THE DEVIL

Evening Star, Issue 20318, 29 October 1929, Page 1

THE DEVIL

HIS HISTORY Even it we have it on the authorily of Denis the soldier that “ le diablo ost mort,” ho is a personage that at some time or other in most of our lives was very much alive. Not a few, of ns in childhood trembled at the thought of tho Tempter and clothed him in the shape made familiar by our ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ or ‘Holy 'War.’' ami it is only later, although" the-old, conception returns even then unconsciously, that wo tend to regard his. Satanic Majesty as a theological term,a. handy word for the totality of those forces that make for evil. Side Inside with those is tho Devil of folic lore and folk song, “ Old Nick.”' “ Auld Clootie’’—a pathetic sort of figure treated with a certain respect, yet never without patronage, an exile from the goodly company of the god" 4 and millcnnially removed from the fallen Star of the Morning.

Tho legend of the fallen angel is ai foreign add’tion to the devil as we know him here. Our devil, despite theological accretions, is our own possession whom the {incidents of timehave forced into the role of the Prince of Evil. Whence came he. and why do Western men regard him with ;( certain affection? Because, say the students of human beginnings, lie H bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. It is tho rule that the gods of one race are the demons of tho next, and once the Horned God of the West, a god of fertility, an animal god, and a ruler of the underworld, was a very great god indeed. A thousand years before our era bis worship in these regions was general in one form or another, and no worship ever absolutely dies. The career of the Horned God began with that of tho first races to inhabit Western Europe. He emerged from magical cults hi the -prehistoric caves, and his attributes are those- of tho earlj- medicine men of the animal cults, who dressed themselves in skins and, animal masks. AH tho essential traits of “Auld Clootie’’ are in the uictnrcs of the disguised magicians, painted on the cavern walls twenty thousand years

The older the cirt'b the more it responds to what is the prinrtive essence* of our nature and the more tenacious it is of life. Despite invasions of men with new cods, the Horned God remained. His powers, functions, and attributes wore modified, hub his on lb persisted all the more firmly as it byforce of circumstances partook of the essence of a secret society uniting the ■ower and often oppressed classes. When Christianity came all the mythologies, were already inextricably confused, hub the obstinate enemy was the cult of the ordinary countrv folk, and the missionary, ever a realist, promptly identified the Horned God. the god of the country, the last stronghold against innovation. with the Devil, the Deceiver of mankind.

Tims the issue was fairly placed before the convicts. Lteverenco for the older cut was devil-worship, worse than sin and nearly as bad as heresy. A* fm last dignities the Horned God acquired also, the characteristics of tba Hebrew Adversary, not inappropriately, for be was indeed an Adversary of tin* most formidable type. Under bi« sceptre gradually coalesced all the remnants of paganism, all the old belief* and practices, the real origins of which, can be only painfully discovered.