Even in the 21st century, many people feel the intrigues of the devil, indulge in apocalyptic visions, fervently believe in prophecies about the imminent end of the world, and are faced with mysterious and inexplicable phenomena. Almost every day, another unfortunate person comes to this or that church to complain "about the dark forces that are viciously oppressing him."
Such an outburst of nightmarish visions and fantasies is understandable. The fact of the new millennium has shaken many weak minds, undermining the mental health of impressionable and unstable people.
However, belief in evil and its ineradicable power is as old as the world. This is one of those primordial fears that have haunted humanity since ancient times. As long as people remember themselves, they have always attributed the blame for natural disasters, illness, poverty, death to all kinds of demons, demons and other messengers of evil.
In Ancient Egypt, they feared Set, a killer god who carried an evil inclination.
Set.
The Greeks considered the embodiment of the forces of evil Typhon - the terrible son of the land of Gaia and Tartarus. His legs were replaced by rings of snakes. The body was covered with feathers, and the despicable body of hundreds of dragon heads crowned. Typhon gave birth to many monsters: the Lernean hydra, the chimera, the hellish dog Kerberus and the destroyer of travelers - the Sphinx. For thousands of years people have suffered from such creatures and thousands of years have tried to defeat them.
If demons, demons, the devil come into this world, these enemies of the human race must be learned to drive out. This is how exorcism (from the Greek word exorkizen - to conjure) arose - the art of coping with evil spirits. Almost all world religions knew in what ways you can summon evil spirits or, conversely, drive them away.
People who know how to cast out the devil, disenchant the poor people possessed by him, or the dwellings in which he moved, are still in honor now. No matter how complicated the culture may be, on its front line, in the opinion of many ordinary people, there are still the same figures: the devil and the man, waging a tireless battle with each other.
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In the Bible, the devil appears before the human race, as soon as it was created. It was he, in the form of a serpent, that “he was more cunning than all the beasts of the field”, convinced Eve, and through her and Adam, to eat the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The results of the tasting are known to everyone: Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise in disgrace. So, according to Christians, original sin was brought into the world.
Since then, for any believer there is no more hated figure than the devil - "instigator" and "earpiece", "contradicting" and "obstructing", "adversary in court, in dispute and in war", "enemy of the human race." He quarrels people, harms them and incites them to do evil.
He tempted and seduced even Jesus Christ. One of the apostles - Judas, nicknamed Iscariot, who betrayed Christ, was possessed by the devil, or (in Hebrew) Satan. “Satan entered Judas,” so one of the evangelists noted (Luke 22: 3).
Medieval theologians are sophisticated in describing the devil and demons, as well as the intrigues they perpetrate against unstable human souls. It is no coincidence that the first Christians are already trying to defend themselves from this dark scourge.
They see enemies everywhere. So, one of the apologists of Christianity Tatian (born around 120-130) declares the whole of classical culture an instrument of the devil. Supporters of the faith insist that every person from birth is possessed by the devil and his minions. Therefore, before baptism, it is necessary to cleanse both the soul and the body of the convert from the evil forces that hitherto played with him. The sacrament of baptism, the first Christian sacrament, was to be received in purity. It was preceded by a lengthy test.
When those who were to be baptized were identified, their lives were carefully and biasedly studied. Every day the bishop laid his hand on the chosen people and cast spells from evil spirits. Only after making sure that a person is pure, he was admitted to baptism. On the eve of this most important event in the life of every Christian, the bishop again laid hands on people who were ready to accept the faith, and ordered every alien spirit to withdraw from them and never return.
After the spell, he blew in their faces, baptized their foreheads, ears, nostrils and, finally, urged them to get up from their knees. All night people did not close their eyes, expecting baptism and fearing in bodily weakness to let the demons into themselves again. So it was in the first centuries of Christianity, until this religion became the official religion of the Roman Empire. Later, "prevention" was replaced by the most severe "surgical treatment".
Well, when all indiscriminately became believers, the devil and demons gained access to baptized, but weak souls.
The first Christians knew how the devil and demons like him seduce human souls, but their appearance remained unknown to them. It didn't seem to interest them. The first images of the devil appeared only in the VI-XI centuries. However, even then they were very rare. Only in the 12th century did the artists, encouraged by the church, begin to paint the nightmarish, terrifying faces of the enemies of the human race.
In subsequent centuries, canvases and book miniatures, frescoes and sculptures appear, depicting either a dragon with seven heads and ten horns, or a gloomy black figure with the head of a dog or a bird of prey. And even a whole army (or, better to say, a herd) of demons galloping to kill people.
With a victorious gait, "the worst enemy of the human race," and behind him, the demons stealthily enter literature. “This terrifying monster had no less than a thousand hands, and each arm was about a hundred cubits long and ten cubits thick,” says the famous “Vision of Tnugdalla” (mid-12th century).
"And I became dumb with amazement when I saw three faces on it … Two large wings grew under each one, as should be a bird so great in the world." This is how Dante Alighieri sees the devil (early 13th century): an impious trinity of faces crowning a gigantic body frozen into the ice.
Looking ahead, let us say that the portraits of the devil and his servants-demons are of particular realistic expressiveness in the works of decadent writers of the late 19th and 20th centuries.
