You know, usually when we talk about like a medical
diagnosis, there's this expectation of absolute
precision. Right. It's almost like engineering.
You fall off a ladder. You break your arm. They
put you in an x -ray machine. And an hour later,
the doctor pulls up this backlit image. They
point to a very clear, jagged white line across
the bone and say, well, there it is. That's the
problem. Yeah, it's binary. The bone is broken
or it isn't. The tumor is there or it isn't.
Exactly. And that is deeply comforting. to the
human mind. We desperately like things to be
visible, to be neatly categorized, and above
all, to have a definitive label. Right. But then
you step into the world of, say, neurodevelopment
or complex trauma or chronic autoimmune conditions,
and suddenly that x -ray machine is just useless.
Oh, completely useless. You're looking at a diagnostic
landscape that is entirely murky. You have symptoms
overlapping. You have these invisible internal
battles, and the labels are just, you know, best
guesses. Right. It's frustrating because we want
the jagged white line, but what we get is a cloud.
It is the absolute definition of diagnostic muddy
waters. You're trying to map something that is
fundamentally fluid and, honestly, entirely subjective
based on the person experiencing it. Yeah. And
I bring this up because... That exact same feeling
looking into muddy unmapped waters and desperately
wanting a clean binary answer is what we are
wading into today. Oh, definitely. Except we
aren't doing it on an individual medical scale.
We are doing it on a grand sweeping historical
scale. So welcome. Thanks for being here. If
you are sitting there listening to this, whether
you're prepping for a heavy academic meeting
on comparative mythology or trying to catch up
on historical anthropology or you are just insanely
curious about why basically every single culture
on the face of the earth has some version of
a devil. You are exactly where you need to be.
Absolutely. We are taking a deep dive into a
truly monumental piece of work today. It's Moncure
Daniel Conway's Demonology and Devil Lore. It
is a massive text. Yeah. And monumental is really
the only word for it. It's huge. Conway was writing
in the late 19th century, and he essentially
attempted to catalog the entire history of human
fear. Wow. He wanted to trace how the things
that terrified early humans evolved over thousands
of years into the codified demons, dragons, and
devils of our formal religions and mythologies.
And our mission for this deep dive is to trace
that epic psychological journey alongside Conway.
We're going to look directly at the monsters
we've created along the way. Which is fascinating.
We're going to map out how human belief evolved
from a very primitive, chaotic kind of pantheism
where the gods were simultaneously good and evil,
bringing both the harvest and the plague into
the rigid systems of dualism. Right, the split
universe. Exactly. The universe split cleanly
into ultimate good versus ultimate evil. The
jagged white line on the x -ray, so to speak.
And the most fascinating part of Conway's work
is how he shows that these abstract shifts in
human consciousness didn't just stay abstract.
They manifested in very literal, terrifying forms.
Yes, and we're going to look at two specific
phenomena that illustrate this perfectly. First,
we'll explore the literal piece -by -piece transformation
of ancient storm deities into the fire -breathing
dragons of our fairy tales. I love that part.
And second, we'll examine how these massive mythological
shifts were, in many cases, actually just reflections
of very real earthly conflicts between opposing
human tribes. Like, we literally took our human
enemies and turned them into cosmic monsters.
It's a journey from the terrors of the sky to
the terrors of the neighboring village. And it
reveals so much about how the human brain processes
threats. It really does. Now, before we really
get into the weeds, I want to make a quick note
for you listening, and I think this is crucial.
Yeah, good idea. The sources we're unpacking
today, especially Conway's text, cover some incredibly
charged material. We're talking about the deep
origins of Judeo -Christian theology, pagan traditions,
Eastern philosophies like Hinduism and Zoroastrianism,
among others. A lot of sensitive ground. There's
a lot of ancient politics and religious history
here. Look, we are absolutely not here to debate
theology, to endorse any specific belief system
or to declare who is historically right or wrong.
Exactly. We are strictly using Conway's text
as an anthropological lens. We're impartially
reporting on the ideas, the linguistic evolutions
and the historical connections he lays out. That's
a vital distinction. Knowledge is most valuable
when we can look at it objectively. To understand
these texts, we have to look at them as artifacts
of human development, observing how ideas mutated
over time without passing modern theological
judgment on them. Okay, let's unpack this. We
have to start at the absolute beginning, long
before anyone had a concept of a guy with horns
and a pitchfork. Right, way back. Take us back
to the era of primitive pantheism. If I'm an
early human, roaming the earth, trying to survive,
what does the universe look like to me spiritually?
It looks completely undivided. To really grasp
this, you have to try and strip away thousands
of years of inherited moral philosophy. Which
is hard to do. It is. We are so conditioned to
see the world as a battleground between good
and evil, primitive man didn't see it that way.
They looked at the world and saw an entirely
unclassified outward universe. Okay. Everything
was just, well, it was just nature. They didn't
have a concept of an ultimate good force fighting
an ultimate evil force. So no cosmic war? No.
They simply looked up at the sun or the gathering
storm clouds or the ocean and worshiped those
natural forces in their entirety. So just to
be clear, in this early stage, there is no devil
at all. None whatsoever. There is no central
figure of evil. It's so hard to wrap our modern
minds around that, a religion with no devil.
But there's no devil. Who do they blame when
things go wrong, when the crops fail or a flood
wipes out the village? Who is doing that? They
believe the gods were doing it. Conway makes
the brilliant point that the earliest gods had
a heavy touch of the demon in them. Because nature
is just brutal sometimes. Exactly. Nature itself
is entirely indifferent to us. It gives life
and it takes life with zero moral agonizing.
Right. Let's look at the Vedic hymns of ancient
India. which are some of our oldest written records
of human belief. You have deities like Indra
or Agni representing the sun and fire. Okay.
Now the sun is beneficent. It gives life. It
warms the earth. It makes the crops grow. But
that exact same sun... also brings the blistering
desert heat, the devastating drought, and the
fatal sunstroke. Yeah, the sun doesn't have a
moral compass. It doesn't decide to only shine
nicely on the people who shared their food and
then actively decide to burn the people who stole.
