The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (38 page)

No trace of the city there I found:

A shepherd sat blowing his pipe alone;

His flock went quietly nibbling round.

I asked, “How long has the city been gone?”

And he answered me, and he piped away—

“The new ones bloom and the old decay,

This is my pasture ground for aye.”

Five hundred years rolled by, and then

I traveled the self-same road again.

And I came to the sea, and the waves did roar,

And a fisherman threw his net out clear,

And when heavy laden he dragged it ashore.

I asked, “How long has the sea been here?”

And he laughed, and he said, and he laughed away—

“As long as yon billows have tossed their spray

They’ve fished and they’ve fished in this self-same bay.”

Five hundred years rolled by, and then

I traveled the self-same road again.

And I came to a forest, vast and free.

And a woodman stood in the thicket near—

His axe he laid at the foot of a tree.

I asked., “How long have the woods been here?”

And he answered. “These woods are a covert for aye;

My ancestors dwelt here alway,

And trees have been here since creation’s day.”

Five hundred years rolled by, and then

I traveled the self-same road again.

And I found there a city, and far and near

Resounded the hum of toil and glee,

And I asked, “How long has the city been here?

And where is the pipe, and the wood, and the sea?”

And they answered me, as they went their way.

“Things always have stood as they stand today.

And so they will stand forever and aye.”

I’ll wait five hundred years, and then

I’ll travel the selfsame road again.

In England, Shelley was the most famous poet to become fascinated by the legend. In his lengthy poem “The Wandering Jew,” written or partly written when he was seventeen, the Wanderer is called Paulo. A fiery cross on his forehead is kept concealed under a cloth band. In the third Canto, after sixteen centuries of wandering, Paulo recounts the origin of his suffering to Rosa, a woman he loves:

How can I paint that dreadful day,

That time of terror and dismay,

When, for our sins, a Saviour died,

And the meek Lamb was crucified!

As dread that day, when, borne along

To slaughter by the insulting throng,

Infuriate for Deicide.

I mocked our Saviour, and I cried,

“Go, go,” “Ah! I will go,” said he,

“Where scenes of endless bliss invite;

To the blest regions of the light

I go, but thou shall here remain—

Thou diest not till I come again.”

The Wandering Jew is also featured in Shelley’s short poem “The Wandering Jew’s Soliloquy,” and in two much longer works, “Hellas” and “Queen Mab.” In “Queen Mab,” as a ghost whose body casts no shadow, Ahasuerus bitterly denounces God as an evil tyrant. In a lengthy note about this Shelley quotes from a fragment of a German work “whose title I have vainly endeavored to discover. I picked it up, dirty and torn, some years ago….”

In this fragment the Wanderer describes his endless efforts to kill himself. He tries vainly to drown. He leaps into an erupting Mount Etna where he suffers intense heat for ten months before the volcano belches him out. Forest fires fail to consume him. He tries to get killed in wars but arrows, spears, clubs, swords, bullets, mines, and trampling elephants have no effect on him.

There are demon-haunted worlds, regions of utter darkness.

—
T
HE
I
SA
U
PANISHAD
(I
NDIA, CA
. 600 B.C.)

Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.

—T
HOMAS
H
OBBES
,
L
EVIATHAN
(1651)

The gods watch over us and guide our destinies, many human cultures teach; other entities, more malevolent, are responsible for the existence of evil. Both classes of beings, whether considered natural or supernatural, real or imaginary, serve human needs. Even if they’re wholly fanciful, people feel better believing in them. So in an age when traditional religions have been under withering fire from science, is it not natural to wrap up the old gods and demons in scientific raiment and call them aliens?

Belief in demons was widespread in the ancient world. They were thought of as natural rather than supernatural beings. Hesiod casually mentions them. 218 Socrates described his philosophical inspiration as the work of a personal, benign demon. His teacher, Diotima of Mantineia, tells him (in Plato’s
Symposium
) that “Everything demonic is intermediate between God and mortal. God has no contact with man,” she continues; “only through the demonic is there intercourse and conversation between man and gods, whether in the waking state or during sleep.”

