AJR Conversations | Writing about Demons

Interview Conducted on Zoom, Transcribed Using Otter.ai. Edited for Clarity and Concision.

Sara: First question, why demons? Why did you choose demons to write on and what can they teach us today?

Travis: Thanks Sara. I was always fascinated by the tension that I perceived in religious studies. In many cases, demons are seen as part of what we might call “superstitious” aspects of religion, or not seen as a core part of “official” religion, if you will. But when I looked at early Christian texts, I noticed that demons are a key part of how they're thinking about the world and understanding what's going on around them.

That paired with the realization that, as much as Christians talked about demons, they disagreed about them just as much. I wanted to understand why, especially in the second and third centuries, Christians couldn't come up with the same answer about many aspects of these demons, despite the fact that they seem to be such an important part of their culture. In that simple sense, demons can teach us a lot about early Christian history, ancient religious history, and especially the diversity of the traditions that that we encounter.

How about you, Sara, what first got you interested in demons and what do you think they can teach us?

S: I came about this through the text, where I was reading parts of the Talmud that addressed demons in very interesting and weird ways. When I looked at academic commentaries and traditional religious commentaries, nobody really dealt with them. It seemed like there was this huge gap, where these foundational figures in classical Rabbinic Judaism spend a lot of time thinking about something, which modern readers then just never really sit with.

But I think more than that, what demons demonstrate in the rabbinic literature of late antique Babylonia is the kinds of ways that the Rabbis are both in conversation with people around them in conversation with inherited Jewish traditions and being extremely creative. Demons are the site of all those things happening at the same time.

T: Yeah, absolutely.

One common thread that runs through both of our books is an emphasis on the performative cultural work that demons do. Can you say more about how you approach this? How can seemingly “supernatural” entities be a part of human culture?

S: You know, a thing that I say a lot is that demons are real. And what I mean by that isn't, “I believe that there are malevolent forces out to get me,” but that demons are real for the thinkers that you and I study and that they are doing real cultural work. Believing in a world which is filled with invisible and visible intermediary beings, that you need to negotiate, changes how you think about what it means to move through the world, what it means to be in relationship with other people, animals, and spirits, and what it means to be in relationship with God. So, speaking of humans, your methodological approach is very informed by posthumanism and what you call in your book “prehumanism.” Why were these frameworks helpful to you in thinking about demonic bodies?

T: It was helpful for me to relate some of my research interests in the ancient world to contemporary concerns. In many threads of the Environmental Humanities, as well as Science Studies, there is interest in thinking about “posthuman” futures, of fracturing the human, or at least the Enlightenment-era manifestation of the human, which was a very bounded, elite, autonomous, and free willing entity, that was disconnected or separate from a world around it. Many Environmental Humanities scholars have argued that this has been quite detrimental to how humans interact with their environments.

Once I started this work on demons, I was fascinated by how pre-enlightenment thinkers [and] intellectual traditions were also concerned with how the human was interconnected or embedded within its world. That's where that terminology “prehuman” comes from, in the sense of, before the Enlightenment-era consolidation of modern ideas of the human, we actually have these alternative ancient ideas. That's where I got into thinking about demons as part of a “cosmic ecology” that humans are a part of, but also demons and other humans and other religious traditions and other animals and trees, etc. I’m trying to think in a more robust way about how demons are a part of a combined cultural and natural and “supernatural” landscape.

One of the most interesting things I found about your book was that you note the “striking absence” of demonic possession from Rabbinic literature, something that shows up all the time in the literature I’m studying. You attribute this to a different construction of the human body among Rabbinic thinkers. Could you explain some more about how Rabbinic anthropology was so important for Rabbinic demonology? And why the Rabbis may have come to view the human body differently from their Jewish predecessors or Christian contemporaries?

S: For most people today who are familiar with concepts of demons, we think about possession and exorcism. All you have to do is go to your local movie-plex to see some horror film which engages with those topics. And it's all over the New Testament and Second Temple Jewish literature. And possession and exorcism are really central to early Christian hagiographies and claims to authority, as well.

But the Rabbis don't talk about it. The Rabbis of the Talmud don't think demons possess people. For a couple of reasons: First, they don't think demons are malevolent, evil attackers who are just trying to take over humankind. That's not the Rabbis of the Talmud’s framework for thinking about demons.

[This is] because possession only works if you have an idea of a human being which is bifurcated. Alon Goshen-Gottstein and Daniel Boyarin have both shown how the Rabbis believe in soul/body which is more interlinked and mutually animated, [rather] than necessarily separated out. The description I always use is, if demonic possession is more like hijacking a car, where your body is the car, the driver is the soul, and a demon can come and kick the soul out and take over the car.

