Evolution, Psychology, and Horror, Part V

 Copyright 2012 by Gary L. Pullman

 

Note: This post assumes that you have seen the movie The Exorcist (1973). If you have not, Wikipedia offers a fairly detailed, accurate summary of the plot.

 

Results of a 2009 Pew Research Center survey indicate that 33 percent of scientists believe in God; another 18 percent “believe in a universal spirit or higher power.” However, 83 percent of the American populace as a whole believes in God and 12 percent “believe in a universal spirit or higher power.” As far as disbelief is concerned, 41 percent of scientists do “not believe in God or a higher power” and 4 percent of the general public share their view. (A 2017 poll places the number of Americans who "do not believe in any higher power/spiritual force" at 10 percent.)

 

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According to some evolutionary psychologists, faith developed like any other evolved adaptation, or trait: it promotes human survival and reproduction. Faith, proponents of this point of view argue, is comforting, provides community cohesion, and offers a basis for ethics and “higher moral values.” Others regard faith as a spandrel or an expatation, that is, a “by-product of adaptations” that is useful for reinforcing the authority and status of the clergy and for providing emotional support for the faithful in times of trouble. As is true of many of the arguments of evolutionary psychology, these claims are controversial, keeping critics aplenty busy on both sides of the discussion.

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The Exorcist offers a concrete example of faith in action in Father Karras's exorcism of the demon (or demons) who allegedly possess Regan MacNeil.

 

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The priest's faith may provide some emotional comfort for him, but, it is obvious to the movie's audiences, his faith does not extinguish his feelings of guilt regarding his perceived neglect of his ailing mother, and faith as such offers little immediate comfort or reassurance to any of the other characters, with the possible exception of Father Merrin, who is killed early in the movie.

Although Karras's faith may hold the “community” of Regan's family together, his life as a priest, although it may assist some members of the wider world, seems to offer little benefit to his own life or to that of the Church he serves.

 

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Karras's faith does seem to cause him to judge, condemn, and feel revulsion toward the demons who allegedly possess Regan, and he frequently rebukes them, denouncing their behavior as impious, blasphemous, and sacrilegious, without passing judgment on the girl herself: he hates the sin, not the sinner.

 Source: docuniverse.blogspot.com

Throughout the movie, Karras experiences a crisis of faith. The ordeal that his mother faced during her illness, his own callous treatment of his mother (as he sees it); the apparent indifference and cruelty of human beings for one another; the sins that he encounters daily, both as a man and a priest; and the evil he witnesses as he seeks to exorcise the demons that have possessed the child he seeks to deliver suggest to him that, either he has lost his faith and, indeed, might never have had a true basis for belief in and trust of God; God has abandoned him; or, worst of all, God is “dead” or never existed to begin with, except as a myth. In any case, faith does not appear to have any true survival value—until Karras makes what Soren Kierkegaarad calls “the leap of faith.”

Close to despair, Karras does not despair. Close to renouncing his faith in God, Karras remains faithful to God. He shows that he is, indeed, the man of faith whom he has long professed to be. He has been discouraged. He has had doubts. He has entertained disbelief. However, to save Regan, he invites her demons into himself and then leaps out of her bedroom window, falling to his death. In doing so, he delivers her from the evil spirits that possessed her. But Karras accomplishes more as well; he remains true to his own beliefs, to his calling, to himself, to God. 

 

Source: ft.com

According to the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in Kierkegaard's thought, “the choice of faith is not made once and for all. It is essential that faith be constantly renewed by means of repeated avowals of faith.” Despite his doubts, Karras has constantly renewed his faith. Despite his temptation to despair, Karras does not despair. Close to renouncing his faith in God, Karras remains faithful to God. In each of these decisions, he maintains his faith and, therefore, himself.

As Kierkegaard points out, “in order to maintain itself as a relation which relates itself to itself, the self must constantly renew its faith in 'the power which posited it.'” This “repetition” of his faith sustains Karras, allowing him to deliver Regan. Initial appearances aside, the priest's faith, as it turns out, has tremendous survival power, both for Karras himself, who, in remaining true to his faith in God, remains true to himself, and for Regan, whom he delivers from her demons.

 

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For those who do believe in God, even if they represent a minority of the populace as a whole, their faith delivers them (and, indeed, many others whom they aid). Their faith makes them whole, even if they are broken; sets them free, even if they are possessed; enables them to reach—and even sometimes save—others, believers and disbelievers alike, by their example. Even if their accomplishments were to be attributed solely to their belief in belief, to their faith in faith, and to their trust in trust, rather than to an objective, real, personal God, these amazing and extraordinary accomplishments stand, testaments to the assertion that the trait of faith has survival value.

