Of demons and devil’s grimaces
An interview on ambiguous beings in art, history and literature
Demons – these elusive beings have always played a role in people’s lives. This is why the research project ‘Demons: Medialities between literature and art, religion and politics’ at the Cluster of Excellence ‘Religion and Politics’ is taking a diachronic and interdisciplinary perspective to explore how people from the Middle Ages to the present have dealt in their respective cultural media with the idea that there exists a latently threatening ‘other’ that is neither human nor divine. A six-part lecture series entitled ‘Demons: Spirituality – Manifestation – Materiality’ took place in the 2024/25 winter term, with the project team providing early insights into the research. A discussion with art historian Eva Krems, literary scholar Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, and historian Nikolas Funke (all University of Münster).
Demons have fascinated people across all eras, cultures and disciplines. You are focusing on these elusive beings in your research project ‘Demons: Medialities between literature and art, religion and politics’. What are you looking at in each of your disciplines?
Wagner-Egelhaaf: We all have different approaches to the research field of demons. As a literary scholar, I am naturally interested in demons as literary figures, especially in the tension between embodied demons and the abstract concept of the demonic. How do they relate to each other? And what function does the use of demons as a metaphor actually have in the modern age, when people no longer believe in real demons? The fascinating thing is that modern demons, even if they are to be understood metaphorically, take on a highly imaginative form in literature and theatre.
Funke: From a historical perspective, we are interested, for example, in how demons were perceived in the early modern period, and how their actions could be proven in the concrete world. Aside from definitional questions about who or what demons actually are, people in the Middle Ages and early modern period felt very acutely that they could be subject to demonic interaction, demonic seduction and also harmful spells, which they often experienced in everyday life in a very real way. So they took demons seriously. This is an interesting contrast to the metaphorical view of demons that we find in the modern period.
Krems: From the perspective of art history, it is particularly intriguing that demons can’t really be visualised at all. Demons are, as can be read in many texts, elusive beings. They are actually described in a relatively unspecific way, and the metaphorical in modern literature is flanked by a very strong physical representation in various media. We in art history are interested in how diverse, but also how ambivalent and ambiguous, this image of a demon is. How can demons be depicted at all, and how has the depiction changed from the 14th century to the present day?
So is there a definition of demons?
Funke: That is a difficult question to answer, since such definitions vary greatly from culture to culture, and change over time. Until the early modern period, Christian Europe knew a variety of beings, such as fairies and nature spirits, that existed somewhere on the fringes of or parallel to the world of humans and animals. People could interact with these beings, which could be helpful, annoying or dangerous. These rather ambiguous beings were then redefined as demons in a relatively consistent way in the 16th and 17th centuries, which shows how mutable and elastic the category of ‘demon’ is.
Krems: There is no such thing as the demon, either in art history or in literature or in history. We’ve been running this project at the Cluster of Excellence for a year and a half now, and are still fascinated by the fact that a clear-cut answer always eludes us. The demon stands for ambiguity, including in how it is represented, too. And I believe that every individual has their very own idea of demons.
Wagner-Egelhaaf: My starting-point is represented by the ‘discoursive demons’, as I call them, for example when we talk about the demons of the past, the demons of history, the demons of the Holocaust. If we take a closer look at why this metaphor is used, then there is something that we want to grasp, but that we cannot easily get to grips with and that troubles us: demons are there, they haunt us, and we have to deal with them somehow. And the metaphor of the demonic stands for this unsettling potential.
What exactly is it about demons that fascinates us humans?
Krems: The idea of demons seems to trigger something, and with it we try to bring an extra-human world into our world and make it tangible. The intangible has always seemed to move people and stimulate their imagination. I think that’s why the demonic plays such an important role in metaphors and the visual arts.
Wagner-Egelhaaf: Where we encounter the demonic visually today, e.g. in films, computer games and fantasy literature, there are often horrible depictions of devils, even devil’s grimaces. What you find there is actually a negative, terrifying image of demons. And then, of course, the gruesome also plays a role, something that transcends real experience in our everyday world. And that is especially appealing for literature.
