Superstition

Ignorance leads to superstition and this usually leads to belief. Belief transforms society and then we end up with people acting out their lives upon a belief system built up on their ancestors’ ignorance.

Ignorance is the result of a lack of education, which leads to a lack of confidence. This tends to make people believe anything they are told by someone they think is more learned or wiser than themselves. Even recent history has shown how easy it is for people to be persuaded into a bewildering belief pattern that they are willing to die for, for example, the kamikaze pilots and the followers of religious fanatics such as David Koresh at Waco or James Jones at Jonestown.

Over the years and especially since the Reformation, evil spirits have been synonymous with witches and witchcraft, but the fact of the matter is that witches are also wary of evil spirits and they are not one and the same. Of course, there are evil witches just as there are all kinds of evil people and it should be pointed out that people committing the most evil acts in this day and age are mostly Christians, whether it be the killings in Ireland and Kosovo, or the child killers that we see reported in the newspapers day in, day out.

Witchcraft has always been with us. However, around the 15th century society split into two groups - pagans who were “those in the country not converted to Christianity” and the Christian townspeople. The Church was not too happy that the common people were not converting to Christianity, therefore not coming under their control and not paying enough taxes.

These pagans followed and respected people like witches, witch doctors or shamans, who were knowledgeable in the magical arts and particularly understood how to use nature to their advantage. They may even have been able to look into the future. The Church with all its power easily persuaded the ignorant pagans that witchcraft was evil by sending their delegates out to murder and torture a few hundred thousand here and there. This heralded the decline of witchcraft, steadily the pagans became Christians and from then on witchcraft could only exist in secret.

It was about this time that printing and books arrived, along with depictions of pagan religious beliefs and gods such as Pan, thought of by the educated as an absurd joke. ‘Evil’ had to be pictured as something and so Mr D.Evil was born and depicted as some sort of pagan comical figure with horns.

The consensus of opinion is that the word devil seems to be derived from translating the Hebrew word satan (meaning ‘the adversary of God’) into the Greek word diablos (meaning ‘personal guardian spirits’) and then into the English ‘demon’ and finally twisted into the word ‘devil’.

So here we have what started out as perhaps one of the first cartoon characters, a belief now so strongly fixed in people’s consciousness, that many actually believe there is such a horned being and that this devil can govern certain people to do its evil deeds, whereas the original Satan idea was that, by understanding evilness is within each of us and not separate from us, people could control and so transform their own evil energies or wicked thoughts into goodness and good deeds. You are not a slave to evilness and when this is apparent to you, you are master of it and so can banish it.

So where is Hell?

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