Angela Puca: If you’re interested in demons, in Christianity, and demonology in history as well as in the contemporary world, you really don’t want to miss this one out.
Hello everyone, I’m Angela, and welcome back to my channel.
Today’s video is going to be on demonology in the context of Christianity with a historical overview on the matter. To then move on to the contemporary world and how demons are portrayed in pop culture. Our fantastic guest, who will share their knowledge with us, is my friend and fellow scholar, Jonathan.
Dr. Jonathan O’Donnell is a postdoctoral researcher at University College Dublin. Their main area of expertise is Christian demonologies and systems of social prejudice. So help me in welcoming Jonathan. Hello Jonathan.
JO: Hello Angela.
AP: Thank you for being here on my YouTube channel.
JO: It’s a pleasure.
AP: How are you today? Are you feeling…
JO: You know, coping with quarantine and the state of the world generally. But things are pretty good so…
AP: The world madness continues.
JO: That it does, that it does.
AP: Yeah, but today’s topic is gonna be demonology. So let’s crack on with our questions. The first thing that I’d like to ask you, Jonathon, is: can you please give us an overview of demonology in its early days. How did it come to be and develop?
JO: So what we call demonology has a couple of roots. One that is more general and one that is, I guess, specific to Christianity. Christian demonology being my specialization. So, in a more general sense, demonology often refers to beliefs and practices related to evil spirits. So this originates, historically, in at least in its Christian and Jewish forms, in the context of ancient, Near Eastern desert spirits. Specifically, storm spirits that were deemed to cause disease and plague, and death. So a number of rituals and practices evolved, related to ways to defend people from getting sick, from dying due to the effect of these kinds of evil spirits. A recent example, in pop culture, would be something like Pazuzu in “The Exorcist” who is an ancient Mesopotamian storm demon and was in fact like one of the demons that you invoke to protect against the other demons, in that context.
So those are in general where, what we think of as demons, could have come from historically and that is the context that they appear in ancient Babylonian traditions. In Judaism, particularly Second Temple Judaism and also in early Christianity. The way we get, specifically, what we think of, partially, as demons in Christianity, however, is partially related to the word. So if we look at the etymology of the word demon, the word originally referred in Greek to these intermediate spirits that existed between the gods and humanity. And early Christianity was very big on, basically, accusing non–Christian deities, particularly pagan deities, of being demons. And this had two different levels; on the one hand, it was an explicit demotion of these deities to the level of demons. To say that, you think these are gods but actually, they’re just these intermediate, lesser spirits and they don’t actually have as much power as you say. On the other hand, this relates to Christianity. Early Christianity is a slightly combative relationship with both pagan deities and, I guess, more traditional ideas of demons as wilderness, desert spirits, and this developed throughout early Christianity, specifically in the context of Roman imperialism and the early Christian persecutions in the Empire.
And gradually, over time, you have a development of conceptions of demons as existing in, I guess, two separate but interwoven places. One would be the wilderness, if we think of the biblical story of Jesus encountering the Devil in the wilderness, for example, he goes out in his fasting journey. That’s the representation of the demons that wait in the wilderness, in the spaces outside. The other place is the city and that relates to the demotion of pagan deities to the level of demons. So early Christians saw themselves as fighting against demons on those two levels. Both in the wilderness and in the city and this arises in a couple of forms of what, today, we refer to as ‘spiritual warfare,’ which I’ll talk about later in the interview. But a couple of ideas… and there’s a couple of really good books that are on early Christian demonology one titled “Demons and the Making of the Monk,” by a David Brakke and one just titled “City of Demons” by Dayna Kalleres and they deal with these two interwoven sides of this conflict.
