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Eureka

AN EXPOSITION OF THE APOCALYPSE
Sixth Edition, 1915
By Dr. John Thomas (first edition written 1861)

 

 

Chapter 9

Section 4 Subsection 11

"The Daemonials"


 
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In the English Version of Apoc. ix. 20, ta daimonia, is very improperly rendered "devils." In my translation I have merely transferred it from the Greek, leaving it for explanation as a symbol.

Under the word daimonion, I find the following among other significations of the noun: "Especially an inferior race of divine beings; the name by which Socrates called his genius, or the SPIRIT he supposed to dwell within him." (Not diminutive from daimon, but neuter from daimonios). The root of the word is daimon, of which one of the senses given is "the souls of men of the golden age hovering between heaven and earth, and acting as tutelary deities; they formed the connecting link between gods and men, and so AEschylus calls the deified Darius daimon, a daemon; hence, when daimones and theoi are joined, the daimones are gods of lower rank; and here note, that theos is never used for daimon, though daimon is for theos. In later authors, as Lucianus, in general, departed souls" -- Liddel and Scott’s Lex.

This was the sense of the word among the heathen who worshipped images. They foolishly imagined that all men, women, and children have within them a genius, spirit or soul which they considered to be a particle of the essence of Deity, whoever or whatever he might be; and that, therefore, said genius, spirit, or soul, was absolutely and essentially immortal or deathless. This was the daemon in a living man, such as Socrates surrendered himself blindly to the guidance and protection of. But, when men, women, and children, ceased to be creatures visibly existing, they supposed, that they still continued in being, only invisible to the naked eye. Their bodies they often burned to ashes, which they deposited in urns; nevertheless, they supposed that they were still in existence, only in a new form. They conceited that the real man was the indwelling soul; and that when the body ceased to breathe, said soul ascended into the air, or aerial, where it "hovered between heaven and earth." These were deified souls -- souls made deities by human decrees, or apotheosis. They styled them "Immortal Gods," though but "an inferior race of divine beings." Of these gods were Darius, Caesar, Alexander, and a host of others, who had made themselves "great," in the estimation of the blind multitude, who decreed divine honors to their souls, and erected statuesque copies of their perished forms, for the glorification of their friends, and the factions they were supposed to have adorned. The immortal soul in the aerial called Darius, and decreed to be a god, was what they called a daemon or a daemonion. Such daemons the heathen worshipped, and placed themselves, their families, their property, and countries, under the protection of. Hence, they styled them "tutelary deities," or divine guardians.

"In classical use," says Dr. Geo. Campbell, "demon signified a divine being, though not in the highest order of their divinities, and therefore supposed not equivalent to Theos, but superior to human, and consequently, by the maxims of their theology, a proper object of adoration." "All demons," says Plato, "are an intermediate order between God and mortals." "It was customary with the pagans to deify abstract qualities, making them either gods or goddesses, as suited the gender of the name." "They sometimes deified men who had been their benefactors." "The proper notion of demons is, beings in respect of power superior to human, but inferior to that which christians comprehend under the term divine."

"What are men?" says a dialogist in Lucian. The answer is, "Mortal gods. What are gods? Immortal men." In fact, immortality disembodied was almost the only distinction between them. Disembodied immortals is the idea represented by demons.

"The pagans were a kind of superstitious atheists," says another writer, "who acknowledged no being that corresponds to our idea of a deity. Besides, a great part of the heathen worship was confessedly paid to ghosts of departed heroes, of conquerors, and potentates, and of the inventors of arts, whom popular superstition, after disguising their history with fables and absurdities, had blindly deified. Now, to all such beings they themselves, as well as the Jews, assigned the name daimonia, demons."

