An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present - Doreen Valiente 2018

Devil

This word of fear to the superstitious, and of profit to the sensational reporter, is generally taken to mean the personified principle of evil. However, the doctrine of the existence of a personal Devil has of late years been dropped by many leading churchmen. The belief in a rebellious Satan as the Power of Evil has always been contrary to the text in Isaiah, Chapter 45, verse 7: “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”

Some religious people need the concept of the Devil; it comes in extremely useful. For one thing, the idea that man is responsible for his own evils is distasteful to him. He likes to have something, or someone, to blame. The pattern was laid down very early, according to the story of the Garden of Eden; Adam blamed the woman, and the woman blamed the serpent. In the eyes of the early Church, which was markedly anti-feminist, woman and the Devil had been responsible for all mischief ever since.

DEVIL (above left) Two woodcuts illustrating conceptions of the Devil. (above right) An old engraving of the Wild Hunt riding the night wind at the full moon.

Also, the story of the Devil, ever seeking and plotting for man’s damnation, has been a powerful weapon of fear, to be used to keep people in line. When the very successful film, Rosemary’s Baby (which deals with the alleged diabolical activities of some modern witches), was first shown in America, it was condemned by the National Catholic Office for Motion Pictures. The plot of the film concerns a girl who has a baby by the Devil; and Mia Farrow, who starred in this part, spoke up in reply to the Catholic Office’s ban.

She was quoted as saying that she did not see what grounds they had for condemnation of the picture, because it was the Catholic Church itself which had “invented the Satan figure” and it was they who were trying to hold masses of people together by the fear of hell.

Miss Farrow could have added that it was the Catholic Church which laid down the dogma that, because all the gods of the older religions were really devils, all pagans were devil-worshippers, and therefore fair game for any treatment, however bad. This attitude appears still to be maintained today, in certain sections of the Press.

Yet the very fact of the enormous success of Rosemary’s Baby, both as a book and a film, indicates the ambivalent attitude of society towards the concept of the Devil. He is supposed to be the personification of evil, and yet he fascinates. Why?

The statement that “the god of the old religion becomes the devil of the new” is something which anthropologists, and students of comparative religion, have found to be literally true. For instance, ’Old Nick’ as a name for the Devil is derived from Nik, which was a title of the pagan English god Woden. Sometimes the Devil is simply called ’the Old ’Un’, another name full of meaning in this respect. (See OLD ONE, THE.)

The conventional representation of the Devil is that of a being with horns upon his head, and having a body which terminates in shaggy lower limbs and cloven hoofs. Again why? Is there any text in the Bible which describes ’Satan’ or ’the Devil’ in this manner? None whatever. Yet this is the picture which a mention of ’the Devil’ conjures up.

In fact, it is simply a representation of Pan, the goat-footed god of nature, of life and vitality; and the Great God Pan himself is just another version of the most ancient Horned God, the deity whom the cave-men worshipped.

“Beloved Pan, and all the other gods who haunt this place, give me beauty in the inmost soul; and grant that the outward and the inward may be as one.” Such was the prayer of Socrates. Was he a devil-worshipper?

Certainly the pagans had some gods of terrifying aspect. But these gods were not fallen angels, who plotted hideously to encompass man’s misery and perdition. They were the personification of destroying natural forces: the storm-wind, the darkness, the plague. The people who really worshipped Nature knew that she was not all pretty flowers and charming little birds and butterflies. The forces of creation were counter-balanced by the forces of destruction; but the Great Mother destroyed only to give rebirth in a higher form.

The word ’Devil’ is of uncertain derivation. In my opinion, its most likely origin is the same as that of Deus, God; namely the Sanskrit Deva, meaning ’a shining one, a god’. The Gypsies, whose Romany language is of Indo-European origin, call God Duvel. Truly, Demon est Deus Inversus, “the Demon is God reversed”, as the old magical motto has it.

The word ’demon’ itself comes from the Greek daimon, which originally meant a spirit holding a middle place between gods and men. Only later, in Early Christian times, was it taken to mean an evil spirit.