In terms of the city, you had early attempts at Christian mission and attempts at Christianisation of the cities by which Christians, in cities, would use things like the relics of saints, used prayer as a form of weapon, essentially a spiritual weapon in an attempt to drive out the demonic forces they saw as controlling the ancient, late antique cities. Those demons, of course, like all those deities and spirits, once they were driven out the city would then go into the wilderness where they lurked around on the edges of civilization. And in this context you had a very growing development of early Christian monastic traditions, that Brakke talks about, where monks would explicitly go on journeys into the wilderness, mimicking Jesus’s journey, as a way of combating demons directly as a form of devotion. They process this as a way they are tempering themselves and to divine warriors for God’s cause, like through this combat with demonic forces. So those are the roots of early Christian demonology.
AP: Is it then that the fascination with demons and the study of demons started then?
JO: I mean yes and no. Because of the roots in Mesopotamian storm spirits and things like that, there were often a large collection of magical texts, for example, treatises on these spirits, on how to ward against them, on how to use them against each other. Early Christian demonology, what we think of today as demonology, was specifically geared around the competing relationship of early Christianity both with, what we now call, paganism, for example, or late antique paganism but also with other forms of Christianity, with Christian heresies. And on the relationship in which Christianity, Orthodox Christianity consolidated itself and its teachings in opposition to other, competing forms of Christian doctrine and non–Christian doctrine in which ideas of demons and ideas of the demonic served as the key way of delegitimizing what became known as Christian heresies and other forms of traditions.
AP: Also I was thinking, what’s the relation between demons, their worship, and witch–hunts?
JO: OK, yeah. So we’re cutting through a few centuries. So as a brief overview between the early period and the period we know as the witch hunts you get the rise of formal demonology, as a school of theology, within the Catholic Church, for example. You get this increased consolidation of what demons are, where they come from, what they do, written about extensively, for example, by theologians, like Thomas Aquinas in the 12th century, for example. The witch hunts are, I think, for a lot of people, when people think about demons, in a historical context, they tend to think about the witch hunts. The witch hunts refer, loosely, to a period between the 15th and 17th centuries – is usually the mean time–frame. Which is the height of the witch hunts, it’s when most of the witch hunts are taking place. The actual witch hunts themselves have earlier roots that I’ll talk about in a moment but also they carry on in a more piecemeal fashion for quite a while afterwards. I guess one of the interesting things that happens between these places is a shift in understanding of demons, of heresy, and of notions of witchcraft.
It was very common, particularly after the conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, to see Christianity as in a period of triumph and for a lot of Christians, this was framed in the language of the millennium, from the book of Revelation, from Biblical prophecy. The millennium being the period where Jesus would reign over the world for a thousand years. But, specifically, Satan would be, Satan and demons generally would be, imprisoned during this period. And after the conversion of the Roman Empire it is very, very common for a general attitude of seeing demons as defeated as like bound, as tied up, and unable to really affect the world in a concrete way. This is interestingly illustrated by the fact that you have many accounts from the 8th to the 12th century of monks and Christian priests just explicitly calling out demons in rituals to do their bidding, for example. And this was considered slightly unwise, probably not a thing you should be doing, but it wasn’t, like it, wasn’t an issue, it wasn’t like a problem of national or Church importance. It was an issue between the individual priests in the state of their soul, for example.
But the general attitude was, that like, you can use demons to do your bidding, yeah they might be a threat to the individual believer but they’re not really a threat to say Christendom and the state of Christian society – the general trajectory of how the world was developing, for example. This started to change in the 12th century and especially in the 13th century, partly as a reaction to the Black Death, which radically shifted the socio-political situation in Europe, through a lot of things, into chaos. It began the collapse of, what we now know as, feudalism. You had mass migration and movement of the peasant class and things like that.
