Rogério Coelho

How the Devil was born The Devil was killed and buried by the Spiritist knowledge Part 1

"(...) To believe that God created a being forever
doomed to evil, a stubborn saboteur of His work, is naïve
and it almost reaches the most sordid blasphemy”.
François C. Liran

Satan, Demo, Beelzebub, Bad Thing, Lucifer, the Bug, foot-Cracked, Demon, Belphegor such are the names that famously designate the Devil, being the last one (Belphegor) created by Jean Weier. The shortsighted Church authorities allowed these names to spread within the Catholic circles to name the antipodes holders of Well, giving them (amazingly!) the "status" of God’s rivals! Even Goethe, for his Faust, increased the already abundant denominations to designate the Dark Lord, calling him Mephistopheles, Lord of the vandals and the perverse…

This fearful being is created by ill minds and soaked by inferior interests; a living legend and the true anti-hero, whose image still today is preserved in the Christian imagination; such an evil creature has been an excellent aid to the medieval and contemporary religions that need this kind of terrorism to still their naive sheep in the narrow and barren folds of dogmatism. Such terrorism acquires dramatic contours when extrapolating the boundaries of the physical world, invading the Spiritual World, in which, through idioplasty makes the disembodied creatures with mental cliches and nurtured by themselves end up getting face to face with this demonic Entity, which is actually the fantasy of some evil Spirit that in this manner terrorizes his helpless and gullible victim. (1)

The same ecclesiastical institutions that had Spiritist books burnt, approved (coherently) the book of Collin Plancy, which contains detailed description of various demons. 

MENTAL CLICHES

Silas explains that the macabre ideas of demeaning magic, namely those regarding witchcraft and demonism that the so called Christian churches spreads on the pretext of fighting them, keeping beliefs and superstitions, with spellcasting and exorcisms, generate demonic mental cliches affecting the weak brains of the unprepared disembodied, who believe in such absurdities, establishing hallucinatory epidemics of fear. On the other hand, the disembodied intelligences, inclined to evil, use these frames supported and spread on Earth by fetishist literature and preaching lacking vigilance, and give them a temporary vitality, in the same manner as the pencil of an artist takes advantage of the fantasies of a child, and draws images to impress the child's mind.

It is therefore clear and easy to "recognize that every heart builds the hell that imprisons it, according to its own works. Thus, we have with us, the demons we want, according to the chosen costume or modeled by ourselves", concludes Silas.

But if God is the Infinite Goodness - and that we cannot doubt - how could a Being, who was His antithesis, originate from Him, the Supreme God? Such was the controversy that arose within the Catholic Church in the early Middle-Ages. But St. Augustine (now redeemed by the Spiritist knowledge) presented, at that time, a solution that satisfied the "lucid" medieval minds: free will.

According to this Father of the Church, the closer a creature is to God, the greater is his intelligence and freedom of choice. And in the use of such freedom even the Avatars of the highest rank, the most perfect creations of the Almighty, may freely choose between right and wrong. 

LUCIFER

Thus, the Devil is none other than the Angel of Light (Lucifer), who made the wrong choice (!?), taking with him a whole cohort of courtiers and acolytes. Such Augustinian theory does not prevail these days when Spiritism explains that the Spirit does not retrograde.[1]

St. Augustine's imagination (the Holy Incarnate Augustine in the Middle-Ages, at that time, was not yet enlightened by Spiritism) goes further: with his philosophical concept of LIGHT (the biblical "Fiat Lux") he considers the initial moment of the divine action like the daylight. By contrast, the demoniac hours are the darkness of the night, the period when evil acts with all its power, thus originating the expression “Spirit of Darkness”.

This Devilish mythological figure, preserved in the bland salt of the dogmas generated in the sterile womb of the Church, experienced the height of its fame and glory with St. Thomas Aquinas, who put him on a pedestal of such striking importance that his presence in religion competed and often overcame God’s presence thus establishing a wave of terror.

In a preaching of less than twenty minutes, certain religious leaders (blind leading the blind) mention the word "Devil" more than a few dozen times, and the images of God and Jesus are then dimmed or completely null.

It is necessary to go back some centuries to be able to watch the birth of the Devil, because already at the time of Jesus, according to a record by Mark, The Gentle Rabbi was accused of partnering with him[2]: "(...) through the prince of demons expels the demons".

The Devil is the anti-hero created in order to frighten and submit the ignorant people to the absurd dogmas and maintain the "status" of the priestly caste with its ancestral parasitism. 

THE DAIMON OF SOCRATES

The word demon, from “daemon", originated in ancient Greece, did not mean then genius of darkness. The Master of Leon[3] reminds us that this word did not have the evil meaning in ancient times as it has today, because it did not exclusively designate evil beings, but all Spirits in general, among which were the High Spirits called gods, and the less enlightened, or demons, who communicated directly with men.