The whole superstructure of paganism is based upon the unscriptural dogma, and invention of the carnal mind, of an immortal essence in man capable of disembodied existence after death. But for this stupid fiction there would have been no daemons, nor any of the thirty thousand gods and goddesses, nor any guardian saints, or tutelary deities, of ancient and modern Greece and Rome. A scribe well instructed for the kingdom of the heavens, knows that man has no such daemon in him; and that however high he may be "in honor," if he understand not the truth, "is as the beasts that perish" (Psa. xlix. 12,20).

In the apocalypse diamonia occurs only once, and that in ch. ix. 20; while daimon in the genitive plural is found twice; first, in ch. xvi. 14; and then in ch. xviii. 2. In ch. ix. 20, it is really the neuter plural of the adjective daimonios, of, or pertaining to, daemons: "that they should not worship ta daimonia things related to daemons" -- things supposed to exist in the aerial, "between heaven and earth." In ch. xvi. 14, the word is different, because it refers to different things, and pertaining to a different region. Both in this text, and, in ch. xviii. 2, the things signified by daimones are related to earth, though, among the inhabitants of the Roman earth, they occupy a position analogous to that of the daemons of the mythical aerial between the political heaven and the peoples beneath. The habitation of these daemons is the aerial of Babylon; "the hold of every foul spirit, and cage of every unclean and hateful bird," such as popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, monks, and other officials of the state. In ch. xvi. 14, they are the gods of the political aerial, whose policies, or "spirits," develop remarkable and notable events. The daemons of these two texts are men of high degree -- real men of flesh and blood, in the official exercise of power; and not objects of superstitious worship. But this is not the case in ch. ix. 20. Here the things related to daemons are associated with idols or images, in the phrase ta daimonia kai eidola, where the definite article ta serves both for daimonia and eidola; and very properly so, because the eidola are the visible representations of the daemonia.

"The passage in which," says Mr. Tayler Lewis, in his Platonic Theology, "we find the most express and the clearest mention of daemons is in the Epinomis," which he renders thus: "Next to these, and under these, the Daemons, an aerial race, having the third seat, must we honor by prayers." They are spoken of as possessing wonderful intelligence, as feeling a deep sympathy in human affairs, as loving the good, hating the bad, and, in consequence of their middle position in the air, acting as interpreters and mediators between gods and men. To the same effect Socrates speaks of them in the Symposion, as: "For the whole demonial race is between Deity and mortals, acting as interpreters or messengers to both. Through this passes all divination, and the whole prophetical art; for Deity mingles not directly with the human race, but through these media is ever carried on the intercourse between Heaven and men, both when awake and when asleep."

Such were the daimones, daemons, ta daimonia, the things pertaining to daemons, of pagan antiquity. They were unsubstantial, unreal, imaginary phantasms, and fit only to make symbols of, as representative of other abominations analogous to, and as unreal as, themselves.

The Greeks and Romans have never relaxed their hold upon daemonolatry or demon-worship to this day. They have only changed the character of their daemons and idols. When they became catholics they did not really cease to be pagans; they only "baptized" their daemons, and called them by other names. Jupiter, the Latins styled St. Peter, and the idol representative of "the father of the gods and men" became the image of St. Peter, "the Prince of the Apostles." Jupiter’s wife, Juno, the Queen of the Universe, was converted by the Collyridion "heretics," who changed her name to "Mary, Mother of Mercy, Queen of the whole world, Mother and Spouse of God." After this fashion, they have conferred the names of fabulous saints and angels upon the gods and daemons of ancient Greece and Rome. All that the old heathens affirmed of their deities, the modern heathens of the Greek and Latin communions affirm of their martyrs, saints, and angels. The daemonology of the ancient world is the daemonology of the Apostasy, catholic and protestant. These are in fellowship with Plato, Socrates, and other pagans, in their views about "souls" and "departed spirits"; and, with all their "ripe scholarship," as they absurdly style proficiency in "the foolishness" of their collegiate "divinities," they are not one step in advance of the Platonists upon these subjects. That is, they know no more about souls and departed spirits, and their post mortem relations, than did they who had no revelation at all to guide them into truth.

