The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [57]
[* ‘Science’ means ‘knowledge’ in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even if we look no further.]
In the eleventh century, the influential Byzantine theologian, philosopher and shady politician, Michael Psellus, described demons in these words:
These animals exist in our own life, which is full of passions, for they are present abundantly in the passions, and their dwelling-place is that of matter, as is their rank and degree. For this reason they are also subject to passions and fettered to them.
One Richalmus, abbot of Schonthal, around 1270 penned an entire treatise on demons, rich in first-hand experience: he sees (but only when his eyes are shut) countless malevolent demons, like motes of dust, buzzing around his head – and everyone else’s. Despite successive waves of rationalist, Persian, Jewish, Christian and Muslim world views, despite revolutionary social, political and philosophical ferment, the existence, much of the character, and even the name of demons remained unchanged from Hesiod to the Crusades.
Demons, the ‘powers of the air’, come down from the skies and have unlawful sexual congress with women. Augustine believed that witches were the offspring of these forbidden unions. In the Middle Ages, as in classical antiquity, nearly everyone believed such stories. The demons were also called devils, or fallen angels. The demonic seducers of women were labelled incubi; of men, succubi. There are cases in which nuns reported, in some befud-dlement, a striking resemblance between the incubus and the priest-confessor, or the bishop, and awoke the next morning, as one fifteenth-century chronicler put it, to ‘find themselves polluted just as if they had commingled with a man’. There are similar accounts, but in harems not convents, in ancient China. So many women reported incubi, argued the Presbyterian religious writer Richard Baxter (in his Certainty of the World of Spirits, 1691), ‘that ‘tis impudence to deny it’.*
[‘ Likewise, in the same work, ‘The raising of storms by witches is attested by so many, that I think it needless to recite them.’ The theologian Meric Casaubon argued – in his 1668 book. Of Credulity and Incredulity, that witches must exist because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true.]
As they seduced, the incubi and succubi were perceived as a weight bearing down on the chest of the dreamer. Mare, despite its Latin meaning, is the Old English word for incubus, and nightmare meant originally the demon that sits on the chests of sleepers, tormenting them with dreams. In Athanasius’ Life of St Anthony (written around 360) demons are described as coming and going at will in locked rooms; 1400 years later, in his work De Daemonialitae, the Franciscan scholar Ludovico Sinistrari assures us that demons pass through walls.
The external reality of demons was almost entirely unquestioned from antiquity through late medieval times. Maimonides denied their reality, but the overwhelming majority of rabbis believed in dybbuks. One of the few cases I can find where it is even hinted that demons might be internal, generated in our minds, is when Abba Poemen - one of the desert fathers of the early Church - was asked,
‘How do the demons fight against me?’
‘The demons fight against you?’ Father Poemen asked in turn. ‘Our own wills become the demons, and it is these which attack us.’
The medieval attitudes on incubi and succubi were influenced by Macrobius’ fourth-century Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, which went through dozens of editions before the European Enlightenment. Macrobius described phantoms (phantasma) seen ‘in the moment between wakefulness and slumber’. The dreamer ‘imagines’ the phantoms as predatory. Macrobius had a sceptical side which his medieval readers tended