The spirits of Nature which the pagans sensed as haunting lonely places, were neither good nor evil. They were simply different from man, not flesh and blood, and therefore best regarded with caution and respect. People of Celtic blood in the lonelier parts of the British Isles take this attitude to this day towards the fairies, whom they call the Good Neighbours or the People of Peace.

The Devil is that which is wild, untamed and unresolved—in nature, and in human nature. He is the impulses in themselves, which people fear arid which they dislike to admit the existence of. Hence these impulses become exteriorised, and projected in the form of devils and demons. No wonder that in the Middle Ages, when the Church ruled with an iron hand, the Devil appeared everywhere! He was the projected image of the natural desires, especially sexual desires, which would not be denied, however much the Church denounced them as sin.

The Devil as the personification of the mysterious and untamed forces of nature, appears all over the British Isles in place-names, applied to things which seemed extraordinary and inexplicable. There is the great gash in the South Downs, near Brighton, called the Devil’s Dyke. Hindhead, in Surrey, has the Devil’s Punch Bowl, and there are two more in the Scilly Isles and in Eire. There are two Devil’s Glens, one in Wicklow and another in the Vale of Neath. A curious pinnacle of rock in the witch-haunted Cotswolds is called the Devil’s Chimney. On the bank of the River Wye, opposite Tintern Abbey, is the Devil’s Pulpit, from which he is said to have preached in defiance of the Church.

There are the Devil’s Cheese-Wring, a strange heap of rocks near Liskeard in Cornwall; the Devil’s Frying-Pan, in the same county; the Devil’s Jumps, a series of low hills near Frensham in Surrey; and so on and on, all over the map.

Curious old buildings often have the Devil’s name attributed to them. There is a Devil’s Tower at Windsor Castle, and a Devil’s Battery in the Tower of London. Prehistoric stone monuments have been called the Devil’s Arrows or the Devil’s Quoits; and one legend ascribes the building of Stonehenge to the Devil. Anything which was felt to be beyond human ingenuity or comprehension, belonged to the realm of the Devil. He was the personifiction of the Unknown.

He was the rebel; he was everything which would not conform. He was the spirit of the wild, the darkness, the storm, the Wild Huntsman riding the night wind. He was the forbidden, yet dangerously attractive; the secret, which allured while defying one to find it out. He put the spice into life, in a situation where goodness had become synonymous with dullness and respectability. He was the enemy of the negative virtues.

As such, the Devil has played an important part in the psychological development of mankind. The corruption of man’s heart has been projected on to him. People have accused his supposed servants, the witches, of doing the forbidden things they wanted to do themselves, in the dark deep hells of their own souls, and then tortured and burned the witches for being so ’wicked’. It is significant that the word ’hell’ comes from the same root as the Anglo-Saxon helan, ’to conceal, to cover over’. The real powers of hell come not from external devils, but from the unacknowledged contents of man’s own mind.

To what extent, then, is the Devil the god of the witches? The answer is that the Church, and not the witches, identified the old Horned God with the Devil, precisely because he stood for the things the Church had forbidden—especially uninhibited sexual enjoyment and the pride that will not bow down and serve. So determined were they upon this identification, that in the old accounts of witch trials nearly every mention by the witches of a non-Christian deity is set down as ’the Devil’ by those recording the proceedings. The male leader of the coven, also, was so persistently described as the Devil that some witches actually began to call him this—though the term is seldom used by witches today.

In fact, the Horned God of the witches is far, far older than Christianity; and he only began to be identified with the Devil when the Church branded nature itself as ’fallen’, and natural impulses as ’sin’. This identification was not only a deliberate matter of dogma; it was a psychological process, which in some places is still at work.

It was this deep-seated emotional drive which gave the witch-hunts of olden days their horrific impetus, their pitiless and obscene cruelty, their element of nightmare unreason. In those days, the dark forces were indeed released; but the hell they came from was of man’s own making, not God’s or the Devil’s.