Religious Thoughts: On Ardent Topics Of Our Time

By Catalin Negru

In every belief system spiritual entities have been labeled as good if they have acted in favor to people and as evil if they have threatened their existence. Furthermore, protective actions and dangerous actions have been classified as such based on the beholder’s level of understanding of order and chaos. Evil entities spread chaos that endangers people’s existence, while good entities create order that preserves human life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Feb 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781447821007

Book preview

Fear of Darkness and Its Religious Implications

In 970 A.D. French monk Abbo of Fleury wrote that demons in the shape of wolves, imitating wild goats bleating, were heard in the middle of the night and triggered panic in Anjou.¹ Across the Atlantic Native American legends speak about evil witches who transformed themselves into owl-beings. By day they still resemble humans, but by night they vomit up their souls (along with all their internal organs) and become undead owl-monsters that feed on human hearts.² Or in 1995, in Tanzania, panic erupted in Zanzibar regarding the nocturnal sodomizing assaults of a shape-shifting spirit called Popobawa (literally bat-wing).³ Across cultures around the globe a pattern can be noticed—good supernatural manifestations take place in broad daylight, while evil supernatural manifestations happen in darkness. Werewolves take their monstrous form at full moon, ghosts show themselves in the middle of the night, vampires cannot stand sunlight, or demons (devils) manifest in darkness in different shapes. Overall, darkness seems to be evil’s playground. Is there something supernatural about the moral division between light and darkness? Are some animals evil? Or is there something much more natural, biological, and very human, behind this issue?

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Every creature is adapted to its environment. If it is not well adapted, it dies prematurely. Some creatures are adapted to life on the ground, others to life underground, while others to life in the water. The coordinate of time can also be added to these spatial realms, because Earth is a planet that rotates around its own axis (movement of rotation) and around a medium-sized star (movement of revolution), the Sun. So, parts of Earth are exposed to light at different times.

Human beings have adapted to life in the day. Accordingly, they are visually dominated creatures and rely heavily on the sense of sight. Processing visual information is much more complex compared to processing information from the other senses we are equipped with. More than 50% of the cortex surface—that is the surface of the brain—is dedicated to processing information coming from the eyes. Naturally, all human senses are important, but a good part of our behavior, such as the ability to manipulate objects with our hands or feet, is based on vision.⁴ About 40% of the nerve fibers connected to the brain are linked to the retina. More neurons are dedicated to vision than the other four senses combined.⁵

Bats have good eyesight for day, but they hunt at night, so they rely heavily on sound. Bats emit high frequency sound pulses through their mouth or nose and listen to the echo. With this echo the bat can determine the size, shape and texture of objects in its environment. It is a technique called echolocation and it is also used by submarines. Bats’ echolocation is so sophisticated that they can detect an object the width of a human hair. So, it is easy to conclude that, of the available senses, a bat’s brain is mainly dedicated to processing sounds.⁶

The dog is neither a nocturnal nor a diurnal being—his main sense is smell. Dogs have 220 million olfactory receptors, compared to our 5 million. Dogs can pick up scents at impressively large distances, while their nostrils can operate independently of one another. This means that they not only detect an interesting scent, but they also roughly locate the origin of the scent.⁷ Dogs can detect odors in parts per trillion—in other words, a dog could detect a teaspoon of sugar in a million gallons of water, or two Olympic-sized pools worth. Dogs have a second olfactory capability that humans don’t have, made possible by an organ we don’t possess—the vomeronasal organ, also known as Jacobson’s organ.⁸ Dogs can determine if there is a danger based on smell before they can see it, or they can determine the previous presence of a being based on the olfactory mark left behind by it. As men see nuances and changes in light, dogs can perceive nuances and changes in odors.

Spiders have a hyper-sensitivity to touch. Through the massive number of hairs (known as trichobothria) on their legs, they are capable of detecting and tracing the origin of a vibration created by an object or another animal.⁹ It is the same with the mole.¹⁰

There are specialized and highly specialized creatures. Every species relies on senses in order to operate in their environment, with one primary sense more developed than the others.¹¹ Senses dictate behavior and, further on, in the case of human beings senses dictate thinking and culture. When (the main) senses are altered or suppressed altogether and the brain no longer receives enough information about the environment, it goes into alert. If man panics when he no longer sees, we can assume that the dog panics when he no longer smells and the bat goes into alert when he no longer hears. In the case of light deprivation and a lack of visual information, the human brain covers the incertitude with possible threats and acts accordingly. This is how the chances of survival are kept at their maximum.

Nature is violent and beings survive by gathering and processing information. Lack of information means an incorrect evaluation of danger, which further means death. In prehistoric times people were scared of darkness because it was the hiding place for all sorts of predators, animal or human alike. Murderers kill in darkness, rapists rape in darkness, evil-doers do harmful things in darkness. So, the human brain adapted to this pattern and when there is no sufficient information it triggers a defensive response. What humans don’t know or don’t see, they fear.