Funke: What is special about pre-modern demons is that they break into our world; they are not transcendent or otherworldly. You have to deal with them because they represent a concrete threat in this world, and that’s why I would diverge here from the slightly positive word ‘fascination’.
There are very different ways of depicting demons in art, some of which appear at the same time. What examples from the visual arts are representative of this?
Krems: Well-known here is Martin Schongauer’s copperplate engraving from the end of the 15th century, ‘The Temptation of St Anthony’. The floating saint is tormented by several demons that appear as bizarre and terrifying hybrid creatures. These are modelled on natural, mostly animal, creatures, whose body parts are defamiliarised and distorted into monstrosities. No two creatures are alike. However, just a few years later, at the beginning of the 16th century, Hieronymus Bosch depicted demons differently in his Lisbon Altarpiece, which also shows the legend of St Anthony: Bosch combines two different elements in each case to create a hybrid, grotesque form. Demons appear as if in an upside-down world as a bird-ship, a fish-boat or a beaked man.
On the other hand, demons were also often depicted in imitation of human beings. Take, for example, Rubens’ ‘The Fall of the Damned’ (around 1620), which shows countless demons maltreating the damned, who, naked, fall helplessly into the abyss. The historical context is important in each case, as Rubens created his painting at the time of the Counter-Reformation, and it was commissioned by a Catholic prince: people of other faiths were often demonised, the boundaries between the devilish and the human blurred, and this is precisely what is disturbing here.
Demons were therefore not only evil, but ambiguous, hybrid – and the meaning of the demonic has changed over the ages. How do the various research disciplines make this ambiguity of demons visible?
Krems: If alongside the performing arts you look at medieval architecture, for example, you are sometimes amazed at what kind of beings can be found there in sculptural form, be it in the keystones of vaults or in column capitals. There are a relatively large number of demonic beings; they appear at borderline locations, as if they were on guard between a divinely ordered and a devilishly disturbed world. But what is their function? Do they ward off evil or do they represent it? There are gargoyles on church roofs, for example, which lead the water away from the building in a huge gush. This could be interpreted to mean that evil is to be kept away. But these very gargoyles themselves are in essence shaped like demons, like animal or hybrid beings.
Funke: In antiquity, demons acted as intermediaries between our world and the supernatural world, and were therefore ambiguous. In Christianity, however, this much is very clear: the angels – Angeloi, the messengers – do something good, and the demons – Daimones, fallen angels – only ever want evil, even if they pretend to want to help people in a specific emergency. Popes and reformers were depicted as devils during the Reformation, while various groups of people were associated with the devil, for example lansquenets, people of other faiths and witches.
Wagner-Egelhaaf: Ambiguity plays a major role in contemporary adaptations of the demonic, too, for example in novels and plays. One example is Olga Tokarczuk’s 2023 novel The Empusium, which in a way retells Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924) and in which empusae, female demons, accompany the protagonist, who turns out to be bisexual at the end. The Basel Theatre brought an impressive theatre performance entitled Demons to the stage and into the urban space in the 2022/23 season. By using demonic figures to create alienation and confusion, the play scrutinised what is considered reality.
What about the power of the demon in the modern secular period? Is the demonic merely a metaphor and is demonisation perhaps an attempt to define evil?
Wagner-Egelhaaf: The metaphor of the demonic is an attempt to understand and at the same time distance oneself from a phenomenon that people cannot easily reconcile with their own imagination. For example, Trump and Putin are often demonised today. They are leaders of world powers that seem to threaten our existence and the worldview in which we grew up. Distancing oneself and trying to understand go hand in hand here.
Krems: Demonisation is an attempt to define not only evil, but also the intangible. To take Donald Trump as an example again: in the media, you can find satirical cartoons in which Trump is shown together with the devil. This is not a trivialisation for me, but an attempt to show what is inexplicable to us, what happens beyond reason. This will continue to occupy us. And that’s why we are organising a conference in April to explore how demonisation works. We are looking forward to gaining further insights. (pie/tec)