Protestants and Catholics now believe, with all the heathen, that there is inherent in man a particle of the Divine Essence, endowed with all the attributes of deity, in like proportion as part bears to whole. This they call "soul," or "spirit," or "immortal soul;" because they imagine it is incorruptible, indestructible, deathless. They regard this fiction as the real man. The body, in their psychology, is of no account. The soul is God in man’s nature -- an immortal god in mortal flesh -- both in combination constituting what the pagan poet styles "a mortal god." When what is mortal of this god dies, that which they style "the immortal soul" still lives, and becomes what their brother Lucian denominates "an immortal man;" that is, a daemon of inferior rank, nevertheless a god!

Now catholics and protestants hold such gods as these in high esteem. The old mythologist had thirty thousand daemons; as

"For thrice ten thousand wait upon our earth;

Jove’s everlasting guards for mortal men.

Who roam the world in robes of air conceal’d."

 

But their successors of the Laodicean church have millions. The immortal soul-daemons of all their favorites are "sainted in heaven," as soon as they are supposed "to shuffle off the mortal coil." The disembodied immortal soul-daemons of what are called men, women, children, babes, are decreed by their theologies, or daemonologies, to be saints and angels in the aerial or sky. The soul-daemon of a babe is transformed into "a little darling angel" with wings, and is symbolized by painters, as wild in their imaginations as the poets, by a head with wings peeping out of a cloud. The air, which these phantoms are supposed to inhabit, they term the "spirit-world," "the spirit-land," "the eternal world," "the world to come," "kingdom come," and so forth; for, in reference to them in the words of Hesiod, they say

"close at hand,

Immortal eyes behold us evermore"

 

Or, as Milton expresseth it --

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,

Unseen, both when we sleep and when we wake."

 

But, though they suppose all individuals of the human race have immortal souls, catholics do not worship all soul-daemons. All these they suppose to go to "purgatory"; but it is only those of the dead they delight to honor whom they exalt to the aerial between heaven and earth. They do this by a process in their ecclesiastical court called canonization. Having tried their characters in this court, and heard all the Devil’s lawyer has to say against them, they are, in spite of the Devil, decreed to be adorable saints, and are translated out of purgatory beneath, to the aerial between heaven and earth!

Apotheosis was the deification of the disembodied ghosts, or soul-daemons, of pagan heroes and great men, by which they were exalted to the aerial between earth and heaven, and became, in their new position, adorable daemon gods, interpreters, mediators, angels or messengers, guardians and protectors of persons, families, nations, temples, and states. Now, what apotheosis was among the worshippers of Jupiter, canonization is among the worshippers of the fictitious ghost which they call "the Virgin Mother and Spouse of God." It is the next process to what they style beatification. The ghost supposed to be a blessed or beatified ghost after a scrutiny of its embodied life, in the presence of the Roman bishop and his cardinals, is proclaimed a holy one, or what these "worshippers" of the daemonials and images term "a saint," upon which the Pontiff decrees the canonization and appoints the day.

On the day upon which the beatified soul daemon is installed by sovereign authority among the saint-protectors and mediators of the Laodicean aerial, the episcopal chief of the apostasy officiates in white, and his cardinals are dressed in the same. The temple dedicated to the ghost-god whom they christen "St Peter," is hung with rich tapestry, upon which the arms of the Romish High Priest, and of the prince or state requiring the deification, are embroidered in gold and silver. A great number of lights blaze around the temple, which is crowded with a swinish multitude, who await with the impatient devotion of ignorance and superstition till the new daemonial has made his public entry into the aerial paradise between earth and heaven, that they may offer up their petitions to his demon-godship without danger of being rejected.

