Diablo

“ So many around the camp in the daytime will keep him shy. You remember there were only Ginger and Red at home all day, when he was here before."
"All right," remarked his chum. "We'll try and have a warm reception ready for our friend Diablo. He's apt to be the most surprised monkey ever, once he hits that trigger; what with the loop snatching him up in the air, the flashlight going off with a great dazzling glow, and the yells of the boys as they get on to the racket. ”

“ The Devil vaulted into the saddle, flung the witch on before him, and off and away they rode—the yells of the clamouring demons, and the shrieks of the tortured soul, sounding for hours, far and wide, in the ears of the monks and the nuns. So here too, in this legend, as in all the rest, the Devil is greater than God, and prayer and penitence inefficacious to redeem iniquity. ”

“ From the cloud on which Eve stands, Satan is seen falling head-long, wound round by the tail of the serpent, whose bulk, nailed to the cross round which he wreathes, is falling into the abyss. Sin is also represented as a female bound in one of the serpent's folds, surrounded by her fiends. Death is chained to the cross, and Time falls together with Death, dragged down by a demon crowned with laurel. ”

“ As a secretly treasured national inheritance, despite both Christian church and Gothic empire, this ancient worship of nature and of the joys of the earth remains with the people. It is this spirit of nature and of natural sensuous delights, and lastly of natural science, that the poet here addresses as Satan. As Satan it appears in nature's secret powers of healing and magic, in the arts of the sorcerer and of the alchemist. ”

“ The devil that you waken in the hearts
You snare and bind in your enticing arts,
The thin, pale stuff that in your veins doth flow
Would freeze in terror.
Strange you have such power
To please, or pain us, poor, weak, soulless things—
Devoid of passion as a senseless flower! ”

“ Dashed from on high, on the very edge of the abyss, Satan was writhing upwards with the last desperate effort of a conquered foe not in the guise of the horned dragon-like monster of the legend, but in a human form of strange demoniac beauty, with dark wings like those of a bird of night. ”

“ Just outside the flames an angel and a devil are fighting in mid-air for the possession of a soul, and a comparison of these figures with the similar ones in the Descent into Limbo or "Harrying of Hell," which is by the same hand as the east window, shows at once the difference between the work of the two men. ”

“ Among the early paintings on canvas a well-known example represents the devil in the shape of a dragon, perched near the head of a dying man, eager to seize his soul as it issues from his mouth, and only kept off by the efforts of the attendant priest. Typical are the colossal portrait of Satan, and a vivid picture of the devils cast out of the possessed and entering into the swine, as shown in the cathedral-windows of Strasburg. ”

“ Blue, green, restless, ghost-ridden, driven in empty quarters by devils riding the wind, secretive, mysterious, making a last gigantic, primeval stand against the conquest of man, hemming and isolating the world, beautiful, horrible, dead god of ten thousand voices, universal incubator, universal grave. ”

“ When the devil enters into a nayre, he goes with a naked sword before the king, shaking and trembling and giving himself many wounds, saying, "I am such or such a god, and am come to tell thee such and such a thing," crying out, and behaving himself like a madman or one possessed. ”

“ Witches and werewolves, alchemists and necromancers, haunted the brains of those strange savage people, barbaric children that they were, and the only thing which was never believed was the truth. Those sons of the old pagan tribes were wrought upon by priest and monk, and they brought all their demons from their mythology and accepted all the demons of the new creed also, turning their old gods into devils. ”

“ Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil: but this worships a dead iron Devil; no God, not even a Devil!—Whatsoever is noble, divine, inspired, drops thereby out of life. There remains everywhere in life a despicable caput-mortuum; the mechanical hull, all soul fled out of it. ”

“ Their hair is cut circularly, like that of monks, but it is longer, and they confine it round the head with a cotton-string, in which bandage they place their arrows when they go hunting.... It appears that their religion is limited to adoring the devil. They pretend that when one of them is on the point of death, ten or twelve demons appear dancing and singing around the dying person.... ”

