<pre style="font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; text-align: left;">THE GENESIS OF DEMONS.
Their good names euphemistic — Their mixed character— Illustrations :
Beelzebub, Loki — Demon-germs — The knowledge of good and
evil — Distinction between Demon and Devil
The first pantheon of each race was built of intellectual
speculations. In a moral sense, each form in it might be
described as more or less demonic; and, indeed, it may
almost be affirmed that religion, considered as a service
rendered to superhuman beings, began with the propitia-
tion of demons, albeit they might be called gods. Man
found that in the earth good things came with difficulty,
while thorns and weeds sprang up everywhere. The evil
powers seemed to be the strongest. The best deity had a
touch of the demon in him. The sun is the most bene-
ficent, yet he bears the sunstroke along with the sunbeam,
and withers the blooms he calls forth. The splendour, the
might, the majesty, the menace, the grandeur and wrath
of the heavens and the elements were blended in these
personifications, and reflected in the trembling adoration
paid to them. The flattering names given to these powers
by their worshippers must be interpreted by the costly
sacrifices with which men sought to propitiate them. No
sacrifice would have been offered originally to a purely
benevolent power. The Furies were called the Eumenides,
'the well-meaning/ and there arises a temptation to regard <span style="font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">the name as preserving the primitive meaning of the San- </span></pre>
<pre style="font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; text-align: left;">skrit original of Erinys, namely, Saranyu, which signifies
the morning light stealing over the sky. But the descrip-
tions of the Erinyes by the Greek poets — especially of
iEschylus, who pictures them as black, serpent-locked,
with eyes dropping blood, and calls them hounds — show
that Saranyu as morning light, and thus the revealer of
deeds of darkness, had gradually been degraded into a
personification of the Curse. And yet, while recognising
the name Eumenides as euphemistic, we may admire none
the less the growth of that rationalism which ultimately
found in the epithet a suggestion of the soul of good in
things evil, and almost restored the beneficent sense of
Saranyu. 'I have settled in this place/ says Athene in
the 'Eumenides' of iEschylus, 'these mighty deities, hard
to be appeased ; they have obtained by lot to administer
all things concerning men. But he who has not found
them gentle knows not whence come the ills of life.' But
before the dread Erinyes of Homer's age had become
the 'venerable goddesses' (cefival 6ea\) of popular phrase
in Athens, or the Eumenides of the later poet's high
insight, piercing their Gorgon form as portrayed by him-
self, they had passed through all the phases of human
terror. Cowering generations had tried to soothe the
remorseless avengers by complimentary phrases. The
worship of the serpent, originating in the same fear,
similarly raised that animal into the region where poets
could invest it with many profound and beautiful signi-
ficances. But these more distinctly terrible deities are
found in the shadowy border-land of mythology, from
which we may look back into ages when the fear in
which worship is born had not yet been separated into
its elements of awe and admiration, nor the heaven
of supreme forces divided into ranks of benevolent and <span style="font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">malevolent beings ; and, on the other hand, we may look </span><span style="font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">forward to the ages in which the moral consciousness of </span><span style="font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">man begins to form the distinctions between good and </span><span style="font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">evil, right and wrong, which changes cosmogony into reli</span><span style="font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">gion, and impresses every deity of the mind's creation to </span><span style="font-size: 12px; text-align: justify;">do his or her part in reflecting the physical and moral </span></pre>
<pre style="font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; text-align: left;">struggles of mankind. The intermediate processes by which the good and evil
were detached, and advanced to separate personification,</pre>