The catholic aerial is full of these deified ghosts, whose demonial images and relics are stored in the church bazaars dedicated to them, for the adoration of their besotted worshippers. All the apostles, and "the noble army of martyrs," and the popes and cardinals, and "the fathers," and Constantine, and Theodosius, and St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and a countless host of the same sort of deities, with the Immaculate Goddess Mary, "the Queen of Heaven," at the head of them, are all supposed to be there, interceding with Mary’s Son for the safety and prosperity of their catholic adorers "whose public and private vows," says Gibbon, "were addressed to their relics and images which disgraced the temples of the east." This catholic aerial is supposed to be before the throne. The reader, therefore, may easily perceive the fitness of the historian’s style, in continuing: "The throne of the Almighty was darkened by a cloud of martyrs, saints, and angels, the objects of popular veneration; while the Virgin Mary was invested with the name and honors of a goddess." They are, indeed, a cloud darkening the Almighty’s throne, so that no worshipper of daemonial ghosts, daemonial relics, and daemonial images, can see that throne, or find transmission for a single sigh.

Such were the many new deities raised to the rank of celestial and invincible protectors of the Roman empire. The intelligent reader will know that they exist only in the intoxicated imaginations of their deluded worshippers, as do the phantoms seen by an inebriate in delirium tremens. Immortality is neither innate nor disembodied. "The Deity only hath it," Paul says; and he only bestows it upon obedient believers of the truth as it is in the Jesus he preached; and that bestowal is upon men and women bodily existing; and by clothing their bodies with incorruptibility and deathlessness after resurrection from among the dead. This is what the scripture teaches in opposition to the mythologies of the ancient and modern worlds. If "the simplicity which is in Christ" had not been departed from, there would have been no catholic and protestant daemonialism. The dogma of inherent immortality in sin’s flesh would have remained with the old pagans; but the faith was departed from by those who ought to have been its earnest defenders. They abandoned the word, and substituted the vain imaginations of the heathen, which are all resolvable into the reasonings and speculations of the brain, unenlightened by revelation of any kind. They became polytheists in spite of revelation; and polytheists they will remain till Babylon falls; and the divine reprobation is stamped upon its idolatry in its destruction by the judgment to be executed by the saints.

The clergy, who are in all ages the blind adherents and patrons of profitable errors, came to perceive that this polytheistic daemonialism would be more valuable to them than gold or precious stones. This stimulated them to a fraudulent multiplication of daemonial relics, such as the bones, hair, teeth, toe nails, blood, and so forth, of some fictitious saint or martyr; all of which were declared to be holy and endowed with miraculous powers for the healing of the sick, and even for the resurrection of the dead. "Without much regard for truth or probability," says Gibbon, "they invented names for skeletons, and actions for names. The fame of the apostles, and of the holy men who had imitated their virtues, was darkened by religious fiction. To the invincible band of genuine and primitive martyrs, they added myriads of imaginary heroes who had never existed, except in the fancy of crafty or credulous legendaries; and there is reason to suspect that Tours might not be the only diocese in which the bones of a malefactor were adored instead of those of a saint."

But, he believes that "the progress of superstition would have been much less rapid and victorious if the faith of the people had not been assisted by the seasonable aid of visions and miracles" (termed by Paul, "all power, and signs, and wonders of falsehood") "to ascertain the authenticity and virtue of the most suspicious relics." He then gives an account of how the remains of Stephen were discovered by the appearance of Gamaliel to one Lucian, a presbyter of Jerusalem, in the reign of Theodosius II, A.D. 421-460. The ghost named Gamaliel revealed the place of Stephen’s burial. When his alleged coffin came into view, the earth trembled, and an odor such as that of Paradise was smelt, which instantly cured the various diseases of seventy-three of the assistants. These fragrant daemonial relics were transported in clerical procession to a church-bazaar constructed in their honor on Mount Zion; and the minute particles of those relics, a drop of blood, or the scrapings of a bone, were acknowledged in almost every province of the Roman world to possess a divine and miraculous virtue. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, a renowned saint of the Apostasy, and the great exemplar of Mr. Elliott’s "sealed ones," attests the innumerable prodigies performed in Africa by the daemonial relics of the catholic St. Stephen. In his work, the City of God, he enumerates about seventy miracles, of which three were resurrections from the dead, in the space of two years, and within the limits of his own diocese! Paul had such "saints" as this Augustine before his mind when he wrote to Timothy that in later times there would be "seducing spirits, with teachings concerning daemonials; speaking lies in hypocrisy; having their conscience seared as with a hot iron." If we enlarge our view to all the dioceses and all the saints of the catholic world, it will not be easy to calculate the fables and the errors which issued from this inexhaustible source.

