Felix wrote his life of St. Guthlac also during the zenith of Latin writings in Anglo-Saxon England, namely in the early eighth century. In vivid, distinctive Latin Felix tells of the experiences of this solitary who went off into the fens of East Anglia to devote himself to God at Crowland, including his dramatic encounters with the demons of hell and various unusual miracles, including the retrieval of a parchment folio carried off by a thieving magpie.

The trial of Alice Kyteler in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1324 took place as the result of charges made against this business woman by members of her own family. Richard Ledrede, bishop of Ossory, was keen to obtain her condemnation for demonic association, on the charges listed in this excerpt from the account of her trial which include sacrifices and the boiling of disgusting potions.

Jesus was a Jewish preacher and, for some Jews, a Messiah. His first followers lived in Jewish contexts. Only gradually did the differences between Christians and the followers of other religions become visible. Thus, there was a parting of the ways between Christians and Jews, but it was never complete. Jews and Christians always observed and influenced each other. Christians also set themselves apart from the many groups they called pagans. Although they believed in the existence of the gods, they considered them to be demons. They also developed their own rituals and created places where they met, so that Christianity became increasingly recognisable as a religion in its own right.

The expulsion and defeat of demonic forces is integral to Pentecostal practice. This chapter, Demons and Deliverance: Discourses on Pentecostal Character, uses close readings of fictional performances allied to the Pentecostal movement to lay out Pentecostalism’s history and its preoccupation with power. Understanding Pentecostal performance of power identity entails not just looking at the practices conducted in the church or the structure of their religious activities, but also at theatrical activities and drama productions about demonic encounters staged to boost Pentecostal faith. The mediatized accounts of spiritual warfare narrated by Pentecostal drama ministers are strategic to the reading of the Pentecostal social history and ritual actions. This chapter chronicles the Pentecostal trajectory and their demonstrated desire for power through two television dramas about deliverance from satanic attacks, Agbara Nla (The Ultimate Power) and Abejoye (The Kingmaker). Both were produced by the same Christian film company, the Mount Zion Faith Ministry, across about three decades. The differences in how both dramas capture the performance of exorcism are instructive in understanding how far the Pentecostal faith has traveled as a social practice and how they have achieved their power identity through a drawn-out period of time.

The so-called Great Peace or Taiping Rebellion is one of the most destructive events of Chinese history. Indigenous beliefs in the efficacy of violence to fight demonic beings, including humans identified as such, were an essential element of this event, next to Christian and Confucian sources of inspiration.

The expulsion and defeat of demonic forces is integral to Pentecostal practice. This chapter, Demons and Deliverance: Discourses on Pentecostal Character, uses close readings of fictional performances allied to the Pentecostal movement to lay out Pentecostalism’s history and its preoccupation with power. Understanding Pentecostal performance of power identity entails not just looking at the practices conducted in the church or the structure of their religious activities, but also at theatrical activities and drama productions about demonic encounters staged to boost Pentecostal faith. The mediatized accounts of spiritual warfare narrated by Pentecostal drama ministers are strategic to the reading of the Pentecostal social history and ritual actions. This chapter chronicles the Pentecostal trajectory and their demonstrated desire for power through two television dramas about deliverance from satanic attacks, Agbara Nla (The Ultimate Power) and Abejoye (The Kingmaker). Both were produced by the same Christian film company, the Mount Zion Faith Ministry, across about three decades. The differences in how both dramas capture the performance of exorcism are instructive in understanding how far the Pentecostal faith has traveled as a social practice and how they have achieved their power identity through a drawn-out period of time.

The Gothic and magic have had a long association. This essay is framed with some relevant remarks by the magician known as ‘Éliphas Lévi’, and refers to a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that might well be thought of as Gothic: Aleister Crowley’s Moonchild, H.P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, Denis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory, M. John Harrison’s The Course of the Heart, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and F.G. Cottam’s House of Lost Souls. All of them have to do with magic, which is also to say that they approach the question of the supernatural through the route of conjuration and return, although from very different perspectives. They all have something to say about ritual magic, and therefore about the afterlife. Some of them express belief in the supernatural efficacy of magic; some do not – but the best leave it up to readers to decide for themselves.

The image of the Persian king is of a leader who rules the known world with justice and safe-keeping. The warrior aspect of the Persian king is the quality of the ruler to emerge victorious in battle with honor. A large part of a warrior-king’s duty was to subdue the presence of evil in the world. Persian kings and heroes of legend were tested through their conflict with the forces of chaos and savagery. In conquest, the hero demonstrated his courage and bravery by defeating monsters, devils, and ferocious beasts. Muslim intellectuals writing about the conquest of India embellished their histories with the ornamentation of Persianate heroic lore that civilized the untamed forces of nature and the demonic realm.

Witch hunts raged for almost 300 years across Europe and its colonies, claiming the lives of some 50,000 women, men, and children. At their height, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, magistrates and inquisitors tortured those suspected of witchcraft in desperate attempts to uncover their confederates and prove their fealty to the Devil himself. Many people believed that their friends and neighbors had made wicked pacts with Satan and practiced harmful magic that destroyed crops, sickened livestock, and murdered the innocent. Lurid tales of secret gatherings, where witches worshipped the Devil and ate the flesh of unbaptized infants, combined with widespread economic hardship, famine, and war to produce unprecedented levels of paranoia and anxiety that lasted for generations. Theologians and philosophers accused witches of engaging in sexual intercourse with demons, the ruling classes led brutal purges of rebels and heretics, and practitioners of folk magic — healers, midwives, soothsayers — went from respected members of their communities to suspected witches.