It just shines. Exactly. And the people worship
the whole phenomenon. In the Vedas, Agni, the
fire god, is praised with these incredibly glowing,
beautiful metaphors. What kind of metaphors?
They sing about how he shines like gold in the
hearth, how he mists graceful smoke, how he brings
families together in the cold. But in the exact
same hymn, in the same breath, they describe
his flames as powerful, fearful, not to be trusted,
consuming forests like a wild beast consumes
fodder. Wow. He is a life giver and a devouring
monster all at once. That dual nature is so striking.
I remember reading in Conway's text about the
ancient storm gods, too. Maruts, I think. Yes,
the Maruts. In the early Hindu hymns, they are
praised as the majestic allies of the sun. They
are part of the divine retinue that crosses the
sky. But they're storms, right? Right. What actually
are the Maruts, meteorologically speaking? They're
the violent storms. They're the roaring winds
and the destructive lightning that shatters ancient
trees and literally strikes people dead in the
fields. And they just worshiped that? Yes. The
early worshippers had no thought of calling them
evil. They didn't classify them as demonic agents.
They were just the chaotic, unpredictable forces
of the universe that had to be respected and
appeased. It reminds me of a quote Conway includes
from the theologian Theodore Parker. It really
stood out to me. That's a great one. Parker is
reportedly debating a strict Calvinist about
the nature of the divine, and Parker just stops
and says, well, the difference between us is
simple. Your God is my devil. It's a profound
statement. And Conway uses it to illustrate that
early deities, whether we were talking about
the Vedic gods in India, or even the early depictions
of Jehovah in the Old Testament, were considered
fully capable of doing both great good and terrible
harm. Right, because Jehovah sends plagues too?
Exactly. If you look at the early biblical narratives,
the same deity who blesses the harvest also sends
the plagues, hardens Pharaoh's heart, and strikes
people down with disease. All of it. The blessings
and the curses came from the exact same central
source. I was trying to think of an analogy for
what it would feel like to live under that kind
of belief system. The best I could come up with
is that it feels like living with an incredibly
powerful but highly unpredictable roommate. Okay,
I like that. Like a roommate who owns the house
and is ten times your size. You don't label them
pure evil even when they randomly smash all the
dishes in the kitchen or set the living room
rug on fire. Right, because you can't kick them
out. Exactly. You just accept that they are a
force of nature, they're way stronger than you,
and you spend all your time trying to figure
out what kind of snacks, or in the ancient case,
animal sacrifices, will keep them in a relatively
good mood. That is actually a very apt analogy.
Because you wouldn't try to defeat that roommate,
you try to manage them. Flatter them. Yes. The
flattering names given to these destructive powers
in ancient times were essentially diplomatic
attempts to soothe a remorseless roommate. Like
what? Well, for instance, the ancient Greeks
referred to the Furies, these terrifying goddesses
of vengeance, as the humanities, which translates
to the well -meaning ones or the gracious ones.
Wait, they called the Furies gracious? That's
just pure PR. That's just kissing up because
you're terrified. Precisely. It was euphemistic.
The worship originated in sheer terror. You call
the hurricane gracious in the desperate hope
that it will decide to spare your house. That
makes total sense. This reflects a mind that
hasn't yet developed a structured moral theology.
Their understanding of the world was just an
undiscriminating mix of wonder and terror. But
I'm stuck on something here. If they didn't have
a concept of pure evil, and the main gods were
already doing all the destroying and the punishing,
why did they invent demons at all? That's a great
question. Because Conway talks about primitive
demons in this era, how do they fit into a world
where the sun god is already giving you heatstroke?
This is where we have to redefine what a demon
originally was. It's a crucial distinction. For
primitive humans, the earliest demons were not
representations of moral evil. OK. They weren't
fallen angels tempting you to sin. They were
personifications of specific physical obstacles
to survival. And the very first obstacle, the
most pressing, relentless daily terror for primitive
man. was hunger. Because the earth was incredibly
stingy. Exactly. We forget how hard it was to
stay alive. Before the invention of agriculture,
before we had reliable food storage for domestication
of animals, humans had to violently fight the
earth for every single calorie. Right. The bird
was too fast to catch. The fish swam away. The
winter frost killed the berries. They looked
at this constant scarcity, this environment that
seemed actively designed to starve them. And
the primitive mind concluded that there must
be invisible, voracious beings who are eating
all the food before humans could get to it. So
they blamed invisible monsters for their empty
stomachs. Yes. Thus we get the invention of the
hunger demons. And these aren't abstract, philosophical
concepts of greed. They are intensely grotesquely
physical. There's a detail in Conway's book about
an African tribe, the Karens, and their visualization
of their devil. Oh, Kefin. Yes, Kefin. Now, when
we think of a devil, we think of a humanoid figure.
Kefin is not a humanoid. Kefin is literally just
a giant stomach floating through the air. It
is arguably the purest, most terrifying mythological
distillation of starvation ever created. It's
so visceral. A disembodied stomach that just
consumes. It perfectly encapsulates the terror
of a hunter -gatherer society. A floating stomach,
wow. And we see this evolution of the hunger
demon scale up. It starts with the floating stomach
eating your berries, but eventually it scales
up to astronomical proportions. If you look at
the Hindu myth of Rahu, it perfectly illustrates
this trajectory. Oh, this is the sun devourer.
I want to get this right. So Rahu is a demon
who causes eclipses, right? Yes. But the mechanics
of the myth are what make it fascinating. In
the ancient texts, the gods and the demons are
churning the cosmic ocean to extract the nectar
of immortality, Amrita. OK. During this massive
cosmic event, a demon manages to sneak in and
get a sip of the nectar. But the sun and the
moon happen to see him do it, and they tattle
on him to Vishnu, the supreme god. Snitches.
Right. So Vishnu instantly throws his weapon
and chops off the demon's head. But the twist
is the nectar had already reached his throat.
Exactly. Because the demon had just swallowed
the nectar of immortality, the severed head doesn't
die. The body dies, but the immortal head survives.
And that head is Rahu. That severed immortal
head is Rahu. And what does he do with eternity?
He is furious at the sun and the moon for turning
him in, so he spends eternity chasing them across
the sky to devour them in revenge. And when he
catches them, he swallows them, which is their
explanation for a solar or lunar eclipse. Precisely.