"Whatever might be the condition of vulgar souls in the long interval between the dissolution and the resurrection of their bodies, it was evident," says Gibbon, satirically, "that the superior spirits (or deified ghosts) of the saints and martyrs did not consume that portion of their existence in silent and inglorious sleep. To the pious worshippers, it was evident that these daemonial spirits enjoyed the lively and active consciousness of their happiness, their virtues, and their powers, and that they had already secured the possession of their eternal reward. The enlargement of their intellectual faculties surpassed the measure of the human imagination, since it was proved by the (alleged) experience of their worshippers that they were capable of hearing and understanding the various petitions of their numerous votaries, who, in the same moment of time, but in the most distant parts of the world, invoked the name and assistance of Stephen or of Martin." The confidence of their suppliants was based on the supposition that the saints, by daemonial transformation were reigning with Christ, and were warmly interested in the prosperity of the catholic church; and that the individuals who imitated the examples of their faith and piety, were the peculiar and favorite objects of their most tender regard. They imagined that the daemonials viewed, with partial affection, the places which had been consecrated by their birth, their residence, their death, their burial, or the possession of their relics. In short, as the daemonials of the aerial were the mere fictions of disordered imaginations, the vagaries of the human mind in its passion and desires were ascribed to them. Thus, they were as proud, avaricious, and revengeful as their votaries, neither more nor less. As all they had to say to their worshippers was said or interpreted by lying and hypocritical priests and monks, they testified their grateful approbation of the liberty of their votaries; and hurled the sharpest bolts of punishment against those impious wretches who violated their magnificent shrines or disbelieved their supernatural power. "The imagination, which had been raised by a painful effort to the contemplation and worship of the Universal Cause, eagerly embraced such inferior objects of adoration as were more proportioned to its gross conceptions and imperfect faculties. The sublime and simple theology of the primitive christians was gradually corrupted; and the monarchy of heaven, already clouded by metaphysical subtleties, was degraded by the introduction of a popular mythology, which tended to restore the reign of polytheism." -- Gibbon.

Thus, contemporary with the sounding of the fifth and sixth trumpets the latter of which did not cease to sound till A.D. 1794, the daemons of pagan Rome recovered their places in the aerial under new names; and became the patrons and protectors of the catholic apostasy. These trumpets were terrible judgments inflicted upon mankind because of their daemonolatry and idolatry. Protestantism appeared on the stage of action about the time of, or a few years before, the killing of the third of the men by the fourth angel power. But, though it protested against some catholic abominations of the grosser sort, it still clung tenaciously to the beatified existence of the daemonials in the aerial. It holds to all the absurdities which flow from the dogma of hereditary immortality, and the disembodied existence of the immortal essence after death. It erects statues in honor of its departed great, and dedicates them with clerical prayers and other ceremonies; and proclaims the dead to be alive in heaven, whence they look down with pleasure and grateful satisfaction upon the demonstrations of their admirers. Protestant daemonolatry is no more agreeable to heaven than the daemon worship of the catholic world. Behold the vengeance that desolates the protestant South, and that oppresses the protestant North with death and perplexity. These sectarian sections, being composed of all kinds of polytheists, are being plagued for reasons similar to those which caused the locust-torment, and the loosing of the four trans-Euphratean angel-powers. Erecting statues, and memorial windows in churches, in honor of "immortal souls in heaven," is worship, homage, or reverence, and they who practice such things are as much guilty of "worshipping the demonials," as are they who bow down before the image of a "saint."
 
 

 

 


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