This is lesson 2 of [[Zac Porcu]]'s [[The Demonological History of the World]] course at the [[Symbolic World]]. Porcu reads long passages from his dissertation, *Cosmological and Epistemic Presuppositions in Origen and the Early Fathers: Reframing the Discussion on Magic and Demonology in Late Antiquity*, and comments on them. Transcript: `Symbolic World/Demonological History/DH-Lesson 2 transcript.txt`. The dissertation PDF and the lesson's book list are in the same folder. ## 0. The framing problem: why modern scholarship on ancient demonology is a mess **Problem.** The secondary literature on magic and demonology in late antiquity keeps producing convoluted debates about how to classify ancient beliefs. **Porcu's diagnosis.** The scholars are materialists. They are trying to explain how sophisticated ancients could believe what "we now know" is fake, and each explanation competes with the others. **His methodological move (the dissertation's original contribution).** Drop the materialist assumption. If you take for granted that the ancients believed these things were real, and allow that they probably were, "there are no more difficulties or confusion about how to define any of these things." - Asked how he defined "real" for the examiners: he didn't. He declined to assume materialism ("question begging") and nobody challenged it. **Why [[Origen]] is the witness.** He is pre-Nicene and not a saint: he made Christological errors, and some of his writings were later condemned. But he was massively influential and cited as an authority by all the early Fathers. He therefore represents both the Greco-Roman world before him and what the Fathers later adopted. Read him "like you read Enoch": follow him where he agrees with the canon and councils, and don't where he doesn't. --- ## 1. Tension: are the pagan gods unreal, or real and wicked? | Modern assumption | The patristic argument (Origen, Justin, Tertullian, Tatian, Augustine) | |---|---| | The pagans worshipped nothing; their gods are fictions | The beings the pagans worship **exist**, but they are **immoral**: "The gods are real, but they suck" | | "Fake" = non-existent | "Fake" = a **scam**. The demons pose as gods to extract worship and food | The Christians did not tell pagans "you're stupid and your gods don't exist." They pointed to the pagans' own stories: petty, vindictive, partisan beings, enslaved to their passions. ### 1a. Origen's conspiracy of the demons (*Contra Celsum*) - **"The gods of the heathen are demons"** (Psalter; Deut 32) is confirmed for Origen by the whole apparatus of Greco-Roman religion. - **Demons eat sacrifice.** They feed on burnt offerings, blood and the odour of sacrifice. Temples are "habitations of deceitful demons"; the smoke of the burnt portion is what the demon consumes. - **They answer prayer for payment.** They "perform the petitions of those who bring requests to them more because of the sacrifices they offer than because of their virtuous actions." - **Blood prohibition.** Strangled meat is forbidden because the blood hasn't been drained, and blood is demon food. Porcu's analogy: don't leave food on the floor if you don't want cockroaches. Ancient ritual rules have to be read in concrete, physical terms. - **Miracles and oracles are real, and part of the con.** Origen grants that pagan oracles and wonders work, but their moral character shows the source: "evil demons and spirits hostile to the human race." - **Exposed and ended by Christ.** "God, who sent Jesus, destroyed the whole conspiracy of demons." With their temples abandoned and sacrifices cut off, the demons "stirred up the emperors and the Senate and the local governors everywhere" against the Christians. - **Consequence:** Christianity was a revolution of the social order in cosmic terms, not just earthly ones. The Roman state represented the cosmos, so the demons struck back through it. --- ## 2. The cosmology: moral weight is physical weight > "…the reason they have fallen from the higher realm of the heavens and down to the airy realm that surrounds the earth." (Origen, read at ~12:42) Demons "love bodies." Their bodies have literally grown **heavier** (Greek *pachutēs*, "thickness, grossness") through wickedness and lust for bodily things. They also eat the physical smoke of sacrifices, which weighs them down. So they have sunk from the heavens into the air around the earth, "unable to attain to the purer and more divine region, far removed from the grossness of the earth." **No one in antiquity thought spirits were bodiless minds.