Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a diversion; they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs with glee, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and he pulls

In the literary period after Homer (c. 800 B.C.), Hesiod writes about the five successive races of humankind: the golden, the silver, the bronze, the heroic, and the iron. He states that the golden race lives on in the form of "benevolent daemons," which is a privilege given to them by Zeus. Hesiod also establishes a divine hierarchy, with the Olympian gods at the highest realm. After the Olympians are the good spirits of the upper order, who are followed by the "bad" spirits of a lower order. The Greeks worshiped all three groups because they could place blame on the spirits of the lower order when bad things happened, thereby exonerating the gods and the daemons of the upper order (Luck 1985, 181). Plutarch, a Platonist from the first century A.D., stated that Hesiod, his kinsman from Boiotia, was the first to distinguish between the daimones and the gods and the first to distinguish between good and bad daimones. Plutarch differs from Hesiod, however, in his belief that the men of the golden age are transformed into daimones because Plutarch believes that daimones are really the souls of the departed.

the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn't it?... I think that if the Devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness. (Dostoevsky 1936, 283).

The question that remains is whether the concepts of demons and the Devil are truly helpful in understanding and conquering evil. Russell states that "The Devil is a metaphor. Even as such he is not to be dismissed, for we have no access to absolute reality and must always rely upon the metaphors that our minds manufacture from sense observations, reason, and unconscious elements" (Russell 1984, 307). If demons and the Devil are only metaphors or personifications of evil, then there must be an alternative way of understanding evil since these metaphors have not seemed to work for everyone or every religion. With the knowledge that evil increases evil, violence produces more violence, and hatred stirs even greater hatred, we should grasp intuitively that love must be the remedy for evil. Unfortunately, this lesson is far from being grasped in the twentieth century, over 2000 years after the search for such a solution began.

Some topics in this essay:
Ignatius Smyrn, Gustav Jung, Egyptian Thamous, , Delphi AD, Originally Greek, Russell Devil, Turks They've, Greeks Romans, Mesopotamia Syria, brenk 1986, demons devil, russell 1977, evil spirits, greek roman, luck 1985, spirits lower, ancient daemonology, beliefs demons, development ancient daemonology, baby laughs, negative connotations attached, beliefs demons devil, evil spirits demons, influence greek roman,