To the ancient mind, an eclipse wasn't a predictable
celestial mechanic involving orbits and shadows.
It was a giant, hungry, severed demon head literally
trying to eat the luminaries. That is so cool.
When the sun goes dark, it's because Rahu has
swallowed it. But because Rahu doesn't have a
body, the sun eventually just falls out of his
severed neck and the light returns. That is incredibly
vivid and terrifying, honestly, if you believe
it's actually happening. You see the sun getting
bitten into. It's the primitive hunger demon
projected onto the cosmos. And you see similar
myths everywhere. The Chinese have a legend of
a celestial dog that tries to swallow the sun.
Really? Yes. And Conway mentions that the Creeks,
an indigenous tribe in North America, would actively
whip their dogs during an eclipse. Wait, why?
Because they thought a giant cosmic dog was swallowing
the sun, and they believed the howling of their
earthly dogs would scare the cosmic dog away.
That shows such a direct, actionable link between
their mythology. and their daily behavior. Absolutely.
OK, so if we pause here and look at the board
early on, the supreme gods are just nature. They
are chaotic, whole, bringing both rain and floods.
And the demons aren't evil tempters. They are
just the physical obstacles to survival, like
a giant floating stomach or a cosmic dog eating
the sun. Correct. But human societies don't stay
in that primitive hunter -gatherer state forever.
We start gathering into cities. We invent agriculture.
We develop commerce. And most importantly, we
develop complex moral and legal codes. And Conway
argues that this societal evolution forces a
massive theological crisis. It forces a complete
restructuring of the cosmos. As humans began
to value justice, mercy, order, and fairness
in their own societies, they ran into a massive
philosophical wall. They could no longer reconcile
their own moral progress with their theology.
How can you, as a human judge, punish a thief
in your city for being unjust while simultaneously
worshipping a supreme God who indiscriminately
sends a plague to kill innocent children. Yeah,
it creates unbearable cognitive dissonance. The
gods were acting worse than the humans. Exactly.
The development of a human moral conscience demands
a moral universe. If the supreme deity is truly
good, he cannot be the author of horrific tragedies
or unjust suffering. The chaotic, unpredictable
roommate is no longer acceptable. So they have
to move out. Well, the universe therefore had
to be split. Which brings us to a massive turning
point. How exactly did humanity pull off this
massive theological divorce? How do you go from
worshipping the whole messy storm to splitting
the universe down the middle? It was arguably
the most monumental shift in human consciousness.
Conway points heavily to the Iranian or Zoroastrian
paradigm as the clearest, earliest, and most
influential example of this. The Zoroastrians?
In the ancient Persian texts, primarily the Avesta,
you see the formulation of a concept called Zoroana
Green. Zoroana Green. What does that translate
to? It roughly translates to boundless time or
uncreated time. It is this silent, unknowable,
infinite eternity. And from this boundless time
emanated two twin spirits. The ultimate cosmic
twins. Yes. You have Ormuzd, also known as Ahura
Mazda. He represents light, truth, order, and
all that is good. And his twin is Ahriman, who
represents darkness, lies, chaos, and all that
is evil. Wow, okay. And the theology states that
these two are locked in a 12 ,000 year war for
the soul of the universe. It's such a clean,
dramatic break from the messy pantheism of the
Vedas we were just talking about. Suddenly Agni
isn't burning the forest and warming the hearth,
Ormuz warms the hearth and Ahriman burns the
forest. Exactly. What's fascinating here is to
look at the sociology behind it. Conway argues
that this theological dualism perfectly mirrors
the physical and social evolution of humanity
at the time. How does that work? Think about
it. Primitive man lived completely at the mercy
of the wild. But civilized agricultural man did
something revolutionary. He built a wall. He
cleared a field, built a fence, and created a
garden. He created a cultivated safe space to
keep out the chaotic dangerous wilderness right
inside the walls predictable outside is wild
Just as man built a physical barrier to separate
the safe from the dangerous. He built a theological
barrier He organized his gods the same way. He
organized his agriculture He conceptually fenced
in a good God to rule the garden the civilized
moral space and banish the evil forces to the
wilderness outside. That is brilliant. It's like
a theological quarantine. They realized that
if the moral law of their society was going to
survive, the concept of goodness had to be kept
absolutely pristine. Precisely. So they took
all the bad behavior, all the destructive forces
of nature, all the plagues and storms, stripped
them away from the supreme deity, and piled them
onto a new, entirely separate entity. The devil
was created as a quarantine zone for all the
universe's flaws. That is a perfect way to conceptualize
it. The devil becomes the necessary scapegoat
so that the good God can remain infinitely good.
Okay, I track the logic. But here is where my
mind gets blown by Conway's research. You have
this new realm of pure evil. You have this new
concept of a central devil, an aramen. Right.
But a king... needs subjects. You need to populate
this dark kingdom. You need legions of demons,
imps, and lesser devils to serve our men and
torment humanity. Where do they get the recruits
for this army of darkness? Because they didn't
just sit down and invent a thousand new monsters
out of thin air. No, they did something much
more efficient and infinitely more political.
They used the gods of their enemies. The ultimate
theological smear campaign. Conway refers to
this phenomenon using a German word, the abgap.
which literally translates to the ex -god. The
ex -god. Yes. You have to look at the geopolitical
reality of the ancient world. Tribes were constantly
clashing, empires were conquering one another,
and sometimes massive cultures simply fractured
from within. When these religious systems collided,
there was a massive problem. No priesthood has
ever in the history of humanity, peacefully consented
to its own downfall. Right. If you conquer a
neighboring city, you can't just walk in and
tell the peasants, hey, those gods you've been
worshipping and sacrificing to for 500 years,
they don't exist. It was all fake. Please start
worshipping our god now. The people would never
buy it. It would be too psychologically radical.
They'd be terrified that if they abandoned the
old altars, the old gods would strike them with
lightning or destroy the crops. So what's the
workaround? The workaround is the abrogate. Instead
of denying the existence of the conquered people's
gods, the new victorious priesthood declared,
you are right. Your old gods do exist, but they
are actually devils. They acknowledge their power,
but completely invert their moral alignment.