Recently, it was a time of great upheaval and during this time you also got the development of a number of Christian heresies the most famous, probably, being the Cathars and the Waldenses – are the big ones – and others that were often apocalyptic or apocalyptically related groups of Christians who were advocating for the radical, social reform based on their interpretations of the Gospel and of the Bible generally. This led to a crisis within what would have been the Catholic Church at this point – like the traditional Orthodox establishments of Christianity in Europe. Specifically, it’s a relationship to monarchs and to the crown. The ideas of Divine Right of Kings and similar processes. But, generally, this led to a number of changes in attitudes to heresy, in particular the attitudes, the relation between heresy and witchcraft. This is covered very nicely in Alan Boureau’s book “Satan the Heretic.” It’s a fairly slim book that talks about this transition. But essentially you had two ideas; one of witchcraft, which was an individual act of, sometimes, using demons to do your bidding or casting magic generally and while this was unwise, it was a threat primarily just to the believer. And then you had an idea of heresy and heresies were social, they were group-based, they were threats to the established church. But historically these had been seen as fairly separate.
And then in the 12th and 13th centuries, you have a gradual merging of these two ideas in doctrines within the Catholic Church. There’s a couple of Papal Bulls, for example, which, explicitly, combine the two. And one of the effects of this is that heresy became associated with magic and witchcraft became associated with social groups and social movements and not just being an individual action. So this idea travels through to what later became the witch hunt period, where you get a merging of these ideas in the idea that there are these vast conspiracies of witches, working in secret, to undermine the authority of Christendom, to undermine the integrity of the church, and to get an, in situ widespread chaos essentially.
This found its manifestation a number of demonologies, demonological treatises by key witch hunters the most famous which being the “Malleus Maleficarum” or “The Hammer of the Witches” by Kramer and Sprenger. But there’s also a number of other works, there was Johann Weyer’s “Pseudomonarchia Daemonum,” for example, there was Jean Bodin’s “On the Demon Mania of Witches” which I’ve written about and, of course, King James wrote his own famous “The Daemonologie.” So this idea that witches were organized with social or witchcraft became a threat to the social fabric leads to the idea of worship of demons, okay, demonolatry, I guess, would be the technical term – which previously, in earlier historical eras, hadn’t really been an issue outside of like the early Christian attempts to combat paganism in the Roman Empire, shortly after.
But the idea that you could worship demons and you could essentially work for demons, in a spiritual sense, became a symbol of threat. It became, rather than just being a threat to your soul, it became a threat to the nation, to the authority of the king, to the authority Church. And so you start getting the development of manuals like the Malleus Maleficarum and others that are sent to discern like; okay, who are witches, how do you identify one, what do they do, what practices do they engage in – as an effort to identify these groups that are essentially working in secret to undermine the nation with the early idea of witchcraft. One of the key things to remember here is that witchcraft was tried in secular courts. It was technically a secular crime rather than a religious one. At this period religious courts and secular courts being separate. It overlapped, quite heavily, with ideas of treason and conspiracy which I think to a modern understanding probably seems very strange. I remember I was quite shocked the first time I read about this, for example. But so you start going with the development of ideas that the witches are meeting and the idea that witches are meeting in secret, that they’re pledging allegiance to the devil, that they are using demons to destroy crops, to cause infanticide.
AP: Was the problem the fact that witches were communing with demons or was the magic heresy?
JO: I mean it was a combination of the two, and part of that relates to the way that magic as understood in this period and the way the demons were understood in this period. So one of the core elements of demonology, and particularly in this period but also more recently, is that demons don’t have the capacity to create things. This is most notably… demons can’t create and so, how demons were a threat to the social order when they can’t technically create anything and this was tied into the idea they didn’t have any real power. It became a question of like, okay, so where are these demons getting their power from? And various doctrines developed that, basically, they were co-opting divine power and rerouteing it through nefarious ritual practices. And this is how magic ties in this period. Magic was a way of using these illegitimate forms of divine power, basically, and channelling them.
AP: So, basically, witches were stealing powers from entities who are stealing powers from other deities.
