Demonizing the Other

Antisemitism, Racism and Xenophobia

Robert S. Wistrich, Robert S. Wistrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135852511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

At the close of the twentieth century the stereotyping and demonization of 'others', whether on religious, nationalist, racist, or political grounds, has become a burning issue. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to how and why we fabricate images of the 'other' as an enemy or 'demon' to be destroyed. This innovative book fills that gap through an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural approach that brings together a distinguished array of historians, anthropologists, psychologists, literary critics, and feminists.
The historical sweep covers Greco-Roman Antiquity, the MIddle Ages, and the MOdern Era. Antisemitism receives special attention because of its longevity and centrality to the Holocaust, but it is analyzed here within the much broader framework of racism and xenophobia. The plurality of viewpoints expressed in this volume provide fascinating insights into what is common and what is unique to the many varieties of prejudice, stereotyping, demonization, and hatred.

Part I

1

Demonizing the “Other”

Harumi Befu

Stanford University, California and Kyoto Bunkyo University,Japan

The literature on demons and demonization almost invariably and in the same breath makes references to “vampires,” “devils,” “satans,” “witches,” “sorcerers,” and the like. Together they form a class of beings which threaten “good people.” While occupying somewhat different semantic spaces, they also partially share the semantic domain as “demons.” Thus “demons” are not always clearly distinguishable from other beings in this class.

When we examine the phenomena of demon and demonization cross-culturally, we immediately run into the problem of identifying the equivalents of demons in different cultures. Is a “demon” in England the same as one in New England, for instance? This problem is compounded when we cross linguistic boundaries. Is a “demon” in English the same as “exotiká” in Greek,¹ or “yakşa”² or “devata”³ in South Asia?

These are reasonable questions to which we have no neat answer. What we can say from the comparative standpoint is that having faith in the unity of humanity, similar phenomena, judiciously considered, may expose a fundamental commonality of human problems and their solutions. We posit that demons and demonization are part of a widespread, if not universal, human problem. They are simultaneously a means by which humans try to solve problems, misguided and incomplete though such a solution inevitably may be. For the time being, however, let us accept “demon” to mean beings which embody evil, i.e., immorality of various kinds.

Demonic Appearance

Demons as a concrete manifestation of immorality and evil typically assume an imaginary form, part-human, that arouses dread, fear, and horror. In the film, Demon Lover, the demon has two horns, fangs, fur all over the body, glittering red eyes, and claws on the fingers. On the island of Naxos in dreaded reptile. They are described as “dragon-like” or “beast-faced,” and assume distinct names. Gorgónes is half woman and half fish; Exotiká may have animal legs or a fish’s tail instead of legs. Spanós, on the other hand, is a man with no facial hair, a wily and treacherous character.⁴

In Japan demons (oni) assume a human form, but are equipped with pairs of fangs in the upper and lower jaws. Often monocular, they are either red-, black-, or blue-green-faced, and have one horn in the middle of the head or a pair of horns. They sometimes leave one huge footprint in snow or mud and subsisting on human blood and human children, they are capable of traveling eighty to ninety kilometers overnight. They are typically large and have extraordinary strength which no human can match.⁵

Demons also assume the forms of dreaded animals, ill-thought of in the local culture. But they are in part feared precisely because of their association with demons. In Greece, a demon often takes the form of a goat (especially female), a snake, a cow, a donkey, a cat, a hare, or a dog. Many of these modes of demonic manifestation share grotesque abnormality and animality as defined by the local culture. It is no wonder, then, that in the Middle Ages in Europe, many of those accused of maleficia were ugly or deformed, solitary eccentrics, or had a bad temper and a sharp tongue.⁶ These are traits which, being beyond the pale of normalcy, placed these individuals at the symbolic margin of society, suspected of demonic activities.

Demons, on the other hand, may assume a form which totally conceals their evilness, representing the opposite of their heinous character. A Sarakatsanos has encountered a devil who appeared as an Orthodox priest in red robes. The devil often pretends to be an ordinary Sarakatsanos.⁷ The heinousness of the demon lies precisely in its treachery, in the ability to disguise itself in an innocent or even a noble character.

The devil appearing in the form of a beautiful woman is a common sight in the demonological landscape of world ethnography. It was a major basis for the great European witch-hunt from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries.⁸ Nereids, a form of female demon in Greece, are beautiful women, impeccable in behavior, good housekeepers, and extremely talented. In India, the female Yakshini, is portrayed in sculpture as beautiful, voluptuous, and erotic. Kapferer has argued that this phenomenon is closely related to the ritually rationalized notion of pollution and religiously justified sinfulness of women, which legitimizes the inferior cultural position that women occupy in many societies.⁹

This cultural construction of the demon as having a normal human façade but with evil intentions, allows a logic which enables inference from human appearances to a presumed hidden demonic character and from apparent demonic traits of a person to their presumed demonic substance. It is their ability to transfigure themselves from one form entirely into another and to totally deceive unsuspecting humans, which gives demons a power that is threatening and terrifying to humans.