Precisely. They say those beings you were worshipping
are actually the evil minions of the darkness
trying to trick you. And this leads us to one
of the most incredible etymological facts in
Conway's entire book. It involves the very word
demon itself. Today, when you and I hear the
word demon, we instantly picture horns, pitchforks,
sulfur, pure malevolence. But where does the
word actually come from? I honestly would have
guessed it always meant something bad. It traces
back to the ancient Sanskrit word deva, and deva
simply means the shining one. Wait, what? It's
derived from the Indo -European root div, meaning
to shine, which is associated with the bright
daytime sky. It's the exact same root that eventually
gives us the Greek theos, the Latin deos, and
our modern English words divine and deity. Wait,
so the literal translation of demon is a shining
divine being? It is. In its absolute original
context, it was a title of supreme reverence.
Even moving forward in history, in Plato's time
in ancient Greece, a demon or daemon was simply
a spirit and very often a good one. Really? Yes.
Plato wrote that good, wise men become demons
when they die, acting as benevolent messengers
or guardian spirits between the gods and humanity.
Oh, Socrates famously talked about having a personal
daemon that gave him good advice. Exactly. But
as the concept of dualism took hold across the
world, and as major religions fiercely competed
for dominance, these shining ones of the older
or rival religions were systematically degraded.
They were pushed down into the dark. And Conway
outlines the most dramatic, indisputable, historical
example of this happening. It's the split between
ancient India and ancient Persia. Yes. It is
the ultimate case study in what is known as the
odium theologicum. the intense bitter hatred
generated by theological differences. Okay, lay
it out for us. Thousands of years ago, the ancient
Aryan peoples who settled in the Indian subcontinent
and those who settled in the Iranian plateau
were originally one people. They shared the same
language roots, and they shared the exact same
pantheon of gods. They worshiped the same shining
ones. But eventually, a massive religious and
political schism occurred between the two groups.
It was a complete fracturing of their culture.
In India, under the influence of the Brahmins,
The Sanskrit word deva remained the holy word
for God. And they used another word, asura, to
refer to the demons or the enemies of the gods.
Okay, so India keeps deva as good and asura as
bad. But in Persia, the followers of Zoroaster,
the ones who championed that dualism of Ormuz
and Aramon, they did the exact opposite. It flipped
completely. The Zoroastrians took the holiest
Hindu gods, the Divas, and declared them to be
the evil lying minions of Ahriman. Oh my gosh.
So in ancient Persia, the word Deva or Div literally
became the word for devil. And what word did
they use for their supreme good deity? They used
Ahura as in Ahura Mazda. And Ahura is simply
the Persian linguistic variant of the Hindu word
Asura. I have to pause because that is genuinely
mind -blowing. They literally took each other's
holiest, most sacred words and turned them into
the ultimate curses. The Indian devil became
the Persian god and the Indian god became the
Persian devil. Exactly. It would be like if two
modern English -speaking nations had a civil
war and one nation decided that the word angel
now legally meant a bloodthirsty fiend while
the other nation decided that demon was the title
for the guardian of heaven. That is exactly what
happened. It shows with incredible clarity how
human conflict directly dictates the shape of
the spiritual world. The borders of heaven and
hell were drawn by earthly politics. That's wild.
And we see this dynamic play out in smaller ways
throughout the evolution of language, too. Conway
points out the historical origins of words we
still use today, like pagan and heathen. Right.
I actually loved this part of the text because
today pagan sounds like an occult term but it
originally just comes from the latin word paganus
which means a country dweller or a villager and
he then literally just means someone who lives
out on the heath in the uncultivated land because
you have to look at how religion spread When
the major cities and the centers of power adopted
a new dominant religion like when the Roman Empire
officially adopted Christianity The change happened
in the urban centers first right the rural folks
the villagers and the people out on the Heath
were isolated They naturally clung to the old
gods the old agricultural rights for much longer
Because their entire survival depended on those
agricultural rights. They weren't going to risk
a crop failure just because an emperor in Rome
changed his mind. Precisely. So over generations,
the urban centers began to view the rural people
with suspicion. The terms for country dwellers
slowly morphed into derogatory terms for backward,
uneducated worshippers of false, evil gods. Wow.
The old gods of the fields became the demons
of the new religion. the people who worship them
became pagans. So if we take a step back and
look at what this all means It means our modern
concept of a devil and his sprawling legions
of demons is essentially a massive historical
graveyard of ancient defeated deities. That's
a great way to put it. Every time an empire fell,
every time a priesthood was overthrown or a tribe
was conquered, its gods were demoted. They were
stripped of their divine status, pushed into
the shadows and added as another layer of terror
to the growing concept of the devil. They were
exiled, but they were never truly erased. Their
attributes, their physical symbols, the myths
surrounding them, they were all absorbed. into
the new terrifying mosaic of the demonic. But
here's the thing, abstract theological concepts
like dualism and exiled foreign gods are fascinating
to scholars, but they aren't enough to scare
a peasant walking home alone in the dark. No,
you need more than a concept. Humanity needed
a physical face for this ultimate adversary.
If you're going to build an empire of evil, you
have to build a monster capable of housing all
this terror. You need a mascot. And as Conway
painstakingly shows us, they didn't just invent
this monster from nowhere. They didn't just sit
in a room and sketch something scary. They looked
up at the sky. Which is the perfect transition
to the most universally recognized monster in
human history, the dragon. Yes, the metamorphosis.
From ancient storm deities to fire -breathing
dragons. I want to spend a lot of time on this
because the mechanics of how the dragon was built
are incredible. To start, we have to clear up
a very persistent modern misconception. For a
long time, there was a very popular scientific
theory, which Conway addresses and dismantled.
The dragons were simply the result of ancient
humans discovering dinosaur bones. Right, the
Saurian theory. And honestly, on the surface
it makes total sense. You're a medieval farmer,
you dig up a massive fossilized skull with huge
serrated teeth, and you have no concept of paleontology,
so you invent a dragon to explain the bones.
