One of the earliest maps ever published, which appeared at Rome in the
sixteenth century, intimates a similar belief in the connexion of the
heathen nations of the north of Europe with the demons of the spiritual
world. In Esthonia, Lithuania, Courland, and such districts, the chart,
for want, it may be supposed, of an accurate account of the country,
exhibits rude cuts of the fur-clad natives paying homage at the shrines
of demons, who make themselves visibly present to them; while at other
places they are displayed as doing battle with the Teutonic knights, or
other military associations formed for the conversion or expulsion of
the heathens in these parts. Amid the pagans, armed with scimitars and
dressed in caftans, the fiends are painted as assisting them, pourtrayed
in all the modern horrors of the cloven foot, or, as the Germans term
it, horse's foot, bat wings, saucer eyes, locks like serpents, and tail
like a dragon. These attributes, it may be cursorily noticed, themselves
intimate the connexion of modern demonology with the mythology of the
ancients. The cloven foot is the attribute of Pan--to whose talents for
inspiring terror we owe the word _panic_--the snaky tresses are borrowed
from the shield of Minerva, and the dragon train alone seems to be
connected with the Scriptural history.[5]
[Footnote 5: The chart alluded to is one of the _jac-similes_ of an
ancient planisphere, engraved in bronze about the end of the 15th
century, and called the Borgian Table, from its possessor, Cardinal
Stephen Borgia, and preserved in his museum at Veletri.]
Other heathen nations, whose creeds could not have directly contributed
to the system of demonology, because their manners and even their very
existence was unknown when it was adopted, were nevertheless involved,
so soon as Europeans became acquainted with them, in the same charge of
witchcraft and worship of demons brought by the Christians of the Middle
Ages against the heathens of northern Europe and the Mahommedans of the
East. We learn from the information of a Portuguese voyager that even
the native Christians (called those of St. Thomas), whom the discoverers
found in India when they first arrived there, fell under suspicion of
diabolical practices. It was almost in vain that the priests of one of
their chapels produced to the Portuguese officers and soldiers a holy
image, and called on them, as good Christians, to adore the Blessed
Virgin. The sculptor had been so little acquainted with his art, and the
hideous form which he had produced resembled an inhabitant of the
infernal regions so much more than Our Lady of Grace, that one of the
European officers, while, like his companions, he dropped on his knees,
added the loud protest, that if the image represented the Devil, he paid
his homage to the Holy Virgin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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