Imaginary vs. Imaginative Worlds as They relate to Horror Fiction

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

In C. S. Lewis: A Life, Alister McGrath points out the distinction that Lewis makes between imaginary and imaginative worlds. For Lewis, the former, McGrath says, depicts a landscape having “no counterpart in reality,” whereas the latter seeks to convey “images adequate to” the depiction of a transcendent “reality.” The worlds of mythology are examples of imaginative worlds, and “the more imaginative a mythology, the greater its ability, Lewis says, to “communicate more reality to us.”

McGrath makes it clear that, in discussing imaginative worlds, Lewis does not mean that such worlds—or the works devoted to them—are allegories. They may be interpreted allegorically, but that does not mean that they themselves are allegories. As Lewis explains, his own Chronicles of Narnia can be allegorized, but that “of itself is no proof that it is an allegory.” Instead, his Narnia series, which presents an imaginative world, is a “supposal,” by which he means fiction that supplies possible answers to questions of a transcendent nature. Using Narnia as an example, Lewis writes:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [in John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress] represents Despair, he [Aslan] would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as he actually has done in ours? This is not allegory at all.”

Lewis makes several points:

1. The writer's work asks or implies a question.
2. Although the question is posed in or by a work of fiction, the question relates to an actual event or events in the real world.
3. In the context of its imaginative world, the work poses an answer to the question.
   
   

Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz fails these tests and is, indeed, McGrath states, a work about an imaginary, rather than an imaginative, world. The world of Oz has no referent beyond itself. Narnia, by contrast, is shadow of another world which is itself the shadow of yet another world, just as, in Plato's thought, our sense perceptions of phenomena are shadows of the objects in the world and the world is itself a shadow of the transcendent world of perfect Forms.

An illustration of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave” pictures a man chained against a wall behind which men carry clay figures. The men hold the figures over their heads, and the upper portions of the figures are higher than the top of the wall against which the man on the other side is chained. A fire burning on a stone shelf of the cave, on the other side of the men, casts the shadows of the objects onto the wall in front of the chained man. Rather than seeing the actual objects—clay figures of a horse, a bull, and a pot—the chained man sees only their shadows. High on one of the cave's walls, a ladder ascends to the world above, where the sun shines in the sky. The objects the men carry are mere copies of the things in the world above—representations of the animals—and the shadows are copies, as it were, of these copies. Only in the unseen world above are the unseen, actual animals (representing, in the allegory, the Forms themselves).

Lewis's Narnia is somewhat like Plato's allegorical cave. The real world is Narnia, where Aslan dwells. Its copy is The Chronicles of Narnia, which recount the events in Narnia. The copy of the copy is our own world, a dim reflection of the imaginative world of the novels, which is, in turn, itself a faint likeness of Aslan's real world. The images that depict the world of the novels are the clay pots in Jung's cave, which represent, but do not truly reflect, the true objects themselves, any more than the objects truly reflect their transcendent Forms. As Lord Digory says, in The Last Battle, “It's all there in Plato.”

In attempting to envision Forms (i. e., in a Christian context, divine realities), Lewis depicts Christ as the lion Aslan, Satan as the White Witch, the fallen, unredeemed world as a frozen wasteland in which Christmas never arrives (until Aslan appears), and the Pevensie children are disciples. As McGrath points out,

Lewis's remarkable achievement in the Chronicles of Narnia is to allow his readers to inhabit this metanarrative—to get inside the story and feel what it was like to be part of it . . . . The Narnia stories allow us to step inside and experience the Christian story.

Do any horror stories accomplish something similar, creating imaginative worlds wherein the writer's work asks or implies and answers a question related to an actual event or events in the real world? Do any works of horror fiction shadow the true horrors of the real world in such a way that readers can enter their imaginative worlds and “experience” the stories depicting these landscapes? Do any of them give rise to myths? Are any horror stories mythopoeic?

The icons of horror that continue to resonate with readers and moviegoers may indicate which images have particular force in conveying feelings of terror and disgust (probably the two chief elements of horror). Often, these icons appear in literary works, but they are also present in the visual arts, especially painting and sculpture. Such icons include demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies, all of which have appeared in novels, short stories, or movies that meet Lewis's criteria, asking or implying a question related to what is (or is, at least, believed by some to be) related to an actual event or events in the real world, and pose answers to the question they pose.

To get just an intimation of the power these images of horror originally held for their audiences, we must try, to the best of our abilities, to envision the world as it was to them and to see, in this context, the supernatural beings they imagined as their enemies.