** For Origen, existing without a body belongs to the Trinity alone. Everything else has a body, however subtle: air, gas, something like electromagnetism. Bodiless angels are a medieval development. (Next lesson: "How Thin Is a Demon?") ### 2a. The four elements and their inhabitants (Augustine citing Apuleius) Augustine (*City of God*) reports the philosophers' threefold division of rational beings: | Being | Place | Body | Shares with… | |---|---|---|---| | **Gods** | heaven (aether/fire) | ethereal | immortality with demons; absolutely good and noble | | **Demons** | the **air**, in the middle | **aerial**, "literally made of gas" | immortality with the gods; passions with men | | **Men** (and beasts) | earth | earthly | passions with demons | | other creatures | water | watery | | Apuleius's definition: demons are "animal in genus, passive in soul, rational in mind, aerial in body, eternal in duration." Every element is "full of living creatures": fire and air hold immortals, water and earth hold mortals. - **Why this matters to Porcu:** space isn't empty. Lewis's point in the Space Trilogy: "space" is the wrong name for a heaven full of light and life. And you "can't go beyond the moon's orbit," because the demons are trapped in the sublunary air. - **Augustine's verdict on Apuleius:** thanks for the definition, but it proves the case. Subjection to passion is "the badge of our misfortune." The demons "have reason only as a capacity for suffering, passions only to make them miserable, and eternity only that there may be no end to their misery." Worshipping them would be madness. - **Porcu's "Pulp Fiction" of the spirits:** demons enjoy "the obscenities of the stage." Today that means movies. ### 2b. The fall runs both ways - Demons **fall by vice**; man **ascends by virtue** into the places they vacated. The saints judge the world and the apostles sit on thrones: "you shall be as gods" comes true, but not the way the serpent meant (Athanasius: God became man so man could become God). - This is why the demons try to keep man down. Athanasius: "out of envy for us Christians, they move all things… to hinder us from entry into the heavens, in order that we should not ascend up there from whence they fell." - **Fasting** is the practical counterpart. Uncontrolled passion transforms you physically, as it did them. --- ## 3. Tension: a tidy two-sided cosmos, or a crowded, graded one? | Medieval / modern picture | Origen's late-antique picture | |---|---| | Spirits are bodiless intelligences | Spirits have subtle bodies whose weight tracks their morality | | Binary: God's side vs. the devil's side (seven virtues, seven vices) | **Degrees of corruption**, not separate species | | Angels good, demons evil | Angels, *evil* angels ("the devil's angels"), demons, unclean spirits, gods, invisible powers… | - **Origen's ranking (from *On First Principles*).** The devil rebelled first, and every soul was influenced to some degree. Those who sinned lightly became angels; those who sinned even less became archangels; those who sinned most became demons. Evil angels could serve the devil without falling as far as demons. - **Demons are "almost like animals":** enslaved to passion, "held down in **prisons made by their lust**." They are nuisances rather than the "intelligent and formidable opponents" evil angels can be. - **Unclean spirits** (Q&A): the late-antique consensus, following Jubilees, is that the unclean spirits of the Gospels are the disembodied souls of the Nephilim drowned in the Flood. They are distinct from demons and the devil's angels. Greek **demigods** = Nephilim. - **How to tell them apart.** Two clues: 1. *Behaviour.* Immoral or unfitting conduct means a fallen creature. Angels "do no harm to those who slight them." 2. *Worship.