For the Rabbis, the human being is more like one of the cars in Pixar’s Cars which can't be hijacked because of the unity. But interestingly, they are aware that other groups think demons possess people. B. Me’ilah 17 contains a fascinating story where the rabbis together with a demon accomplice literally “perform” a possession and an exorcism for the Roman emperor. So it's not that they don't know about it. They're making a particular choice based on their understanding of what it means to be a human and what it means to be a part of a world created by a single, omnipotent, omniscient, good God. Those are the commitments that they have more than commitments to buy into a particular popular -- I don't mean that in the sense of folk, [but] in the sense of, everyone was into it -- understanding of demonic possession.

But I think what that really shows us is that when you look at these pieces of ancient religion that are ostensibly weird, or just understudied, you see all kinds of implications for different aspects of [both] ancient thinking and modern thinking – anthropology, group identity, how we relate to others and to the divine.

Building on what you said, that to be a human is to be in a particular kind of relationship with demons who are not supernatural, but part of our natural world, is fundamental to a way of seeing the world.

T: Yeah, I think that's wonderful. I now have in my head Lightning McQueen as part of rabbinic legal discourse of some sort.

It seems like [your approach] could have so much value for thinking in more subtle ways of interactions between divine, semi-divine and human religious actors in the ancient world. I see that even in studies of ancient Christianity, a quick assumption that descriptions of demonic activity jump right to the model of possession, when, [while] that often is the case, there are also some more subtle ways that Christian authors think about how demons are influencing the humans they're interacting with.

S: Speaking of these groups, one of the things that I noticed in both of our books is that both community’s demonological discourses are the products of male literary elites who are largely homosocial. What can we learn about how demons are particularly important to the construction of the male body in your work?

T: This is a question that animated much of my research. I was first interested in the demonic body thanks to the robust research that has been done on early Christian embodiment. The chapter where it really comes to the fore is the first chapter of the book on the Gospel of Mark, where I'm addressing the masculinity of Jesus. Building on Candida Moss’s work, I examine the Gospel’s portrayal of Jesus’s porosity, especially in the story of the hemorrhaging woman, whose grasping of Jesus’s robe leads to a power flowing from his body and healing her condition. Moss notes how Jesus’s permeability here cuts against most ancient Roman and ancient Jewish ideas of proper masculinity.

I propose, in turn, that Jesus’s exorcisms function to shore up his masculinity. We see the Gospel of Mark make this connection quite explicitly, for example, in some of the language used by Jesus as part of his discussion of defeating Satan; Jesus talks about defeating the “strong man” (Mark 3) and points to exorcism as a sign that Jesus -- the “stronger man,” if you will -- is defeating the Satan and driving evil from the world.

S: In my own work, for the Rabbis to be a homosocial, scholastic elite, is to be a student and teacher of Torah. One of the things that I noticed in both of our works is there's this stereotype that, when they were talking about demons, they must really be talking about women. But really, they're talking about men. For the Rabbis, in the sense that to be a man is to study Torah, they then understand (largely male) demons as participants in the project of Torah study, and [that], ‘what we do is so important and so right, that even the demons want to join us.

T: Yeah, absolutely. One of the other commonalities that I see run through our works is paying attention to those blurry boundaries between what we often call religion and what gets labeled as magic. Can you say more about how demons made you rethink these categories?

S: For the Rabbis, demons are normative law. They are treated with the same degree of seriousness, of legal creativity, of theological insight, as discussions of the Sabbath, or the dietary laws. And I think we need to take that seriously in order to understand the Rabbis. And, more broadly then, the rabbis as part of a broader community of Jews and non-Jews in a particular time and place.

T: Yeah, I really like that. I think it shows how the demonic overflows or is interconnected with these other elements of, in this case, rabbinic life and rabbinic thought.

I see something similar in the writings of the early Christian Justin Martyr. His depiction of the demonic body often emphasized its shapeshifting abilities, and in my book I connected this to his concurrent construal of magic. Whenever he's talking about magic, which he sees as an illicit activity, he often constructs it as something that deceives by presenting you with optical illusions. That's where these demonic bodies…play a major role in “magical” activities, because they can shapeshift and deceive you, with a body that isn't the real body of whatever they are.

But for Justin, his understanding of demons also informs his characterization of the divine. When he's discussing the Christian God, his major emphasis is on its unchanging character and solidity, and how God never changes in the way that demons change all the time. Analyzing Justin’s demonology, therefore, helps us to see a specific element of his theology in a new light. And so, taking these categories seriously, as you put it, can provide insight into broader aspects of these ancient thinkers’ understanding of the world.