Another interesting aspect that shaped our fear of darkness is the predisposition of man to exteriorize his thoughts, feelings or needs over entities and elements around him. This means he interprets them according to his intellectual limitations. The cat and the dog do not lick and toady their owners in order to show them affection, but to mark their territory. Through contact animals leave their olfactory print over humans and send a message to other animals that those people are taken. In a similar fashion the ancestral fear of darkness has caused the cultural effect of demonizing nocturnal beings or phenomena that are characteristic to or slightly more visible during the night, together with the invention of malefic entities and characters that manifest predominantly at the shelter of darkness.

The Moon, the luminary of the night, was mainly perceived as evil. Islamic eschatology says that some of the signs of the end of the world are the rise of a black flag, both a lunar and a solar eclipse in the same month of Ramadan, or the rise of a star with a glowing tail from the east.¹² In the Book of Revelation the Sun turns dark, the Moon turns red and the stars fall from the sky (Revelation 6:12). The medieval philosopher Roger Bacon believed that there would be only six major religions in the history of mankind, each one symbolized at astrological level by the conjunction of Jupiter, the patron of all religions, with the other six planets—Judaism (Jupiter and Saturn), Chaldean (Jupiter and Mars), Egyptian (Jupiter and the Sun), Islam (Jupiter and Venus) and Christianity (Jupiter and Mercury).¹³ The first five religions had already appeared—only the religion governed by the conjunction of Jupiter with the Moon had not yet come into being. So, the last religion was about to be established by the Antichrist.¹⁴ Comets and falling stars can be seen well during the night, so they were believed to be bad omens.¹⁵ And there are also eclipses—the lunar eclipse, which has a bloody color; and the solar eclipse, that turns day into darkness. The deprivation of light and the spectacular installation of darkness in the natural middle of the day was seen for a long time as a symbolic message through which the earthly order of things heads toward a dramatic point. In 968 the soldiers of Otto I panicked at the sight of a solar eclipse, while the chronicler Sigebert of Gembloux says that the eclipse of June 29, 1033 horrified people and foreshadowed a horrible plague.¹⁶ Last but not least, a solar eclipse was also believed to signal the birth of the Antichrist.¹⁷

Evil supernatural entities often take the form of nocturnal animals, while good supernatural entities take the physical form of diurnal creatures. From the first category, the wolf has mainly been portrayed as a demonic, brutal killer or a reflection of the mysterious, untamed wilderness. The reality of the matter, however, is that the true nature of the wolf has been little understood. In fact, wolves are not nocturnal, but rather crepuscular. As opportunistic predators they take what they can get. Their predatory hunting times are mainly during the night because the prey is easier to catch. In addition to this, wolves help preserve nature’s delicate balance by keeping herds of deer, elk, moose, and other large mammals in check. They also keep these populations strong and healthy by hunting the weak and sick.

The demonic wolf is a creation of the human mind. The wolf was accused of unbridled depredation on livestock, though in reality he almost always prefers wild prey. He was also denounced for craving human flesh, though in fact he does not generally hunt down human beings. People have believed to some degree that wolves howl at the moon or are driven crazy by the smell of blood. Native Americans, however, have had an overwhelming tendency to look upon the wolf in a favorable light. Yet, the Navajo called the wolf mai-coh, meaning witch, and believed that human witches used, or possibly abused, the wolf’s powers to hurt other people.¹⁸

Pagan Rome had the legend of a she-wolf feeding the twins Romulus and Remus, the founders of the city. The status of the wolf changed dramatically in the eyes of the Europeans after the spreading of Christianity. It is true that during the Middle Ages wolves, like foxes, skunks, and even domestic and wild dogs, sometimes carried and transmitted rabies. However, fables of evil skunks, foxes, or dogs were not created as they were with the wolf. The Bible contains 13 references to wolves, usually as metaphors for greed and destructiveness. Quoting from Leviticus and Deuteronomy, Malleus Maleficarum¹⁹ states that wolves are either agents of God sent to punish sinners, or agents of the Devil sent with God’s blessing to harass believers in order to test their faith.²⁰ The symbolism of the New Testament follows the pastoral culture of Israel. The wolf is repeatedly used as a metaphor for evil men with a lust for power and dishonest gain, as well as a metaphor for Satan preying on innocent God-fearing Christians in contrast to the shepherd Jesus Christ who keeps his flock safe (Matthew 10:16; Acts 20:29). In fact, Jesus himself introduces the concept of the wolf in sheep’s clothing, as a warning to people against false prophets (Matthew 7:15). There is no doubt that, by comparing them to dangerous and treacherous people, Jesus doomed the wolves to centuries of slaughter in the Western world.

Christian symbolism regarding the wolf inevitably reverberated over Western folklore, literature, and culture.²¹ Man’s fear of wolves has been fed by tales of wicked creatures acting out of devotion to the darkest powers of hell. More dreadful than the wolf was the werewolf. The thought that a human could transform into a wolf and be able to attack, kill, and sometimes even gorge other humans struck deep fear into the minds and hearts of many medieval men. In many cultures, the identification of the warrior with the wolf gave rise to the notion of Lycanthropy, the mythical or ritual identification of man and wolf.²² Human beings can turn into wolves during a full moon—an additional connection with the significance of darkness. The popular image of the wolf is significantly influenced by the Big Bad Wolf stereotype from Aesop’s Fables²³ and Grimm’s Fairy Tales.²⁴ The hunting of wolves and