Socrates claimed to be intimate with a "daemon" with who he learned high philosophical concepts, and stated that after death, the daemon (here a Protecting Spirit), who stood by us during our life, leads us to a place where all those that have to be conducted to Hades were gathered, to be judged.

The Master of Lyons studied this subject at length in Chapters IX and X of the basic book, "Heaven and Hell", where with his usual forceful and undeniable logic concludes that to believe in the existence of such a being would result in the following tragic and unacceptable corollary: God made a mistake, thus, we arrive to the absurd conclusion: God is not infallible (!?). 

THE GOOD AND EVIL 

With the scope of his lucid reasoning, Allan Kardec takes us to the root of the Devil when he approaches the old issue of Good and Evil. He says[4]: “Being it proven and patent the struggle between Good and Evil, the latter often triumphing, and not being able to rationally accept that Evil originated from a Good power, we conclude that there are two rival powers governing the world. Hence the doctrine of the two principles was born, incidentally logic at a time when man was still unable, by reasoning, to understand the essence of the Supreme Being.

How could he then understand that Evil is merely a transitory state from which Good can emanate, leading him to happiness through suffering and helping him progress?

The limits of man’s moral horizon, nothing allowing him to see beyond his present, in the past as in the future, also did not allow him to realize that he had already progressed, that he would progress even individually, let alone that the vicissitudes of life resulted from the imperfections of the Spiritual being, residing in him, which pre-exists and survives the body in several cleansing lives until he reaches perfection.

To understand how Good can result from Evil, it is necessary to consider not one but many lives; it is necessary to grasp the whole of which - and only which – clearly results in causes and their effects.

Both the principles of Good and Evil were, for many centuries and under various names, the basis of all religious beliefs. We see it so synthesized in Oromase and Ahriman among the Persians, and in Jehovah and Satan among the Hebrews. However, as every sovereign has ministers, religions generally admitted secondary powers, the Good and Evil geniuses.

The pagans made of them individualities with the generic name of gods and gave them special powers for good and for evil, for vices and virtues. Christians and Muslims have inherited angles and demons from the Hebrew. We easily conclude, therefore, that the doctrine of demons comes from the ancient belief of two principles: good and evil".

The fact that allowed the genesis of the doctrine of the demons was the total medieval ignorance that then existed about the true attributes of God: One, Eternal, Immutable, Immaterial, Omnipotent, Supremely Just and Good, Infinite in all perfections. Such is the axis around which - necessarily - every philosophical or doctrinal concept has to turn to, if it wants to align itself with the truth and with logic. 

THE HEBREW GOD

In a tour in the History of Ancient Civilizations accompanied by the to the historian Carlos Roberto F. Nogueira, based on his book "The Devil in the Christian Imaginary", EDUSC, and in Savio Laterce’s company too, Master in Philosophy from the IFCS-UFRJ, in his excellent article published in the Jornal do Brazil, edition of 06.30.2001, we can see the eternal and endless fight of Evil against Good, with their respective armies and weapons of combat, as well as the distinct amphibological characteristic of the gods, since among the ancients Eastern peoples, certain gods already incorporated destructive, negative powers, and - invariably - carried a specific  typical logic of the myth, which already marked them: the ambiguity. Baal was at the same time the Mesopotamian god of the storm and of fertility. Hades represented the Greek deity that protected the thieves and also guarded flocks. Apollo, the Greek god of beauty, music and balance, had his obscure facet linked to divination rituals, to the lack of clarity in the words and to summary punishments.

Even the Hebrew God of the Old Testament follows the same line: it's good, but only to those who are good and friendly to Him, and is strongly jealous and vengeful. The reason for such dichotomy is not difficult to foresee: the reports on the origin of the Universe in different cultures reveal that it is necessary to unite constructive and organizing forces, with creative spurts in several directions to perform the task.

The Hebrew culture, which left its inheritance to the Christian religion bathed in the rich cultural broth of primitive and ancestral cults.

"The Jewish people," - explains Laterce - "connected by roots to Mesopotamia and to polytheism, set, around the sixth century BC, Yahweh as the only God and the most perfect one of the gods of other cultures. Permanently harassed by Persians, Babylonians and Mesopotamians, the foreign and unknown is to the Hebrews a threat. The stranger turns the place of second order deities and also the territory of the enemy, which in Hebrew means Satan. But along with the promise of the hereafter and the dualistic idea of ​​two worlds - influences of Persian and Chaldeans, come the concepts of Heaven and Hell, the most marked division between good and evil and also some myths that narrate the journey to a higher world, celestial... God is one, but Evil is dispersed in a grouping of Entities. (Continued in the next issue.)