Demons deserve our sympathy

They aren't the irrationally evil beings you think they are

I spent yesterday singing Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. There’s a famous “Demon’s Chorus” in this piece, which made me think… well, about the demons. I felt sorry for them. Seriously.

In the Dream of Gerontius, demons are an auditory representation of mindless evil and cruelty. The Soul doesn’t hear them until after death, but of course mindless evil and cruelty exist in life too, so they must have been present throughout its earthly life. Perhaps it encountered them a few times but didn’t realise what they were. Or perhaps it never went to places where demons hang out.

Anyway, the Soul is disturbed by the sound. Demons are noisy things. The Soul asks the Angel what the “fierce hubbub” is, and comments that it ought to find it frightening, though fear now seems to be impossible. The Angel replies:

We are now arrived close on the judgement court; that sullen howl is from the demons who assemble there, hungry and wild to claim their property, and gather souls for Hell.

The Soul is fearless, but we, the living, are invited to fear the demons. If they get the chance they will seize us and carry us off to Hell, where they will torture us for eternity. The Angel tells us that the hate they express is "the restless panting of their being". It has neither reason nor justification. They hate because they are evil, and they torment because it gives them pleasure.

But the demons themselves tell another story:

"Dispossessed, aside thrust, chucked down by the sheer might of a despot's will.”

This makes them sound more like innocent victims than evil monsters, doesn’t it?.

As they continue, the story unfolds. It is one that many people will find all too familiar.

The demons say that heaven is theirs by right. They are the original occupants, brutally evicted by a despotic God who gave their rightful property to his slavish worshippers:

Who, after expelling their hosts… gave each forfeit crown to psalm-droners, to canting groaners, to ev'ry slave, and pious cheat, and crawling knave, who lick'd the dust under his feet.

The demons despise God’s human followers, who foolishly believe God’s deceitful promise that if they do as he says they will earn the right to live in the place stolen from the demons:

Low-born clods of brute earth, they aspire to become gods, gods! by a new birth, and an extra grace, and a score of merits, as if aught could stand in place of the high thought and the glance of fire of the great spirits, the powers blest, the lords by right, the primal owners of the proud dwelling and realm of light

And the demons laugh at them for their subservience to God, which (with some justification) they believe is driven by fear and greed:

Virtue or vice, a knave’s pretence,
’Tis all the same, haha.
Dread of hellfire, of the venomous flame,
A coward’s plea, haha.

Give him his price, saint though he be,
From shrewd good sense, he'll slave for hire,
And doth but aspire to the heaven above
With sordid aim, and not from love.

But it is God the demons hate. They hate him for his injustice and cruelty. This doesn’t stem from “the restless panting of their being”, as the Angel alleges. It is a rational reaction to the way he has treated them - and still treats them. After all, they are still locked up in the outer darkness, unable to return to their homeland.

It’s hard to like the God of Gerontius. Not only did he brutally evict the demons from heaven, he also presides over an entire lake full of souls that didn’t quite make it to his impeccable standards and now lie in torment until he sees fit to let them into his kingdom. “Come back, O Lord,” they cry. “How long? How long?” There’s even an Angel who spends its entire time pleading with God to let them in. Towards the end of the piece, the Soul of Gerontius joins the tormented souls in the lake when, after briefly glimpsing God, he realises he hasn’t made the grade. It’s presented as a voluntary choice - “Take me away, and in the lowest deep, there let me be”. But he doesn’t have any alternative. God isn’t going to let him in, and the Angel is hardly going to help him gatecrash.

How can such a God be considered ‘good’? And whatever happened to the eternal sacrifice of Jesus, which was supposed to end all such suffering?

And yet it is the dispossessed demons we are supposed to believe are evil…

In truth, they are evil, but because of what has been done to them, not what they are (or were). "Dispossessed, aside thrust..." is all they can think about. It eats them up. Whatever “high thought” they had in the past has been consumed by their hatred of God and his followers, who have stolen their home and condemned them to an eternity of pain. They aren’t powerful enough to challenge God, but they’ll happily destroy his human worshippers if they can catch them. Hence the Angel's guardianship of the Soul as it passes them.

Newman’s fable is metaphorical, of course. But metaphor is a veil over reality. And this veil is particularly thin. A proud independent people evicted from their lands by a powerful ruler to make way for his own followers... now where else have we seen this?