* Any being that demands worship is a demon for that very reason. The angels in charge of "the fruits of the earth and the birth of animals" deserve blessing and thanks, not sacrifice, and "approve of us more when we take care not to sacrifice to them." - **Nature isn't mechanical.** For the ancients, crops and births were stewarded by minds. Laws of physics are a post-Scientific-Revolution frame, and Porcu will argue later that the older frame is the *more* sophisticated one. - **Origen doesn't care much about taxonomy.** Other gods "are either non-existent or, if they do exist, worthy of honour, but not of worship." Some spirits may even be **self-deceived** into thinking they are gods, like philosophers who have fooled themselves. His real question is **how we are saved**: "we do all we can to ascend not only above those worshipped as gods by the nations… but even above those whom the scripture holds to be gods." --- ## 4. Tension: were the nations handed over, or seized? **Localisation.** Origen speaks of "the demon of the locality." Prayer and exorcism drive demons out of people, animals, and "places where they have established themselves." **Celsus vs. Origen (*Contra Celsum* 5).** Celsus argues that the regions of the earth were allotted to different overseers from the beginning, so each nation should keep its ancestral customs, and abandoning them is impious. This is another pagan witness to the allotment, after Plato in Lesson 1. Origen **agrees with the model**. He cites the gods contending over Attica, the Egyptian *nomes* divided among gods, and above all Deuteronomy 32:8 (LXX), "according to the number of the angels of God," read as Babel. So the Lesson 1 reading "is not just Father De Young. This is in Origen too." **Origen's two hypotheses for how demons came to rule:** | Usurpation | Delegated punishment | |---|---| | Demons were never allotted anything; through wickedness they entered "regions where there is not to be found any knowledge of God" and seized them | The Logos appointed demons to govern and punish those who had given themselves to evil rather than to God | The Ezekiel 28 **Prince of Tyre** is "an adverse power, formerly holy and blessed," who fell and was cast to earth, and the Tyrians were committed to his care. **Porcu's summary.** The devil fell first, and others fell by degrees under his influence. When men fell (whether Babel continues Eden or is a separate event), they were given over to overseers who had fallen or would fall. "Not tidy at all." **Q&A extensions (Porcu's hypotheses, flagged as such):** - Can a region's demons return once Christianity recedes? "I don't see why not." They are physical, so removing crosses matters. Cf. the swept house and the seven spirits (Matt 12:43–45). - Riverside, with crosses everywhere, seems saner than the rest of Southern California. The recent fashion for extreme piercings there recalls the Mesoamerican cultures once ruled by "bloodthirsty gods." "That's as far as I'm gonna go with that." - Modern secular analogues: Moloch and abortion; "techno-Aphrodite" and pornography. "Please don't cite me as someone who knows what's going on in the invisible realm." - St Patrick smashing the idol of Crom Cruach: the powers are physically present, so they can be physically removed. --- ## 5. Justin, Tertullian, Tatian: mythology as demonic propaganda - **Justin Martyr.** After their fall, the demons "subdued the human race to themselves, partly by magical writings, and partly by fears… and partly by teaching them to offer sacrifices and incense and libations, of which things they stood in need after they were enslaved by their lustful passions." They sowed "murders, wars, adulteries." - The poets, not knowing better, ascribed the demons' deeds to Zeus, Neptune, Pluto and their offspring. The **genealogies of the gods** are a garbled memory of fallen angels begetting offspring. - Justin distinguishes the **gods** from the **demons who seize their names**. - **Tertullian.** - Calls them "angelic apostates," "deserters from God and lovers of women" (the Watchers), and treats Enoch as Spirit-inspired: "the Holy Spirit… forechanted through the most ancient prophet Enoch." - "Demons are the **magistrates of this world**; they bear the fasces and the purples." - **Demons have no names individually** but take a name where they find a token: consecration binds them to it. Porcu compares "My name is Legion." - **Tatian.