The world in which such creatures existed was a pre-scientific world wherein there was no well-established association of objective cause and effect. Demons, rather than bacteria, birth defects, viruses, radiation, or the like afflicted people with disease, blindness, or mental illness. They also animated human corpses, using dead bodies, as “vampires,” to drink blood. Demons also empowered witches to perform spectacular feats and wonders. The soul's survival of death enabled the existence of ghosts and zombies.

Today, we might call such a view of “reality” superstitious, but, for the ancients, it was simply the truth, the way things were, reality itself. Against such evils, such remedies as prayers, rituals, incantations were the only recourse which might prevail, and, only then, because God ruled over even the supernatural entities that afflicted humanity.

Horror is, like poetry, painting, sculpture, dance, and many other human enterprises, of religious, not secular, origin, and, despite the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the Enlightenment, horror continues to tap the primeval aspects of our existence as human beings that religion once addressed and, indeed, continues, for many, to address.

Just as adults retain vestiges of their childhood experience, humanity retains traces of its primordial heritage. In our fiction and in the dark, dim recesses of our ancient selves, demons, ghosts, vampires, witches, and zombies continue to horrify us, just as, in times past, they possessed, haunted, stalked, hexed, and vexed our ancestors in the “real world” in which they lived. If you doubt this, spend a few minutes alone in a cemetery by yourself after dark or imagine spending a night alone in the catacombs, among centuries-old corpses and skeletons of the dead.

Then, you will begin to fathom the terrible terror felt by those who believed in things that go bump in the night, and reading Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, or Stephen King will take on a new intensity. In Platonic and mythopoeic terms, their works are, after all, shadows of the shadows of the Real Horrors awaiting us beyond this world.

A History of Hell, Part III

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In their exhaustive survey of human civilization, historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel introduce many topics, including some that touch upon matters of interest to the writer of horror fiction, such as hell. This post provides a brief summary of the points that Will Durant (not yet joined in his venture by his wife) makes concerning this rather otherworldly theme in Volume IV, The Age of Faith, of The Story of Civilization:

• Al Ghazali claimed that theists considered heaven and hell to be “spiritual conditions only,” rather than actual places.
• The Sufi Moslems held that hell is but temporary and that, ultimately, salvation is universal.
• Arab descriptions served as part of the basis for Dante’s vision of hell in The Divine Comedy.
• For their inspiration for hell, the Hebrews referred to He Hinnom or Sheol, a valley in which rubbish heaps were continuously ablaze to prevent the spread of disease. Sheol, Durant observes, “was conceived of as a subterranean region of darkness that received all the dead.” The Hebrew hell consisted of seven stories , “with graduated degrees of torment.” It was a place of temporary torment for all but adulterers, those who shamed others publicly, and those who slandered or libeled others.
• Irishman Johannes Scotus Eringena believed that heaven and hell were spiritual conditions, not physical locations.
• Pope Gregory the Great held that hell is a physical place, wherein fire eternally burns the damned, tormenting them without destroying them; their suffering is increased, he maintained, by their being made to witness the torment of any of their loved ones who have also been damned and by their despair at ever being liberated or delivered from their suffering.
• Durant says that medieval Catholic men and women “hoped vaguely for heaven, but vividly feared hell.” The Bulgarian king, Boris, was converted, it is said, by seeing a mural of hell that an artist painted upon his palace wall. Mystics claimed to have visions in which they saw the “geography of hell.” Satan, chained upon “a burning gridiron,” was alleged to snatch suffering sinners and crush them in his teeth, swallowing “them down his burning throat,” as “assistant demons with hooks of iron plunged the damned alternately into fire or icy water, or hung them up by the tongue, or sliced them with a saw, or beat them flat on an anvil, or boiled them or strained them through a cloth.” A sumptuous stench permeated the damned and their environs, and the flames gave no light, the darkness adding to the terror and the suffering of the damned. Christ was feared in his aspect of the judge of the living and the dead, for he could send or deliver the souls of the dead to eternal bliss or to everlasting damnation. “The devil,” Durant points out, “was no figure of speech but a life and blood reality, prowling about everywhere, suggesting temptations and creating all kinds of evil.” He was also quite the ladies’ man, fathering monstrous children, one of whom is alleged to have had “a wolf’s head and a scorpion’s tail.” His many assistants also tempted people and liked to lie with women as incubi, or sex demons. Although the people feared the greater demons, “a saving sense of humor saved this demonology, and most healthy males looked upon the little devils rather as poltergeist mischief-makers than as objects of terror,” and one exhausted demon, resting “on a head of lettuce. . . was inadvertently eaten by a nun.” Limbo was introduced as the abode of the unapprised infant, although St. Augustine had believed that they also went to hell. There was debate as to whether more souls would be saved and go to heaven or more souls would be damned and go to hell, and Moslems believed most Christians would go to hell, while Christians believed the opposite. No soul could be saved, the Roman Catholic Church contended, except through itself. Volcanoes were assumed to be “the mouths of hell,” and “their rumbling was a faint echo of the moans of the damned.” According to Pope Gregory, “the crater of Etna was daily widening to receive the enormous number of souls that were fated to be damned.” Pope Gregory IX held as heretical Raymond Lully’s assertion that the greatness of Christ’s love ensured the salvation, rather than the damnation, of the vast majority of souls. “The last moment of life” was considered to be “decisive for all eternity,” which added to the terror of life that many felt. Purgatory offered slight hope to the living. According to a legend, St. Patrick had a great pit dug, into which monks descended; “some returned. . . And described purgatory and hell with discouraging vividness.” Many other travelogues of hell also existed. As Durant notes, “Apocalyptic literature describing tours or visions of heaven or hell abounded in Judaism and Christianity,” and priests, such as Peter Damian, delivered “fiery sermons on the pains of hell.” Nevertheless, some challenged these doctrines of the faith--and, indeed, the faith itself, asking, for example, why God should have created the devil if he’d known in advance that the devil would sin and fall, whether a just and loving God could “punish finite sin with infinite pain,” and whether hell-fire would not at some point render the damned insensitive to its pain.
• The doctrine of original sin was a theological attempt to account for “the biological theory of primitive instincts” and “the preaching of this doctrine” led to a diminishing of the “fear of hell. . . till the Reformation,” when it was “to reappear with fresh terror among the Puritans.”
• St. Anselm said that only the “infinite atonement” of Christ could atone for the “infinite offense” of Adam and Eve, their sin being “infinite” because it had been directed “against an infinite being,” God. Therefore, only “the death of God become man could ransom humanity from Satan and hell. . . . and restore the moral balance of the world.”
• For medieval people, “the earth was the chosen home of Christ, and the shell of hell, and weather was the whim of God.”
• Roger Bacon endorsed the study and use of mathematics because this subject “should aid us in ascertaining the position of paradise and hell.”
• Dante used many Arab sources as inspirations for his descriptions of hell, including the Koran, “the story of Mohammed’s trip to heaven and hell in Abu-l-Ala a;-Ma’arri’s Irisalat al-Ghufran. . . . and Ibn Arabi’s Futubat.
• The hell of Dante’s Inferno is entered through an opening in the earth near a forest. The opening leads to the gates of hell, where an inscription reads, in part, “All hope abandon, ye who enter here!” In the poem, “hell is a subterranean funnel, reaching down to the center of the earth,” imagined by the poet as featuring “dark and frightening abysses between gigantic murky rocks; steaming, stinking marshes, torrents, lakes, and streams; storms of rain, snow, hail, and brands of fire; howling winds and petrifying cold; tortured bodies, grimacing faces, blood-stilling shrieks and groans.” The funnel leads through nine levels. Nearer the surface, the lesser sinners reside, whereas the greater sinners dwell at the lower levels. At the lowest level, the ninth circle of hell, traitors are housed, and, at the lowest of all points, “Lucifer lies buried to the waist in ice, flapping enormous wings from his shoulders, weeping icy tears of blood from the three faces that divide his head, and chewing a traitors in each of three jaws--Brutus, Cassius, and Judas.” Dante included actual people among the damned, including, in addition to popes. His Divine Comedy also describes purgatory and heaven, or paradise.

What can we learn from this part of the survey of the ideas of the afterlife and the underworlds? Many sources have formed the idea of hell, including mythological, pagan, Jewish, and Christian ones.

For the first time, the idea is formed that hell may signify a spiritual condition, rather than a literal place. Theology seems to be losing out to psychology as an explanation of human behavior.

The idea that hell is permanent and eternal rubs some the wrong way, and the doctrine of universal salvation appears, both in Moslem and Christian faith, only to be condemned in Roman Catholicism as heretical. However, Limbo is allowed for unapprised infants, to spare their innocent souls from hell. For those who maintain faith in the existence of an actual, physical hell, the torment of the damned becomes more extreme, the imagination supplying many details as to the nature and effects of the suffering that the lost souls must endure there, forever, as if the catalogue of horrors somehow ensures their reality and, therefore, the reality of the hell in which they occur.

Many write of their supposed journeys to heaven and hell, as if they are reporting trips to foreign lands. Locating heaven and hell becomes a motive for the study of science and mathematics.

