It is a daunting task that this collection of essays has set itself: to write, if only partially, the history of demons in relation to health, a subject necessarily involving aspects of theology, medicine, natural science more widely, magic, and witchcraft (among other scholarly minefields).
We might think of seeking momentary relief from the complexities of the topic with people who seem to have achieved enviable clarity. The Four Tantras (rGyud bzhi) remains a foundational text of Tibetan medicine.
They are believed by some to reflect, in translation from the Sanskrit, the authentic teachings of the Buddha ‘Master of Remedies', but more probably they represent a quite original piece of systematizing by a medieval author, such as the twelfth-century Yuthog the Younger. Part of the text considers the 404 specific illnesses to which anyone might succumb, regardless of age or sex. There are 101 light illnesses, which do not necessarily require treatment by a doctor; 101 serious illnesses, for which medicines are indispensable; 101 illnesses caused by the intervention of spirits and demons, which require not only medical treatment but also religious rituals performed by monks to appease these malignant forces; and, lastly, 101 untreat- able illnesses, which are caused by karmic predestination and thus cannot be cured by doctors or by monks.[1198]So far so clear. Yet even this neat classification raises questions. What is the precise meaning of the term gdon usually translated as ‘demon'? What difference would it make to our initial reaction to the text if it had been translated only as ‘spirit', or as ‘minor deity'? What here are the differences between medicine and monastic ritual, how are the two to be combined in treating spiritbased ailments, and what marks out these 101 ailments as requiring such a two-pronged response? In the New Age, or the post-new age, Tibetan medicine may seem more familiar to many in Europe than the (now ethically suspect) European ‘classical heritage'—Graeco-Roman or Judaeo-Christian. And yet it is hard to discuss demons and disease without using Judaeo-Christian vocabulary, and thereby perhaps prejudicing all attempts at comparison.
The present little afterword to a rich collection of scholarly papers is headed ‘pandaemonium’ because it looks back at all the demons encountered in previous pages and tries to draw some lessons from their attested activities that might be used to stimulate further research.
What might a historical pandaemonium—a genuinely rounded, comparative view of demons in the context of health and healing—look like? Under what headings might it be organized?
Geography could be the first such heading. It is no adverse reflection on a group of papers that spans at least two millennia and some half dozen cultural traditions to say that the next task is to go global—and go later. Global, so that Tibetan demons, if that is what we should call them, are considered alongside Greek ones (Tibetan medicine owing so much to contact with the Greek world from the seventh century onwards) and alongside possible equivalents from Asia, Africa and the Americas. Later, so that we can begin to question and if necessary rephrase the Eurocentric narrative of ‘disenchantment’, the presumed decline of widespread acceptance of demons and of the need for demonology. It may well be that Europe’s intellectuals lost their fear of demons in the earlier eighteenth century, but they did not all deny the existence of such beings; and they were, on a global scale, unusual.[1199] In February 2005, thanks to Channel 4, I watched a purported exorcism on live television. There was a panel of experts to witness it and reflect on what they had seen: a psychiatrist, a religious person of some kind, an anthropologist, and so on. Cutting edge neuro-imaging technology was primed to reveal the brain activity associated with the exorcism. The possessed person described the main symptom of his condition: an irresistible urge to push the foot on the accelerator pedal to the floor when driving and thus go much too quickly. The exorcist passed his hands over the victim’s head and, if I recall correctly, the driver professed himself cured of his demonic speeding.
Before we smile too readily and too knowingly we should reflect on the number of cultures across the twenty-first century globe in which such a performance would be viewed with great interest and seriousness. (I shall give two examples in a moment.)Yet if we are to go global, we need next a pandaemonic philology, an attention to the precise words in question, their usual linguistic contexts and their meanings and overtones. It may not be enough to say in effect: ‘in this culture in this period there are representations of beings the term or terms for which can be roughly translated as demons’. What are the obstacles to easy translation?J. H. Hexter once divided historians into lumpers and splitters.
Comparative history requires a certain amount of lumping if it is to be more than a catalogue of cultural particularities. But how much? Perhaps we need to be clear first about what we are lumping. To use only the basic English terms, in this collection we have some spirits, angels, ghosts, demons, and others. Some cultures, such as pharaonic Egypt, seem to have no overall category that we can translate as demon (Lucarelli). Others, from pre-classical Mesopotamia to early modern England, have highly variable, complex and much debated taxonomies. For Konstantopoulos, the term demon ‘ill applies' to udug and lama. Some contributors above mention, but do not follow through on, the possibility of using a neutral designation such as ‘personified harmful forces' (Bacskay), ‘evil celestial beings' (Hamidovic), or ‘chaotic natural forces' (Verderame) so as to facilitate broad comparisons. In this collection, we are operating within the very broad but still recognizable line of cultural descent from the ancient Near East, through the classical world, to the European and Middle Eastern cultures of the three Abrahamic religions. That does not mean, even within any one strand of that line of descent, that demons are simply demons (Ockenstrom and Saif, for example, stress the diversity of views of demons found in their sources). To take one outlying example from an area not considered above: how much more are Anglo-Saxon elves than demons in local costume?[1200] If we go global, the problems of translatability become even more acute.