Plato, Socrates’ most celebrated student, assigned a high role to demons: “No human nature invested with supreme power is able to order human affairs,” he said, “and not overflow with insolence and wrong….”

We do not appoint oxen to be the lords of oxen, or goats of goats, but we ourselves are a superior race and rule over them. In like manner God, in his love of mankind, placed over us the demons, who are a superior race, and they with great ease and pleasure to themselves, and no less to us, taking care of us and giving us peace and reverence and order and justice never failing, made the tribes of men happy and united.

He stoutly denied that demons were a source of evil, and represented Eros, the keeper of sexual passions, as a demon, not a god, “neither mortal nor immortal, neither good nor bad.” But all later Platonists, including the Neo-Platonists who powerfully influenced Christian philosophy, held that some demons were good and others evil. The pendulum was swinging. Aristotle, Plato’s famous student, seriously considered the contention that dreams are scripted by demons. Plutarch and Porphyry proposed that the demons, who filled the upper air, came from the Moon.

The early Church Fathers, despite having imbibed Neo-Platonism from the culture they swam in, were anxious to separate themselves from “pagan” belief-systems. They taught that all of pagan religion consisted of the worship of demons and men, both misconstrued as gods. When St. Paul complained (Ephesians 6:14) about wickedness in high places, he was referring not to government corruption, but to demons, who lived in high places:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

From the beginning, much more was intended than demons as a mere poetic metaphor for evil in the hearts of men.

St. Augustine was much vexed with demons. He quotes the pagan thinking prevalent in his time: “The gods occupy the loftiest regions, men the lowest, the demons the middle region…. They have immortality of body, but passions of the mind in common with men.” In Book VIII of
The City of God
(begun in 413), Augustine assimilates this ancient tradition, replaces gods by God, and demonizes the demons—arguing that they are, without exception, malign. They have no redeeming virtues. They are the fount of all spiritual and material evil. He calls them “aerial animals…most eager to inflict harm, utterly alien from righteousness, swollen with pride, pale with envy, subtle in deceit.” They may profess to carry messages between God and man, disguising themselves as angels of the Lord, but this pose is a snare to lure us to our destruction. They can assume any form, and know many things—”demon”
means
“knowledge” in Greek—especially about the material world. However intelligent, they are deficient in charity. They prey on “the captive and outwitted minds of men,” wrote Tertullian. “They have their abode in the air, the stars are their neighbors, their commerce is with the clouds.”

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 Schönthal, 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 Moslem 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 through 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 labeled incubi; of men, succubi. There are cases in which nuns reported, in some befuddlement, 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.”

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 Daemonialitate,
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 (
phantasmata
) seen “in the moment between wakefulness and slumber.” The dreamer “imagines” the phantoms as predatory. Macrobius had a skeptical side which his medieval readers tended to ignore.

Obsession with demons began to reach a crescendo when, in his famous Bull of 1484, Pope Innocent VIII declared,

It has come to Our ears that members of both sexes do not avoid to have intercourse with evil angels, incubi, and succubi, and that by their sorceries, and by their incantations, charms, and conjurations, they suffocate, extinguish, and cause to perish the births of women

as well as generate numerous other calamities. With this Bull, Innocent initiated the systematic accusation, torture, and execution of countless “witches” all over Europe. They were guilty of what Augustine had described as “a criminal tampering with the unseen world.” Despite the evenhanded “members of both sexes” in the language of the Bull, unsurprisingly it was mainly girls and women who were so persecuted.

Many leading Protestants of the following centuries, their differences with the Catholic Church notwithstanding, adopted nearly identical views. Even humanists such as Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More believed in witches. “The giving up of witchcraft,” said John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, “is in effect the giving up of the Bible.” William Blackstone, the celebrated jurist, in his
Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1765), asserted:

To deny the possibility, nay, actual existence of witchcraft and sorcery is at once flatly to contradict the revealed word of God in various passages of both the Old and New Testament.

