In the early 1580s, the Mughal ruler Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar brought to his court scholars from many of the religious traditions followed in the Mughal Empire, building for them the Ibadat Khana (“House of Worship”), where they could discuss their beliefs and practices in front of the emperor. These discussions involved both Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, especially those who were interested, as Akbar was, in Sufism, that mystical form of Islam. They also involved those who followed the diverse religious tradition that would later be called Hinduism, the religious practice of the majority of Akbar’s subjects. But Akbar’s guest list did not stop there. The discussions also included Zoroastrians, called “Parsis” in Hindi, Jains, Jews, and atheists of the Carvaka tradition, who believed that the world was simply material, and did not involve divine forces. There were Indian Christians from the southwest coast of India, usually termed the Malabar or St. Thomas Christians, whose church dated back to the fifth century and may have been even older. There were Sikhs, a new religion founded during the reign of Akbar’s father Babur by Guru Nanak, and there were Jesuit priests from the Portuguese colony of Goa on the west coast of India. These discussions were described in a number of Indian sources, including the Akbarnama, an enormous history of Akbar’s reign written by the Sunni Muslim scholar Abu’l Fazl, a great fan of Akbar’s. They were depicted in visual form by several artists, including the Sikh artist Nan Singh, whose illustration to a manuscript of the Akbarnama is shown here. (Figure 1) One of the Jesuit priests, Father Anthony Monserrate, took many notes, and transformed them into a coherent work after he left Akbar’s court, though he never sent this on to Rome as he was supposed to.

The gathering at Akbar’s court has become a prime example of one of our favorite themes in world history: cultural encounters. Akbar himself has also become a symbol of religious toleration and enlightened reason, and compared in this — and in other aspects of his long and successful reign — with his contemporary Elizabeth I of England, another ruler who did not, in her words, “make windows into men’s souls.” The contemporary sources support this positive view of Akbar. Abu’l Fazl comments that

A set of wisdom-loving judicious men were in readiness to propound questions and to record views. The degrees of reason and the stages of vision were tested, and all the heights and depths of intelligence were traversed…By the blessedness of the holy examination, the real was separated from the fictitious… the just and truth-perceiving ones of each sect…displayed profundity and meditation, and gathered eternal bliss on the divan of greatness. 
Monseratte describes him as full of “piety, integrity, and prudence.”    Even Akbar’s enemies, such as the orthodox Sunni Muslim historian ‘Abd ul-Qadir Bada’uni, describe him as “an earnest searcher after truth,” who listened to all “proofs based on reason and traditional testimony.”
 
At about the same time that Akbar was gathering scholars around him for reasoned discussion, another cultural and religious encounter was taking place half a world away. In 1555, the French king Henry II equipped a small fleet of two ships and several hundred sailors and colonists to establish a colony, France Antarctique, at what is now Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. They were led by the French vice-admiral Nicolas Durand de Villegaignon (1510–1575), who had made his name fighting the Ottomans in the Mediterranean. (Figure 2) Villegaignon’s own religious allegiance at this point is unclear, but the colony was designed as a refuge for Huguenots (that is, French Protestants) and the fort established on a small island was named Fort Coligny, in honor of the most important French Protestant admiral(it was also designed to give France direct access to the red wood used as a dye for textiles that the Portuguese called braza-wood, but that’s another story.) (Figure 4) More settlers followed several years later, including a small group from the Geneva of John Calvin, whose ideas about the Eucharist differed sharply from Villegaignon’s. The vice-admiral banished the Calvinists from the island fort, and they settled for several months near the Tupinamba Indians on the mainland. Some managed to return to France, and a few returned to Fort Coligny, where they were executed by Villegaignon for their religious beliefs.

