4010

Concerning the Evil Demon, we know that he is regarded as the antithesis of God and yet is very close to him in his nature. His history has not been so well studied as that of God; not all religions have adopted the Evil Spirit, the opponent of God, and his prototype in the life of the individual has so far remained obscure. One thing, however, is certain: gods can turn into evil demons when new gods oust them. When one people has been conquered by another, their fallen gods not seldom turn into demons in the eyes of the conquerors. The evil demon of the Christian faith - the Devil of the Middle Ages - was, according to Christian mythology, himself a fallen angel and of a godlike nature. It does not need much analytic perspicacity to guess that God and the Devil were originally identical - were a single figure which was later split into two figures with opposite attributes.¹ In the earliest ages of religion God himself still possessed all the terrifying features which were afterwards combined to form a counterpart of him.

We have here an example of the process, with which we are familiar, by which an idea that has a contradictory - an ambivalent - content becomes divided into two sharply contrasted opposites. The contradictions in the original nature of God are, however, a reflection of the ambivalence which governs the relation of the individual to his personal father. If the benevolent and righteous God is a substitute for his father, it is not to be wondered at that his hostile attitude to his father, too, which is one of hating and fearing him and of making complaints against him, should have come to expression in the creation of Satan. Thus the father, it seems, is the individual prototype of both God and the Devil. But we should expect religions to bear ineffaceable marks of the fact that the primitive primal father was a being of unlimited evil - a being less like God than the Devil.

¹ Cf. Reik, 1923, Chapter VII.