Innocent commended “Our dear sons Henry Kramer and James Sprenger,” who “have been by Letters Apostolic delegated as Inquisitors of these heretical [de]pravities.” If “the abominations and enormities in question remain unpunished,” the souls of multitudes face eternal damnation.

The pope appointed Kramer and Sprenger to write a comprehensive analysis, using the full academic armory of the late fifteenth century. With exhaustive citations of Scripture and of ancient and modern scholars, they produced the
Malleus Maleficarum,
the “Hammer of Witches”—aptly described as one of the most terrifying documents in human history. Thomas Ady, in
A Candle in the Dark,
condemned it as “villainous Doctrines & Inventions,” “horrible lyes and impossibilities,” serving to hide “their unparalleled cruelty from the ears of the world.” What the
Malleus
comes down to, pretty much, is that if you’re accused of witchcraft, you’re a witch. Torture is an unfailing means to demonstrate the validity of the accusation. There are no rights of the defendant. There is no opportunity to confront the accusers. Little attention is given to the possibility that accusations might be made for impious purposes—jealousy, say, or revenge, or the greed of the inquisitors who routinely confiscated for their own private benefit the property of the accused. This technical manual for torturers also includes methods of punishment tailored to release demons from the victim’s body before the process kills her. The
Malleus
in hand, the Pope’s encouragement guaranteed, inquisitors began springing up all over Europe.

It quickly became an expense account scam. All costs of investigation, trial, and execution were borne by the accused or her relatives—down to per diems for the private detectives hired to spy on her, wine for her guards, banquets for her judges, the travel expenses of a messenger sent to fetch a more experienced torturer from another city, and the faggots, tar and hangman’s rope. Then there was a bonus to the members of the tribunal for each witch burned. The convicted witch’s remaining property, if any, was divided between Church and State. As this legally and morally sanctioned mass murder and theft became institutionalized, as a vast bureaucracy arose to serve it, attention was turned from poor hags and crones to the middle class and well-to-do of both sexes.

The more who, under torture, confessed to witchcraft, the harder it was to maintain that the whole business was mere fantasy. Since each “witch” was made to implicate others, the numbers grew exponentially. These constituted “frightful proofs that the Devil is still alive,” as it was later put in America in the Salem witch trials. In a credulous age, the most fantastic testimony was soberly accepted—that tens of thousands of witches had gathered for a Sabbath in public squares in France, or that 12,000 of them darkened the skies as they flew to Newfoundland. The Bible had counseled, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” Legions of women were burnt to death. And the most horrendous tortures were routinely applied to every defendant, young or old, after the instruments of torture were first blessed by the priests. Innocent himself died in 1492, following unsuccessful attempts to keep him alive by transfusion (which resulted in the deaths of three boys) and by suckling at the breast of a nursing mother. He was mourned by his mistress and their children.

In Britain witch-finders, also called “prickers,” were employed, receiving a handsome bounty for each girl or woman they turned over for execution. They had no incentive to be cautious in their accusations. Typically they looked for “devil’s marks”—scars or birthmarks or nevi—that when pricked with a pin neither hurt nor bled. A simple sleight of hand often gave the appearance that the pin penetrated deep into the witch’s flesh. When no visible marks were apparent, “invisible marks” sufficed. Upon the gallows, one mid-seventeenth-century pricker “confessed he had been the death of above 220 women in England and Scotland, for the gain of twenty shillings apiece.”

In the witch trials, mitigating evidence or defense witnesses were inadmissible. In any case, it was nearly impossible to provide compelling alibis for accused witches: The rules of evidence had a special character. For example, in more than one case a husband attested that his wife was asleep in his arms at the very moment she was accused of frolicking with the devil at a witch’s Sabbath; but the archbishop patiently explained that a demon had taken the place of the wife. The husbands were not to imagine that their powers of perception could exceed Satan’s powers of deception. The beautiful young women were perforce consigned to the flames.