JO: Yeah or that’s rather how it went or through things like the demonic pact. The witch was pledging herself, I use her because the witch is, in Western and Central Europe, usually female but the witch was, through the demonic pact, the witch was pledging herself to work for the devil, work for demons who then granted them this power that they had co-opted from the divine. An example of the way this worked, for example, the ideas of how the sacrament was used in things like the black mass, for example. The idea being that the sacramental wafer had this innate divine energy or power to it. So by taking this store of power and abusing it in the black mass context allowed them to subvert its energy to new and nefarious ends.
AP: For example, in the Italian Renaissance they used to make a difference between natural magic and witchcraft. And natural magic was basically healing or doing magic but through means of natural elements like plants, and herbs, and concoctions. Whereas witchcraft was communing with demons and entities and, of course, any entity which was not God. Yeah.
JO: Yeah, there is a gradual conflation that happens, I think, over the course of early modernity in Northern and Central Europe. Ideas of natural magic and ideas of witchcraft get increasingly combined.
So do you feel that that then by the end of the Renaissance these two ideas were combined into one so that everything that was witchcraft and it was bad?
JO: I mean, it varies a lot by place and I think this is something to keep in mind, with the witch hunts in Europe, is that witchcraft, while there were commonalities that were shared between the United Kingdom and France and Germany and Italy alike, also these ideas developed in those spaces somewhat distinctly and this is also reflected in punishment. For example, witches in England were generally not burned, for example, they were generally hung.
AP: Yeah, even in Italy it was uncommon. It did happen but it was uncommon.
JO: Because it’s very common for people today to see the witch hunt as effectively Medieval, they see them as happening in this bygone era long, long ago. And I think it’s important to realize that the witch hunts happened in, what we generally refer to as, early modernity. We’re dealing with the period when feudalism is collapsing and, what we think of today is, the rise of the nation – the idea of the nation-state is slightly coming about. And the witch hunts have a very specific relationship to that and to the rise of the nation-state in two very different ways.
Firstly, ideas of witchcraft, particularly in the more formalized capacity, were generally disseminated from fairly centralized forms of authority. A lot of them came from people who were high up in the courts or related to the forms of government in particular nations. They were disseminated to the periphery but this is particularly the case with punishments for witchcraft. A lot of the way that witchcraft was dealt with was radiated out from these fairly centralized forms of government and then practised by regional authorities and groups. But this could have changed over the course of the 15th to the 17th century as you had this shift. And eventually, you had kind of the opposite happening where it was the regional authorities that were getting overzealous, that were doing particularly brutal forms of witch hunts, and one of the ways that modern nation-states were centralized was essentially through cracking down on those regional governments to stop them persecuting witches in the harsh ways that they had previously been pushing.
In prior eras, you have these movements of decentralization and then centralization that accrues to the early formation of the nation-state that’s very tied up with the witch hunts in the way that witch hunts were practised. Another key, slightly more, I guess, maybe abstract point related to that is the way that the diabolical pact, specifically the witches relationship to the devil, was very much modelled on feudal systems of power and feudal oaths. The feudal oaths of fealty being the idea that you would swear fealty to a lord who swore fealty to the king. But there were these, generally, reciprocal networks where your expense is like, okay, I’ll work for you in return you let me work on your land bla bla bla – there’s the general structures. And the demonic pact very much works on that model. It’s the idea that you have these two or more beings that are contingent. They have limited power in themselves, like neither the witch nor the devil are omnipotent, have absolute authority. They’re beings of limited authority entering into a transactional relationship based on spiritual power and the spiritual transference of power. And, in that context, I think it’s important to situate it in the context of the rise of the nation-state and in the connection to the rise of state sovereignty and the idea of the nation-state authority is being centralized and absolute. The idea that you owe fealty to the king or the ruler, not because they’re part of this network of transactional relationships, but because they are absolutely, they have absolute authority and you owe authority to them like because they are there, because just because.
