
(39:13):
he's got a different sort of body.
We don't say that a dog has supernatural powers because it's
got a sense of smell that's muchbetter than ours.
It's just how dogs are made. They are made with that ability.
The devil as a fallen Angel has those some of those powers which
(39:34):
are associated with him having athe body of a spirit, an
ethereal body, as you were. Saint Augustine in the 5th
century spends quite a lot of time thinking about this issue.
He argues that we have flesh andblood bodies, so our motions are
(39:56):
limited by our form, by our body.
We can't move that fast. Demons though have ethereal
bodies, so that means that they can move incredibly fast.
Much of what you attribute to demons or as miraculous or semi
miraculous things that demons. Do are actually a function of
(40:19):
their nature? Demons can make things appear
suddenly to you and me, and we are amazed and we are thinking
that they are gods or something.But in actual fact, that's just
because in the twinkling of an eye, a demon has gone from here
off to pick up a bunch of stonesfrom, I don't know, the Syrian
(40:42):
desert. Brought them back here and
stepped them on your desk. And he's done it in the fraction
of an instant. From our perspective, it looks
like a miracle. The devil has counted stones out
of nowhere. But from the demon's
perspective, it's just how he's made, right?
He can do that. So for Saint Augustine, this
goes a long way to explaining some of the things that demons
(41:07):
can do. They're wholly natural, right?
There's nothing unnatural about a demon doing this.
Demons are also because they canmove so fast, they seem to be
able to make prophecies or predictions that come true.
But again, for Saint Augustine, this is just a function of their
(41:28):
nature. Because what demons can do is
they can flit across to your enemy next door.
See that the enemy is gathering a massive army.
Come back to tell you, hey, by the way, I think you're going to
be attacked in about six weeks. Sure enough, six weeks down the
road, you're attacked. Aha, The demons are gods.
No, it's just entirely because they can move so fast and see
(41:51):
things that you can't see. The other thing Gustin says
about demons is that they've been around since the beginning
of time. Pretty much.
They were created at some point,and as a result, they've come to
know the world in a way that we don't in our just 7080 years or
whatever. So they understand how the world
(42:14):
works in ways that we just don't.
So they've got a long experienceof nature so they can see signs
in the natural world. And they say, aha, when I see
that, I know that this is what'sgoing to happen.
In the same way that a doctor can look at your symptoms and
say in two weeks this patient's probably going to be dead, They
(42:40):
can predict the future that way.But the devil, when he's making
predictions based upon his knowledge of nature, is not
making secure predictions in theway that God would.
These are just his, the devil's diagnosis on what's going to
happen based upon his reading ofthese signs.
Augustine people, the theologians that come after him,
(43:02):
are really quite happy with that.
It keeps the devil confined within nature.
The devil can't actually do anything miraculous.
You do lots of things that seem strange to us, but that's only
because we're trapped here in flesh and blood and we can't do
very much. But the problem with this is
that it doesn't actually do muchfor sort of the some of the more
(43:32):
problematic aspects of people's beliefs.
One of the thorniest questions is the extent to which the devil
or demons can change people's shapes.
There's there's a whole pile of folklore tradition here, which
is Christians are encounter and the devil sort of transmute
(43:55):
people into wolves. I mean, the Romans have got
werewolf stories. Is that sort of thing possible
later during the witch hunting period?
Are they able to transmit peopleinto the form of cats?
Can they do that? Do they have this sort of power?
Can the devil transform you intothe form of a cat so you can get
(44:17):
into your neighbour's house and spy around or whatever?
Does the devil down the road have the power to create
ointments that can cause witchesto fly?
Is that really something the devil can do?
Is that sort of a natural thing and the devil's just felt all
(44:41):
sorts of natural knowledge and he knows how to make some sort
of ointment which would cause broomsticks to fly with people
on them? Or is this sort of some sort of
illusion be crafted, which is the dead devil is crafted in
people's minds? But particularly when we get
into the witch hunting period, these sorts of stories of
(45:05):
transmutation and many of the stories we'll talk about the
Sabbath down the road, but many of the stories associated with
the Sabbath need to be true at some level.
Because if they are just illusions, all you've actually
got are a bunch of women who've been duped, right?
(45:27):
And it's it's not a crime to be duped.
You don't deserve to be executedto be duped.
In fact, the passage in Exodus seems to suggest that there's
something going on. Exodus 2218 on meleficus non
parieres vivere. You shouldn't suffer a sorcerer
(45:48):
to live. Incidentally, in the Latin
meleficus is masculine. It's in the Protestant
translations when it becomes feminized as which, but it
would, I mean, wizard would be sort of it's very definitely a
masculine sort of noun. Evil doing.
But you need that. You need them.
(46:10):
You need, which is actually to be committing real affronts in
order to justify the punishment in Exodus.
Because if they were just being deceived, then you don't kill
them. Obviously God thinks there's
something so incredibly offensive about these malaficos
that they deserve to die, that they are actually working
(46:35):
demonic magic. Doing something supernatural
would justify that. Just being duped by demonic
illusions. Well, yeah, that's that doesn't
really deserve death. So there needs to be some sort
of way of accommodating folk club.
But also, particularly when witches start confessing all
(46:58):
sorts of odd things, a chunk of them need at least to be real.
And some of the things which witches are described and the
leading questions and tortured, which I'm sure you've talked
about many, many times, some of the things which is describing
are unnatural. They're supernatural, that is,
they're above the natural realm,and only God is meant to have
(47:19):
that power above the natural realm.
So they're actually performing evil miracles in some level.
And when they confess to. Well, there's a case which I
wrote about where a woman is transmitted into the form of a
cat, enters into the House of her son, slips open a hole in
(47:41):
his spide, inserts a pile of mudand stuff in there.
It miraculously seals up and then later explodes.
And happily, that's unsafe. But nevertheless, he's arrested,
she's certificated chief prosecuted, and she's executed
for that. But that has to be real at some
level to justify that. So, and I think that's quite an
(48:02):
important point. So this sort of gets us into
another area that's quite interesting, and that is the
problem of experience and how sort of people's experience of
the world maps into their sort of ideas of the demonic.
(48:26):
Early Christianity. If you think about it
underground in the Roman world, it's oppressed frequently.
This is a secret sect, right? People are gathering in secret
and taking the sacred meal together.
And the danger is periodically they are persecuted, the
(48:49):
sporadic persecutions and various Christians go off and at
various times they are martyred.So when Christians start
thinking about the relationship with ancient Rome, it's a pretty
easy one, that one. The Old Testament condemns
idolatry. That's clear.
(49:10):
It's in the 10 commandments. And worshipping any God that
isn't the true God is obviously a problem.
It detracts from God's dignity. God doesn't appreciate that.
The 10 commandments clear. That shouldn't be tolerated.
Roman religion clearly idolatrous, right?
(49:31):
We should have no sort of accommodation for Roman
religion. OK, so Roman religion, idolatry.
It's right out. It's demonic, right?
And in fact, the Romans are persecuting us, and members of
our faith are dying for the truth.
(49:51):
In other words, they're being killed by lies.
And who's the source of lies? John was pretty clear about
that. Demons or demonic, The
relationship with magic is much more interesting and much more
peculiar. You talk to Tabitha Stanmore
earlier this year about service magic, and one of her points was
(50:17):
that service magic persists because it fulfills a real
social need. It's important, and it's
important in her period, 15th, 16th, 17th century.
It's important in the ancient world as well.
It's a way to try and exercise some sort of control in the
(50:37):
world against life's trials and tribulations.
It's a way of exercising controlin the chaotic world.
And all sorts of magical services are available across
the ancient world. Love magic.
Havasa talked about love magic in the 16th, 17th century.
Blessings, charms, cures for allsorts of diseases, Good luck in
(51:02):
business and you've already got a raise.
An array of Panther magic as well the opposite forms of
curses. You can curse your business
rivals as a famous curse tablet where some Roman brothel owner
wants the prostitutes in a competitors brothel to go mad,
so he takes out a curse tablet. He pays for a curse to be made
(51:25):
on these prostitutes, so he'll go mad and so he ends up getting
all of the local business. How does this point is that
magic is basically useful? She called IT service magic.
People need to be able to expel disease, find thieves, protect
the future, protect themselves against misfortune.
