Читать книгу Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside - Brad Steiger - Страница 66

The folklore of Tibet includes numerous accounts of malignant, shape-shifting demons that lurk near trees, rocks, lakes, and many other places to seize men and animals and suck away their vital breath and life force. One of the most vicious of these entities is the Thags yang, a demon that can appear as a tiger, a man, or a weretiger. The terrible Thags yang follow those travelers who are not sufficiently protected by strong spiritual beliefs and drain their life essence from them. They also lurk near villages, seeking out the weak and the foolish who do not utter their prayers of protection.

The guardsman had been awakened one night by the sound of his kitchen door being slammed open. He heard furniture being tossed around his living room.

Could our guardsman from New York have come face-to-face with such a being? Could his home have been invaded by a demon that could appear as a Bigfoot-type creature?

How a demon is defined is determined in large part by who is framing the definition.

When Socrates spoke of consulting his “daimon,” he was not referring to an evil spirit or a fallen angel, but to his tutelary spirit. The ancient Greeks believed that everyone had an attendant entity to which he or she might turn for advice in dealing with life’s problems.

The Romans called their “daimon,” their guardian angel, a “genius,” which could also be interpreted as roughly analogous to the soul.

Since those days of antiquity, however, most people would call Socrates’s “daimon,” a spirit guide; a “genius” is a mortal human being of high intelligence; and a “demon” has through millennia of the Abrahamic religious come to refer to the fallen angels who rebelled against the Creator and who seek to work harm against humankind.

While, indeed, there may well be fallen angels, demons are not members of that rebellious band of entities.