** - The demons, "with Zeus at their head," are subject to fate and passion. The demons invented the **doctrine of fate** so that men could shed responsibility. - **Astrology** is their work too: they put the animals they lived among after their expulsion into the constellations, "in order that they might themselves be thought to remain in heaven." This inverts the hierarchy by putting earthly things in heaven. - **Pagan religion as parody.** Having fallen from heaven, the demons knew what true worship looks like (holy ground, temples, incense) and built counterfeit religions from its pieces. "They can only parody" (Lewis, Tolkien). ### 5a. Tension: should we still read Homer? | Inspired | Propaganda | |---|---| | "Sing in me, O Muse": pagan epic really is spiritually inspired and contains things "only these spirits would know" | …but filtered through beings who fell and want to justify themselves | Porcu: yes, read Homer, but read between the lines. This extends Lesson 1's "myth as demonic narrative self-justification." --- ## 6. Porcu's "spiciest claim": the true gods are unfallen **Question from chat:** why would demons take names tied to the sun, sky and lightning? **Answer:** those are the domains of the **real gods**, and the demons covet their status. **The sun argument.** Every culture has a sun god (Ra, Helios/Apollo, Amaterasu). But does the sun ever stray from its course or rebel against the God of gods? "He wakes up every day… does his job and goes to bed." The same goes for the moon and most of nature. So the stewarding powers of creation seem to be **unfallen and doing their jobs**. The fallen ones are the demons of the lower air, who imitate them. - Chat counterpoint: what about hurricanes and tornadoes? Porcu: "the tornado and the hurricane are **air**. So which of the elements was fallen? Think about that." - This agrees with Augustine (gods "absolutely good and noble," often interchangeable with angels) and Justin (demons "seize the names" of the gods). - **Lewis and Tolkien as witnesses.** They are not authorities, but they read the primary sources in the original languages. Their mythic frameworks are a learned synthesis of antique and medieval thought: the Valar with one fallen (Melkor/Morgoth), and Lewis's planetary Oyarsa with Earth's the bent one. That is the Babel allotment again. - **Why scripture says "angels" and not "gods."** Porcu's hypothesis: to keep us from worshipping them, given man's track record. Hence his refusal to identify St Michael with Apollo: "we kind of don't need to know." - Porcu is writing an article for *First Things* on this, and says Lord of Spirits won't go this far. --- ## 7. Practical coda - **Talking about this without sounding crazy:** you don't need to convince anyone. Use fiction (Demon Slayer's "become a demon by vice"; K-pop Demon Hunters) to get past the "watchful dragons." - **Addiction as possession.** AA works by appeal to a higher power: "you're possessed by a spirit… you need a more powerful spirit to exorcise it. Isn't this our whole lives?" - **Guarding home and land.** The sign of the cross on everything, crosses on doors, and the archangels over the threshold. - **Technologists and the occult.** Jack Parsons of JPL, rocket pioneer and ritual magician: "these are just facts… not a conspiracy theory." --- ## 8. Cross-lecture connections - **[[Who Are Our Older Cousins]]** (Lesson 1): this lesson supplies the patristic witnesses for Lesson 1's scriptural case. Origen reads Deut 32:8 exactly as De Young does, and Celsus joins Plato as a pagan witness to the allotment of nations. Lesson 1's "myth as demonic narrative self-justification" (Prometheus) is here stated by Justin and Tatian outright. "Knowledge before maturity" returns as Justin's demons teaching "magical writings." - **[[Kingdom of the Air]]**: the lesson gives the cosmology behind Ephesians 2:2. Porcu himself cites Paul's "prince of the power of the air" in Q&A: the demons are physically **aerial**, so they are physically *present* in a place. Air here is the Greek *aēr*, the thick lower atmosphere, as opposed to the