And wrap that point up, like you see this manifested in some early works of political philosophy, for example, the most obvious example being Thomas Hobbes’ book “Leviathan” which is one of the early, published I think in 1650, one of the early formulations of where absolute state sovereignty and Hobbes talks about the witch in Leviathan at several points. And he makes the point that he doesn’t actually believe that witches have any power but they should be persecuted anyway because their belief that they have power is a threat to like social order, basically. This idea that, basically, like witchcraft and the witch’s belief that they have this spiritual power, this supernatural power was itself a threat to the nation-state and to systems of authority, like in the nation-state.
AP: It makes sense in terms of the perspective of Hobbes’ philosophy.
JO: Yeah, yeah, it does. Hobbes isn’t the only one. I mean it’s not a surprise, it’s not necessarily a shock that King James wrote The Demonology considering that he was also convinced that witches were literally trying to overthrow him from being King. He famously almost had a shipwreck on the way back from France and thought it was witches calling up storms to try and take him out. Which is it’s always fun.
AP: Yeah, it seems like sort of blending into superstition when it comes to this kind of…
JO: Very much so.
AP: Fears, yes, yeah because it’s like irrational fears, I’d say. Well, of course, that depends on the definition of rational.
JO: Yeah, pretty much. I guess that and I guess the definition of rational leads us on quite neatly to the next topic I’m just talking about.
AP: Why has demonology fallen out of fashion in modernity?
JO: I guess there are multiple levels to this; there’s one degree to which it didn’t fall out of fashion but I’ll get onto that in a bit. Demonology, as a formal theological discipline mostly falls out of fashion through modernity. And I think part of this has happened for a number of reasons, one is related to the witch hunts and really, particularly related to the brutality of the witch hunts. A lot of, particularly, intellectuals in Europe, once it got to the 17th and 18th centuries are looking back at this period and being like, so that’s a bit off wasn’t it. That really it felt like demonology being so closely tied up to the witch hunts, particularly their brutality, made a lot of, particularly, intellectuals in Europe uncomfortable. They saw it as this element of irrationality and this generally ties into the rise of secularization and the rise of the Enlightenment and rationalism. As ideas of the secular and ideas of enlightenment rationalism gained traction within Europe a lot of, mostly, religious institutions both – particularly the Protestants but also Catholicism, particularly in Protestantism started to try and adjust their ways of doing religion to seem more rational, basically, to seem more in tune with the times. And demonology was one of those aspects of this that seemed a bit too irrational, a bit too outré, a bit too out there. It didn’t really fit an idea of an enlightened form of faith, basically.
This is also related closely to the fact that there was also a turn towards, not like biblical literalism – that comes later but, like, closer attention to what was actually in the Bible and what the Bible said. Because while demons are mentioned in the Bible and discussed in the Bible at several points, most of what had become formal theological demonology, at that point, was not remotely related to what was in the Bible at all. It was a collection of extra-biblical traditions, extra-biblical figures. You can see this if you look at early modern demonologies like the Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, for example, and you look at how many demons, that are in there, are actually based on demons that are referenced in the Bible and it’s a very few of them. A lot of them are mostly invented or mostly products of folk traditions or other kinds of non–biblical tradition. It’s a combination of this return to the Bible as a source text, particularly in Protestantism because the Bible has been translated into vernacular languages at this point. And this rise of enlightenment rationalism meant that for a lot of the formal Christian denominations, formalized demonology became increasingly marginalized.
And you see this through to today, in fact, where the way that like evil is talked about in Anglicanism, for example. So you get this transition from talking about demons as a multiplicity and plurality. Actually talking about Satan as a specific individual, yeah, there might be demons, maybe, but we don’t really talk about them. They’re gonna focus on a singular figure and then towards today like there’s a far more common trend of just talking about evil in this de-personified way. To the point where I think, a few years ago, the Anglican Church actually took out references to Satan from its baptismal rite, for example, and replaced them with just references to evil, like generally. Because basically, their argument was, basically, because for young people today Satan is a bit too strange and out there and that doesn’t really make a lot of sense to people, say, and talking about evil connects more to people. Looking at it illustrates that trajectory that happens. It spends several hundred years like with regards to the diminishment of formalised demonology in denominations.
