Exactly what it says on the (dramatic) title.
We always hear about Biblically accurate angels: the burning wheels with tons of eyes, the strange looking creatures that sound like they come from the anime “Evangelion”, the cherubim with 4 faces, but I had a thought while watching The Exorcist: Believer (it was…not good for anyone wondering. At all. The disrespect Regan’s mom had towards Merrin and Karras after they died saving her daughter was baffling to listen to, especially…but i digress) a couple of days ago, specifically, if that’s how the demonically possessed are said to more or less act in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, or if they’re they completely different to what we see in movies and games. I’m guessing it’s more than likely the second one, right, but I’m curious about the details like the signs someone’s possessed, the demon’s endgoal, and what they look like, basically everything you can gimme to sate this curiosity or to send me on a rabbit hole, if you’d be so kind?
In the bible, the demons are fallen angels so…
Most of the lore you see is from dantes inferno, not the bible.
I’ve only gotten to Leviticus in my Bible reading. God that chapter is a slog.
Anyway, if you need to know which part of the goat may be a waved offering and which may be a burnt offering and which may be a meat offering, and which order in which to pile the guts and the cauls and the livers and hearts and bones thereof and all the fat within and all the viscera and connective tissue so that the priest may toss three splashes of blood on the left side and three splashes of blood to the right side and so on and so forth, I might be able to help.
I guess one positive thing about slogging through Leviticus is I now realize how many ways there are to sacrifice a goat.
Not what I was looking for…but TIL lol
Never know when proper goat sacrificing might be needed
Know why demons always speak Latin instead of ancient Aramaic? Because The Catholic Church made it up. It’s fiction.
Doubt Catholics made them up since there are depictions and writings that talk about demons in ancient mesopotamia. That they threw them in their canon and gave them their own quirks like the Romans did with the Greek Pantheon tho, I can believe. Whether it’s fiction or not is irrelevant info to me tho.
And do the scriptures imply demons speak Latin? Because that, specifically, is the part Catholicism made up.
It’s honestly been a while since I cracked open a Bible and actually sat down to read it, so i couldn’t give ya a definative answer on that (plus, I was a very poor excuse of a Catholic lol).
My opinion? it’s one of the quirks Catholicism threw in when demons were incorporated into their canon.
There really isn’t any until the exorcisms of the NT, which is again missing much description.
Even the parts that some people think are describing demons often aren’t.
For example, the locusts of Revelations:
And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star that had fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key to the shaft of the bottomless pit; he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft. Then from the smoke came locusts on the earth, and they were given authority like the authority of scorpions of the earth. They were told not to damage the grass of the earth or any green growth or any tree, but only those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads. They were allowed to torment them for five months but not to kill them, and the agony suffered was like that caused by a scorpion when it stings someone. And in those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will flee from them.
In appearance the locusts were like horses equipped for battle. On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women’s hair, and their teeth like lions’ teeth; they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots with horses rushing into battle. They have tails like scorpions, with stingers, and in their tails is their power to harm people for five months. They have as king over them the angel of the bottomless pit; his name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon.
Look closely at a few of the details there:
- allowed to torment for five months
- the agony suffered was like that caused by a scorpion when it stings someone
- like horses equipped for battle
- On their heads were what looked like crowns of gold
- faces were like human faces
- hair like women’s hair
- their teeth like lions’ teeth
- scales like iron breastplates
- the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots
- tails like scorpions, with stingers
- in their tails is their power to harm people for five months
- have as king over them
So back in the day, there was no Greek word for a specific hornet, just a general term that applied to any wasps.
But in Judea the equivalent of the murder hornet was Vespa Orientalis.
This hornet, like many wasps, was active outside its nest for 5 months.
At the time, they thought a hive was ruled by a king, not a queen (thanks a lot Aristotle). And their nests are made underground (like the pit in the passage above).
Like most hornets, they had mandibles with large ‘teeth’ like a lion.
Unlike locusts, their faces were more human looking with the placement of the eyes centrally as opposed to on the edges of the head.
They were covered in fine hairs like a woman’s body hair.
Covered in segmented ‘scales’ with stings painful like a scorpion.
They had a yellow stripe across the lower part like a saddle (this was actually used to effectively solar power the insect).
But the most striking similarity between the above passage and this specific insect native to the area was the gold crown marker on its head: https://www.biolib.cz/IMG/GAL/33881.jpg
So while people have had their imaginations running wild with Fabio looking scorpion/horse chimeras for years now, it may have simply been a poetic description of the local murder hornet equivalent being really active and stinging people - a nightmarish scenario for anyone who has been on the wrong end of a hornet before, but not quite the nightmarish people have been dreaming up since.
As a lover if insects and arachnids who spends significant time in nature and the garden, the fear I feel for wasps is indescribable.
The idea someone, two millennia ago, wrote wasps to be the most evil, feared, sadistic thing in their experience of the world resonates with me deeply.