It sounds logical, but Conway points out a massive
flaw in the timeline. If the dragon myth was
based on humans encountering fossilized crocodilians,
pterodactyls, or t -rex skulls, then the earliest
myths would feature creatures that actually looked
like those multi -limbed terrestrial fossils.
But they don't. But they don't. The deeper you
go back in ancient text, the dragon isn't a four
-legged lizard with bat wings. The earliest versions
of the dragon in almost every mythology are serpents.
They are gigantic, legless snakes. Interesting.
The conventional dragon we think of today, with
the wings, the legs, the claws, the barbed tail,
is a much later highly composite creation. So
if it's not paleontology, what is it? It's primitive
meteorology. The dragon wasn't born in the dirt
from fossils. It was born in the clouds. To understand
the dragon, we have to go back to the Vedas in
India one more time. We have the supreme sun
god Indra, and his great eternal enemy is a monstrous
entity named Vritra. Okay, so who or what exactly
is Vritra in the original text? Because the name
literally translates to the coverer, right? Yes.
Vritra is the dark massive, suffocating storm
cloud that rolls in and covers the sky, hiding
the life -giving sun. And the foundational myth
says that Ritra steals Indra's cows and hides
them away in a dark, impenetrable cavern. Which,
when you first read it, sounds like a very weird,
petty, mythological, cattle -rustling story.
Right. The ultimate cosmic battle is over livestock.
But then Conway decodes the metaphor. Exactly.
You have to think like an ancient poet looking
at the sky. The caes are not literal animals.
The cows represent the gentle, white, life -giving
rain clouds. Oh, wow. They are the fluffy clouds
that bring the light showers. And their milk
is the gentle rain that nourishes the earth and
makes the crops grow. So if we translate the
poetry back into meteorology, Vritra, the dark,
oppressive, black storm cloud, has swallowed
up the gentle white rain clouds. He is hoarding
the moisture in the sky, causing a terrible drought
on the earth below. And the people are starving.
So Indra, the sun, has to do battle with Vritra
to release the rain. How does he defeat the dark
cloud? He strikes Vritra with his thunderbolt.
Exactly. The black cloud is pierced, it shatters,
and the waters are finally released to pour down
on the earth. It is a literal step -by -step
description of a massive thunderstorm breaking
a summer drought. It's ancient weather reporting.
That's exactly what it is. But as generations
pass, the original poetic meaning is forgotten.
The poetry hardens into literal belief. The abstract
cover of the sky coalesces in the human imagination
into a living, breathing, monstrous entity. Vritra
becomes heavily associated with another term
in the texts. Ahi, which means the strangling
serpent. Why a serpent, though? Why did a cloud
become a snake? Look at a massive storm system
rolling over the plains. Look at the winding,
twisting, coiled nature of dark clouds. Furthermore,
look at the lightning. Oh, the strike. Right.
The sudden jagged flash of lightning darting
out of the dark cloud perfectly resembles the
sudden darting strike of a serpent's forked tongue.
The storm cloud was perceived as a massive, twisting
snake striking at the earth. That paints such
a clear picture. In fact, Conway notes that the
ancient Greek word for adder or viper, aches,
is derived directly from that ancient Sanskrit
name for the storm serpent, ahi. That linguistic
connection is incredible. Okay, so we have established
a giant atmospheric sky serpent, but how do we
get from a snake in the clouds to the medieval
dragon painted on a night shield? Right, because
they look very different. Yeah, because the dragon
on a shield has legs, wings, fire, a weird tail.
Conway maps this physical evolution out and it
is brilliant. He shows how every single part
of the conventional dragon's anatomy is just
a hijacked force of nature. He really is a composite
monster. Let's piece this dragon together, starting
with the body. Okay, the body is usually described
as being covered in massive, impenetrable scales,
and it's almost always green or dark brown. Why?
The colors and textures are symbolic of its origins.
The dark green scales represent the primeval
sea and the deep slime, the chaotic, formless
waters from which massive storms and typhoons
are born. Okay, and the brown? The dark brown
or black represents the impenetrable suffocating
darkness of the storm cloud itself blocking out
the sun. OK, then you move to the head. The dragon's
eyes are always described as a glowing red. And
of course, the defining feature, it breathes
fire. Now, biological animals don't breathe fire.
Where did they get that? It breathes fire because
it is a thunderstorm. The glowing red eyes and
the fire from the mouth are the lightning. Of
course. It is the sudden terrifying flash of
red light from the belly of the dark cloud. And
remember, lightning literally starts fires. When
a thunderstorm rolls over a dry forest and lightning
strikes, the forest erupts in flames. It literally
spits fire. Exactly. To the ancient mind, the
flying monster in the sky was literally breathing
fire onto the earth. The dragon breathing fire
isn't a weird biological mechanism. It is the
exact description of a dry thunderstorm igniting
the landscape. That makes so much sense. And
what about the tail? A dragon's tail isn't just
a lizard tail, it always has that specific barbed
arrow -like point at the end. Snakes don't have
barbed tails. That barbed tail is the thunderbolt
itself. If you look at ancient Greek depictions
of Zeus throwing a thunderbolt, it's often drawn
as a jagged spear with a barbed tip. The piercing
strike of the storm, the lightning bolt hitting
the ground, was conceptualized as the monster's
tail whipping down and striking the earth. Oh.
It's deeply ironic, but fascinating. The weapon
of the god Indras, or Zeus's thunderbolt, eventually
becomes incorporated into the anatomy of the
very monster the god is supposed to be fighting.
The monster absorbs the weapon. Wow. And finally,
the wings, because the original Sky Serpent Ahi
didn't have wings. It just floated like a cloud.
Wings had to be added later as the myth became
more literal. Once people started thinking of
the dragon as a physical, heavy reptilian beast
rather than just a cloud, they ran into a logical
problem. How does this massive armored lizard
get up into the sky to fight the sun? Right.
It's too heavy. Exactly. They needed a physical
mechanism for flight. So the myth makers borrowed
The leathery spiked wings from other mythologies,
specifically ancient wind demons, harpies, and
bats. The flying cloud was given bat wings to
explain its mobility. So the dragon is essentially
a Frankenstein's monster of bad weather. It's
the slime of the flood, the blackness of the
cloud, the flash of the lightning, the fire of
the strike, and the wings of the hurricane all
stitched together into one beast. Exactly. And
because bad weather is a universal human experience,
we see these storm monsters evolve in almost
every single culture on Earth. Conway provides
some amazing cross -cultural examples that prove
this atmospheric origin. My absolute favorite
example he gave was the bobtail dragon in China.
