Apuleius, On the God of Socrates 6
1.
Gods are not the only superhuman beings who feature in real-world religions. A whole host of lesser beings crowd the space between humans and the heavens. The ancient Greeks called these beings daemones. From this our own word "demon" derives, yet, unlike the demons of the New Testament or the saints' lives, these spirits were not unambiguously maleficent.
Fickle as the air of which they were made, the daemones were sometimes good, sometimes evil. As Apuleius, the author of the most famous ancient fantasy-story, the Metamorphosis, tells us in his theological treatise On the God of Socrates, they served as the gods' intermediaries with mankind, transmitting prophetic dreams and inspiring seers. They could even direct the lives of individual persons: each man had his guardian daemon, and the philosopher Socrates himself felt (so Plato's Apology tells us) that he was directed through life by the inspiration of his daimonion, the titular "god" of Apuleius' treatise.
The gulf between gods and men was not impermeable, therefore, and not everything that received worship was a "god" in a strict sense, that is, a good and powerful being fully removed from the corruption of the world. The gods' underlings had their place, and deserved their due, just like the emperors' subordinates, or the patrons--the bosses, or perhaps the dons, as it were--to whom the average Roman looked for support in time of need.
2.
The daemones were drawn to the sacrifices of their worshippers. From this fact arose one of the fateful episodes of Roman history. Roman magistrates were accustomed to sacrifice and read the message of the gods in the entrails of the sacrificial victim. The reading was the work of Etruscan soothsayers, the haruspices, and relied (so Apuleius, for example, reports) on the work of intermediate daemones, who manipulated the entrails and other signs, such as lightning bolts, to make known the will of the gods.
This custom had been established for a very long time. There was, however, within the Roman Empire a growing people that denied the lawfulness of sacrifice and embrace the worship of One God alone. To the Christians, all the gods of the nations were demons, as the Psalmist had said: not just lesser spirits, that is, but lesser spirits who were addicted to nothing but evil, corruption, and rebellion against the only God. Against them they invoked the power of Christ, who had destroyed the kingdom of the demons by rising from Hell and the grave.
One day around the year 300, the emperor Galerius, one of the Tetrarchs (the "Gang of Four," as it were, who jointly ruled the empire from 293 to 305), was offering his customary sacrifices to the gods. Several members of his entourage made the sign of the cross, probably over their foreheads, as was the custom for the baptized. The demons were driven off, and the sacrifice failed. Galerius was infuriated, and purged his army and palace of Christians.
A few years later, he began to agitate with the senior emperor, Diocletian, for a more universal campaign. Advised by his military and civilian subordinates and encouraged by the guidance brought from the oracle of Apollo at Miletus, Diocletian concurred. On February 23, 303, Diocletian and Galerius ordered the church in Diocletian's capital, Nicomedia (modern İzmit, at the east end of the Sea of Marmara in Turkey), to be burned to the ground. The next ten years would see near-continuous persecution of Christians in the eastern half of the Roman Empire, and the rise to power of its first Christian ruler: Constantine.
3.
Our account of the affairs in Galerius' court comes from On the Deaths of Persecutors, a tract written in a mood of ferocious exultation by a prominent Christian member of Diocletian's court, the rhetoric professor Lactantius, and dedicated to a Christian who had been imprisoned and probably tortured for his refusal to sacrifice to the gods. Lactantius certainly had no sympathy for Galerius, and we may doubt whether he had accurate knowledge of events in his court.
Still, the demonic mechanism underlying soothsaying is precisely what the pagan Apuleius had described a century and a half earlier, and the ability of the sign of the cross to disrupt divination was a well-known problem. Some two centuries after Lactantius wrote, another Christian writer, a biographer of the great Severus of Antioch, would give the pagan explanation for why it worked: the gods did not like to be reminded of human suffering. That was a very old, and authentic, pagan notion. Though pagans and Christians agreed on nothing else about sacrifices, they did agree on this: they really did involve demons, and the invocation of the cross could, at least sometimes, interfere with their successful operation as an instrument of soothsaying.
4.
I have gone on at length about a single historical example. It is, I think, worth the consideration. Often, fantasy-writers think of world-building as a matter of basic architecture: are humans the only race, or are there elves and dwarves too? Are there orcs and, if so, are they good? Is there a Dark Lord, or only a bunch of grey ones? Is the world ruled by Powers who dwell off in some cardinal direction, or do the inhabitants expect to solve their own affairs, with or without the intervention of heavenly beings?
These are the facts of a fantasy-story, the nuts and bolts of the world, and they are very much worth thinking through. But there is a great deal of room in which to explore the subjective experience of those facts, as well. I have already mentioned the possibility of religious conflict in my preceding post, and hope to devote the whole of another post to it.
For now, it is enough to observe this: the gods and lesser spiritual beings of a fantasy world may not only be different from our own--or from those the average Westerner is accustomed to think about, at any rate, which is not the same thing--but also perceived in contradictory ways by the inhabitants of the imaginary world itself. Put differently: if a story is going to have gods or lesser spirits who interact with the characters, there probably are going to be different opinions about them, and those opinions likely will matter, if not to the story you wish to tell, then to the wider world in which it takes place.
It is, however, important not to let typical modern ways of viewing the world limit one's writing. It has become rather popular in contemporary fantasy (perhaps especially urban fantasy) to have demonic or angelic beings be corporeal, subject to wounding or even killing by sword, crossbow, or high explosive (yes, I have seen this, or something like it, in an appallingly bad book of fantasy!) While it is perfectly fine, I suppose, to imagine races of elves or orcs--that is, people who, while corporeal like humans, are somehow better or worse than we--that is not what a demon (or, still less, an angel) is, in pagan or in Christian thought. Demons are, for the Platonists at least, neither immaterial intelligences, like the properly immortal gods, nor do they have bodies of earthly matter, like mortal humans; they are spirits, and have to be dealt with accordingly.
It is important, therefore, not to make one's demons too un-spiritual. I do not mean, of course, that they should sit around and meditate or some such: that is not what it means to be a spirit. But it will do no good to try to fight off an airish beast with a crossbow, any more than to treat a virus by hitting it with a shovel. If a fantasy story is to have enemies solely of flesh and blood, well and good, but one suspects that fantasy-demons have often been made corporeal because the author does not realize that many people actually do believe in the reality of incorporeal, personal beings. If one really is going to have evil demons, therefore, they ought to be dealt with by the means through which the story's peoples deal with their gods, their gods' minions, and their gods' inhuman adversaries, whether prayer or expiatory sacrifices or (who knows) feeding raw bulbs of garlic to a virgin who is wearing a tunic woven of a single unbroken thread of pure gold. Religion itself can be a method for fighting the fantastic enemies, and it may very well work.
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