Villegaignon himself also returned to France, where he led military campaigns against Huguenots during the French Wars of Religion. He also became involved in a pamphlet war about the Eucharist, with Pierre Richier — one of the Calvinists who had made it safely back to France — on one side publishing a pamphlet against Villegaignon in French, entitled "Refutation of the foolish lunacies, execrable blasphemies, errors and lies of Nicolas Durand de Villagagnon," and Villegaignon responding (in Latin) with "The consecration, mystical sacrifice and double offering of Christ,” published in 1569, shortly before he died (meanwhile the French colony in Brazil had been conquered by the Portuguese.)  Religiously-inspired debates about Villegaignon and the French colony continued after both were gone. The Catholic André Thévet, who had been the chaplain on Villegaignon’s first voyage, published Singularities of France Antarctique, a description of Brazil that included an attack on the Protestants. This was answered by Jean de Léry — another of the Calvinists who had made it safely back to France — in his History of a Voyage to the  Land of Brazil, otherwise called America, published in 1578. (Figure 5)

Villegaignon can be seen in many ways as the opposite of Akbar. Instead of religious toleration and enlightened discussion there is intolerance expressed in words and deeds, including military campaigns and violent repression. Through Villegaignon’s actions, the religious disputes tearing Europe apart spread to the tiny French colony in Brazil, tearing it apart as well during its very brief history. We could easily use this to engage in one of the most common methods in world history, comparison, in which Akbar would energe as a modern forward-looking ruler and Villegaignon as a backward one.

But wait. In his essay “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Sanjay Subrahmanyam argues that world historians should not only make comparisons, but also study connections, particularly connections across broad geographic areas that take us out of regions defined by today’s nation-states or even as defined by the Area Studies approach. “We should not only compare from within our boxes,” he asserts, “but spend some time and effort to transcend them, not by comparison alone but by seeking out the at times fragile threads that connected the globe, even as the globe came to be defined as such.” With the latter phrase Subrahmanyam is referring to the early modern period, an era that he notes is particularly full of connections because it “defines a new sense of the limits of the inhabited world, in good measure because it is in a fundamental way an age of travel and discovery.”

 I would like to pick up on this idea, and examine a subject that links Akbar’s court and the French colony in Brazil: demons. Whether they were Catholic or some variety of Protestant, the French colonists in Brazil firmly believed in demons — that is, malevolent supernatural beings who were, as I put it in my title, sowers of discord and agents of decline. And so did most of those gathered at Akbar’s court, or at least many of their co-religionists.  (Figure 7)

Demons have been part of people’s understandings of the seen and unseen world, and the relationships between these, since the Neolithic age, if not before. They appear in nearly every indigenous religion, and in all of the text-based ones. Belief in demons by people living in the late sixteenth century, however, particularly among educated men, has been seen as an anachronistic aberration. After all, this was the early modern period, and demons seem strikingly medieval.  Thus discussion of demons in the writings of highly learned men of this era have until recently been dismissed either as embarassing remnants of earlier ways of viewing the world that intelligent men had not yet been able to shake, or as marginal to intellectuals’ main concerns.

I am using gender-specific language here because recorded discussions of demons by highly learned women of the early modern period are extremely rare, just as are highly learned women themselves. Unlearned women do discuss demons, but this is generally within the context of a trial for witchcraft, and they are answering questions about demons posed by their learned inquisitors. No woman took part in the discussions at Akbar’s court, so we also learn little about women’s religious ideas from the sources about those discussions. The group was diverse along the lines of religion, skin color, and social group, but gender diversity was literally unthinkable.

Within the last decade, however, there has been a reconceptualization of ideas about demons. In his massive Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe,  Stuart Clark has argued that demonology was an intellectual system that made sense to those who accepted it, and fitted rationally with ideas about science, history, religion, and politics.  The title of his book captures his primary point: witchcraft was an idea, not simply a matter of belief, and demons were something that helped people to think about a variety of matters. He takes the idea of “thinking with” from the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, who, when studying the function of totem animals in many cultures, commented that “animals are good to think with.”  Ideas about demons were inseparable from ideas about social order, proper hierarchies, nature’s normal processes, and the consequences of sin, and “thinking with demons” helped educated men consider other intellectual problems involving the natural world, the processes of history, the political order, and God’s purpose in the world.

Clark only discusses Christian thinkers in Europe, but demons were connecting links between many parts of the early modern world. Demons travelled, and so did ideas about them. Here I will examine demons in four religions of the early modern world — Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Islam — whose adherents were themselves travelling through those world historical processes of colonization, migration, expulsion, diaspora, and conquest.   In all of these religions, demons helped philosophers, religious leaders, and political figures think about other issues, and also provided them with a reason to act, to develop new ways of confronting the chaos and disorder cretaed by demons. Demons were agents of decline, but also agents of modernity.

