Abomination

“ For such as now delight in vanity, cruelty, filthiness, superstition, or idolatry, shall be adjudged to the fire inextinguishable, in the which they shall be tormented for ever, as well in their own bodies, as in their souls, which now they give to serve the Devil in all abomination. ”

“ And upon a wing of abominations he shall cause desolation, even until the consummation, and that which is determined be poured upon the desolate. The Prophets, in representing kingdoms by Beasts and Birds, put their wings stretcht out over any country for their armies sent out to invade and rule over that country. Hence a wing of abominations is an army of false Gods: for an abomination is often put in scripture for a false God; as where Chemosh is called [10] the abomination of Moab, and Molech the abomination of Ammon. ”

“ These things are bad enough, but they are small and contemptible in comparison with that most cruel abomination, or most abominable cruelty, by which either set is so deluded that neither perishes of its wound. There the enchantment of fields is feared ”

“ Devils are foul spirits; God’s great enemies. Their habitation is the blackness of darkness; a place of the utmost filthiness, abomination, darkness, disgrace and torment. O, how would you rather ten thousand times have no place of abode at all, have no being, than to have a place [with devils] !
(3) If you die unconverted, you will have the worse place in hell for having had a seat or place in God’s house in this [Pg 76] world. As there are many mansions, places of different degrees of honor in heaven, so there are various abodes and places or degrees of torment and misery in hell ”

“ In the famous cities of the Continent, and in exquisite Swiss villages, we have the most noisome stinks and sights, yet we hear nothing of fever. In fact, it almost seems a rule that, where Heaven throws the greatest beauty and magnificence, man should exhibit the greatest abominations. ”

“ Before they committed the crime of crimes, before they killed their Master, before the cross, before the slaying of Christ, it was an abomination. ”

“ They are much worse than the worst form of the doctrine of materiality. These aberrations betoken a perverse and prurient play of the abnormal fancy—groping for the very holy of holies in kennels running with the most senseless and god-abandoned abominations. Our natural superstitions are bad enough ”

“ Those are marked for ruin who persist in sin, and are not ashamed of the abominations they have committed, Jer. ”

“ I called it mother and knelt before it in tears. I called it my beloved and felt its ripe kiss of fulfilled desire. I called it devil and whore, vampire and murderer. It invited me to the tenderest dreams of love and to the most horrible abominations—nothing was too good and precious for it, nothing too bad and vile. ”

“ Thine abominations shall be in the midst of thee - They shall ever stare thee in the face, upbraid thee with thy ingratitude and disobedience, and be witnesses against thee.
Verse 5
An evil, an only evil - The great, the sovereign, the last exterminating evil, is come: the sword, the pestilence, the famine, and the captivity. Many MSS. read אחר achar, after. So evil cometh after evil; one instantly succeeds another. ”

“ These devils are life-size, and so are the nude male and female figures suffering torments. The mouth of hell is represented as a yawning beast, vomiting fire and smoke, into the jaws of which the nude wicked are tumbling. ”

“ Cursed—always blood—and witchery—you cannot get rid of it—the thought of Hell—and the faces of your dead who died foully—your disfigured dead—and your child slaying your child—both damned—and singeing in Hell! ”

“ Rather must that monstrous shape be a focus for all the evil in unbounded space throughout the eons past and to come–and those eldritch symbols be vile sentient ikons endowed with a morbid life of their own and ready to wrest themselves from the parchment for the reader's destruction. To the meaning of that monster and of those hieroglyphs I had no clue, but I knew that both had been traced with a hellish precision and for no namable purpose. As I studied the leering characters, their kinship to the symbols on that ominous lock in the cellar became more and more manifest. ”

“ Moreover, so far as esthetic theory was involved, if the psychic emanations of human creatures be grotesque distortions, what coherent representation could express or portray so gibbous and infamous a nebulosity as the specter of a malign, chaotic perversion, itself a morbid blasphemy against nature? Molded by the dead brain of a hybrid nightmare, would not such a vaporous terror constitute in all loathsome truth the exquisitely, the shriekingly unnamable? ”

“ The inferior demons—the rabble rout of Hell, amused themselves by drilling holes in the skulls of some of their victims, and inserting a spoonful of fused metal—the extract of a heap of books which were seething in a bulky black cauldron, a hell-broth of heretical ideas. ”

“ Alongside of these guardian angels there appear evil spirits and demons. "These demons were everywhere: they lurked in every corner, watching for their prey. The city streets knew their malevolent presence, the rivers, the seas, the tops of the mountains. They appeared sometimes as serpents gliding noiselessly upon their victims; as birds, horrid of mien, flying resistlessly to destroy or afflict; as beings in human form, grotesque, malformed, awe-inspiring through their hideousness. ”

“ Or, it may be, with demons, who impair The strength of better thoughts, and seek their prey In melancholy bosoms, such as were Of moody texture from their earliest day, And loved to dwell in darkness and dismay, Deeming themselves predestined to a doom Which is not of the pangs that pass away; Making the sun like blood, the earth a tomb, The tomb a hell, and hell itself a murkier gloom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Accordingly we are told that the devils appear clad in filthy and tattered garments; that they dwell in deserts, bogs, and miry places—some of them in caves and dens like those of wild beasts; that among the objects by which they are surrounded, are dreary deserts, rocky and barren wastes, thorns and thistles, ferocious beasts and venomous reptiles, dirty pools and heaps of filth. And these things (all of which are spiritual in their nature) are but the embodied forms, under the law of correspondence, of the filthy and infernal loves of the evil spirits themselves. ”

“ And the ancient demon, the spirit of prehistoric confusion, of hoary chaos, rejoiced in the destruction of things, while the wild eyes of the madman reflected horror, like the horror of the death agonies of some monster. ”