“ There are a number of other names by which the Devil is called in Scripture, each of which expresses something of the essential nature of hell; such as, Angel of the bottomless pit, Prince of this world, Prince of darkness, Destroyer, Beelzebub, Belial, Adversary, Accuser, Deceiver, Liar, Murderer, Tormentor, Serpent, Lucifer, Leviathan and Dragon. Such are the significant names which we find in the Bible sometimes applied to the collective body of evil spirits in the other world, who, viewed as one individual, are more frequently called the Devil and Satan. ”

“ The rebellious angels having been transformed into devils, and by swords and spears thrust over the battlements of Heaven, are falling into the jaws of Hell, which is here represented, in the conventional style of medieval designers, as the mouth of a hideous monster filled with forks of flame. ”

“ The pilgrim turned, and pointed with his finger to the road they were to take; but as he turned, the angel seized him by the shoulders, and precipitated him into the stream below. At this the terrors of the hermit were again aroused—"It is the devil," exclaimed he internally—"it is the devil, and no good angel! What evil had the poor man done that he should be drowned?" ”

“ In the cathedrals, too, we still see this idea fossilized. Devils and imps, struck into stone, clamber upon towers, prowl under cornices, peer out from bosses of foliage, perch upon capitals, nestle under benches, flame in windows. Above the great main entrance, the most common of all representations still shows Satan and his imps scowling, jeering, grinning, while taking possession of the souls of men and scourging them with serpents, or driving them with tridents, or dragging them with chains, into the flaming mouth of hell. ”

“ All the souls that have lived on the earth, good and bad, saints and sinners, Devil and demons, will stand before the Throne and be judged. The words, thoughts, and deeds of men and devils shall be made known. The final doom of the Devil and his angels will be shown up in detail before an assembled universe: the Godhead, angels, archangels, cherubim and seraphim, and all that have lived upon this planet. ”

“ The whole upper half of the fresco, on this side, is filled with angels and devils carrying souls to heaven or to hell; sometimes a struggle takes place, and a soul is rescued from a demon who has unwarrantably appropriated it; the angels are very graceful, and their intercourse with their spiritual charge is full of tenderness and endearment; on the other hand, the wicked are hurried off by the devils and thrown headlong into the mouths of hell, represented as the crater of a volcano, belching out flames nearly in the center of the composition. ”

“ The exact technical distinction between the two terms in ecclesiastical usage may be seen in the phrase used in the decree of the Fourth Lateran Council [1] : “Diabolus enim et alii dæmones.” (The devil and the other demons) , i.e. all are demons, and the chief of the demons is called the Devil. This distinction is preserved in in the Vulgate New Testament, where diabolus represents the Greek διάβολος, and in almost every instance refers to Satan himself, whilst his subordinate angels are described, in accordance with the Greek, as dæmones or dæmonia. ”

“ The Devil makes us quarrel whether we ought to have schools with or without bigoted religious teachings; he burns incense to stupefy our senses, lights candles to obscure our sight, amuses the masses with buffooneries to prevent them from thinking, draws us away from common-sense morality, and leads us, under the pretext of a mystic and symbolic religion, to the confessional, the very hothouse of mischief. ”

“ I opened the book and found it a catalogue list of devils, with magic writing interspersed, and an explanation of the laws that govern the spirit world. The old priest wrote out one magic recipe, and having set fire to it countless devils at once assembled, at which I was greatly alarmed. He then sat with me and called over the names one after the other, and said to the devils, ‘I am an old man now, am going away, and so am about to [121] put you under the care of this young man ”

“ Evidently the Devil is moving very fast; for all the boys are running;—the pattering of bare feet upon the pavement sounds like a heavy shower.... Then the chanting grows fainter in distance; the Devil's immense basso becomes inaudible;—one only distinguishes at regular intervals the crescendo of the burden,—a wild swelling of many hundred boy-voices all rising together,—a retreating storm of rhythmic song, wafted to the ear in gusts, in rafales of contralto.... ”

