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Updated: June 15, 2025
But ultimately all this rests on one and the same thing—the supernatural and dualistic hypothesis. Consequently demonology is the kernel of the Christian conception of paganism: it is not merely a natural result of the hypotheses, it is the one and only correct expression of the way in which the new religion understood the old.
I remember reading, not without amusement, a severe and trenchant article in the Hibbert Journal, in which Christ's admission of demonology was alone thought enough to dispose of his divinity. The one sentence of the article, which I cherish in my memory through all the changing years, ran thus: "If he was God, he knew there was no such thing as diabolical possession."
"God forbid, honoured Lady," said Doctor Lundin, "that you should suppress it longer nothing may more endanger the frame of your honoured body; and truly, if there be witchcraft in this matter, it is held by the vulgar, and even by solid authors on Demonology, that three scruples of the ashes of the witch, when she hath been well and carefully burned at a stake, is a grand Catholicon in such matter, even as they prescribe crinis canis rabidi, a hair of the dog that bit the patient, in cases of hydrophobia.
It was reconciled with demonology by the supposition that the demons had assumed the masks of dead heroes; they had beguiled mankind to worship them in order to possess themselves of the sacrifices, which they always coveted, and by this deception to be able to rule and corrupt men.
Apparitions of things past are a very unpractical sort of demonology, in my opinion, compared with apparitions of things to come." "How in the world did such an odd idea come into your head?" asked pretty Nellie Tyrrell, whose dancing black eyes were the most piquant of interrogation points, with which it was so delightful to be punctured that people were generally slow to gratify her curiosity.
It is characteristic of the power of demonology in this domain that in support of his point of view he can quote no less a writer than Machiavelli. The author who opened battle in real earnest against demonology was a Dutch scholar, one van Dale, otherwise little known. Van Dale was a Protestant, so he easily got over the unanimous recognition of demonology by the Fathers of the Church.
Instead of Christian morals surviving in the form of humanitarian morals, Christian demonology has survived in the form of heathen demonology. But it has not survived by scholarly traditionalism in the style of Gladstone, but rather by obstinate objective curiosity according to the advice of Huxley.
My clerk Buchanan came here, and assists me to finish the Demonology Letters, and be d d to them. But it is done to their hand. Two ladies, Mrs. Latouche of Dublin, and her niece, Miss Boyle, came to spend a day or two. The aunt is a fine old lady; the conversation that of a serious person frightened out of her wits by the violence and superstition of our workers of miracles in the west.
Kant has a good deal to say, like Scott in his 'Demonology, on the physics of Hallucination, but it is antiquated matter. He thinks the whole topic of spiritual being only important as bearing on hopes of a future life. As speculation, all is 'in the air, and as in such matters the learned and unlearned are on a level of ignorance, science will not discuss them.
The Christians also could not avoid recognising that part of the pagan worship was worship of natural objects, in particular of the heavenly bodies; and this error of worshipping the “creation instead of the creator” was so obvious that the Christians were not inclined to resort to demonology for an explanation of this phenomenon, the less so as they could not identify the sun or the moon with a demon.
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