Oh, that's a perfect one. The Chinese mythology
regarding dragons is beautifully complex because
very often the dragon is venerated. It's a symbol
of imperial power and good fortune. But the bobtail
dragon is a specific terrifying exception. What's
the story there? The ancient legend says that
this dragon's tail was amputated by a human.
And ever since that injury, it has held a deeply
soured violent temper toward humanity. And how
does that temper manifest? When the bobtail dragon
flies past, it causes violent, devastating typhoons.
Conway notes that even into modern times, when
a massive hurricane or typhoon hits the coast,
the traditional Cantonese proverb is the bobtail
dragon is passing. It's exactly the same mechanism
as the Vedic Ritra. The weather event is the
monster passing by. Then you look at Greek mythology
and you have Typhon. Typhon is this horrifying,
gigantic, hundred -headed, fire -breathing monster.
The myth says Zeus fought him in this epic cosmic
battle and finally defeated him by burying him
alive underneath Mount Edna in Sicily. Which
is an incredibly elegant mythological explanation
for a volcano. The fire and smoke coming out
of Mount Edna is just the trapped monster breathing.
But Typhon's deeper origins, before he was buried,
are entirely atmospheric. He represents the hurricane,
the scorching, suffocating wind. Right. Conway
points out a specific detail. Typhon is often
depicted with a massive, lolling tongue. That
tongue represents the terrible, desiccating thirst
brought on by the Sirocco, the hot, dry, dusty
wind that blows off the Sahara Desert. Typhon
is the hot, tainted tempest personified. And
if we move to the ancient Middle East, you have
the Babylonian epic of Belle and the Dragon.
The dragon in that myth is Tiamat. Yes, Tiamat.
She's one of the oldest dragon figures we have.
She represents the deep, the oceanic abyss, and
the chaotic oceanic storm. She brings an army,
right. In the epic, she brings 11 tribes of grotesque
monsters to fight against the gods of light and
order. It is the ultimate mythological codification
of the battle between the organized, luminous
heavens and the chaotic, destructive, unpredictable
waters of the sea. Now, In all these myths, across
all these cultures, there is one specific recurring
characteristic of dragons that I always sound
weirdly specific. You see it everywhere. The
hero fights the dragon, cuts off a head, and
two more heads immediately grow back. Ah, yes.
Or the dragon gets chopped to pieces by a knight,
but the pieces magically slither and flow back
together to reform the monster. The Greeks had
the Hydra, which grew heads back. In British
folklore, there's the legend of the lambton worm
which gets cut in half, but the halves rejoin.
Why do dragons always have this magical healing
ability? If we connect this to the bigger picture.
the atmospheric origin. It makes perfect logical
sense. It goes back to the simple fact that you
cannot kill a storm with a sword. Right, you
can't stab the weather. Imagine standing in a
field and swinging a sword at a thick fog or
a low cloud. You slash at the cloud, the missed
parts are on the blade, and then immediately
closes back up behind it. Nothing happens. Exactly.
You can watch a massive storm cloud break apart
in the sky, seemingly defeated by the sun, but
the winds just gather the moisture again an hour
later. The storm reforms, the weather always
returns. It's the principle of recurrence. Precisely.
Therefore, in the myth, the hydra grows two heads
when one is cut off. The lambton worm is cut
in two, but the pieces flow back together like
water. The dragon represents the unstoppable,
self -multiplying, regenerative principle of
nature's wrath. That's amazing. It's the ancient,
deeply humbling realization that while humanity
might survive one specific storm, You can never
permanently defeat the concept of the storm itself.
That is such a profound realization to bury inside
a fairy tale. The dragon is literally man's battle
with nature, codified, armored, and given teeth.
But as Conway's book progresses, he points out
a dark shift. Yeah, things change. As humanity
continued to evolve, as we clustered into larger
and larger civilizations, built thicker walls,
and developed better agriculture, the greatest
threat to our daily survival was no longer a
thunderstorm. We figured out how to survive the
rain. The greatest threat to human survival became
other humans. It was the people across the river.
It was the neighboring tribe competing for the
same hunting grounds or the same fertile valley.
And this is where the psychology of myth takes
a very grim turn. Just as the terrors of the
sky were personified as dragons, the terrors
of neighboring human tribes were given demonic
form. Which brings us to the final and perhaps
most disturbing phase of this evolution. The
shadow of war. and how tribal conflicts forged
our most enduring monsters. If we go back to
the logic of dualism we discussed earlier, the
idea that the universe is split into good and
evil, and that your civilization is protected
by the good god inside the wall, that logic demands
a very specific, dangerous conclusion about your
enemies outside the wall. It's an inescapable
logical trap. If our tribe is the chosen people
of the light, and we worship the good God who
provides order and truth, and that tribe over
the mountain is trying to kill us, burn our crops,
and take our land, they cannot possibly be guided
by the same light. They have to be evil. Exactly.
They are opposing the good. Therefore, they must
be guided by the darkness. They must be the literal
agents of the devil. Demonizing the other. It's
a political and military tactic as old as human
history, but Conway isn't just saying we call
our enemies mean names. He shows how we literally
wrote them into our holy texts as non -human
monsters. Let's look at the ancient texts again,
specifically the Aryans migrating into India.
When the Aryans invaded the Indian subcontinent
thousands of years ago, they encountered the
aboriginal tribes who were already living there.
The Aryans called these indigenous people the
Dacians. Okay. The Aryans were generally lighter
skinned, they spoke a different language, they
had different social customs, and they worshipped
different gods. The conflict over the territory
was brutal and protracted over generations. It
was a literal physical war for land. But look
at how that physical war was recorded in the
Vedic hymns. Over time, the Dacians are not just
described as rival human armies, they are entirely
mythologized into actual supernatural demons.
