Ontology
Are demons real (as well as natural)? It is apparently a naive question—but not the less worth asking for that. Put it another way: how close are the close encounters we can detect in the surviving evidence with demons or something like demons? There are ethnographic reports aplenty of the demeanour and behaviour of those possessed by a spirit or of spirit mediums such as shamans.
These are the contemporary equivalents of the possessed people mentioned above. Their experiences hardly fit with the narrative of disenchantment. There are perhaps even more accounts of peoples for whom the ancestors are as detectible as living relatives or for whom other spirits are real presences. Among the Buryats of Mongolia and China for instance, the flickering of the oil lamps burning during a shamanic ceremony not only indicates the displeasure of the spirits who are feasting next to the Buryats, but is actually caused by it. Each spirit feasting at the table is, however, visible only to the shaman since it is a ‘thing of the air’.[1201] Rather more unusual is an anthropologist who reports having seen a spirit. Edith Turner participated in the Ihamba tooth ritual of the Ndembu of Zambia in the mid-1980s. The sufferer here has been bitten by the tooth of a dead hunter. The tooth travels along the victim’s veins, biting and causing a unique disease. The tooth is also a spirit and is removed by the application of cupping horns after a long ritual involving singing, clapping, drumming and quaffing a (seemingly psychotropic) herbal preparation.Suddenly Meru [the patient] raised her arm, stretched it in liberation, and I sow with my own eyes a giant thing emerging out of the flesh of her back. The thing was a large grey blob about six inches across, a deep gray opaque thing emerging as a sphere. I was amazed—delighted. I still laugh with glee at the realization of having seen it, the ihmaba, and so big![1202]
Close encounters with individual spirits in the past are harder to find.
Gideon Bohak quotes a Talmudic recipe for a powder including ground afterbirth of a black female cat that, once put in the eye, enables the user to see demons. But I think that is the closest we can get in this collection to an actual sighting. Nor do we hear much directly from individuals suffering from demonic interference or invasion. To take an example not discussed above: John Chrysostom (future bishop and saint), as a newly-appointed deacon of the church in Antioch wrote at some point in the early 380s a long letter of consolation to an ascetic called Stageirios. This man thought himself vexed by a demon causing symptoms resembling those of epileptic fits. He was experiencing athumia— literally lack of spirit (ironically), depression—and he was near to succumbing to suicidal impulses. He did not think these were directly caused by the demon; rather the demon was strengthened by the despair that led to ideas of suicide. In his letter Chrysostom never denies the ‘madness of the demon' as one underlying cause of the athumia but he focuses very much on what we might now describe as psychotherapy for this disease of the soul. He entirely marginalizes the demon, and indeed the epilepsy.[1203] There is some analogy here with Arnald of Vilanova, discussed above by Giralt, who thought that necromancers, spirit conjurors, were (diabolically?) deluded and were really exhibiting the symptoms of melancholy. And of course in any of the periods covered above, there will have been demon deniers, who claim that though demons exist, in some particular context they are not fully operative. Epilepsy is often a litmus of the extent to which disease aetiology is viewed naturalistically in any given period (see Escobar-Vargas).The question of the ontology of demons could be pushed further. I am struck by the number of occasions on which demons appear in the forgoing chapters as figures that fit into a narrative, indeed that may be required by a narrative, whether Babylonian or Christian (e.g.
Konstantopoulos, Frohlich, Bailey, Trenery). Demons are good to tell with. Does that also apply to an incantation that addresses demons? Do we perhaps need to develop a rhetorical analysis of demonic invocations or adjurations? Psychological need for demon figures was recognised by some at the time (Lucarelli). Demons, as the editors note in their introduction, are good to blame. And that is because they are seen as personal. Does that make them less real on some occasions? When are they clearly personifications or figures of speech? There is still much to be said for the view that ‘evil spirits are often no more than the evil itself conceived as substantial and equipped with power'. E. R. Dodds, who first developed the analogy between demons and germs explored by Bohak, quoted this dictum of Henri Frankfort and reminded us that the Greeks spoke of famine and pestilence as gods.[1204] Put it another way: perhaps we need a literary history of demons before we tackle the question of where and how far people ‘really' believe in demons.