(51:47):
But when Christ shows up, he's doing some of the same sort of
thing. He's curing people of diseases,
he's expelling diseases, he's using exorcisms to expel
disease, he's expelling demons, he's bringing the dead back to
life. He's doing all sorts of miracle
(52:07):
workings. So one of the problems, one of
the many problems confronting early Christians is what do they
do about this magical tradition?How do they distinguish their
sort of set of wonder working because it's passed on after
Christ through things like holy water, the power of the cross,
(52:31):
sacraments, baptism in particular?
How do we sort of safeguard our wonder working and distinguish
it from the wonder working of all of these competitors?
And there's all sorts of competitors.
It really is a marketplace in the ancient Roman world.
(52:52):
One thing that Christians can't do is say that the wonder
working of their competitors doesn't work.
They can't just say Roman magicians.
They're all common. Keep your money, folks.
They can't do that because of a story in the book of Exodus.
There's a story in the book of Exodus where Moses and his
(53:14):
brother Aaron are confronted by Pharaoh and his magicians and
they get into a wonder working contest.
Pharaoh and his magicians turn their Staffs into snakes.
So Moses and his brother do the same sort of things.
Story goes on for a while and don't need to repeat it, but in
(53:34):
the end Moses, the snakes heat conjures end up eating Pharaoh's
snakes, which is meant to take that their power is greater than
the power of Pharaoh. But what the story doesn't say
is that this stuff doesn't work.It does work.
It does work. So that means that Roman magic
(53:56):
and at some level work. What Saint Augustine would say
is, of course, all that's happened with Pharaoh's
magicians is that demons have shown up.
They've taken away the rods thatPharaoh's magicians have had,
tossed them away, brought, gone and got a couple of snakes,
brought them back from Namidia or somewhere, brought them back,
(54:19):
given them to Pharaohs guys. And it all happened in an
instant and it looked like they'd conjured up these snakes.
That's exactly what Saint Augustine would say.
So this magic is works, the magic of the Romans works, but
it's ultimately worked through commerce with demons, right?
(54:44):
So what we're saying is that that is magic.
It does have powers, but it's dangerous magic.
So be careful or actually don't use it because it's really
dangerous stuff. By contrast, our magic is the
good stuff. All of magic is the legitimate
(55:05):
stuff. And Christians, gods develop all
sorts of wonder. Working tools, holy walls of the
cross, charms in the forms of blessings, invocations.
There's little difference between an invocation and a
prayer. When you actually start reading
these things, comparing invocations to demons to
invocations to God, that interestingly all set in the
(55:29):
junctive. They're all actually orders.
So, so you're ordering demons around and you're also ordering
God around. So what Christianity does with
magic is it demonizes it. Literally.
It says that it works, but it works through colours with
demons. So it's dangerous.
We've got the good stuff. So their experience with magic
(55:52):
is to demonize it. So now we've got a new category
of the demonic. We've got idolatry, we've got
the we've got magic as well. But devil knowledge really gets
another big boost from the livesof some of the early monks in
particular. You've got the life of Saint
(56:14):
Anthony. He's the most important Anthony
lives is his dates are absolutely amazing.
He lives from 251 to three, 5-6,yeah, 105.
He live he the story is classic.He gives up the family fortune
and decides to go off to leavingthe desert as a hermit.
(56:37):
Of course, Christ was of the story of Christ from the
wilderness. He went off into the desert to
do to be tempted by the devil. So I'm he's doing the same sort
of thing. He's looking for demons in a
way, and boy does he find demons.
He sets himself up in the desertand he's regularly beaten up by
(56:58):
demons. They # him.
They smash him up. He's regularly in pain because
he's been fomented by demons. But these demons also tried to
tempt him. They change forms, they create
apparitions, they create illusions.
They appear to him in the form of a woman, a black boy, a monk,
(57:20):
various beasts. They even appeared to him in the
form of fire at one point. Now the problem with this is
Augustine has these demons as ethereal, able to flit around.
So how does a spirit beat somebody up?
(57:44):
The problem is you've got 2 quite contrasting ideas here.
You've got Augustine and his nice packaged theology with
demons who are just flitting around in the air.
That's fine, that's great, they're all natural.
But here you've got a demons, well a host of them, who are
physically powerful enough to beat up the Saints.
(58:05):
What's important about Anthony'saccount is he doesn't explain
it. Well, the author, the guy writes
it down, doesn't explain it. I'm not giving you any theology
here, readers. This is just what happened,
right? The devil was able to do all of
these things. I'm not going to try and explain
it theologically, but it doesn'twork theologically.
(58:28):
But I'm not going to try and explain it.
So it because of this sort of role of experience, the devil
often takes on all of these new sorts of forms as a result of
contact with other sort of cultures are the sort of
traditions are the sorts of waysof living and you don't have the
(58:51):
theology doesn't work, but it gets fitted in there as it will.
How can attacks from the devil be viewed as evidence of the
target's importance? Yeah, this is a really
interesting point as well. So the devil obviously doesn't
need to attack people he's already got, right?
(59:11):
They're quite happy to live in safety and security.
They're already some of the devil's followers.
So the devil attacks the most vulnerable, the weakest, in
particular women. The will of women is believed to
be weaker. They're more prone to gossip and
temptation as a result of that. Also, and this is a trope that
(59:36):
you see all the way through thisstuff, it's all in the
witchcraft literature as well. Female sexuality is never
satisfied for the womb. In the language of the time, the
womb will do anything to see itself filled.
So that means women are more likely to come to lust and all
of the vices associated with that.
(59:56):
So that's women are an easy target in that respect.
And that's why the devil, of course, attacked Eve.
And not Adam in the Garden, Garden of Eden.
There's a really good story which circulates around in
apocryphal book of the Old Testament where Eve's on her
deathbed and she is really, really annoyed because the way
(01:00:21):
she describes it, in the Garden of Eden, she and Adam are
manning the defenses against Satan on the outside and the
angels are weighed with them. Then at 4:00 or whatever God
demands the angels come and worship him.
So the angels go off, leave Eve defending half the Fort of the
Garden of Eden by herself. The devil comes in, what's she
(01:00:42):
going to do? Eve really angry.
Anyway, that's a different storyfor another day.
It's a really good story and he doesn't talked about it now
anyway. So the devil targets women
disproportionately. He also, of course, targets
anybody who's a soft target, anybody who's already
particularly vulnerable because of gluttony or because of
(01:01:05):
lechery or greed. If there's something there to
exploit, he'll find a way to worm himself in.
But he also is really repulsed by piety, by great piety.
That's why I attacked Anthony. Anthony's being provocative.
But there's a great set of stories associated with a monk
(01:01:27):
from the 13th century, guy called Recalmus of Chantal.
He writes a book called the Bookof Revelations concerning the
deceit and coming of demons against men.
It's a very strange book. You've got lots of details about
how demons have infiltrated intohis monastery.
(01:01:48):
He says demons are all over the place, like the spots in the
sunlight. They are so common.
They're all over the place. And sometimes these things
combine to make human forms. They're always looking to entrap
monks, he said, monks in particular.
And they do it through tiny things as well, he says when he
goes to do the monastic reading.So reading out loud to the to
(01:02:11):
the congregation, sometimes demons know what the text is and
they begin to say the words justbefore you do to make it sound
like you're stuttering. I think it's quite clear that
Raquelmus actually has a stutterand he's just attributing it to
demons. Later he's talking and he seems
to smell something really strange.
(01:02:33):
And he says to the guys, when God, didn't you smell that?
Oh, that's demons. I think he's farting close and
it's just written there in his book.
But demons also manipulate people's faces.
They twist their nose, they curlup their lips and make them look
a bit ugly to started God's perfect creation, making them
(01:02:53):
look a bit a bit nasty when theyfuss around trying to prevent
monks from sleeping. And they also do all sorts of
bigger things as well. They try to tempt monks by
showing up in the form of naked women or taking on the bodies of
dead people, all this sort of thing.
And he hears demons talking to each other.
(01:03:16):
Demons aren't actually that confident for recalmers.
They have to egg each other on. Oh, and you could do it.
You could do it. You could make his nose twist.
Yes. And it's really quite a bizarre,
bizarre text. But the monastery is set up as a
fortress. It's set up in the wilderness,
(01:03:36):
and it's meant to be a fortress against the devil.
In fact, Bernard de Clairvaux inthe 12th century describes it as
a fortress in militaristic terms.
And the issue is you've got to clothe yourself in the armor of
gods, defend yourself from intrusions.
But within the monastery, what do you do with people who might
(01:04:00):
succumb to temptation? What do you do with them?