Visions of the afterlife in late medieval Europe (1300-1500) circulated in collections of saints’ legends and sermons, in religious manuals, mystics’ writings, stand-alone pieces, and literary works. Along with the stories inherited from earlier centuries, there were many new accounts. Together they demonstrate how the medieval Church’s teachings on heaven, hell, and purgatory, as well as on prayers and masses for the dead, on engaging in the sacrament of penance, on accruing merit, on fighting against the demonic realm, and on devotion to the saints, were conveyed to, assimilated, and adapted by the laity. This chapter draws on several categories of these otherworld narratives, including visitations by ghosts, demons, and saints, and explores three primary spiritual dynamics illustrated by the visions:purgatorial ‘transactions of satisfaction’ with the ghosts, spiritual warfare with the demons, and ‘reciprocated devotion’ with the saints. The glimpses of the otherworlds and their inhabitants shored up the religious beliefs and practices of the late medieval laity.

This chapter uses current theories in the cognitive science of religion (CSR) to examine the widespread popularity of hybrid monsters in ancient Syro-Palestinian and Near Eastern art and the role of material culture in enhancing memory and expanding the ordinary boundaries of the religious imagination. The chapter analyzes the iconography of hybrid figures from the perspective of two current cognitive frameworks: Dan Sperber’s epidemiological approach to cultural representations and Pascal Boyer’s theory of minimally counterintuitive (MCI) concepts. Artifacts and imagery include hybrid creatures on glyptic and minor art, monsters and demons, as well as a discussion of hybrid creatures such as the seraphim and cherubim in the biblical books of Isaiah and Ezekiel. It is argued that culturally specific depictions of hybrid animals exhibit a core set of properties, which helps to account for their stability across geographical and temporal distances. The MCI theory is also empirically tested with recourse to the ancient iconographic data.

This chapter contrasts two parallel views of demons and their disruption of the ascetic life which coexisted in fourth-century Egypt. It rests on the hypothesis that we can read discussion of the nature, mode, and location of demons and the violence they work upon the ascetic as a medium for creating religious subjectivities in relation to a non-human adversary. Examination of each ascetic teacher’s demonology therefore reveals their vision for the ascetic life, its urgency and potentials, as well as the precarity and vulnerability an ascetic could expect to experience. The demons in the Letters of Antony manipulate the thoughts, impulses, and emotions of the individual. Their work occurs inside the person and exploits the weakness of the human mind and body. For Athanasius, in contrast, demons function primarily in an external, corporeal, and physically violent mode. Athanasius locates the ascetic life in a large-scale conflict with demons who do not merely corrupt the monk’s perceptions and emotions, as in the Letters, but also turn out in gangs and beat him senseless. This introduction of physicalised and externalised violence into the ascetic work of Antony moves the readers far away from the process of careful reflection and discernment of one’s emotions and thoughts which the Antony of the Letters had encouraged as a defence against internally located demons. This project of comparative reading shows that Antony and Athanasius have diverging and partially incompatible notions of the human predicament and therefore also of the ethical urgencies to which a human being is subject, suggesting that there is substantial diversity within early Christian ascetic thinking which goes far beyond any issue of doctrine. By focusing on each teacher’s account of demonic violence, we can see how violence interacts with the ethical imagination, bodies, and monastic pedagogy.

Chapter 1 demonstrates that in his De legibus William of Auvergne emphasised the differences between animals and humans, regarding them chiefly as tools. God used them to shape human behaviour, both by demanding sacrifice and by granting them symbolic meaning. Demons used them in natural magic. Humans used them as valuable and sometimes necessary property in pursuit of survival, and to ensure proper relations with God. In the De universo, however, William noted significant similarities between animals and humans. Some animals knew and thought in very similar ways to humans. The power of their wills was similar to that of humans. These similarities were most likely to receive attention when William discussed providence or when he analysed animals in order to work out the nature of higher beings on the grounds that if something of lower standing in the hierarchy of being had a power or quality, beings higher up must also possess that same power or quality, though to a greater degree and perhaps with other powers in addition. This last approach meant that William treated animals as a profoundly valuable learning resource, one predicated on the existence of meaningful similarities across the boundaries that structured the hierarchy.

By the middle of the first millennium CE in China the notion that the unseen world, while capable of offering respite from the perils of our world, was itself full of danger was shared both by Daoists drawing on earlier local ways of thinking and by Buddhists who incorporated beliefs originating in South Asia. In reality the this-worldly economic success of the monastic establishments of the latter tradition attracted occasional episodes of forced, often violent laicization at the hands of the state, while eschatological ideas drawn from both traditions nourished for some alternative visions of the future that also triggered violent clashes with the authorities. Exhortations to devoutness meanwhile could spur self-inflicted violence, whereas the summoning of demons to injure others was recognised and forbidden in the legal code. As our sources become more plentiful from the end of the first millennium onward, we learn more of the sometimes sanguinary content of popular religious eschatology, while it also becomes clear that the imagery of violence was commonplace in a wide range of religious contexts and that in situations such as those of foreign invasion or political collapse fear of demons could prompt unrestrained and merciless violence against outsiders.

This chapter focuses on the first known example of an extensive Jewish demonology − that is, the Book of the Watchers. It interprets its demonology in relation to the angelology of the Astronomical Book as well as evidence for ancient Jewish "magic."

This chapter draws upon new evidence for the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls to make the case for situating the beginnings of Jewish angelology and demonology in the third century BCE. It considers the new views of scribes, books, and knowledge within sources like the Aramaic Levi Document, Admonitions of Qahat, and Visions of Amram in relation to broader cultural trends in the Hellenistic Near East.