AP: would you say that in doing so they were trying to be more rational or more secular?
JO: I think both, in some ways, definitely more rational, especially early on. I think the ideas of secularity and rationality are very closely entwined throughout modernity, particularly in the early parts and through to today, in fact. It’s a kind of yes to that question.
AP: Yes to both.
JO: Yes to both.
AP: We can see that in the contemporary world there is a resurgence of the interest in demonology which is found both among magic practitioners and in pop culture. So can you tell us something more about demonology in the contemporary world?
JO: I can and to do this I have to roll back, very slightly, to the more early modern period as, while demonology was definitely diminished within formal denominations especially in the Protestant tradition, it did survive in a lot of different ways. It cropped up a lot in apocalyptic movements, for example, like apocalyptic forms of Christianity. It often had a stronger focus on, if not demons generally, like the devil specifically, like as a force of active… as an active force of evil in the world. You also, at the same time, had the appropriation of demons in radical traditions in Europe like specifically things like the anarchist and the socialist traditions, in the early women’s liberation movement appropriated a lot of bits from the demonic and from Christian imagery of the demonic, as a way of articulating social protest. There are a few really good books on this. But one of the other key aspects of this relates to things like conspiracy theories and the rise of, what we today refer to as, conspiracy theories. There are scholars who have pointed out that Christian ideas of Satan are like the original conspiracy theory – because the idea of Satan has this invisible, dark, manipulative force that’s controlling the world and there’s a lot of continuity between that and like the witch hunts, for example. The witch hunts are the idea of this conspiracy of which it was trying to undermine society. But you essentially get this continuation of ideas of the demonic in more and less secularized forms or ideas of evil as this underlying hidden force. It’s manipulating society behind the scenes.
It becomes a variable prevalent in apocalyptic movements throughout the 19th and the 20th centuries. So you have that – but, related to pop culture, probably, one of the key aspects that popularized demons in the contemporary era are movies like “The Exorcist” and other kind of pop culture phenomenon that really put demonology and the idea of demons back in the public consciousness in a large way. I know there’s been some scholarship that talks about how ideas of demonic possession and exorcisms actually changed after the Exorcist came out, for example. Because there had been demonic possessions ongoing all of this time, within traditions, but the way that these would have manifested and the way people acted when they were possessed, apparently, increasingly started mimicking the way it was depicted in pop culture after these landmark projects came out.
Yeah, so you have this interesting feedback between pop culture and the way that these religious ones get a manifesting like on the ground. So, basically, today, in a way, you’ve ended up with two – especially related to pop culture – you have these different conceptions of demons. On the one hand, you have the Exorcist – of figures like Pazuzu, who isn’t actually a Christian demon, is actually an ancient Mesopotamian demon. But you have heard of Rosemary’s Baby, of The Exorcist, The Ninth Gate, these kinds of movies that have these figures that use Christian demonology fairly directly or indirectly. They’re drawing on these particular images of the devil as this underlying force in society. Maybe, usually evil – in some movies slightly less so or at least morally ambiguous. On the other hand, of course, you have TV shows like “Lucifer”, for example, that have the devil as a fairly debonair kind, very sexy, debonair anti-hero, sometimes just hero, but definitely slightly edgy, edgy hero. And that comes out specifically the Milton, “Paradise Lost”, post Paradise Lost tradition of what is sometimes referred romantic or symbolic Satanism. Just the appropriation of the demonic as a symbol of cultural rebellion, passion, social transformation, that whole school of thought.
AP: Which is quite common among certain Satanists nowadays. That kind of interpretation I mean.