This notion of a safe space, an enclosed space comes from the
monastery, but I think it you still see see echoes of it down
the road when you talk about theSatanic PAX as you did with
Scott Culpepper. The suburb, the white enclave of
(01:04:21):
the American suburb is that sortof safe space would argue, goes
so far as to argue that one of the subtexts of Christian
nationalism and the idea of building a wall with Mexico.
And presumably you'll have to dosomething about us, our Canadian
border as well down the road. It's about creating another sort
of safe enclosed fortress space where you are immune from
(01:04:47):
demonic incursions at some level.
Thank you so much, this has really been wonderful.
I've learned so, so much. Well, thank you.
It's been a great pleasure. Mary Bingham is back with Minute
with Mary. I listen to Richard Raisewell as
(01:05:09):
he described how the devil is viewed by people and varying
historical cultures from 1600 to1650.
According to Richard, the Puritans living in colonial
Massachusetts would have viewed the deceitful beasts of the New
Testament with much power. You see, where there was good,
(01:05:30):
there was evil. To believe in the existence of
God, one also believed in the existence of the devil.
And the scary thing for them is that the devil lurked
everywhere, around every corner.This baleful beast was part of
their invisible world, who they believed could disguise himself
(01:05:52):
as someone's likeness, moving about and causing harm to that
person's adversaries and their environments.
Such was the case when two men accused Sarah Wilde's spirit of
spooking their oxen, causing thebeast to drive the cart straight
down into the brook, throwing loads of hay into the water
(01:06:14):
after a full day of mowing. This was also the case when
Abigail Faulkner stood accused of witchcraft at the bar in the
meeting house. As her accusers were flailing
with fits. The magistrates demanded.
And I quote, look at their distress, Abigail replied.
(01:06:36):
I do not afflict them. It is the devil who does it in
my shape. Then there is John Proctor, who
wanted to beat the devil out of the accusers, but that's another
story for another time. Thank you.
Thank you, Mary. And now Sarah has End witch
(01:06:58):
hunts news. End witch Hunts news This
January, as we recognize National Human Trafficking
Prevention Month, let's discuss a critical but often overlooked
aspect of trafficking, the exploitation of cultural beliefs
and spiritual practices as toolsof coercion.
Traffickers don't just use physical force or financial
(01:07:20):
control, they exploit deep cultural beliefs, including
fears of curses or spiritual harm, to maintain power over
victims. The psychological manipulation
combined with document confiscation, debt bondage, and
isolation creates complex chainsof control that can be
especially challenging for survivors to break.
(01:07:41):
Strength and prevention efforts must ensure culturally informed
support services recognize trafficking in all sectors from
agriculture to hospitality, address increased digital
recruitment through social media, and protect vulnerable
populations through education and community support.
If you or someone you know needshelp, the National Human Traffic
(01:08:02):
Hotline is 1-888-373-7888. Together we can build more
effective, culturally sensitive approaches to prevention and
survivor support. Join us on February 1st at 1:00
PM for remembering the innocent victims of the Connecticut Witch
Trials, a special 2 hour commemoration of those who lost
(01:08:24):
their lives in colonial Connecticut's witch trials at
Connecticut's Old State House inHartford, CT.
Award-winning performers DeborahWalsh and Jenny Wolf will open
with a dramatic reading, followed by an expert panel
featuring the Connecticut Witch Trials Exoneration Project
founders, historian Richard Ross, the 3rd and Connecticut
Representative Jane Garabe, and Connecticut Senator Saud Anwar.
(01:08:48):
The afternoon culminates in a walk of remembrance to the
Memorial Bricks at the Ancient Burial Ground, where author
Richard Ross will share insightsfrom his popular history walks
and offer closing reflections. Connect with fellow community
members as we work together to shine a light on this crucial
chapter of our history. Don't miss this powerful blend
of performance, education, and commemoration that aligns with
(01:09:11):
Connecticut's recent legislativerecognition of these historical
injustices. Reserve your free ticket through
our Eventbrite link. Thank you, Sarah.
You're welcome. And thank you for joining us on
Beach Hunt. Spend time with us again next
week. Have a great today and a
beautiful tomorrow.
And so when you unpack that garbage can that is the demonic,
you've got really quite an interesting index of the kind of
things that people are afraid ofat different times, the things
which are causing them to lose sleep.
Welcome to Witch Hunt Podcast. I'm Josh Hutchinson.
And I'm Sarah Jack. Today, we're looking into one of
(00:21):
history's most enduring and complex figures, the devil.
This is a topic that connects intimately with our ongoing
exploration of witch hunts, as beliefs about Satan played a
central role in many which persecution narratives.
To help us unravel the fascinating history of the
Devil, we're joined by Doctor Richard Raiswell, Professor of
(00:41):
History at the University of Prince Edward Island and expert
in medieval deviled lore. Doctor Raiswell brings years of
scholarly research to our discussion, including his work
on forthcoming Rutledge History of the Devil.
As we'll discover, much of what we think we know about the devil
isn't actually found in biblicaltexts, but emerged through
centuries of theological interpretation and cultural
(01:04):
evolution. From ancient monasteries to
modern political rhetoric, we'lltrace how Satan has remained a
powerful symbol of Western culture.
Serving is what Doctor Raiswell describes as the garbage can of
Western history, a repository for society's evolving fears and
anxieties. We cover a lot of ground today,
(01:24):
everything from the Devil's supposed involvement with
witches to his place in modern political discourse.
It's an episode you won't want to miss, so sit back, relax, and
prepare to have your mind expanded as we uncovered the
Devil's complex, multifaceted origins with Richard Racewell.
Thank you for coming on Witch Hunt Podcast.
(01:46):
Please introduce yourself and tell us about your expertise and
work. So my name is Richard Rizwell.
I'm a professor at the University of Prince Edward
Island, offering Eastern Canada.I work largely on aspects to do
with the history of the devil. I have translated and edited
with a colleague, David Winter, a collection of primary source
(02:07):
documents on the Middle Ages. I'm one of the editors with
David Winter again and the Michelle Brock of the
forthcoming Rutledge History of the Devil, which should be out
in May, I believe. And I've done various articles
and other books on devil relatedthemes and issues.
(02:28):
So I'm really glad that you're coming around to talking about
the devil. It's really exciting.
I mean, underneath so much of the Western conception of
witchcraft is the devil. And if these witches are going
to be anything more than what Reginald Scott describes as sort
of these weather beaten old Crohn's who are just sort of
(02:50):
deluded, you need the devil underneath all of that.
So the devil sort of underneath a lot of the stuff that you've
been talking about over the lastcouple of years.
So it's great to be here and to actually bring some devils to
this conversation. It's wonderful that you are
here. We're so thrilled to begin this
(03:11):
look into the devil, and this will be just our first episode
on him. So why is the Devil so
resilient? Yeah, that's an excellent
question, really, because we've had the scientific revolution,
we've had the Enlightenment. The devil is sort of the epitome
(03:33):
of this sort of anti intellectualism.
You would have thought the sort of the light of reason would
have exposed the devil and just he would slowly have evaporated
away and people wouldn't talked about him anymore.
In fact that used to be the argument.
There's a quartet of books done by the great historian Jeffrey
(03:53):
Burton Russell which was done inthe 80s.
Very fine collection of books, but one of the things Russell
does, as he sort of says, after the Enlightenment, really the
devil isn't much of a problem. I mean, yeah, there's some
people at the butt lower end of society who started to talk
about him, but that's just not true.
(04:13):
He lingers on in sort of popularChristianity, but he's been very
much part of contemporary discourse, particularly in the
United States, since World War 2.
The idea of communism, godless communism.
In the end, who's the opposite of God?
If you're not godly, what are you?
Godless communism. You've got the sort of debate
(04:36):
about removing prayers from schools.
If you take God out of the schools, what's going to move
into that vacuum? You've got the growth of new
religious, new movements, neo paganism, Wicker than the Church
of Satan in the in 1966. And you've got sort of the
crisis in the family, which sortof results in the satanic panics
(04:58):
of the 80s that you talked aboutwith Scott Culpepper just a
couple of weeks ago. And you just had to watch your
recent election campaign to sortof see the way the devil is
deployed in political rhetoric these days after the attempted
(05:18):
shooting of Trump. It was just before the
Republican convention, wasn't it?
One of the senators said that the devil came down to
Pennsylvania today and tried to shoot the presidential
candidate. Very much part of political
discourse. So your question then, is a
(05:39):
really important one. Why is he still here?
