Demonology and Devil-Lore Volume 1

by Moncure Daniel Conway

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE GENESIS OF DEMONS. Their good names euphemistic?Their mixed character?Illustrations: Beelzebub, Loki?Demon-germs?The knowledge of good and evil?Distinction between Demon and Devil. THE first pantheon of each race was built of intellectual speculations. In a moral sense, each form in it might be described as more or less demonic; and, indeed, it may almost be affirmed that religion, considered as a service rendered to superhuman beings, began with the propitiation of demons, albeit they might be called gods. Man found that in the earth good things came with difficulty, while thorns and weeds sprang up everywhere. The evil powers seemed to be the strongest. The best deity had a touch of the demon in him. The sun is the most beneficent, yet he bears the sunstroke along with the sunbeam, and withers the blooms he calls forth. The splendour, the might, the majesty, the menace, the grandeur and wrath of the heavens and the elements were blended in these personifications, and reflected in the trembling adoration paid to them. The flattering names given to these powers by their worshippers must be interpreted by the costly sacrifices with which men sought to propitiate them. No sacrifice would have been offered originally to a purely benevolent power. The Furies were called the Eumenides, 'the well-meaning, ' and there arises a temptation to regard8 EUPHEMISTIC TITLES. the name as preserving the primitive meaning of the Sanskrit original of Erinys, namely, Saranyu, which signifies the morning light stealing over the sky. But the descrip- .tions of the Erinyes by the Greek poets?especially of v.'.. Eschylus, who pictures them as black, serpent-locked, with eyes dropping blood, and calls them hounds?show that Saranyu as morning light, and thus the revealer of d..

124 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1881

About the author

Moncure Daniel Conway was an American abolitionist minister. At various times Methodist, Unitarian, and a Freethinker, the radical writer descended from patriotic and patrician families of Virginia and Maryland but spent most of the final four decades of his life abroad in England and France, where he wrote biographies of Edmund Randolph, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Paine and his own autobiography. He led freethinkers in London's South Place Chapel, now Conway Hall.