pure upper *aithēr* of the gods. This matches the dictionary note's "the heavens that the birds inhabit." - **[[Rapture]]** / **[[Epistle of First Thessalonians]]** (a thread from the Journal, not from Porcu): 1 Thess 4:17 says believers are "caught up… to meet the Lord **in the air**" (*eis aera*). In this cosmology that is the demons' own realm. Two leads to follow: - **Athanasius, *On the Incarnation* 25** explains that Christ died *lifted up in the air* on the cross precisely because the devil is "prince of the power of the air." He "cleared the air and made the way up into heaven." This fits Athanasius's line above about demons blocking our ascent. - [[N. T. Wright]] reads "to meet" (*apantēsis*) as the civic custom of going out to meet an arriving dignitary and escorting him back into the city. On that reading the saints meet the King in enemy-held air and return with him, rather than leaving the earth. - **[[Three-tier Biblical Cosmology]]** / **[[Biblical Cosmology]]** / **[[BP Heaven and Earth]]** ([[Tim Mackie]]): Apuleius's layers (aether, air, earth) map onto the heavens / sky / earth tiers. Origen's moral-physical weight gives the tiers an ethics. - **[[I See Satan Fall Like Lightning]]** ([[René Girard]]): Porcu relays De Young's reading of Luke 10:18. "Satan" there is the accuser and angel of death, who falls only when he sees Christ will defeat death. He is distinct from the devil/serpent (perhaps Azazel). Girard's Satan as the accusing mechanism is the anthropological mirror of the accuser in Job's council. - **[[Pageaunian Fringe]]** / **[[Jonathan Pageau]]**: the demons putting animals into the constellations is the lower drawn up into the higher, an inversion of the hierarchy. Pageau used to ask constantly about neutral spirits. - **[[Malay Divination and Magic]]**: Origen's "demon of the locality" and the Hindu household offering Porcu describes are the category to read the Malay manuscripts' local spirits and offerings through. - **[[Plato]]**: Augustine reads Plato's banishment of the poets as depriving the *demons*, not the gods, of their theatre. - **Recurring structural argument:** Lesson 1 made **maturity** the decisive question, and Lesson 2 makes **passion** the decisive ontology. Beings sink by passion and rise by virtue, and fasting is the human technique of rising. --- ## 9. Vocabulary - ***Contra Celsum*** (*Against Celsus*): Origen's reply to the pagan Celsus's *True Word* - ***On First Principles*** (*De Principiis*, *Peri Archōn*): Origen's systematic work - ***pachutēs***: thickness, grossness, heaviness (of bodies) - **aerial / ethereal**: made of air (*aēr*, the lower atmosphere) vs. aether (*aithēr*, the fine upper region) - **sublunary**: the realm below the moon, where demons are confined - **demon of the locality**: a spirit attached to a place - **nome**: an administrative district of ancient Egypt - **evil angels / the devil's angels**: fallen, but less far than demons (Origen) - **unclean spirits**: the souls of the drowned Nephilim (Jubilees) - **subtle body**: the fine, non-gross body every created spirit has (next lesson) --- ## 10. Reading named in the lesson - Porcu, *Cosmological and Epistemic Presuppositions in Origen and the Early Fathers* (PDF in the Symbolic World folder) - Origen, *Contra Celsum*; *On First Principles* - Augustine, *City of God* (Book 8 on Apuleius) - Apuleius, *On the God of Socrates* - Justin Martyr, *First* and *Second Apology* - Tertullian, *On the Apparel of Women*; *On Idolatry* - Tatian, *Address to the Greeks* - Athanasius, *Life of Antony* - Stephen De Young, *The Religion of the Apostles* (multiple falls; Satan ≠ the devil) - 1 Enoch; Jubilees - Homer, Virgil (invocation of the Muse) - C. S. Lewis, Space Trilogy; Tolkien, *Ainulindalë* - Next lesson: "How Thin Is a Demon?" --- ### Errata in the lecture (worth not repeating in an essay) - **The Cappadocians and Nicaea.** Porcu says the Cappadocian Fathers were "some of the most influential on the first council of Nicaea." Nicaea was 325. Basil and the two Gregorys were born around 330 and shaped the **Council of Constantinople (381)**, which completed the Nicene settlement. - **"Strangled things"** is not Mosaic law. It comes from the apostolic decree of **Acts 15:20, 29**. Moses forbids *blood* ("the life is in the blood," Lev 17:11; Gen 9:4). Origen links the two (*Contra Celsum* 8.30), and the lecture blurs them. - **"Only the Trinity exists without a body."