Why is he so resilient? Part of the reason for that, of
course, is that he's woven integrally into Christian belief
structures. But that said, most of what
people believe about the devil isn't biblical, right?
The word communist isn't in the Bible.
(06:02):
Jesus does advocate wealth redistribution in some level,
but Billy Graham labeled communism as demonic.
And in fact, in the wake of these sorts of arguments you had
in God We Trust printed on your money, IE we're not godless
communists, we're not on the side of demons.
(06:25):
The Bible takes no position on most of the hot button issues in
the contemporary culture wars, has nothing to say about
transsexuality, drug use, evolution, psychoanalysis, all
of these things. The Bible doesn't mention them.
It's nothing to say about black metal, Ouija boards, the occult,
(06:46):
Dungeons and Dragons, these sorts of things.
It does, interestingly, have a bit to say about astrology.
But he quite likes astrology, right?
The three wise men, led by a star, they're astrologers.
They're able to use astrology towork out the birth of the Christ
child and define him. And if you ask many people to
(07:09):
describe something like the Black Mass, it's not in the
Bible, but people would happily describe elements of it or what
they think to be elements of it.So much of what we take to be
demonic isn't biblical per SE. So the issue is where does it
come from? And that's an interesting
(07:31):
question. We got to spend some time
unpacking it. But at at this this point, I'd
just like to say that if you do look at this kind of things
which are labeled as demonic, ifyou take them apart and open up
this big folder of the demonic and think about what's there,
it's pretty ridiculous. Heretics, AIDS, witches, the EU,
(07:56):
Jews, Freemasons, trans folk, black metal enthusiasts,
Scientologists, New Age religious practitioners, the
International Monetary Fund, Spiritualist, aggressive women,
the United Nations, homosexuals,Elvis Presley, tarot cards.
Put them all on the table and you've got things which have
nothing in common, right? There's absolutely nothing that
(08:19):
links them beyond the fact that over time, over history,
somebody somewhere has labeled them as demonic, right.
In that sense, the demonic functions as like the garbage
can of Western history. It's where you put your fears,
your anxieties, the things that are causing a bit of angst and
(08:40):
worry. And the demonic is just a fairly
easy receptacle for them. In the same way that your
kitchen garbage can has all sorts of different sorts of
stuff. Rotting vegetables, Well, they
should probably go new compost, but you've got all sorts of odds
and ends which have nothing in common with each other beyond
(09:00):
the fact that you've decided to get rid of them.
So the devil functions a lot like that.
So the devil is very practical in that sense of of the term.
And so I think that's the most important thing to keep in mind.
(09:21):
He's resilient because people find it useful here and that use
changes over time. And so when you unpack that
garbage can that is the demonic,you've got really quite an
interesting index of the kind ofthings that people are afraid of
at different times, the things which are causing them to lose
(09:43):
sleep. How has that usefulness of the
devil? How What uses has he been put to
over time? So all sorts of different uses.
So he's a way of thinking about difference, right?
(10:04):
One of the things that the gospel says is that Christ what,
what agreement is there between Christ and burial which suggests
that there is no sort of middle ground, no sort of common
ground. So is a way of sort of dealing
with difference, right? We don't need to come up with
(10:26):
some sort of accommodation with Roman religious tradition.
And we'll probably unpack this in more detail down the road.
And we don't need to think aboutin too much detail magic or
about heresy or something like that.
We don't need to think about them in that much detail.
We can just sort of demonize them, and then that's enough to
(10:51):
explain them. Because when you can't say
something is demonic, Scientology is demonic, what
you're doing is linking them together with all these other
things which are demonic. And it's all just part of the
same story. The death, the devil has many,
many different tricks, and in the end they're all the same.
And do you really need to know any more than that?
(11:14):
So it's a really useful way of dealing with different, so a
really useful way of dealing with forces which are
potentially destabilizing, like progressive forces, feminism or
the civil rights movement or something.
In the course of U.S. history, the civil rights movement
suggests that America was founded on an original sin,
(11:38):
right? It wasn't this sort of paradise
in the woods, as it were. There is a deep original sin in
there, and coming to terms with that is awkward and is
difficult. Equally, feminism seeks to
destabilize patriarchal, masculine, biblical masculinity,
(11:59):
to use some of the sort of phrases.
And so it's a challenge that just demonize it.
It's destabilizing and we can get rid of it.
We don't need to deal with it. It's up there with Roman
idolatry, feminism, Roman idolatry.
Again, they've got nothing in common beyond the fact that
people at different times have labeled them as demonic.
(12:19):
So I think that's quite a usefulway of thinking about some of
these things. Thank you for opening up the
discussion talking about the demonization in our world.
What is the back story to the Devil?
Yeah, this is really interesting.
It's really contrived. It's really complicated and it's
(12:43):
doesn't really have an awful lotdirectly to do with the the the
devil. The story most people know,
Lucifer is a puffed up Angel, puffed up with pride, rebels
against God and his rebellion isunsuccessful and so he gets cast
down to earth, maybe into the pit as well.
(13:05):
That's certain Bible. I mean, there's no narrative in
the Bible for that. The story that Satan took on the
form of a snake, entered the Garden of Eden and tempted Eve.
Yeah, that's not actually what the Bible says either.
So what does the Bible actually tell us about the devil?
(13:26):
Well, what I'm going to do now is give you sort of a greatest
hits. Now, I don't have every biblical
verse to hand and you don't havethree hours for this podcast, so
we we just go with some of the greatest hits.
So if you turn to the Gospels inthe New Testament, the Gospels
(13:49):
of Mark, Matthew and Luke, they all record early on the story of
Christ going into the wildernesswhere he's tempted by the devil.
And at one point the devil says to Christ, I will show you, he
shows Christ all the kingdoms inthe world, and he says, I will
(14:10):
give you all the power over these kingdoms.
Christ, of course, says, no, yeah, I'm, I'm not having it.
But this is the story of Christ's temptation.
Very famous, but it's more interesting for what it doesn't
say in many respects, because Christ does not say devil, this,
(14:33):
these kingdoms are not yours. He doesn't say devil.
You're lying to me. Christ keeps the devil at face
value. This is an offer.
This is a genuine offer and I'm refusing it.
In fact, it needs to be a genuine offer.
Because if it's not a genuine offer, Christ hasn't actually
refused anything. He hasn't really been tempted,
(14:54):
right? So it's got to be a genuine
offer. So Devil's has that power and
Christ doesn't deny it. So he doesn't do anything about
that. And then he also does nothing
about the devil. He doesn't.
The story doesn't conclude with Christ beating up the devil or
(15:14):
expelling the devil out of the wilderness or off earth or
anything like that. He doesn't do anything about it.
So that's quite interesting. There's a couple of problems
there right away, but this is the first Gospel story which
deals with the devil. The Gospel of John has quite a
lot more to say about the devil.John 844 famously says that the
(15:40):
devil was a murderer from the beginning and that he is a liar.
Well, OK, Christ in the wilderness story didn't say that
the devil was a liar. In fact, he seems to have
accepted devil was telling the truth.
OK, so that's problematic, but the devil was a murderer from
(16:00):
the beginning. OK, who did he kill?
Because that's news to us. Who did he kill?
And the beginning of what? The beginning of creation.
OK, flip back to your Old Testament.
When was the devil created? I mean, we've got Genesis 1,
which details the creation story, and there is no story in
(16:25):
there about the creation of the devil.
It's just not there. Some of these, these lines from
the Gospel of John are problematic.
Who did he kill and when did he kill it and why?
We're only finding out about this now.
We've got the Old Testament and it's four times the length of
the New Testament and just doesn't mention it.
(16:46):
But if we turn to the letters ofSaint Paul to the Corinthians,
there's a section in the First Corinthians where Paul is
complaining to the community of Corinth about fornicators in
their presence. But what he says about the
fornicators is interesting, because he says that the
(17:07):
community should deliver the fornicators to Satan for the
destruction of the flesh, so that their spirit may be saved.
It suggests actually that the role of Satan here is to punish
fornicators, to punish their bodies so that their spirits may
(17:29):
be saved, that in the end Satan is doing, fulfilling the role of
a parent disciplining a bad child.
You don't call the parent disciplining the child if the
discipline is, within reason, anevil parent.
It's something which is necessary for the child's
development in the same way thatit's necessary for the
(17:52):
fornicators to be disciplined sothat they can be saved.
Again, that's problematic. What do we do with that story?
Finally, there's the book of Revelations in the Bible, and
this describes the Great War in heaven between forces led by the
(18:13):
Archangel Michael and an army which is led by what Revelations
described as the old serpent whois called the Devil and Satan.
