From Deities to Demons (1)

Do we not see that our priests carve, out the same rock, the deities and demons which we know of today? Then how dare they have the audacity to blatantly accuse each other of worshiping the latter kind, when, both of them are essentially fashioned from the same dirt?

Let us first define God as, for lack of a better word, the Unknowable, which to it is assigned no sense of benevolence nor malignancy, because God, by monotheistic definition, generally bears a positive connotation, viz, the All-Knowing, All-Good, benign being who maintains an intimate relationship with his creations, specifically- us, Man, to whom the planet he created, and all life that it sustains, is entrusted.  

When this Unknowable bestows the land with rain, and blesses the trees to harbor hearty fruit, we adorn it with titles worthy of reverence and admiration. But we call that same unknowable being Satan, Baphomet, Angra Mainyu, Lucifer; the morning star, Baalzebub; Lord of the Flies, when it sends forth a swarm of locusts to consume the grain-fields, a deluge, or a violent tempest to scourge the land.

Overtime, as each of the dual natures of the being became more and more detached and personified from the single substance, they eventually became antagonistic entities; separate from each other, like how, within, the primordial chaos resides the potential to give rise to the heavens and the earth. The Devil becomes a dark silhouette, to which all the evils and the suffering of the world are entailed. Then, needless to say, its counterpart, namely, God, by default, is assigned all the goodness that was withheld from the devil. Ergo the goodness of the unknowable transfigured into God, which became the visage of Light, and the evils became its disfigured shadow, the mask of Darkness. Moncure Daniel Conway, in his Demonology and Devil-lore (1879) says “Every bright god had his shadow, so to say; and under the influence of Dualism this shadow attained a distinct existence and personality in the popular imagination. The principle having once been established, that what seemed beneficent and what seemed the reverse must be ascribed to different powers”.

But one man’s God is another man’s Devil. When nations wage war against each other, or when religious ideals of a civilization come into conflict with another’s, these discords are reflected in the heavens above. In these celestial warfare gods do not hurl lightning bolts against each other, nor do they play a vital role, as depicted in popular culture. It is the priests and the monks of the nations that blow the war horns and lead the battalion. Brandishing the greatest weapon in their arsenal; propaganda, combined with their sharp tongue and quick wit, the fervency with which they promote the superiority of their patron gods while simultaneously demonizing those of their enemies’ is comparable to today’s electoral campaigns. The rule of the thumb was that the priests had to demote the foreign gods into devils and demons, whilst still retaining their existence, because such denial will inevitably lead their followers into questioning the existence of their own patron deities. Lesser belief systems with little or no evangelical power could either continue appeasing the old idols, which are then demonized, and expose themselves to ridicule and accusations of blasphemy, or they could come to an appeasement by letting their gods gradually relegate into the ranks of the superior religion, like how Nats were absorbed into the Buddhist cosmogony, and under its guise continue worshiping their ancestral deities. The role of priesthood reverberates far beyond the altars and the temples within which they dwell, and often permeates into the political landscape and so the priests, at their prime, were equally potent politicians as they were disseminators of religious beliefs.

-to be continued