“ This sounds like the black art. Are you a necromancer?” she murmured incredulously.
“At my magic wand cities rise and fall, villains commit crime and are punished, romances blossom and fade, the world laughs and weeps and rejoices,” he boasted calmly. ”

“ In some frightful pictures death was represented also as an eyeless corpse, out of which all kinds of goblins, demons, and bad dreams were swarming, like maggots. Of course such are the pictures referred to here by the poet. Believe in goblins and devils, and you will see them; believe that all men are wicked, and you will find them wicked; believe that Nature is evil, and Nature will certainly destroy you, just as the demons in the mediæval story tore to pieces the magician who had not learned the secret of making them obey. ”

“ The ghosts have therefore been laid, and the devil has been cast into outer darkness, and now the delight of our spirits is to dwell on all the vices and blackest passions of our nature, tricked out in a masquerade dress of heroism and disappointed benevolence: the whole secret of which lies in forming combinations that contradict all our experience, and affixing the purple shred of some particular virtue to that precise character, in which we should be most certain not to find it in the living world ”

“ Ghouls, ghosts and warlocks, vile witches and the mighty company who traffic in hell's commerce shall not prevail against them. In lands as yet unknown thy name and blood shall spread confusion in the hosts of evil. ”

“ The ancient demons, the good genii of mankind, shorn of their honours, driven forth, pursued, hunted down, remained hidden in the woods. There, if they still showed themselves to men, they adopted, to hold them in awe, a terrible face, a red, green, or black skin, baleful eyes, an enormous mouth fringed with boars' teeth, horns, a tail, and sometimes a human face on their bellies. The nymphs remained fair, and the barbarians, ignorant of the winsome names they bore in other days, called them fairies, and, imputing to them a capricious character and puerile tastes, both feared and loved them. ”

“ Harpies and vampires and werewolves—what are they but magnifications, distortions of the great birds and bats and ferocious dogs that harassed and tortured our ancestors? It is easy enough to arouse fear by such means. It is easy enough to frighten men with the flames at the mouth of hell, because they are hot and shrivel and burn the flesh—and who does not understand and dread a fire? ”

“ The maddened damned, crowded together like a herd of sheep, demons grabbing shrieking souls who hide their eyes and ears with horror, the falling of bodies which come down like masses of lead, and in the extreme right-hand corner Minos, evil and undisturbed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We are each our own devil, and we make
This world our hell. ”

“ They raised storms by magic rites, they had charms against the hurt of weapons, they had their assemblies on wild heath and mountain-top, they could ride through the air on beasts and even turn into witch-cats and were-wolves themselves, they had familiar spirits, they had intercourse with incubi and succubi, they conveyed thorns, pins, feathers and such things into their victims’ bodies, they caused disease by demoniacal possession, they could bewitch by spells and the evil eye, by practising on images and symbols, on food and property. ”

“ I looked out over the landscape, with its glorious autumn coloring, to the expanse of turquoise waters beyond, and wondered if, above the fleecy clouds and the infinite blue of the heavens, there was an Omnipotent monstrosity Who gloried in the torture of what He created, and brought forth life that He might wreak vengeance upon it. Ignorance, fear, and superstition have led men into 94 strange paths. ”

“ Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss what could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor—a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate-distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half-transparent devils of a race no man might mistake—the crawling reptiles of the nameless city. ”

“ They dreaded the mysterious power of spells and incantations, of potent herbs and execrable rites, which could extinguish or recall life, influence the passions of the soul, blast the works of [27] creation, and extort from the reluctant demons the secrets of Futurity. They believed with the wildest inconsistency that the preternatural dominion of the the air, of earth, and of hell, was exercised from the vilest motives of malice or gain by some wrinkled hags or itinerant sorcerers who passed their obscure lives in penury and contempt. ”

“ How could creatures shaped like men prove themselves such fiends, such hideous devils of malignity? It sickened me with horror, and I shrank from those dead bodies as if each had been a grim and threatening ghost. ”

“ Some readers may think of it as a frantic revel of grim skeletons, or perhaps—like me in my boyish musings—imagine nameless shapes with Death and Hell gleaming in their faces, each clasping a mortal beguiled to its embrace, all flitting and floating round and round to unearthly music, and gradually receding through vast mysterious gloom till they are lost in its horrible obscurity. ”

“ A. Pride, Fulness of Bread, and abundance of Idleness, and I may say earthly Mindedness or Covetousness, that mighty, mighty, almost Almighty Monster, the chiefest of the Seven Devils and Supream Ruler, Head and Governor in Hell, Babylon and Bottomless Pit. The other Six Devils have Slain their Thousands and Tens of Thousands; but this cursed, ugly, hateful, damned piece of Deformity, and Mother Midwife, and Nurse of Enormities, has destroyed more Millions of Thousands, as it is thought and hath been thought by discerning and observing Men. ”

“ These fables of devils have covered the world with blood; they have filled the world with fear, and I am going to do what I can to free the world of these insatiate monsters. Small and great they have filled the world with monsters, they have made the world a synonym of liar and ferocity. ”

“ It arose, no doubt, from this taste—from the darker shade which spread over men’s minds in the twelfth century—that demons, instead of animals, were introduced to personify the evil-doers of the time. ”

“ If one would paint three, four, or five devils tormenting one soul with divers agonies, — one applying fire, another serpents, another red-hot pincers, and another holding him bound with chains, — it would have a fine effect, especially if the whole were distinctly shown, and rage and misery should appear on the features of this damned soul. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Such of the shadows as succeed in eluding the evil spirit and effecting an entrance are for ever happy; on the other hand, those whom the malicious female demon succeeds in precipitating into the abyss sink into the region of endless woe and torture. ”