JO: Yeah, I mean it’s the founding of modern Satanism, it’s built on that. Whether you’re talking about the Church of Satan or the Satanic Temple or some of the earlier precursors that you get that are more or less explicitly Satanist. Some really good books on this; Ruben van Luijk’s “Children of Lucifer,” which is like a history of modern, religious Satanism, it talks about how it developed through the 18th and 19th centuries and then the 20th century. Per Faxneld’s book “Satanic Feminism” is a really, really good study of usage of demonic and satanic imagery in the women’s liberation movement, specifically in the 19th century. The both of these are reacting to this early, historically, those roots are reacting to the rise of secular rationalism, the wider secular modernity, but in the context of a culture that is still very steeped in Christianity. So although institutions may be secularizing, Christian imagery is still very prevalent like most systems of authority when they are tied to Christianity and in that context, especially with the formal diminishment over demonology as a focus, it opened up this space for these more playful, ironic, or revolutionary interpretations of demonic imagery as a challenge to a status quo that is still deeply embedded in Christian symbolism and the Christian symbols of authority.
And I think it’s important in that context to note that those visions, although they’re very prevalent in the early 18th century, gradually tend to fade, over time, as society becomes more secular – particularly in Europe. That revolutionary appropriation of the demonic loses a lot of its symbolic value and symbolic power because society isn’t, any longer, as heavily steeped in the tradition that it was opposing. And in that context, I think it’s important to recognize that a lot of modern forms of religious Satanism, whether that’s the Church of Satan or the Satanic Temple that, not only, but are very very prevalent in contemporary America where Christianity still has that immense cultural holdover, what is ostensibly a secular country. But it’s in that space where those kinds of forms of revolutionary or counter-cultural symbolism have the potential for larger symbolic resonance because they’re happening in the context where Christianity is still incredibly powerful both institutionally but also culturally, generally.
So, I guess I can talk a bit about demons in general and contemporary American culture or the contemporary world in general because we’re seeing a resurgence over the past thirty years also with, I guess, more formalized demonology is again, not necessarily, in the established Christian denominations and not necessarily in the Anglican tradition or even formal evangelical churches like the Baptist’s, for example. Particularly in Charismatic and Pentecostal churches or in neo-charismatic churches, which are – neo-charismatic, in this context, meaning Charismatic churches that are not formally affiliated to a particular denomination. Over the past thirty or so years you had the rise of spiritual warfare discourses in contemporary America and globally through missionary networks in which these more elaborate returns to demonology are happening. And in a lot of ways, these are interesting because they were turning to an idea that was very prevalent when demonology was more formalized in the early church and in the Mediaeval period, that other deities from other traditions are metaphysically real, they’re just evil, essentially, in this context. So a very common belief in a lot of mainline Protestant churches, for example, is that other deities from other traditions aren’t real, they don’t really exist, they are empty idols, basically.
But it’s important to realize that that wasn’t actually the view of the early church in Christianity that saw other deities very much as real, they just saw them as not necessarily good and as less powerful than their conception of God. And contemporary Pentecostal and Charismatic churches are very much going back to some of those traditions, in the sense that they’re framing other deities but also other interpretations of the Christian deity that they don’t necessarily agree with, essentially as demonic but as metaphysically real and just evil and nefarious and out to deceive humanity.
This plays out in their constructions of all contemporary paganism, for example, but also New Age traditions, also Islam – because they’re very convinced that God in Islam is not the same as the Christian God. But like there are a lot of books that they write trying to argue this point. Forms of Christianity they don’t agree with, they’ll tend to point towards that like in the more anti–Catholic strands of Protestantism, for example, they’ll accuse Catholicism of secretly being in league with demons.