So this is important because it suggests that the Devil and
Satan are the same thing, and maybe that the snake in Genesis
(18:34):
is also the same thing. That's useful.
It's the last book of the Bible,right?
We've read the whole thing up tothis point, and now finally
we've thought all of these characters are the same thing.
That's handy. But the problem with Revelations
is it's a book of prophecy. This hasn't happened yet.
(18:54):
This war in heaven hasn't happened yet.
In fact, it happens at the end of time, and the situation
becomes so bad that Christ has to come back and sort everything
out. It's a prelige prelude to the
end times. So that story about the Great
War in heaven coming from the rebellion hasn't happened yet.
(19:18):
So the New Testament stuff is confusing.
So let's turn to the Old Testament.
There is a character who looks through the Old Testament called
Satan or a Satan. Does this clarify things?
Well, not really. The most important book in this
(19:39):
respect is the Book of Job. This is the story of how Satan
tests Job. Very pious worshipper of God.
Satan is described as destroyingall of Job's property, killing
his livestock, killing all of his children, destroying his
house, inflicting Job with all sorts of painful sores across
(20:03):
his body. It goes on and on and on.
So far, so evil. But it's the beginning of that
book, which is so interesting and strange because we're told
that Satan is in heaven. That he is.
(20:23):
Talking to God in heaven and he's giving God advice in heaven
he says God, you might want to test this guy's joke because
you've given him everything is why life is wonderful.
How deep is his conviction to worshipping you?
And God says, you know what Satan, that's not a bad idea.
(20:44):
Go ahead and do it. So Satan is working for God,
which is interesting, silly if you're thinking historically,
Satan is still in heaven at the time the book of Job is meant to
have taken place. This again is a problem.
(21:07):
And then there's one more section in the Old Testament
which is quite interesting, the beginning of Genesis 6.
It's one of the strangest littletexts in the Bible.
It's just 4 lines. You go put it in context.
(21:27):
We've had the story of creation,the creation days, and then
we've had the story of Adam and Eve and the story of this
plantation of Eve, the story of Cain and Abel.
And then Genesis 5 is a long genealogy.
And then suddenly, out of nowhere, we've got this
introduction to Genesis 6, And it begins by talking about a
(21:50):
group called the Sons of God. Hang on, who on earth are they?
Where did they come from? And these sons of God, they mate
with human women and have children with them.
Oh, and then there's another throwaway line in passing.
(22:10):
By the way, there were also giants on the earth in those
days. And there's nothing else after
that. The story of Noah and the flood
begins, and it begins by saying that God's so concerned about
the level of evil across the whole world that he decides to
destroy everybody except for Noah and his family and start
again. So the sense is that this little
(22:33):
4 lines beginning Genesis 6 is something which is linked to the
flood story. But what?
So this is a skeleton view of what the Bible sort of says
about the devil and Satan, equating the two reading
backwards the the Old Testament in the light of the New.
(22:54):
But it's raises an awful lot of more questions than it solves.
When was the devil created? If he fell, when did he fall?
Because he seems to still be in heaven in the time of the book
of Job. So what's happening in the
Garden of Eden, which presumablyhappened before the story of
(23:15):
Job? And what's his role?
He's working for God in the bookof Job.
He also seems to be working for God, or at least doing something
godly in Paul's letters to the Corinthians.
So theologians in the early church, trying to think about
(23:36):
these sorts of things end up looking elsewhere to build a
back story. They realize that what they have
to do is interpret this text. They can't take it literally
because it doesn't work literally easily.
They've got to read some of it metaphorically or allegorically.
(23:58):
And that's not a problem for many of these people, because
Jesus spent a lot of its time talking in parables.
They're clearly not meant to be read literally.
I'm in fact, Christ says I speakto you in parables sometimes
because it makes you think you've actually got to think
about these things. So if Christ talking in
parables, why wouldn't you expect to find parables
(24:20):
elsewhere in the text? So there are people who've been
doing this for quite some time. There's a book attributed to a
an Old Testament patriarch called Enoch doesn't make it
into the Old Testament composed around about 170 BC.
(24:44):
And it expands in expands on that sons of God story and it
makes clear that the sons of Godare actually angels.
And these angels lust after human women, and they rape them
and they impregnate them. And these angels know that what
(25:06):
they have done is wrong. So their leader gets them to
take an oath that they won't rateach other out, that they'll
stick together in all of this. And because they're angels, they
know the secrets of God. And so they also no all of the
(25:29):
secrets of the universe, all of the secret powers in the
universe, things that we will later label as magic.
And they teach them to these human women they have mated
with. Obviously God is rather annoyed
at all of this. So the text has one of these
(25:50):
angels passed into an opening made into the earth, and they
will not see the light until thecoming of Judgement, at which
point he'll be cast into the fire.
And the text then goes on to talk about these giants, who now
are the children of these women and angels.
(26:14):
And these giants are identified as evil spirits, and they reside
on Earth, and their job is to afflict a press, destroy, and do
battle for the destruction of the earth.
So we're getting somewhere there.
(26:35):
But the leader of these angels isn't called Satan or Lucifer is
called SEM Jazzer. And the Angel who's cast into
the earth is Azaro. But we've got an origin story
for magic as well. We've got skeleton of what's
going to become a full story. We're not quite there yet, but
(26:58):
we've got the skeleton of it beginning.
And we've got an origin story for magic as well.
And it's a lot like the story ofPrometheus in Greek myths,
stealing the secrets of God, as it were, A generation after the
Book of Enoch is written. There's another one of these Old
(27:20):
Testament apocryphal books circulating.
This is written round about between about 150 and 100 BC,
the book of Jubilees. And in many ways it's an attempt
to flesh out the story in Genesis.
It begins by giving the creationstory.
(27:43):
But there are a few differences here.
Jubilees makes clear for the first time that angels and all
other types of spirits were created on the 4th creation day.
It was the 4th thing God did, and that was create angels and
spirits. And then it says that Adam and
(28:05):
Eve lived in the Garden of Eden for seven years before the
incident with the snake. We're getting a chronology here,
and that that's handy. And then it repeats the story of
the angels lusting with women that comes from the Book of
Enoch. But then, and then it goes into
the story of knowing the flood. But after the flood, it gets a
(28:28):
bit interesting again. God sent out the flood because
human beings have become sinful.God wants to wipe one more out,
start all over again. So the earth should have been
pure purified as a result of this.
But where Jubilees picks up withNoah having a conversation with
(28:49):
God, Noah's complaining to God about these things he calls
unclean demons who clearly haven't been destroyed by the
flood. They still seem to be around.
And these demons are a problem because they're leaving all of
his grandchildren astray. And it turns out, according to
(29:09):
the book of Jubilees, that thesethese demons are actually the
ghosts or the spirits of these giants from the book of Enoch.
And now Noah says to God, can you do something with these
demons, please? They are annoying my family.
(29:31):
They're leading my grandchildrenin a stray.
Can you do something with them? Can you confine them to a place
of judgement? He says, And God agrees.
And at that point the leader of these spirits come forward.
His name is Mastima. And this Mastima says to God,
(29:56):
can you leave some of these evilspirits free?
Can you let some of these evil spirits be free and under my
control, let them roam around onthe earth because human beings
have the potential to go astray.And my job is to to lead these
(30:17):
people astray, to lead the the faithless, to test the
faithless, to test how deep their faith is.
So God agrees to that. God agrees with Mastima to let
him keep a tenth of all of theseghost demon giant thingies
allowed to roam around on earth.And then Jubilees crucially says
(30:41):
that Mastema may have a tenth ofthese demons so that they might
be subject to Satan on the earth, which is sort of Mastema
becoming Satan as the head of this force of demons which is
roaming the earth doing destruction.
(31:04):
So we still don't don't have a full story yet.
This, the full story in the end,is largely the work of two
Christian theologians, Guy called Tertullian in the 2nd
century and a guy called Origin in the 3rd century.
(31:25):
Origin is from Alexandrian. And he sets about thinking at
one point about the various names and titles that are used
to denote the devil in the Bible.
This devil, the Satan, there's wicked one, there's enemy of
God. There's also Prince of the
(31:48):
World. And that's what gets Origen
interested. He says there are lots of
Princess of the world described in the Old Testament, and their
power is described in the Old Testament as ultimately coming
to nothing. There's the story of the Prince
of Tyre in Ezekiel. The Prince of Tyre is enormously
(32:13):
wealthy, very powerful, but he'sexceptionally proud, incredibly
arrogant. He even proclaims himself a God.