Satan and the lesser demons are believed to be incarnate and to be able, in fact, to have sexual relations with women, as incubi (and with men, as succubi). Lesser demons are considered mischievous rather than malignant.

Churchmen argue whether more souls will be saved or damned, with more supporting the latter over the former view.

Dante’s Inferno, borrowing from many earlier sources, Christian and otherwise, offers the most detailed geography of hell, populating it with both imaginary and actual historical figures, including popes, suggesting that hell is a real place to which anyone, including leaders of the church itself, may be tormented in a variety of real and agonizing ways.

Today, the imagining of hell continues in sermons and in books written by people who claim to have undergone near-death experiences, and the debate continues as well as to whether a literal hell exists or, whether, for that matter, literal demons live and stalk the earth.

Those who appear as damned in literary texts represent the values of the society or the poet or other writer in whose work the damned appear, for the values of the lost souls are the values that are rejected by these creators of hell. Therefore, hell can be thought of, in the Jungian sense, as representing a psychic reservoir, akin to the universal mind, in which humanity’s collective shadow archetype lives, in bits and pieces, disguised as this or that individual or type of person. For example, in Dante’s hell, from least (closest to the surface) to the greatest (farthest down), these are the damned; whose values represent the opposites of those embraced by the poet himself:

1. Unbaptized infants
2. Lustful
3. Gluttonous
4. Greedy and wasteful
5. Wrathful and sullen
6. Heretical
7. Violent
8. Fraudulent
9. Treacherous

Plus, did anyone notice the historical references to "mouths of hell"? Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, apparently did, because at least two are mentioned in his television series, one of which was located beneath the Sunnydale High School library (or, in the high school later built on the same site, the principal's office)!

A History of Hell, Part II

copyright 2008 by Gary L. Pullman

In their exhaustive survey of human civilization, historian Will Durant and his wife Ariel introduce many topics, including some that touch upon matters of interest to the writer of horror fiction, such as hell. This post provides a brief summary of the points that Will Durant (not yet joined in his venture by his wife) makes concerning this rather otherworldly theme in Volume III, Caesar and Christ, of The Story of Civilization.

• Etruscan soldiers believed that they could free one relative’s soul for every foe whom they slew in battle.


• The Etruscan concept of the afterlife included the judgment of the dead, an eternity of torment in hell or of bliss in heaven, and a purgatory of sorts. Their ideas concerning the suffering of the damned haunted Virgil and Dante.


• By far, most of the dead, in Greek belief, went to Hades, but a few spent eternity in paradise, in the Islands of the Blessed or (in Roman mythology) the Elysian Fields.


• Hades, for whom the underworld realm of the dead was named, ruled the subterranean world, and was armed with a mallet by which he could stun the dead.


• Although the Romans sometimes conceived of Hades as a place of punishment, they generally thought of it, as did the Greeks, as a twilight realm in which the dead existed as shadowy figures.


• Dreary Hades as the final destination of almost all the dead disappointed the Roman poet Virgil, and, in The Aeneid, along with “ideas of reincarnation and a future life,“ he sought to describe three alternatives: “a rewarding heaven, a cleansing purgatory, and a punishing hell.”


• Plutarch wrote of the existence or evil spirits who were the source of all chaos and wickedness in nature and humanity and, like Virgil, believed in both heaven and purgatory as well as hell. He believed that even Nero, after his soul had been purified in purgatory, might enter heaven and hoped that the vast majority, rather than a tiny minority, might enjoy a blessed eternity. He rebuked the Stoics for seeking to replace faith in hell with a doctrine of death as annihilation.


• Jesus of Nazareth argued that, upon damnation, hell is eternal, punishing, and irrevocable. In hell, he said, the fire is not quenched, nor is the worm sated. Not the least comfort or compassion is permitted.


• The book of Revelation declares that God’s great enemy, Satan, and his followers, the demons, reside in hell, but will be loosed upon the earth in its final days before being defeated forever and cast, along with the souls of the damned, into hell again, this time for eternity.
  

What can we learn from this part of the survey of the ideas of the afterlife and the underworlds? We see that many of the earlier ideas concerning judgment, purgatory, heaven, and hell continue and are developed more specifically. In addition, we learn that Jesus held a strict view of a literal and eternal hell of endless punishment and suffering and that God’s enemy, Satan, and his demons reside in hell along with the souls of the damned. The idea of the afterlife as a shadowy place full of shadowy figures living insubstantial half-lives is gone, replaced with the idea that the souls of the dead are fully alive and subject either to endless bliss or to eternal torment.

In “A History of Hell, Part III,” we will summarize Will Durant's survey of hell as it was conceived during The Age of Faith.