S: Yeah. So, for the Rabbis, [they] really believe that demons are capricious, dangerous, but not ultimately malevolent, as part of a way of understanding the whole world as created by a God who is not malevolent, at the very least. But I was really struck, in reading your book, about how so many of the early Christian writers really think that the world is fundamentally dark or bad. And what does it mean that they think that? What does it mean for their understanding of God, each other, and the environment in which they live, to encounter the world as malevolent?

T: Much of this comes from early Christian Apocalypticism, in the idea that we have this fallen world now, but sometime soon, the perfect world would be restored by Jesus and God. I think that certainly influences the way the way that Christians think about demons and the way they think about the world, [especially] as a way of explaining Christian misfortune or opposition to Christianity.

To cite Justin Martyr again, demons help him explain why a system that is completely rational to him, Christianity, is oppressed so vehemently (in his eyes, at least) by fellow philosophers and intellectuals of the Greco Roman world. What could it be that that makes other people persecute or oppose Christianity? For Justin, he explains this through the idea of demons: these demons have tricked people into persecuting Christians.

But it also gives us a different way consider about environmental interconnection; if we think about demons as part of ancient Christian environments, they become a way of contemplating darker environmental interconnections. The environmental theorist Timothy Morton has often talked about how a major emphasis in the environment humanities has been seeing and emphasizing interconnections between the human and nonhuman, but often in quite romanticized ways. These approaches often point to the positive interactions we have with our environments, or the beautiful landscapes that we’re a part of, as part of rationales for environmental conservation.

Morton, by contrast, emphasizes our “darker ecologies,” that is, that we have interactions with nonhuman things and entities and landscapes, [which] can be ambivalent or harmful. We have to grapple with that when we're thinking about environmental ethics and how we treat the environment, as well. So that was one part of the ancient world that I thought could be helpful in providing a different model for environmental interconnections.

S: By situating the rabbinic work in this really thick culture, what it highlights…is how much of it is actually…exclusively rabbinic; [that is,] how much of it is actually the Rabbis being creative about, obviously, shared questions about good and evil and a world we can't understand always and when bad things happen to good people, but even in those shared questions just how much is exclusive to the rabbis as part of a particular way of understanding the world.

And then we can see the kinds of conversations they're having and where they say, this is a site where we aren't going to agree with you, because there are all these other implications to that belief that just don't fit with us, or because we just think you're wrong.

That's one way to approach the question. The other way to approach the question evokes something that Naomi Koltun-Fromm once said, which is, to do this work requires being in a community. Nobody is an expert at all things. And so, part of what this process looked like for me was being in conversation with lots of brilliant scholars who are experts in their fields, to think about where there might be interconnections. To do this kind of thick contextualization, which I think is crucial to the field, requires collaboration, community, conversation, you know, all the all of those things.

T: Absolutely. Yeah, you provide a fascinating and very different model of thinking about embedding something within its broader cultural matrices, if you will, but not then just to identify a source…, but to think about these broader convergences and divergences, and how these cultures are intersecting and then disagreeing, and therefore figuring out both areas of overlap but also areas of real creativity.

Okay, I have one final hard-hitting question: what's the most terrifying demon you encountered, and why is it the demon of the privy?

S: I have a nephew who is currently being toilet trained. And it is apparently common for toddlers who are in the process of toilet training to have nightmares about bathrooms. This shows how bathrooms are, to this day, terrifying to people who aren't used to them.

So that's my humorous connection. And back in the day, bathrooms were dark, they stank. They could be a place where rodents or snakes or scorpions lived, and you were profoundly exposed. They really do seem rather terrifying.

But I have to say, one of the things that I always think about when I encounter the early Christian texts, is the way that sloth and napping are seen as demonic you know. Thinking today about how we began to valorize napping as part of, the nap ministry, and how the early monks were just so terrified of taking a nap. To my mind, that's the most terrifying.

T: [Laughs].

Well, if I've learned anything from reading your excellent book, [which has helped] me to reflect on my own work, it's that demons are everywhere. You know, from the privy to the couch.

Thank you, Sara for this interview and taking the time to interact. I really enjoyed this.

S: Me too! Really, demons are everything, everywhere, all at once.

T: [Laughs]. I hope our books win as many awards as that movie.

S: I'm not holding my breath.

Sara Ronis as an Associate Professor of Theology at St. Mary’s University.

Travis Proctor is an Assistant Professor of Religion at Wittenberg University.