Here is one of the fantasies left by D. Joyce: “Some creatures are wandering in the field: one, three, six. They wander aimlessly here and there. Goat-like creatures with deathly human faces, horned ones, with thin beards … Their old bony faces glow dimly with a grin of malicious gloating. One is wrapped in a torn flannel vest, the other whines monotonously when his little beard clings to the bundles of weeds. Indistinct words escape their parched lips."
So, to their misfortune, people saw what the messengers of evil look like, ready to confuse and torment them. Their images flickered, frightening and annoyingly reminding of themselves. The people of the Middle Ages lived under the constant supervision of demons (but also angels!), Watching their every step, every deed.
"Are there demons that lie in wait for people?" - asks Honorius of Augustodunus, a German theologian of the 12th century, and he himself gives the following answer: “Every sin is commanded by demons, which with their ranks are innumerable. They constantly incline the souls of people to vice and inform their prince about their misdeeds."
By the beginning of the 13th century, fear of the devil had gradually spread throughout Christendom. The devil seduced and persecuted people, appearing to them either in the form of a young maiden or a stately handsome man, then in his true form, gazing at them with his black eyes, moving his thick lips, clattering dog teeth, shaking his goat's beard or shaggy sharp ears.
The fear of this tempter, no matter who he showed up - a voluptuous or a freak, was so great that people forgot about love for their neighbor and subjected their own kind to the most cruel executions, as soon as they were suspected of having even the slightest intercourse with the devil.
Throughout Europe, bonfires begin to burn, on which “heretics”, “sorcerers”, “sorcerers” are burned - those who, for the sake of prodigal, earthly gains, conclude an agreement with evil spirits, accepting the rite of devil's baptism. They are easy to distinguish, because on their body the devil imprints his mark - a red or black birthmark, hard as a pea.
The era of the Renaissance seems to us bright, sunny at times, but it is now that the witch-hunt reaches its climax. In the middle of the XIV century, a plague epidemic hits Europe. The terrible disease carried out the work of death and destruction with unprecedented speed.
Whole cities turned into cemeteries, villages were emptied, the gifts of nature perished in vain, and cattle, deprived of visibility, ran wild, scattering through the surrounding mountains and forests. The priests did not have time to commit absolution, and the funeral bell rang from early dawn until late evening, until it stopped altogether, as if he himself was struck by an illness. “God sent a black death as a punishment for our sins, in order to cleanse the world of sinners who betrayed their souls to Satan,” the church reiterated, explaining the calamity that suddenly destroyed a huge part of the European population.
At the end of the 15th century, belief in the invisible power of the devil over people resulted in a form of hysteria. The year 1500 was approaching, and these round numbers inspired the idea of an imminent apocalypse. Most of the people foresaw the imminent end of the world and prepared for the fact that "all of us will now be rewarded for our sins."
Millions of Catholics were preparing for the worst, when suddenly Pope Innocent VIII revealed to them "the culprit of all our troubles, destructive to the whole world." Behold - a woman, for all evil comes from her. “Wives are created for evil,” the pontiff, who did not know them, assured. “Satan seduces men with them in order to draw them away into the mouths of hell. Woman is the gate of the devil."
The inquisition, which persecuted all apostates from the faith, was supposed to protect the entire Christian world from such a danger. In its dungeons, for several centuries, both heretics and sorcerers who sniffed the devil were brutally dealt with. The victories over these wicked were decisive and brilliant.
Western Ukrainian prose writer Stepan Tudor cited as an example of such battles in the field of spirit and flesh the lists of people burnt in the city of Würzburg in just three years of the 17th century (in those years, 29 group executions took place here).
“1st burning, four persons: Liebler's wife, Anters the old widow, Gutbrot's wife, Hecker's pregnant wife; 2nd burning, four faces: old Baitler, two foreign women, old Schenker … 4th burning, five faces: the burgomaster Glyazer's wife, Brinkman's wife, one midwife, old Rumi, a foreigner … 13th burning, four faces: old blacksmith, an old woman, a ten-year-old girl, her younger sister … the 16th burning, six faces: a boy from Ratsenstein, another ten-year-old boy, two daughters of a recently burnt headman, his farm laborer, Seidler's wife …"
Only at the end of the 17th century did the priests who exorcised the devil stop simultaneously burning the bodies of the unfortunate victims, which sheltered this invisible but terrible guest. The time of professional exorcists begins.
Numerous books report miracles performed by these fearless enemies of Satan. For a long time, the mocking remarks of some doctors, who were blinded in their learning, explaining the strange behavior of people possessed by the devil by some kind of mental illness, were not taken seriously for a long time.
“Is it a matter of diseases, no matter what they call them - epilepsy or melancholy,” the priests asked rhetorically, “It’s clear to everyone that these are demons or the devil reigning over them muddies the weak minds of people!”
And yet, at the beginning of the 18th century, the panicky fear of the forces of hell gradually weakens. There were reasons for this. The plague epidemics that have plagued Europeans for so long have subsided.
People learned to take measures against this disease and thus eluded the "punishment of the Lord." The end of the world, so long expected and prophesied many times, did not come. The mistakes of frantic diviners only discouraged belief in utter predictions.
The advances in medicine, it would seem, finally forced the devil to hide, yielding the human body to the deeds of learned doctors. For them, all were alike patients suffering from mental illness: either people possessed by the devil, or mystics who saw God in ecstasy. So exorcists were replaced by doctors: psychiatrists, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts.