But this general movement has led to the production of vast quantities of literature, which is what I primarily study in my research, ongoing research of spiritual warfare manuals which are these books that are combinations of a self–help guide, a demonological treatise and, I guess, a military tactics manual. And they have various different functions depending on the manual in question. Some of them will be targeted at other evangelical Christians who don’t believe the demons are real and the purpose of the book will then be to convince the reader that, in fact, demons are real and act in the world. You’ll have other books that assume you already think that and they’ll be more geared towards teaching you how the demonic realm operates, what demons are, what they do, how you can find them. You’ll have other books that are more tied in with conspiracist subcultures that will accept both of those previous points or then be like oh this is how the demonic works and say contemporary US government or in international relations or in global religious paradigms. But essentially the production of this vast quantity of charismatic and evangelical literature that’s entirely geared around how the demonic is real and how the demonic operates the contemporary world. And these are in a lot of ways less formalized than, say, what we think of as the formal demonologies of the early modern period. These are not Johann Weyer’s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum. These are not generally going to contain elaborate hierarchies of demons telling you how many legions they control or what their specific specializations – they won’t contain that much detail.
But they will contain information and say specific demonic figures that are common in these movements, including figures like Jezebel, for example, where they have written about and Leviathan or the Antichrist spirit, for example. Sometimes they’ll just be referred to as spirits of negative behavioural or emotional traits. So demons will be a spirit of hatred, or a spirit of envy, or a spirit of drug addiction, the spirit of alcoholism, for example. This is a generally like super naturalised flaming of the world and of the idea of, I guess, like individual problems and social problems and the state of the general health of the nation, for example, were tied up with this underlying demonological discourse where demons underlie the various problems of society.
AP: So Jonathon, thank you very much for this interview. It was really fascinating. I’m sure that the other members of the Symposium will really appreciate it. So I’d like to ask you how can people contact you in case they want to and do you have anything coming up in terms of books, works, and…?
JO: Thank you. Okay, so I’ve recently created a website where you can find me. And you can find me at www.drsjodonnell.com So you can contact me through there. In terms of work, I have a few things coming out. I have a couple of articles that are recently released, one on anti-Semitism and one on the politics of witchcraft. I have another one coming out dealing with spiritual warfare and the context of contemporary Japan and that should be out in the fall. However, the big project that I have coming out is I have a book I’m releasing later this year, it’s currently scheduled to release on November third. It’s being published by Fordham University Press. The title of the work is “Passing Orders; Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare” and it is a study of the relationship between contemporary Christian demonology in the United States and its relationship to systems of social prejudice and structural discrimination. It looks specifically at demonologies as related to gender and sexuality, related to Islam, related to indigenous traditions, and socialism, and other things that the evangelical right generally writes about as apparently bad. If that is interesting to you I encourage you to pre-order the book or at least to check it out.
AP: Yes and I will leave all the links and the references in the infobox, of course, do go check them out. So thank you again Jonathan for being with us.
JO: Yeah, it’s been a pleasure, Angela, thank you.
AP: This is it for today’s video. Hope you liked it. I’d really like to thank Jonathan for doing this interview with me and I also like to thank Philip Holm – so thank you very much Philip for being one of my patrons.
If you liked this video, SMASH the like button, subscribe to the channel, leave me a comment because I really, really want to know what you think about what we’ve talked about in this video and, as always, stay tuned for all the academic fun.
Bye for now.
JONATHON’S CONTACT DETAILS
Website: www.drsjodonnell.com
JONATHON’S PUBLICATIONS
S. Jonathon O’Donnell, “Witchcraft, Statecraft, Mancraft: On the Demonological Foundations of Sovereignty.” Political Theology. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317X.2020…
S. Jonathon O’Donnell, “The Body Politic(s) of the Jezebel Spirit.” Religion and Gender 7(2). Available at: https://brill.com/view/journals/rag/7…
(Open Access!)
BOOKS CITED
Alain Bourreau, Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West. University of Chicago Press, 2006.
David Brakke, Demons and the Making of the Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity. Harvard University Press, 2006.
Dayne S. Kalleres, City of Demons: Violence, Ritual, and Christian Power in Late Antiquity. California University Press, 2015.
Per Faxneld, Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as the Liberator of Women in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 2017.
Ruben van Luijk, Children of Lucifer: The Origins of Modern Religious Satanism. Oxford University Press, 2016.