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Updated: June 16, 2025
The figures would occasionally assume a demonic elusiveness and he could no longer carry his liquor with his former assurance. While outwardly he was the same suave, debonair old beau, he was beginning to have inner doubtings and despairs. And Joe, who had, as it were, taken up the pen when he had cast aside the sword, became for him a potential straw adrift on the downward current.
Apotropaism has hardly survived at all in the higher religions. In popular customs it appears in the reliance placed on horseshoes and other objects as means of keeping witches and similar demonic things out of houses.
So stark was it that, to some degree, it seemed that he too was on fire, that he too was plummeting as if from one of the infernos of the World Trade Center while gusts of wind were carrying to him the barely audible moans, screams, and demonic laughter of other fallers; it seemed that he too was flailing his arms against becoming a swallowed morsel cast down the vast expanse of the deep gullet of devouring skies, and obsessively- redundantly bewailing having jumped from a window at all.
Men were convinced that God sometimes allowed bad spirits of every class to exercise a destructive influence on parts of the world and of human life. The only reservation made was that the man to whom the Evil One came as tempter, could use his free will to resist. In Italy the demonic influence, especially as shown in natural events, easily assumed a character of poetical greatness.
"The very thought that this extra-ordinary beauty is to be lost to the world," I continued still watching her enthusiastically, "is horrible all this glorious facial expression, this mysterious eye with its green fires, this demonic hair, this magnificence of body. The idea fills me with a horror of death, of annihilation. But the hand of an artist shall snatch you from this.
It has been hinted by both the suspicious and the credulous writers on the period that the young man was employed on some secret mission. This might be expected from those who attribute demonic qualities to the child of destiny from earliest infancy, but there is no slightest evidence to sustain the claim. Quite possibly the lad relapsed into the queer restless ways of earlier life.
It would seem, however, that there is another kind of demonic power the power of shedding quite unconsciously one's personality upon all brought into contact with it. The demonic power of Rossetti, like that of D'Arcy in this story, was quite unconscious. In Rossetti's presence, as in D'Arcy's, it was impossible not to yield to this strange, mysterious power.
There arose too a whole catalogue of ceremonies ceremonies of Initiation, by which the novice should learn to keep within the good grace of the Powers, and under the blessing of his Tribe and the protection of its Totem; ceremonies of Eucharistic meals which should restore the lost sanctity of the common life and remove the sense of guilt and isolation; ceremonies of Marriage and rules and rites of sex-connection, fitted to curb the terrific and demonic violence of passions which else indeed might easily rend the community asunder.
At first sight, this might appear like a reversion to the old, crude theory of disease as a demonic obsession, or invasion by an evil spirit, of which traces still remain in such expressions as, "She was seized with a convulsion," "He was strong enough to throw off the illness," "He was attacked by a fever," etc.
An expression of scornful pride, a bitter smile, a glance of inspiration, and that 'something' mysterious, demonic, fateful that was essential to our conception of the muse, the muse of Byron, who at that time held sovereign sway over men's fancies. There was nothing of that kind to be discerned in the face of the girl who came in.
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