The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil Quotes

“The name Azazel is derived from aziz, which means strength, and El, God.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“The prophet Zechariah speaks of Satan as an angel whose office it is to accuse and to demand the punishment of the wicked. In the Book of Job, where the most poetical and grandest picture of the Evil One is found, Satan appears as a malicious servant of God, who enjoys performing the functions of a tempter, torturer, and avenger. He accuses unjustly, like a State’s attorney who prosecutes from a mere habit of prosecution, and delights in convicting even the innocent, while God’s justice and goodness are not called in question. It is noteworthy that Satan, in the canonical books of the Old Testament, is an adversary of man, but not of God; he is a subject of God and God’s faithful servant.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“if we constructed a man consisting of virtues only, would not that fellow be the most unbearable bore in the world, wearisome beyond description?”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“According to the account in the second chapter of Genesis, Satan is the father of science, for he induced Eve to make Adam taste of the fruit of knowledge, and the”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“While the Bible declares that man is made in the image of God, anthropologists say that men make their gods after their own image: and the truth is that every God-conception is characteristic of the man who holds”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“Every man’s conception of God is a measure of his own stature. He pictures God according to his comprehension, and thus it is natural that every man has a different notion of God, every one’s God being characteristic of his mental and moral caliber.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“God is neither good nor bad, neither moral nor immoral, he is unmoral;”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“Says the wolf in Æsop’s fable: “Why is it right for you to eat the lamb, when for me it is supposed to be wrong?” Is not man in the same predicament as the wolf, and does not mankind slaughter more animals than all the wolves in the world ever ate?”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“Good and evil, however, are views taken from a certain given standpoint, and from this standpoint good and evil are features forming a contrast, but as such they are always actualities; neither the one nor the other”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“True enough, the idea of a personal Devil is as imaginary as a fairy, or an elf, or a hobgoblin;”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“for although he is said to be a liar from the beginning, not one case is known, in all devil-lore in which the Devil attempts to cheat his stipulators. Thus he appears as the most unfairly maligned person, and as a martyr of simple-minded honesty.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“Religion is the most important problem of life, and we can ignore it as little as a reckless storage of dynamite in crowded parts of great cities.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“Matthias Hopkins, commonly called “witchfinder general,” took advantage of the disorders of the English civil wars of the seventeenth century and made a special business of the discovery of witches. He was quite successful, until his own methods were tried on his own person, and as he did not sink in the water ordeal, the people declared him to be a wizard and slew him (1647).”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“One of the most comical witch-prosecutions took place in 1474 against a diabolical rooster who had been so presumptuous as to lay an egg. The poor creature was solemnly tried, whereupon he was condemned to die at the stake and publicly burned by order of the authorities of the good city of Basel.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“hauling up and dropping down was repeated for some hours, until the hangman and his helpers went to dinner. (6) When they returned, the master-hangman tied her feet and hands upon her back; brandy was poured on her back and burned. (8) Then heavy weights were placed on her back and she was pulled up. (9) After this she was again stretched on the rack. (10) A spiked board is placed on her back, and she is again hauled up to the ceiling. (11) The master again ties her feet and hangs on them a block of fifty pounds, which makes her think that her heart will burst. (12) This proved insufficient; therefore the master unties her feet”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“The hangman binds the woman, who was pregnant, and places her on the rack. Then he racked her till her heart would fain break, but had no compassion. (2) When she did not confess, the torture was repeated, the hangman tied her hands, cut off her hair, poured brandy over her head and burned it. (3) He placed sulphur in her armpits and burned it. (4) Her hands were tied behind her, and she was hauled up to the ceiling and suddenly dropped down.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“As a rule the prisoners of the inquisition ask for death as a boon and wherever possible commit suicide; for torture made of every one a hopeless cripple unfit for either work or enjoyment of life, even though he might be released”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“The greatest heresy is not to believe in witchcraft” (haeresis est maxima opera maleficarum”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“Inquisitor Hugo de Beniols had a number of prominent people burned alive at Toulouse, in 1275, among them Angèle, Lady of Labarthe, a woman of sixty-five years accused of sexual intercourse with Satan.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“People possessed of a lively imagination began to dream that they stood in all kinds of relations to the Evil One. There are cases in which imaginary witches surrendered themselves voluntarily to the Inquisition.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“The devotional spirit is not less intense among, the pagans of the prairie than it was among the ancient Israelites and the early Christians.[128]”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“The early Christians practised healing the sick by the laying on of hands and by praying; so did the Therapeutæ and other Gnostics; yet faith-cure and Christian science are not countenanced by the churches to-”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“It is a habit common among all classes of people to condone the faults of their own kind but to be severe with those of others.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“the church doctrines of sin and salvation are based upon pre-Christian conceptions ultimately dating back to human sacrifices and the mystic rites of cannibalism in which man hoped to partake of divinity and immortality by eating the flesh and drinking the blood of his incarnated God or his representative.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“The historical St. George, an archbishop of Alexandria and a follower of Arius, possesses no features whatever of the heroic dragon-slayer of the legend.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“The old Greek saviours simply changed names and became Christian saints,”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“gnosis (i.e., knowledge or enlightenment), forbade him to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge. But the God, the highest Lord, the all-good and all-wise Deity, took compassion on man and sent the serpent to induce him to eat of the tree of knowledge so that he might escape the bondage of ignorance in which Yahveh, the demiurge, tried to hold him.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“peculiarly interesting sect of gnostics is called the Ophites, or serpent worshippers. The demiurge (so they hold), on recognising the danger that might result from the emancipation of man”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“and contrast him with the highest God who had nothing to do with the creation. As the demiurge created the world, he has a right to it, but he was overcome through the death of Jesus. The demiurge thought to conquer Jesus when he let him die on the cross, but his triumph was preposterous, for through the passion and death of the innocent Jesus the victory of God was won and the salvation of mankind became established.”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day

“gnostics, as a rule, represent the demiurge, i.e., the architect of the world, whom they identify with the Jewish Yahveh, as the father of all evil. They describe him as irascible, jealous, and”
― Paul Carus, The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day