A demon is not, therefore, a being with specific substance. Instead, it is an abstract entity—with evil will and intentions—which assumes a variety of forms and is capable of transforming itself from one being to another. In Stewart’s words, the “abstract concept of evil represented by the Devil is mediated by the plethora of anthropomorphic or zoomorphic exotiká.”¹⁰ Herein lies the justification of Kapferer’s proposal for the concept of “the demonic” as an attribute, instead of positing a concrete substantive being called “demon.”¹¹

Doers of Evil

The existence of the demonic is predicated on the definition of morality in the community. Looking at it from the flip side, “the monstrous is an appropriate subversion of whatever the society holds to be aesthetic. It entails an affront to the moral order—society’s ideal of what is good, beautiful.”¹² A demon is an icon for the bad and the evil of the world. Since evil forces are invisible, demons are a useful means for visualizing the inner obstacles and terrors that a person must overcome. Since demons are symbolized by aberrant behavior, this then becomes proof of the demon’s existence.

Demonic manifestations, such as in witchcraft, are grounded in individuals who are under attack by demons, suffer mentally and physically, succumb to the Devil’s temptations, and traffic with devils. Remedies, such as exorcism, are performed for the benefit of suffering individuals. The organic and psychological aspects of demonology should never be slighted in this process. Nonetheless, we shall focus on the collective side of the story, the demonic as a moral issue. If demonic manifestations in illness and suffering are signs of cosmic disorder, then it stands to reason that exorcist ceremonies “actively restore an order and occasion the restructuring of social and political relationships….”¹³

In Japan, demons mislead women, rob travellers on highways, cause crop failure, bring about diseases, and otherwise cause human sufferings of diverse sorts. In Greece, demons may cause disease and illness, leading people astray and causing them to sin. They provoke lewdness, shamelessness, greed, and envy. They stir up illusions, make people lethargic, and promote lies, pride, vanity, evil, idolatry, and covetousness. Demons defile; they delude and pollute. In Greece they can cause abnormal swelling of the penis and make men impotent. They can trick humans into death. Exotiká in Greece are blamed for miscarriages, infant mortality, for drying up a mother’s milk.¹⁴ In the form of wild exotic women (nereids), they can seduce men, take their brains away, destroy their ability to reason.¹⁵ Stríngla in Greece is said to drink the blood of children, eat their entrails, and kill their parents. A nereid can harm a woman who marries a man that the nereid wanted to marry. In Medieval Europe, witches were believed to kill babies, hence midwives were prime suspects since many newborn babies died in their hands, presumably aiding the witch’s insatiable craving for very young flesh.¹⁶

Sutherland’s following summary of the dimensions of evil or “disvalue” as embodied in yakşa and other demons is informative¹⁷:

1. opposite of the good

2. illusion, delusion

3. impediment to performing ritual

4. abuse of power

5. disturbance of social hierarchies and relationships

6. suffering and frustration of life and death

7. otherness conceived of as enemy and threat.

8. obstacle to union with the gods.

The demonic is thus the anti-structure of the moral community.

Because demons are manifestations of evil and what is bad, in time of social dislocation, when the society is in flux, demons engage in intensified activity and social disruption. Demonic (= witchcraft) activities are thus “a symptom of a sick society.”¹⁸ The infamous Salem witch-hunt of 1692, according to Boyer and Nissenbaum, basically resulted from the impossibility of locating an unambiguous center of authority in a divided Salem, due to political, social, and religious strife and changes taking place in late seventeenth-century Salem in an era of upheaval.¹⁹

Witch-hunts and exorcism may be thus viewed as an attempt to restore homeostasis.²⁰ The witch-hunt in Orissa, India which Bailey analyzes so deftly, illustrates the homeostatic model. It began when a girl in Bisipara, Orissa, died and was divined to have been killed by devata who had possessed her. This devata was kept by a washerman who earned far more income than he should—for reasons I cannot go into here—thereby disturbing the social equilibrium—and more importantly—the moral order of the village. Identifying the washerman and accusing him of witchcraft were ways to restore the moral balance of the community, according to Bailey. “Morality triumphed,” as he puts it.²¹

Structural Separation of Good and Evil: Spatial and Temporal

Good and evil are in constant struggle, in which the latter continually tries to make inroads into the good. In the Greek community of Sarakatsan shepherds, “God and the Devil fight a pitiless battle for the souls of men in which the three elements in the struggle are the grace of God, the cunning and subtlety of the Devil, and the will of man.”²² A community must therefore try diligently to prevent the erosion of “the space for the good” by setting up barriers. These barriers are a mode of spatial/temporal separation and ritual/symbolic segregation. The two are often combined. The transitional, temporal and spatial boundaries are interstices of order and disorder, a liminal zone. This liminal zone is dangerous. Sorcery is most potent, as is demonic attack generally, according to Kapferer, at the margins, during moments of transition or at points of hierarchical reordering, where the cosmic unity is momentarily out of joint.²³ Mary Douglas recognized structurally marginal areas as being prone to magical danger, and particularly to witchcraft.²⁴

Demons, as a manifestation of ritual pollution, prefer to reside outside the ritually clean and purified community. It thus m...