Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

The Ancestry of the Demonic 49serpent destroyed by Baal. 97 Reference to the (dangerous and chaotic) seagoes back to the goddess Tiamat in Babylonian mythology. The most distinctfeatures of the popular Christian conception of evil were neverthelesstaken in from the Greeks. Jeffrey Burton Russell writes:A few Greco-Roman deities had direct influence on the Devil. The Christiansassociated all the pagan deities with demons, but Pan more than others.Pan was feared for his association with the wilderness, the favoritehaunt of hostile spirits, and for his sexuality. Sexual passion, which suspendsreason, was suspect to both Greek rationalism and Christian asceticism;a god of sexuality could easily be identified as evil, especially sincesexuality was linked through fertility to the underworld and death. Pan,hairy and goatlike, with horns and cloven hooves, was the son of Hermes.A phallic deity like his father, he represented sexual desire in both its creativeand its threatening aspects. Pan’s horns, hooves, shaggy fur, and outsizedphallus became part of the Christian image of Satan. 98Demonic imagery in its popular form adopted Pan within the satirical(or, indeed, “satyrical”) discourse or expressive register that this figure hadbeen associated with in antiquity. The lascivious spirits of woodlands andfield – fauns, satyrs, Priapus and Pan – were essential in the satyr plays thatwere performed at the Dionysiac festivals. The satyr plays were an importantcounterbalance to the serious tragedies, and they were written to give comicalrelief to the audience who had seen a series of three tragedies before it. 99The satyrs were inhabitants of the borderline between wilderness and civilisationand their appearance corresponded to this role: half-human, halfanimalthey gave a fantastic shape to the “not-so-civilised” aspects of humanity.The god Dionysus himself may have originally been worshipped inthe shape of a great bull, and his bacchanals and festivals were practical opportunitiesto take part in “otherness” – to experience how one can losehis/herself in animalistic frenzy, madness, or in religious ecstasy. 100 The medievalfantasy of the Witches’ Sabbath seems to owe much to this rejectedsensual and orgiastic religiousness (the myth of the fallen angels, in comparison,was much more concerned with pride and intellectual questions).In his study The Ludicrous Demon Lee Byron Jennings has focused particularlyon this interesting combination of fearsome and ridiculous attributes.His aim is to explain how the grotesque has become an important (albeitoften marginalised) part of art and literature. He sees that the power ofthe grotesque is embedded on its ability to evoke contradictory emotionalresponses, and to build a new ordering principle to incorporate this tension(an “anti-norm”). Personal identity, the stability of our unchanging environment,the inviolate nature of the human body, and the separation of the97 Cavendish 1975, 11.98 Russell 1988/1993, 17.99The only satyr play that has been preserved complete is The Cyclops by Euripides.100 Many of Dionysus’ worshippers were women. See The Bacchae by Euripides; also(in Finnish) Simonsuuri 1994, 91-97.