Demons, Angels, and the Human Psyche

As a culture, we take a unique pleasure in insulting the intelligence of our ancestors. Stories of blood-letting and witch-burning are woven into our conceptions of the past. When we say 'Dark Ages,' it's with an undertone that those centuries were truly brutal, degraded, and filled with the most vile forms of ignorance. Neighboring countries slaughtered each other, raped and pillaged. People accused one other of heresies and murdered criminals for the slightest infraction. It's easy to conjure the image of a man swaying from the gallows, or of a smoldering ruin that was once a thriving village. These images glow with a celluloid menace, and sitting in the movie theatres, it's easy to think, 'I'm glad it's not like that anymore.' How proud we are that we're better than the medieval peasantry, whose ignorance serves to highlight the sophistication of our own culture.

Yet rather than dismissing their belief as ignorant, what happens when we explore them seriously? Let's take, for instance, the phrase 'bless you,' which originates from the bygone belief that when a man is sneezing, he's expelling demons from his body. Taken at face value, many of us find this laughable. But at the same time, our ancestors were on to something. Like modern doctors, they noticed that when an individual started sneezing, his behavior likewise changed. He had greater trouble rising from bed, he was lethargic, he complained of aches. They blamed these symptoms on 'demons' and said that the man was trying to expel them when he sneezed. This explanation isn't that far from the truth. We simply replace the word 'demon' with that of 'virus,' and suddenly it fits seamlessly with modern medical science. Our ancestors understanding of sickness was more colorful than our own, but it was likewise based on observation and reasoning.

This gets even more interesting when we examine their beliefs on temptation. While modern psychology blurs the interplay of psychic forces to create a single 'self' or 'I', medieval psychology recognized the multitude of impulses and thought patterns that composed the individual. Some of these psychic qualities they classified as demons, asserting that many of our thoughts and impulses were just the whisperings of these infernal beasts. Others they ascribed to the Holy Ghost, who spoke on God's behalf within the individual's psyche. This same dichotomy would later be depicted in cartoons from the beginning of the 20th century, with a child protagonist conflicted between a selfish or pro-social choose, a demon standing on one shoulder and an angel on the other.

Because they differentiated between their thoughts in this manner, it's easy to conceive that even in their ignorance, many of our ancestors were more aware of themselves than we ourselves are. The modern layman simply doesn't have as many symbols to attach to his own mental processes. Meanwhile, within the cosmology of demons and angels, there is a great wealth of encoded psychological wisdom, and we are fools for so casually dismissing it.