At one point. God declares that because of his
arrogance, he will fall. And then there's the story of
the king of Babylon in the book of Isaiah.
(32:33):
Similar sorts of story, a proud ruler that God will cast down at
some point down the road. Both of these stories are
prophecies in the Old Testament,But there's a line in the story
(32:54):
of the Kingdom king of Babylon which is quite suggestive to
origin because the prophecy saysafter the king of Babylon is
fallen, the Israelites is mocking him, saying how you have
fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, who did rise in the morning, how
(33:14):
you have fallen to earth, you who wounded nations.
And so Origin argues that these stories need to be read
allegorically. They're not about kings per SE.
They're actually allegorical tellings of the fall of an Angel
(33:35):
called Lucifer. And he says if you look in the
Gospel of Luke, Christ says at one point that he saw Satan
folding like lightning from heaven.
So this is where you've got the back story of this proud Angel
(33:58):
falling from Earth. It comes from these, the Enoch
Jubilees tradition, sort of trying to expand on the idea of
demons, developing the idea of demons and then Satan from
Mastema. But then Satan was read in on
the basis of identification withLucifer, read into the story of
(34:22):
the Prince of Tyre and the king of Babylon.
So it's not literally biblical, but that's how it develops over
time. It's really quite a lot of fun.
(34:43):
Yeah, it's really amazing to seethose things put together.
So thank you for explaining thatorigin.
Pleasure, Yeah. It sounds like there's multiple
origins to Satan, that he's Mustima and he's Lucifer.
(35:05):
Are those ever reconciled in anyof the literature or how?
How does that get resolved? Yeah, it just gets elided
together into one big story, thestory.
By the time after origin, nobody's really questioning that
sort of back story, but it's clearly something that people in
the first couple of centuries ofthe Christian tradition are
really trying very hard to explain.
(35:27):
Just the Gospels. Well, the New Testament is
really contradictory about this and it's obviously the kind of
thing that people are very interested in, in thinking
about. You've got to consider the early
Christianity like this in this point is it's not a top down
Christianity. They they'll read back and say,
(35:49):
yeah, there is a Pope, but you've got no network of
communications beyond sort of letters crossing the
Mediterranean, which would take months at a time.
No centralized authority. Really what's happening is the
people are just asking their local Bishop or whatever.
OK, can you explain this to me? Can you explain that to me?
And because the people in again,different explanations to the
(36:11):
people the other end of the the Christian world, you've got lots
of different sorts of traditions.
But with origin, you've got something which is becoming
accepted as you know. I mean, there's all sorts of
problems with origin story, but nevertheless it becomes almost
settled and nobody's really disputing it after that much.
(36:36):
What powers did early Christiansattribute to the devil, and what
were the limitations on those? This is really interesting and
very important point. So you've got to think about
things as divided. You've got theologians at one
point, very well educated men. They're all men, of course, and
(36:57):
they're reading books. They're in the early church.
They're reading books of Greek philosophy, Roman philosophy,
very learned men thinking about these problems from that angle.
But you've got ordinary people as well who are illiterate.
They know some of the basics of the faith, but they don't know
much more than that. What they do know is that this
(37:19):
world was apparently created perfectly.
But my baby died last week unexpectedly.
My crops are in danger of being wiped out by a freak weather
event. Their experiences of misfortune
in a perfect world are differentto what's going on with the
theologians. The theologians are very, very
(37:42):
clear that the devil ultimately is a natural thing.
What does that mean? Nature is the thing that God
uses to order and control the universe.
God created the universe, Yes, absolutely.
And then after that, he created this thing called nature, which
(38:02):
is what causes things to behave pretty much regularly.
The sun rises every day, not because God gets and moves the
sun around, but because nature causes it to move that way.
So nature is technically it's the secondary 'cause God is the
primary cause. Nature is the secondary 'cause
it's a thing which God uses to control the universe.
(38:23):
The theologians will argue that the devil is a natural thing.
So what that means is he's not supernatural.
The devil cannot do miracles. A miracle is something where God
intervenes directly in nature tomuck around with nature to cause
it to behave in a different, irregular way.
(38:46):
God could, and he does in the Old Testament, stop the sun from
moving, right? That's a miracle.
And he starts it up again when it's convenient, when it's
necessary. Devil doesn't have that kind of
parent. He has natural powers, but he
is, he's a spirit, so his powersare different from yours because
(39:13):
he's got a different sort of body.
We don't say that a dog has supernatural powers because it's
got a sense of smell that's muchbetter than ours.
It's just how dogs are made. They are made with that ability.
The devil as a fallen Angel has those some of those powers which
(39:34):
are associated with him having athe body of a spirit, an
ethereal body, as you were. Saint Augustine in the 5th
century spends quite a lot of time thinking about this issue.
He argues that we have flesh andblood bodies, so our motions are
(39:56):
limited by our form, by our body.
We can't move that fast. Demons though have ethereal
bodies, so that means that they can move incredibly fast.
Much of what you attribute to demons or as miraculous or semi
miraculous things that demons. Do are actually a function of
(40:19):
their nature? Demons can make things appear
suddenly to you and me, and we are amazed and we are thinking
that they are gods or something.But in actual fact, that's just
because in the twinkling of an eye, a demon has gone from here
off to pick up a bunch of stonesfrom, I don't know, the Syrian
(40:42):
desert. Brought them back here and
stepped them on your desk. And he's done it in the fraction
of an instant. From our perspective, it looks
like a miracle. The devil has counted stones out
of nowhere. But from the demon's
perspective, it's just how he's made, right?
He can do that. So for Saint Augustine, this
goes a long way to explaining some of the things that demons
(41:07):
can do. They're wholly natural, right?
There's nothing unnatural about a demon doing this.
Demons are also because they canmove so fast, they seem to be
able to make prophecies or predictions that come true.
But again, for Saint Augustine, this is just a function of their
(41:28):
nature. Because what demons can do is
they can flit across to your enemy next door.
See that the enemy is gathering a massive army.
Come back to tell you, hey, by the way, I think you're going to
be attacked in about six weeks. Sure enough, six weeks down the
road, you're attacked. Aha, The demons are gods.
No, it's just entirely because they can move so fast and see
(41:51):
things that you can't see. The other thing Gustin says
about demons is that they've been around since the beginning
of time. Pretty much.
They were created at some point,and as a result, they've come to
know the world in a way that we don't in our just 7080 years or
whatever. So they understand how the world
(42:14):
works in ways that we just don't.
So they've got a long experienceof nature so they can see signs
in the natural world. And they say, aha, when I see
that, I know that this is what'sgoing to happen.
In the same way that a doctor can look at your symptoms and
say in two weeks this patient's probably going to be dead, They
(42:40):
can predict the future that way.But the devil, when he's making
predictions based upon his knowledge of nature, is not
making secure predictions in theway that God would.
These are just his, the devil's diagnosis on what's going to
happen based upon his reading ofthese signs.
Augustine people, the theologians that come after him,
(43:02):
are really quite happy with that.
It keeps the devil confined within nature.
The devil can't actually do anything miraculous.
You do lots of things that seem strange to us, but that's only
because we're trapped here in flesh and blood and we can't do
very much. But the problem with this is
that it doesn't actually do muchfor sort of the some of the more
(43:32):
problematic aspects of people's beliefs.
One of the thorniest questions is the extent to which the devil
or demons can change people's shapes.
There's there's a whole pile of folklore tradition here, which
is Christians are encounter and the devil sort of transmute
(43:55):
people into wolves. I mean, the Romans have got
werewolf stories. Is that sort of thing possible
later during the witch hunting period?
Are they able to transmit peopleinto the form of cats?
Can they do that? Do they have this sort of power?
Can the devil transform you intothe form of a cat so you can get
(44:17):
into your neighbour's house and spy around or whatever?
Does the devil down the road have the power to create
ointments that can cause witchesto fly?
Is that really something the devil can do?
Is that sort of a natural thing and the devil's just felt all
(44:41):
sorts of natural knowledge and he knows how to make some sort
of ointment which would cause broomsticks to fly with people
on them? Or is this sort of some sort of
illusion be crafted, which is the dead devil is crafted in
people's minds? But particularly when we get
into the witch hunting period, these sorts of stories of
(45:05):
transmutation and many of the stories we'll talk about the
Sabbath down the road, but many of the stories associated with
the Sabbath need to be true at some level.
