Forbidden Rites by Richard Kieckhefer

Author:Richard Kieckhefer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penn State University Press
Published: 1997-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Demons and Daimons:

The Spirits Conjured

In his recent study of late Byzantine demonology, Richard Greenfield distinguishes between a ‘standard orthodox’ tradition of demonology and ‘alternative’ traditions. The former sees demons as immaterial, as ranked under a single chief (Satan, the Devil), and as acting only with God’s permission or through illusion (which they use because, weakened by Christ, they must dupe humans into believing they still wield power). The latter ascribe some degree of materiality to them, classify them in various hierarchies with multiple leaders, and ascribe some power to the demons themselves.1 Greenfield says that in the alternative traditions, ‘it is always assumed that the demons are free to obey the practitioner or are capable of doing what he wants as long as sufficient or coercion is provided. There is no suggestion that they can only do so if allowed to by God for the ends of divine providence or economy, the state of affairs required by standard belief – indeed, many of the purposes for which they are employed would seem to be most inappropriate, if not actually contradictory to normal Christian concepts of God’s purposes.’2 Greenfield does not mean to suggest a clear or sharp dichotomy, but rather a strong difference in tendency between the theological purists and those with alternative and at least implicitly non-orthodox views.

With perhaps some differences in nuance, one can make the same rough distinction for the later medieval West as well, and some if not all of the specific contrasts that Greenfield isolates would apply in the West. Most fundamentally, one can discern – in the Munich manuscript, as in Western magic generally – a tension between the early Christian notion of demons as fallen angels, whose status is determined by their free moral act of rebellion against God, and the Graeco-Roman conception of daimones (or daemones in Latin) as spirits linked with the world of nature, whose status is fixed by their natural position within the hierarchy of beings. Apuleius’s De deo Socratis remained long influential in Christian tradition, despite its incongruence with the notion of demons as fallen angels; for Apuleius, daemones were rational beings whose natural sphere was the sublunary air, just as gods and humans are rational beings residing in the ether and on earth respectively. They are not naturally evil, but may be either good or evil.3 The conjurations of late medieval necromancers, resembling as they do the exorcisms intended for the possessed, presuppose that the spirits in question are the same sort of fallen ones that Christ expelled from the energumens of first-century Palestine. But intermingled with references to such manifestly maleficent beings are notions of benign or neutral spirits, neither angels nor demons in classical Christian terms, a category not recognized in the orthodox theology of the late Middle Ages.4 One might thus say that the conjurations betray a tension between ‘demonology’ and what we might call ‘daimonology’.

Theologians as well as necromancers believed that the demons held various ranks, in a kind of hierarchy that parodied that of God’s heavenly court, or rather a ‘Lowerarchy’, as C.

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