No, the demonology is not a film genre, despite celebrating movies like The Exorcist , the saga of The Prophecy or works more recent as The Rite or The Exorcism of Emily Rose ; Demonology is a discipline of theology that studies the adversary of God and his bureaucracy in hell.
And the first thing that should be noted is that both hell and demons predate the emergence of religions abramanicas ("of Abraham", Judaism, Christianity and Islam), and that they did not always have the negative connotation they enjoy today.
Some historical notes
It is likely that demons as such are even prior to organized religions , considering the large number of evil spirits present in different cultures and associated with different spaces and phenomena of nature.
Even the belief in underground spaces where beings hostile to humans live is also very old, and is associated in part with cave systems, sometimes combined with fumaroles or mouths of volcanic origin From there the term hell: from Latin infernum or inferus , "inferior, underground".
The term demon comes from the Greek δαίμων , daimon , and can also be interpreted as a spirit, without indicating whether it is something evil or benign.Some ancient gods or demons of Sumer are known, who have continued to play in our culture thanks to the cinema , as is the case of Pazuzu , king of the demons of the wind and storms, propitiator of plagues and plagues, with a relevant role in the famous film The Exorcist .
It should be noted that many gods of the neighboring towns or enemies of the Jews were degraded to demons upon entering the hell of the Christians, as was the case of Baal.
Infernal census
In Zoroastrianism , the religion of the ancient Persians, there is talk of 3,333 demons , with a certain structure and individuals with precise assignments such as war, famines or certain epidemics.In the Talmud (book of Judaism) there is talk of 7,405,926 demons, organized in 72 legions or companies .
It is with Christianity that begins to mention the demons as fallen angels, under the leadership of Lucifer, the archangel who overflowed and faced God.We should also mention the grigori , a group of fallen angels who went down-or went up-to earth and mated with women to produce a race of giants, the nefilim.
Returning to demography, in the 16th century, in De Praetistigiis in, a demonologist took up the figures of the Talmud , stating that hell was populated by 7,500,000 demons, organized in 1,111 legions commanded by 72 infernal princes … (we wonder how those numbers would have been drawn).
And although since then nobody has l I raise the account, with the amount of human souls that must have been incorporated into it, it is likely that today they have problems of overpopulation.Or maybe not, because that version of hell seems to have been left behind, or passed to the trunk of imaginary beings.
An updated and unfinished vision
Since the second half of the twentieth century the great religions they tried to adapt to the avalanche of new knowledge, especially in the field of psychology and natural sciences, and one of those adaptations has been that of a reinterpretation of hell and its occupants.Here we will emphasize changes in this sense that have occurred in Christianity.
Although the existence of the devil and the presence of evil is not denied, hell is no longer that space of medieval torture, rather it tends to be seen as an absence of God in men, and of his divine grace; hell would not be the opposite of heaven, but its absence .
The other hell, that of our childhood nightmares, is still present in horror movies, and in the horror of the wars and miseries and diseases that continue to ravage our old-and at times hell-Earth.
And you, do you know of any other demons that have been overlooked? As you remember, read also The most curious African ghosts.
Images: Holly Hayes , Lawrence OP , Peter Roan , sanna.tugend , Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 15 Million views) , ah zut , -=Duke One=-, tutincommon
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