They became the Asuras we were talking about
earlier, the enemies of the gods. Exactly. The
physical historical war for territory was rewritten
by the victors as a cosmic spiritual war between
the gods of light and the demons of darkness.
The human enemies were systematically stripped
of their humanity. That's terrifying. Their physical
traits or cultural differences were exaggerated
into monstrous deformations. They were described
as shapeshifters, as creatures who ate raw flesh,
as monsters resisting the divine order of the
universe. And this isn't an isolated incident.
This geographical racial conflict, creating literal
monsters, happens everywhere in world mythology.
Conway brings up the Greek myth of Bellerophon
killing the chimera, which I found fascinating.
Because when we hear chimera today, we just think
of this weird fantasy mashup, a lion's head,
a goat's body, a snake for a tail. But Conway
traces it back to a real human conflict. Yes,
Bellerophon is celebrated as a great mythological
hero, but his actual historical achievement,
the root of the myth, was conquering a real group
of people called the Lycians. Now the etymological
root of the word Lycian tied closely to the Greek
word for wolf, lycos. So they were the wolf people.
Right. They were likely a fierce nomadic tribe,
perhaps less technologically civilized compared
to the urban Greeks. They probably wore animal
skins into battle and utilized terrifying guerrilla
-style warfare. To the Greeks, they were perceived
as savage, hairy wolf men. Which gives us the
origin of werewolf myths. Exactly. When a highly
structured civilized society encounters a nomadic,
fierce, animal skin wearing tribe in the dark
woods, the sheer terror of that encounter breeds
the myth of the man beast. It's trauma. Yes.
The werewolf isn't just a spooky campfire story
invented to scare children. It's the cultural
traumatic memory of being attacked by actual
human warriors who seemed as savage and unrelenting
as wolves. Conway also applies this historical
lens to the legends of giants and dwarfs, which
completely blew my mind. I've read fairy tales
my whole life about tall, brutish giants being
outwitted by smaller, clever, magical dwarfs.
I always just thought it was a fun story dynamic.
But Conway argues you're actually reading a distorted
history book. It is the mythological history
of a massive technological collision. Think about
human migration. You have early aboriginal tribes
who were still living in the Stone Age. They
relied on immense brute strength, they used massive
wooden clubs or heavy stones, and they were intimately
connected to the earth. And then a new wave of
migration happens. Smaller, perhaps more physically
slight migrating tribes arrive. But these smaller
tribes have a secret. They have discovered metallurgy,
they have invented iron weaponry, they know how
to forge chainmail, and they have developed superior
military strategy and organization. Now put yourself
in the shoes of the Stone Age Warrior. You are
massive, you are strong, you swing a heavy club
that has crushed every enemy you've ever faced,
you swing it at the smaller invader, and the
club bounces off a shiny, impenetrable skin.
Or the invader swings a thin, shining stick and
it cleanly cuts through your wooden club. To
a Stone Age warrior, a forged iron sword that
doesn't break, an interlocking ring armor that
deflects a crushing blow, is entirely incomprehensible.
It defies the laws of nature as they know it.
It seems like pure terrifying magic. So the superior
technology is mythologized as the magic of the
dwarfs, who, not coincidentally, are always depicted
as living underground and forging metals and
fairy tales. And the brute, raw strength of the
vanquished primitive tribe is exaggerated over
generations into the massive lumbering size of
the giants. It's the clash of the Stone Age and
the Iron Age. Over centuries of storytelling,
the actual human beings fade away entirely, the
historical context is lost, and only the fairy
tale monsters remain. That is just incredible.
But Conway sees the ultimate example of this
for last. The most profound consequential instance
of a tribal conflict morphing into pure demonology
is the biblical epic of Israel and Edom. It's
the story of the twin brothers, Jacob and Esau.
This specific narrative is an absolute masterclass
in how human sociology and historical conflict
are crystallized into theology. On the surface,
if you just read the text literally, it's a family
drama. It's a story of two brothers fighting
over a birthright and their father's blessing.
But underneath that? Historically and sociologically,
Conway shows that Jacob and Esau represent two
entirely different, fundamentally conflicting
societal structures. Right. Let's look deeply
at their profiles in the text because it's so
revealing. Jacob is described as the smooth man.
He lives in tents. He represents the trader,
the agriculturist, the civilized barter. He uses
his intellect, his cunning, and contractual agreements,
like literally buying his brother's birthright
in exchange for a bowl of lentil stew to get
what he wants. He is the prototype of the settled
citizen. Whereas Esau is the rugged outsider.
He's described as a man of the field, a hunter.
a nomad. He doesn't rely on contracts or agriculture.
He relies on his physical strength, his bow,
and the immediate bloody kill. So Jacob is the
farmer and Esau is the hunter -gatherer. Precisely.
They represent the massive historical clash of
the Neolithic Revolution and agricultural societies
and nomadic societies have never ever gotten
along. No they haven't. They are fundamentally
competing for how the land should be used. The
farmer wants to fence the land in, plow it, and
claim ownership. The nomad sees a fence as an
unnatural barrier to the hunting grounds and
the grazing paths. They are completely incompatible
ways of life, so they clash. But let's trace
how this human -societal clash shifts into mythology.
Esau's descendants become the historical tribe
of Edom. Now, the word Edom literally means red,
and they settle in a rugged mountainous region
called Ser, which translates to hairy or shaggy.
So you have the red -hairy men of the wild mountains
constantly threatening the smooth, settled farmers
of the plains. Right. Over centuries of intense
border skirmishes, violent raids, stolen cattle,
and deep -seated tribal hatred, the actual historical
human brother Esau and his human descendants,
the Edomites, begin to morph in the cultural
memory of the Israelites. Let's stop being just
annoying neighbors. You become a spiritual enemy.
The terrifying, unpredictable, nomadic raider
who comes down from the hills to destroy the
Harvest becomes the abstract demon of strife.