Because if they are just illusions, all you've actually
got are a bunch of women who've been duped, right?
(45:27):
And it's it's not a crime to be duped.
You don't deserve to be executedto be duped.
In fact, the passage in Exodus seems to suggest that there's
something going on. Exodus 2218 on meleficus non
parieres vivere. You shouldn't suffer a sorcerer
(45:48):
to live. Incidentally, in the Latin
meleficus is masculine. It's in the Protestant
translations when it becomes feminized as which, but it
would, I mean, wizard would be sort of it's very definitely a
masculine sort of noun. Evil doing.
But you need that. You need them.
(46:10):
You need, which is actually to be committing real affronts in
order to justify the punishment in Exodus.
Because if they were just being deceived, then you don't kill
them. Obviously God thinks there's
something so incredibly offensive about these malaficos
that they deserve to die, that they are actually working
(46:35):
demonic magic. Doing something supernatural
would justify that. Just being duped by demonic
illusions. Well, yeah, that's that doesn't
really deserve death. So there needs to be some sort
of way of accommodating folk club.
But also, particularly when witches start confessing all
(46:58):
sorts of odd things, a chunk of them need at least to be real.
And some of the things which witches are described and the
leading questions and tortured, which I'm sure you've talked
about many, many times, some of the things which is describing
are unnatural. They're supernatural, that is,
they're above the natural realm,and only God is meant to have
(47:19):
that power above the natural realm.
So they're actually performing evil miracles in some level.
And when they confess to. Well, there's a case which I
wrote about where a woman is transmitted into the form of a
cat, enters into the House of her son, slips open a hole in
(47:41):
his spide, inserts a pile of mudand stuff in there.
It miraculously seals up and then later explodes.
And happily, that's unsafe. But nevertheless, he's arrested,
she's certificated chief prosecuted, and she's executed
for that. But that has to be real at some
level to justify that. So, and I think that's quite an
(48:02):
important point. So this sort of gets us into
another area that's quite interesting, and that is the
problem of experience and how sort of people's experience of
the world maps into their sort of ideas of the demonic.
(48:26):
Early Christianity. If you think about it
underground in the Roman world, it's oppressed frequently.
This is a secret sect, right? People are gathering in secret
and taking the sacred meal together.
And the danger is periodically they are persecuted, the
(48:49):
sporadic persecutions and various Christians go off and at
various times they are martyred.So when Christians start
thinking about the relationship with ancient Rome, it's a pretty
easy one, that one. The Old Testament condemns
idolatry. That's clear.
(49:10):
It's in the 10 commandments. And worshipping any God that
isn't the true God is obviously a problem.
It detracts from God's dignity. God doesn't appreciate that.
The 10 commandments clear. That shouldn't be tolerated.
Roman religion clearly idolatrous, right?
(49:31):
We should have no sort of accommodation for Roman
religion. OK, so Roman religion, idolatry.
It's right out. It's demonic, right?
And in fact, the Romans are persecuting us, and members of
our faith are dying for the truth.
(49:51):
In other words, they're being killed by lies.
And who's the source of lies? John was pretty clear about
that. Demons or demonic, The
relationship with magic is much more interesting and much more
peculiar. You talk to Tabitha Stanmore
earlier this year about service magic, and one of her points was
(50:17):
that service magic persists because it fulfills a real
social need. It's important, and it's
important in her period, 15th, 16th, 17th century.
It's important in the ancient world as well.
It's a way to try and exercise some sort of control in the
(50:37):
world against life's trials and tribulations.
It's a way of exercising controlin the chaotic world.
And all sorts of magical services are available across
the ancient world. Love magic.
Havasa talked about love magic in the 16th, 17th century.
Blessings, charms, cures for allsorts of diseases, Good luck in
(51:02):
business and you've already got a raise.
An array of Panther magic as well the opposite forms of
curses. You can curse your business
rivals as a famous curse tablet where some Roman brothel owner
wants the prostitutes in a competitors brothel to go mad,
so he takes out a curse tablet. He pays for a curse to be made
(51:25):
on these prostitutes, so he'll go mad and so he ends up getting
all of the local business. How does this point is that
magic is basically useful? She called IT service magic.
People need to be able to expel disease, find thieves, protect
the future, protect themselves against misfortune.
(51:47):
But when Christ shows up, he's doing some of the same sort of
thing. He's curing people of diseases,
he's expelling diseases, he's using exorcisms to expel
disease, he's expelling demons, he's bringing the dead back to
life. He's doing all sorts of miracle
(52:07):
workings. So one of the problems, one of
the many problems confronting early Christians is what do they
do about this magical tradition?How do they distinguish their
sort of set of wonder working because it's passed on after
Christ through things like holy water, the power of the cross,
(52:31):
sacraments, baptism in particular?
How do we sort of safeguard our wonder working and distinguish
it from the wonder working of all of these competitors?
And there's all sorts of competitors.
It really is a marketplace in the ancient Roman world.
(52:52):
One thing that Christians can't do is say that the wonder
working of their competitors doesn't work.
They can't just say Roman magicians.
They're all common. Keep your money, folks.
They can't do that because of a story in the book of Exodus.
There's a story in the book of Exodus where Moses and his
(53:14):
brother Aaron are confronted by Pharaoh and his magicians and
they get into a wonder working contest.
Pharaoh and his magicians turn their Staffs into snakes.
So Moses and his brother do the same sort of things.
Story goes on for a while and don't need to repeat it, but in
(53:34):
the end Moses, the snakes heat conjures end up eating Pharaoh's
snakes, which is meant to take that their power is greater than
the power of Pharaoh. But what the story doesn't say
is that this stuff doesn't work.It does work.
It does work. So that means that Roman magic
(53:56):
and at some level work. What Saint Augustine would say
is, of course, all that's happened with Pharaoh's
magicians is that demons have shown up.
They've taken away the rods thatPharaoh's magicians have had,
tossed them away, brought, gone and got a couple of snakes,
brought them back from Namidia or somewhere, brought them back,
(54:19):
given them to Pharaohs guys. And it all happened in an
instant and it looked like they'd conjured up these snakes.
That's exactly what Saint Augustine would say.
So this magic is works, the magic of the Romans works, but
it's ultimately worked through commerce with demons, right?
(54:44):
So what we're saying is that that is magic.
It does have powers, but it's dangerous magic.
So be careful or actually don't use it because it's really
dangerous stuff. By contrast, our magic is the
good stuff. All of magic is the legitimate
(55:05):
stuff. And Christians, gods develop all
sorts of wonder. Working tools, holy walls of the
cross, charms in the forms of blessings, invocations.
There's little difference between an invocation and a
prayer. When you actually start reading
these things, comparing invocations to demons to
invocations to God, that interestingly all set in the
(55:29):
junctive. They're all actually orders.
So, so you're ordering demons around and you're also ordering
God around. So what Christianity does with
magic is it demonizes it. Literally.
It says that it works, but it works through colours with
demons. So it's dangerous.
We've got the good stuff. So their experience with magic
(55:52):
is to demonize it. So now we've got a new category
of the demonic. We've got idolatry, we've got
the we've got magic as well. But devil knowledge really gets
another big boost from the livesof some of the early monks in
particular. You've got the life of Saint
(56:14):
Anthony. He's the most important Anthony
lives is his dates are absolutely amazing.
He lives from 251 to three, 5-6,yeah, 105.
He live he the story is classic.He gives up the family fortune
and decides to go off to leavingthe desert as a hermit.
(56:37):
Of course, Christ was of the story of Christ from the
wilderness. He went off into the desert to
do to be tempted by the devil. So I'm he's doing the same sort
of thing. He's looking for demons in a
way, and boy does he find demons.
He sets himself up in the desertand he's regularly beaten up by
(56:58):
demons. They # him.
They smash him up. He's regularly in pain because
he's been fomented by demons. But these demons also tried to
tempt him. They change forms, they create
apparitions, they create illusions.
They appear to him in the form of a woman, a black boy, a monk,
(57:20):
various beasts. They even appeared to him in the
form of fire at one point. Now the problem with this is
Augustine has these demons as ethereal, able to flit around.
So how does a spirit beat somebody up?
(57:44):
The problem is you've got 2 quite contrasting ideas here.
You've got Augustine and his nice packaged theology with
demons who are just flitting around in the air.
That's fine, that's great, they're all natural.
But here you've got a demons, well a host of them, who are
physically powerful enough to beat up the Saints.