British though I am, battles between “cowboys and Indians” often featured in my childhood games with my brothers. The ‘cowboys’ were always the goodies, and the ‘Indians’, the baddies. If ‘cowboys' killed ‘Indians’, that was self-defence even if the ‘cowboys’ attacked first, but if ‘Indians’ killed ‘cowboys’ that was an atrocity. Everyone knew the ‘Indians’ specialised in atrocities. Dammit, they scalped people. ‘Cowboys’ didn’t do that. But ‘cowboys’ did massacre ‘Indians’. In truth, there was brutality on both sides.

Underlying these childhood games was a pernicious - and frankly racist - myth. As children, we were taught to believe that the ‘Indians’ constantly attacked the 'cowboys’ for no other reason than irrational hate. But as an adult, I now know that if anything, it was the reverse. The ‘Indians’ - the proud Indigenous people of North America - had been brutally evicted from their lands by the ‘cowboys’, white settlers backed by the U.S. government and its army. “Dispossessed, aside thrust, chuck’d down by the sheer might of a despot’s will…”

Invading forces systematically dehumanise and ‘demonise’ the people they drive out of their lands. And those who settle on the stolen lands learn to fear and hate the people who lived there before, calling them ‘animals’, ‘vermin’, ‘demons’. Myths abound about the brutality of these ‘demons’.

As with all myths, there is a core of truth. Proud people evicted from their lands and brutally repressed to prevent them coming back may well hate those they see as the illegal occupiers of their lands. And hate can, with opportunity, become brutality. There isn’t any justification for this: but neither is there any justification for the eviction and brutal repression that led to it.

The demonised ‘Indians’ were not only fighting for their lands and their independence, but for their lives. During the long war between the Indigenous people of North America and the U.S. Government - for that is what it was, in reality - there were several massacres, of which perhaps the most notorious is the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee, in which over 250 largely unarmed civilians of the Lakota tribe were gunned down by the U.S. army.

The massacre at Wounded Knee occurred near the end of what has been called the Indigenous Holocaust. In 1492, there were an estimated 5 million Indigenous people living in the area now known as the United States (excluding Hawaii). By the time of Wounded Knee, only a few hundred thousand remained. Many were killed or died of wounds. Many died of famine and disease. And because so many adults and children died, many future children never came into existence. Russell Thornton estimates that settler colonialism cost the lives, including future lives, of at least 12 million Indigenous people in the United States alone, and over 100 million across the Americas as a whole.

I wonder how many demons lost their lives in the war with God and his angels? How many more died because of famine and disease? And how many future demons were never born? A remnant still clings to life, locked up in the outer darkness, forever forbidden to approach the light. They look with hatred on the human souls in the beautiful place that used to be theirs but which now they cannot enter. They pace to and fro, and howl in anger and frustration, as “beasts of prey” do when caged in tiny barren compounds and tormented by passing humans.

We wouldn’t now treat beasts of prey like this - at least, I hope we wouldn’t, whatever the Angel may think. But for demons, both metaphorical and real, this is still what passes for ‘justice’.

I didn't expect to feel sympathy for demons. But after singing the Demon's Chorus, now I do. I think Elgar felt some sympathy for them too. That final line, as they fade into the distance, is heartbreaking. "Dispossessed…dispossessed…aside thrust..." They have no hope. And when hope is gone, hate is all that is left.

I hope that today, children are no longer taught to demonise Indigenous people, but to recognise them as proud and independent people who have been dreadfully wronged, and who still, to this day, suffer the consequences of that wrong.

But the wrong done to Indigenous people is far from unique. Many more proud, independent peoples have been brutally driven out of their lands, condemned to eternal poverty and subjugation, and demonised when they try to fight back.

If Indigenous people are the ‘demons’ of the past, who are today’s demons?

If you would like to hear the Dream of Gerontius, the Bach Choir (of which I am a member) is performing it in the Festival Hall on Thursday 16th May. There are still a few tickets available. https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/classical-music/bach-choir-dream-gerontius?eventId=963086

Related listening:

Demon’s Chorus, Dream of Gerontius - Elgar (Ashkenazy)

Related reading:

When the world turns dark

Evil wears an ordinary face

The road to Armageddon

The ones who walk away from Omelas - Ursula le Guin

Header image: Temptation of St. Anthony (detail), Hieronymous Bosch. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Image of the Wounded Knee mass grave by Northwestern Photo Co.,available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a44690. Via Wikipedia.