He becomes Samael. Yes. In later mystical texts
and folklore, the guardian angel of Esau, or
the spirit of Edom, is Samael. He is the accuser,
the adversary, the central demon of violence,
chaos, and unrest. I want you to think about
what this means for you listening to this right
now. It means that every time we read ancient
texts about Samael or the adversary or the devil
tempting people to violence and chaos, We are
actually looking at the ghost of a nomadic hunter
-gatherer tribe. Yes. We are looking at the cultural
trauma of agricultural settlers who clashed with
nomads thousands of years ago. Conway refers
to the early devil as the highwayman in epaulets,
the barbaric warrior, the literal guy who rides
down from the hills on a horse to steal your
crops, burn your barn and kill your cattle. That
human being became the very definition of Seton.
And understanding the sociological origin perfectly
explains a core characteristic of almost all
historical depictions of hell. What's that? If
you look at Dante or Milton or ancient folklore,
hell is almost never depicted as a place of quiet,
passive suffering. It is always, universally,
a place of absolute unrest, endless chaos, noise,
and continuous strife. Why is it always so noisy
and chaotic? Because to the civilized agricultural
man who invented the concept, the greatest fear
wasn't just dying. We're greatest fear their
ultimate nightmare was the chaotic restless Unpredictable
violence of the nomadic Raider who destroys the
peace and order of the settled community Hell
is chaotic because the nomads were chaotic a
civilized man Just wants to grow his wheat sit
in his tent and have peace And the devil is the
guy who rides in yelling and burns the field
down. It is so deeply grounded in the dirt of
reality. It really is. We've taken the very real
visceral trauma of ancient border wars, of losing
our crops and our families to the tribe next
door. And we have projected that trauma onto
eternity. It's the ultimate act of human projection.
We took the unpredictable, terrifying sky and
made it a scaled dragon. We took the competing
human tribe and made them legions of demons.
We built the spiritual world out of of the raw
materials of our earthly fears. Okay, we have
covered an absolutely massive amount of ground
today. I want to try and pull all these threads
together. We started this journey in a world
where nature was just nature, a chaotic pantheism
where gods brought both the gentle rain and the
devastating flood. Yes, the undivided universe.
And the only demons were floating stomachs that
represented the very real daily physical fear
of starving to death. And then we watched as
the human conscience evolved. As we developed
complex moral codes and systems of justice, we
couldn't handle the cognitive dissonance of a
God who did evil things. Right. So we split the
universe. We created the grand system of dualism,
ultimate good and ultimate evil. And we populated
that newly created evil realm by systematically
demoting the gods of the people we conquered.
From there, we watched the dark rolling storm
clouds of the ancient sky literally gather scales,
glowing red lightning eyes and barbed thunderbolt
tails to become the fire breathing dragons of
our myths. A monster you couldn't ever truly
kill because you can't kill the weather. Exactly.
And finally, we saw how the people across the
river or the tribe on the other side of the mountain
got transformed into literal monsters. We justified
our ancient wars and eased our cultural trauma
by stripping our enemies of their humanity, turning
the red, hairy, nomadic hunter Esau into the
demonic, cosmic adversary Samuel. It is a breathtaking,
epic journey of human psychology, but I keep
coming back to this, so what of it all? Conway
spent years of his life writing this massive
catalog of horrors. What are we supposed to do
with this knowledge? How does knowing that a
dragon is just a thunderstorm help us today?
This raises an important question, and Conway
suggests that understanding this history is actually
deeply liberating. He uses a beautiful literary
metaphor. He says that science, historical anthropology,
and comparative mythology act as the spear of
Ethereal. Ethereal. That's from Milton's Paradise
Lost, right? Yes. In the poem, Ethereal is an
angel who possesses a magical spear. The property
of this spear is that no illusion or falsehood
can withstand its touch. Oh, interesting. If
Ethereal touches a disguised creature with his
spear, the creature is instantly forced to reveal
its true original form. Satan is disguised as
a toad whispering in Eve's ear. Ethereal touches
him, and he is forced to appear as himself. Conway
argues that historical analysis is our spear
of ethereal. I love that. When we touch these
terrifying ancient oppressive dogmas with the
light of historical understanding, they shrink
back down. They lose their supernatural terror.
They become mundane. Exactly. The cosmic omnipotent
devil shrinks back into a tribal border skirmish
over grazing rights. The apocalyptic world -ending
dragon shrinks back into a severe summer thunderstorm.
They become the natural earthly phenomena they
always were. Which completely takes away their
power to terrify us or control us. But it also
leaves us with a profound mirror. Conway's text
hints at something really challenging here at
the end. He suggests that the war between man
and beast will only truly end when the wild beasts
in our own souls have been tamed. That's the
real challenge. Think about what we've learned
today. We have spent thousands of years taking
our own human aggression, our own greed, our
own vicious tribal hatreds, and putting them
into the bodies of imaginary dragons and devils.
We externalized all our worst traits so we didn't
have to own them. It is so much easier to declare
war on an imaginary dragon or a demonized neighbor
than it is to fight your own selfishness, your
own prejudice, or your own capacity for cruelty.
Exactly. So I want to leave you with this thought
to mull over. If all our ancient monsters are
just mirrors of human nature, what modern dragons
are we currently inventing right now? How are
we explaining away our own darker impulses today?
That's a great question to end on. Think about
that the next time you hear someone on the news
or in a debate call their political opponent
pure evil or a monster. Are they really a demon?
Or are we just writing the exact same chapter
of dualism all over again? Are we just inventing
a new simile because we don't want to sit down
and do the hard work of dealing with the Esau
across the aisle. It's a sobering thought. The
human tendency to demonize the other hasn't disappeared
at all. We have just updated our vocabulary.
It really is something to sit with. We started
this deep dive talking about a broken x -ray
machine, how diagnosing the human spirit or human
history isn't clean or binary, the waters are
muddy, there is no neat jagged white line. Not
at all. But maybe by looking closely at the monsters
we've created over the millennia, we're actually
looking at the only true x -ray of the human
mind we will ever get. We see all our ancient
fears of starvation, our tribalism, our desperate
need for moral order, all laid out in green scales
and hellfire. It's a messy, muddy, terrifying
picture. But it's us. It is the ultimate self
-portrait, painted entirely in shadows. Beautifully
said. Keep questioning everything, keep diving
deep into the history of how we think, and remember
that behind every terrifying monster, there is
a very human footprint right beside it. We'll
catch you on the next deep dive.