In certain old books you shall find strange mention of witches,
warlocks, succubae, spirits, daemons, and a thousand other powers
of darkness, whose pronounced vocation was the plague of poor
humanity. Within these books you may read (if you will) divers
wondrous accounts, together with many learned disquisitions
upon the same, and most minute and particular descriptions of
witch-marks and the like.
Aforetime, when a man committed some great offence against laws
human or divine, he was said to be possessed of a daemon--that is
to say, he became the medium and instrument through, and by
which, the evil was wrought; thus, when in due season he came to
be hanged, tortured, or burned, it was inflicted not so much as a
punishment upon him, the man, as to exorcise, once and for all,
the devil which possessed him.
In these material, common-sense days, we are wont to smile the
superior smile at the dark superstitions and deplorable ignorance
of our forefathers; yet life is much the same now as then, the
devil goeth up and down in the world, spirits, daemons, and the
thousand powers of darkness abide with us still, though to-day
they go by different names, for there is no man in this smug,
complacent age of ours, but carries within him a power of evil
greater or less, according to his intellect. Scratch off the
social veneer, lift but a corner of the very decent cloak of our
civilization, and behold! there stands the Primal Man in all his
old, wild savagery, and with the devil leering upon his shoulder.
Indeed, to-day as surely as in the dim past, we are all possessed
of a devil great or small, weaker or stronger as the case may be;
a demon which, though he sometimes seems to slumber, is yet
watchful and ever ready to spring up and possess us, to the
undoing of ourselves and others.
Thus, as I followed my companion through the wood, I was
conscious of a Daemon that ran beside me, leaping and gambolling
at my elbow, though I kept my eyes straight before me. Anon, his
clutching fingers were upon my arm, and fain I would have shaken
him off, but could not; while, as I watched the swing and grace
of the lithe, feminine body before me, from the little foot to
the crowning glory of her hair, she seemed a thousand times more
beautiful than I had supposed. And I had saved her tonight--from
what? There had been the fear of worse than death in her eyes
when that step had sounded outside her chamber door. Hereupon,
as I walked, I began to recall much that I had read in the old
romances of the gratitude of rescued ladies.