** Porcu guesses it's in *Peri Archōn*, and it is: *On First Principles* 1.6.4 and 2.2.2. - **The Athanasius quote** ("hinder us from entry into the heavens… from whence they fell") is from the ***Life of Antony*** (ch. 22), spoken by Antony in Athanasius's account. It is not a theological treatise of Athanasius. - **"Tashian"** in the transcript is **Tatian**, *Address to the Greeks* (chs. 8–9 on fate, the zodiac and the constellations). - **Augustine "not as influential."** That is true only of the East. In the Latin West he is the most influential Father after Paul. Porcu's Orthodox vantage point shows here. - **Aether as "the realm of fire."** Porcu equates them and speaks of "the four elements." Aristotle made aether a **fifth** element distinct from fire. Platonists and Stoics often did identify the heavens as fiery, so the lecture's version is one strand, not the ancient view. - **"Celsus was a Neoplatonist"** (a chat question, left uncorrected). Celsus wrote in the late 2nd century and was a **Middle Platonist**. Neoplatonism begins with Plotinus in the 3rd century. - **Jack Parsons.** He belonged to Crowley's ***Ordo Templi Orientis*** (Agape Lodge), not the **Golden Dawn**, which Crowley had long since left. The ritual series was the **Babalon Working** (1946, with L. Ron Hubbard), meant to incarnate the goddess Babalon, not to "summon the whore of Babylon." Parsons co-founded JPL's precursor with Frank Malina and others. - **Riverside as a "mission town founded by Catholics."** Riverside was founded in 1870 as a citrus colony (John W. North). Its **Raincross** emblem (a mission bell with a cross) was adapted from the Mission Inn in the early 1900s. The Mount Rubidoux cross (1907) honours Junípero Serra. The crosses are real, but they came from a mission-*revival* style, not a mission foundation. - **Nothing in DC may be taller than the Washington Monument.** This is a popular myth. The Height of Buildings Act (1910) caps height by **street width**, not by the Monument. - **"90% of the signers of the Declaration were Freemasons"** (a chat claim Porcu affirms). Only about **9 of the 56** signers are documented Masons. "A third of U.S. presidents" is roughly right (about 14). - **"Lincoln held a séance in the White House."** The séances were **Mary Todd Lincoln's**, after Willie's death. Lincoln's own attendance is reported but disputed. - **"The Martians call it the field of the sun."** In *Out of the Silent Planet* it's **Deep Heaven**. The solar system is **"the Field of Arbol"** (Arbol being the Sun), so the gist is right. - **St Patrick "with a sledgehammer."** Patrick's overthrow of Crom Cruach (at Mag Slécht) comes from later hagiography. In it he strikes the idol with his crozier and it bows, rather than being smashed. It's legend, not history. --- Back to: [[The Demonological History of the World]] Previous Lesson: [[Who Are Our Older Cousins]] Next Lesson: Lesson 3 — magic, idol-making, and "How Thin Is a Demon?" ## Journal mentions - [[Journal#Wednesday, 30 September 2026|2026-09-30]] — Origen is quoted describing demons falling from the heavens onto our airy realm. - [[Journal#Wednesday, 30 September 2026|2026-09-30]] — our earthly region is described with the attribute of "grossness" which, in Greek, meant "thickness." - [[Journal#Wednesday, 30 September 2026|2026-09-30]] — Augustine is quoted explaining that god resides in the highest realm which is heaven, humans in the lowliest realm which is the earth, and demons in the middle, which is the air - [[Journal#Wednesday, 30 September 2026|2026-09-30]] — Demons love to be entertained by poetry and plays, but these pleasures are far removed from the gods. - [[Journal#Wednesday, 30 September 2026|2026-09-30]] — Demons have aerial bodies, and gods have ethereal bodies. Ethereal is lighter than air. - [[Journal#Wednesday, 30 September 2026|2026-09-30]] — They correspond to the four elements too. So ether is related to fire, thus the gods inhabit the realm of fire.