“ The Devil Lore Series, which opens with this book of Devil Stories, is to serve as documentary evidence of man’s abiding interest in the Devil. It will be a sort of portrait-gallery of the literary delineations of Satan. The Anthologies of Diabolical Literature may be considered, I trust, without any risk of offence to any theological or philosophical prepossession. To those alike who accept and who reject the belief in the Devil’s spiritual entity apart from man’s, there must be profit and pleasure in the contemplation of his literary incarnations. ”

“ Balancing hell, on the left hand of the spectator, is brute earth, the grave, the forming and the swallowing clay, out of which souls, not yet acquitted or condemned, emerge with difficulty, in varied forms of skeletons or corpses, slowly thawing into life eternal. ”

“ An angel coming down from heaven with the key of the abyss, and a great chain in his hand, lays hold upon the Dragon, the Old Serpent, Satan, and binds him for a thousand years, and then shuts him up in the abyss, his present dwelling-place, from which he can now emerge at will during the period of conflict, and seals it over him that his power may be restrained until the end of that time. ”

“ We are all, as I may say, my son, beset by devils in this infidel land. They are worshipped on the altars of the false gods, and they live in the hearts of the idolaters. But if thou hast no heavy sin on thy soul, these are such devils as thou canst better exorcise with the sword, than I, perhaps, with prayers. ”

“ The gods of the pagan mythology were in all their characters and attributes exalted human beings; the demon of the coward, and the angelic form that appears in the dream of some maid smitten by devotion, and who, having lost her earthly lover, fixes her thoughts on heaven, are clothed in the character and vestments of humanity changed by the dreaminess of passion. ”

“ Of a winter’s evening, by the faint light of a peat fire and rush candles, our forefathers recounted the weird stories of p. 183olden times, of devils, fairies, ghosts, witches, apparitions, giants, hidden treasures, and other cognate subjects, and they delighted in implanting terrors in the minds of the listeners that no philosophy, nor religion of after years, could entirely eradicate. ”

“ I creeps in 'mongst the dreams; they hangs there like big flowers, dripping dew and sugar and blood—red, red blood. And there's little fairies there that hop about and sing, and devils—great, ugly devils that grabs at you and roasts and eats you if they gits you ”

“ The terrified women and children flee for life, the men huddle them inside a circle, and, on the principle of fighting the devil with fire, they swing [pg 171] blazing firebrands in the air, yell, whoop, and make frantic dashes at the marauding and bloodthirsty devils, so creating a terrific spectacle, and striking great fear into the hearts of the assembled hundreds of women, who are screaming and fainting and clinging to their valorous protectors. ”

“ I cannot but take Notice, that this very Piece of optic Delusion seems too much akin to the mock Possessions and infernal Accomplishments, which most of the Possessionists of this Age pretend to, so that they are most of them meer Phantasms and Appearances, and no more; Nor is the Spirit of Divination, the Magic, the Necromancing, and other Arts which were call’d Diabolical, found to be of any Use in modern Practice, at least, in these Parts of the World; but the Devil seems to do most of his Work himself, and by shorter Methods ”

“ Devils and goblins and ghosts were as plentiful as saints. The bones of the dead were used to cure the living. Cemeteries were hospitals and corpses were physicians. The saints practiced magic, the pious communed with God in dreams, and the course of events was changed by prayer. The credulous demanded the marvelous, the miraculous, and the priests supplied the demand. The sky was full of signs, omens of death and disaster, and the darkness thick with devils endeavoring to mislead and enslave the souls of men. ”

“ During the latter period of the Middle Ages the grim and ascetic contemplation of death caused the artists of that period to represent it as the devil, the father of sin, horned and cloven-hoofed, carrying {364}off the sinful souls and forcing them into the mouth of hell. ”

“ Besides the above-named gods and demons, we have spirits of the whirlwind and the Northern Lights; gnomes; and a host of inferior demons, as well as various grades of sorcerers, especially Wind-sorcerers, Word-sorcerers, or soothsayers, and Death-sorcerers, or necromancers. ”