(58:05):
What's important about Anthony'saccount is he doesn't explain
it. Well, the author, the guy writes
it down, doesn't explain it. I'm not giving you any theology
here, readers. This is just what happened,
right? The devil was able to do all of
these things. I'm not going to try and explain
it theologically, but it doesn'twork theologically.
(58:28):
But I'm not going to try and explain it.
So it because of this sort of role of experience, the devil
often takes on all of these new sorts of forms as a result of
contact with other sort of cultures are the sort of
traditions are the sorts of waysof living and you don't have the
(58:51):
theology doesn't work, but it gets fitted in there as it will.
How can attacks from the devil be viewed as evidence of the
target's importance? Yeah, this is a really
interesting point as well. So the devil obviously doesn't
need to attack people he's already got, right?
(59:11):
They're quite happy to live in safety and security.
They're already some of the devil's followers.
So the devil attacks the most vulnerable, the weakest, in
particular women. The will of women is believed to
be weaker. They're more prone to gossip and
temptation as a result of that. Also, and this is a trope that
(59:36):
you see all the way through thisstuff, it's all in the
witchcraft literature as well. Female sexuality is never
satisfied for the womb. In the language of the time, the
womb will do anything to see itself filled.
So that means women are more likely to come to lust and all
of the vices associated with that.
(59:56):
So that's women are an easy target in that respect.
And that's why the devil, of course, attacked Eve.
And not Adam in the Garden, Garden of Eden.
There's a really good story which circulates around in
apocryphal book of the Old Testament where Eve's on her
deathbed and she is really, really annoyed because the way
(01:00:21):
she describes it, in the Garden of Eden, she and Adam are
manning the defenses against Satan on the outside and the
angels are weighed with them. Then at 4:00 or whatever God
demands the angels come and worship him.
So the angels go off, leave Eve defending half the Fort of the
Garden of Eden by herself. The devil comes in, what's she
(01:00:42):
going to do? Eve really angry.
Anyway, that's a different storyfor another day.
It's a really good story and he doesn't talked about it now
anyway. So the devil targets women
disproportionately. He also, of course, targets
anybody who's a soft target, anybody who's already
particularly vulnerable because of gluttony or because of
(01:01:05):
lechery or greed. If there's something there to
exploit, he'll find a way to worm himself in.
But he also is really repulsed by piety, by great piety.
That's why I attacked Anthony. Anthony's being provocative.
But there's a great set of stories associated with a monk
(01:01:27):
from the 13th century, guy called Recalmus of Chantal.
He writes a book called the Bookof Revelations concerning the
deceit and coming of demons against men.
It's a very strange book. You've got lots of details about
how demons have infiltrated intohis monastery.
(01:01:48):
He says demons are all over the place, like the spots in the
sunlight. They are so common.
They're all over the place. And sometimes these things
combine to make human forms. They're always looking to entrap
monks, he said, monks in particular.
And they do it through tiny things as well, he says when he
goes to do the monastic reading.So reading out loud to the to
(01:02:11):
the congregation, sometimes demons know what the text is and
they begin to say the words justbefore you do to make it sound
like you're stuttering. I think it's quite clear that
Raquelmus actually has a stutterand he's just attributing it to
demons. Later he's talking and he seems
to smell something really strange.
(01:02:33):
And he says to the guys, when God, didn't you smell that?
Oh, that's demons. I think he's farting close and
it's just written there in his book.
But demons also manipulate people's faces.
They twist their nose, they curlup their lips and make them look
a bit ugly to started God's perfect creation, making them
(01:02:53):
look a bit a bit nasty when theyfuss around trying to prevent
monks from sleeping. And they also do all sorts of
bigger things as well. They try to tempt monks by
showing up in the form of naked women or taking on the bodies of
dead people, all this sort of thing.
And he hears demons talking to each other.
(01:03:16):
Demons aren't actually that confident for recalmers.
They have to egg each other on. Oh, and you could do it.
You could do it. You could make his nose twist.
Yes. And it's really quite a bizarre,
bizarre text. But the monastery is set up as a
fortress. It's set up in the wilderness,
(01:03:36):
and it's meant to be a fortress against the devil.
In fact, Bernard de Clairvaux inthe 12th century describes it as
a fortress in militaristic terms.
And the issue is you've got to clothe yourself in the armor of
gods, defend yourself from intrusions.
But within the monastery, what do you do with people who might
(01:04:00):
succumb to temptation? What do you do with them?
This notion of a safe space, an enclosed space comes from the
monastery, but I think it you still see see echoes of it down
the road when you talk about theSatanic PAX as you did with
Scott Culpepper. The suburb, the white enclave of
(01:04:21):
the American suburb is that sortof safe space would argue, goes
so far as to argue that one of the subtexts of Christian
nationalism and the idea of building a wall with Mexico.
And presumably you'll have to dosomething about us, our Canadian
border as well down the road. It's about creating another sort
of safe enclosed fortress space where you are immune from
(01:04:47):
demonic incursions at some level.
Thank you so much, this has really been wonderful.
I've learned so, so much. Well, thank you.
It's been a great pleasure. Mary Bingham is back with Minute
with Mary. I listen to Richard Raisewell as
(01:05:09):
he described how the devil is viewed by people and varying
historical cultures from 1600 to1650.
According to Richard, the Puritans living in colonial
Massachusetts would have viewed the deceitful beasts of the New
Testament with much power. You see, where there was good,
(01:05:30):
there was evil. To believe in the existence of
God, one also believed in the existence of the devil.
And the scary thing for them is that the devil lurked
everywhere, around every corner.This baleful beast was part of
their invisible world, who they believed could disguise himself
(01:05:52):
as someone's likeness, moving about and causing harm to that
person's adversaries and their environments.
Such was the case when two men accused Sarah Wilde's spirit of
spooking their oxen, causing thebeast to drive the cart straight
down into the brook, throwing loads of hay into the water
(01:06:14):
after a full day of mowing. This was also the case when
Abigail Faulkner stood accused of witchcraft at the bar in the
meeting house. As her accusers were flailing
with fits. The magistrates demanded.
And I quote, look at their distress, Abigail replied.
(01:06:36):
I do not afflict them. It is the devil who does it in
my shape. Then there is John Proctor, who
wanted to beat the devil out of the accusers, but that's another
story for another time. Thank you.
Thank you, Mary. And now Sarah has End witch
(01:06:58):
hunts news. End witch Hunts news This
January, as we recognize National Human Trafficking
Prevention Month, let's discuss a critical but often overlooked
aspect of trafficking, the exploitation of cultural beliefs
and spiritual practices as toolsof coercion.
Traffickers don't just use physical force or financial
(01:07:20):
control, they exploit deep cultural beliefs, including
fears of curses or spiritual harm, to maintain power over
victims. The psychological manipulation
combined with document confiscation, debt bondage, and
isolation creates complex chainsof control that can be
especially challenging for survivors to break.
(01:07:41):
Strength and prevention efforts must ensure culturally informed
support services recognize trafficking in all sectors from
agriculture to hospitality, address increased digital
recruitment through social media, and protect vulnerable
populations through education and community support.
If you or someone you know needshelp, the National Human Traffic
(01:08:02):
Hotline is 1-888-373-7888. Together we can build more
effective, culturally sensitive approaches to prevention and
survivor support. Join us on February 1st at 1:00
PM for remembering the innocent victims of the Connecticut Witch
Trials, a special 2 hour commemoration of those who lost
(01:08:24):
their lives in colonial Connecticut's witch trials at
Connecticut's Old State House inHartford, CT.
Award-winning performers DeborahWalsh and Jenny Wolf will open
with a dramatic reading, followed by an expert panel
featuring the Connecticut Witch Trials Exoneration Project
founders, historian Richard Ross, the 3rd and Connecticut
Representative Jane Garabe, and Connecticut Senator Saud Anwar.
(01:08:48):
The afternoon culminates in a walk of remembrance to the
Memorial Bricks at the Ancient Burial Ground, where author
Richard Ross will share insightsfrom his popular history walks
and offer closing reflections. Connect with fellow community
members as we work together to shine a light on this crucial
chapter of our history. Don't miss this powerful blend
of performance, education, and commemoration that aligns with
(01:09:11):
Connecticut's recent legislativerecognition of these historical
injustices. Reserve your free ticket through
our Eventbrite link. Thank you, Sarah.
You're welcome. And thank you for joining us on
Beach Hunt. Spend time with us again next
week. Have a great today and a
beautiful tomorrow.
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