I begin with Christianity. The heyday of Christian demonology was the early modern period, but thinkers of that era built on centuries of tradition. To provide a brief recap: The New Testament mentions Satan and his minions in a number of places, including the Gospels in which Satan tempts Jesus and Jesus casts out demons from people who suffer from various ailments,  and the Book of Revelation in which demonic fallen angels, led by Satan, battle heavenly angels, led by the archangel Michael. Satan is never described physically, however, nor is his fall  narrated or explained. The early Church Fathers also do not discuss Satan and demons much, and the first known depiction of Satan comes from the sixth century. In this he is already shown wearing one of two colors associated from that point on in Christianity with the demonic, however: red. Art historians think that showing him as red or in red clothing may have come from Egyptian traditions in which the evil god Seth is red, or from red’s associations with blood and fire. The other color for Satan and his demons is, of course, black, a color about which there is a long negative association in western thought. (Figure 8)

Medieval Christian thinkers developed much more elaborate ideas. They added the story of the fall of Satan, in which Satan was originally an angel, but desired God’s power for himself and refused to worship him, so was thrown out of heaven. They began to classify demons, give them names, and attempt to count them. Artists portrayed them on everything, and created the standard picture: winged, dark, physically grotesque, often with horns, cloven hoofs, and a tail. (Figure 9)

Demons were always sowers of discord in Christian thinking, but in the later Middle Ages the ways in which they did this increasingly involved specific human agents: witches. Like demons, most societies in history have believed in witches, that is, people who use magical or supernatural forces to do evil deeds. In late medieval Europe, however, the essence of witchcraft became instead making a pact with the devil, a pact that required the witch to do the devil's bidding. Witches were no longer simply people who used magical power to get what they wanted, but people used by the devil to do what he wanted.  Witchcraft was thus not a question of what one did, but of what one was. Gradually this demonological or Satanic idea of witchcraft was fleshed out, and witches were thought to engage in wild sexual orgies with demons, fly though the night to meetings called sabbats that parodied the mass, and steal communion wafers and unbaptized babies to use in their rituals. Some demonological theorists also claimed that witches were organized in an international conspiracy to overthrow Christianity, with a hierarchy modeled on the hierarchy of angels and archangels constructed by Christian philosophers to give order to God's assistants. This demonic idea of witchcraft was explained in hundreds of books by learned authors, proclaimed from pulpits by educated Catholic and Protestant clergy, and shown in illustrated pamphlets and broadsides; these are what Clark studies in Thinking with Demons. (Figure 10) It was also the most important factor in the witch hunts, in which 100,000-200,000 people were tried and probably between 40,000 and 60,000 executed, the last in 1775.

Europeans took their ideas about demons with them when they explored and colonized —  and, in fact, saw their voyages and the movements of demons as connected. For example, Pierre de Lancre, a French magistrate appointed in 1609 by King Henry IV to investigate the activities of witches in the Basque region of France, noted that the reason there were so many more witches in his day than earlier was the coming of European missionaries to the New World, which had forced more of Satan’s demons to return to Europe. The demons traveled, in Lancre’s opinion, with Basque fishing ships. They remained with the “impudent and undisciplined” Basque women when their husbands left again in search of cod, women whose only marketable agricultural commodity was apples, and who “ate with abandon this fruit of transgression, which caused the trespass against God’s commandment, and they ignored the prohibition made to our first father.” 

  
Lancre was not alone in this idea. In On the Demon Worship of Sorcerers, first published in 1580 and republished many times over the next several decades, Jean Bodin, the French jurist and legal theorist best known for his writings about the divine right of kings, argued that the demon worship and witchcraft of the Americas was the same as that found in Europe. In all places this was a rebellion against God, and was to be treated severely:

Those too who let the witches escape, or who do not punish them with the utmost rigor, may rest assured that they will be abandoned by God to the mercy of the witches and demons. And the country which shall tolerate this will be scourged with pestilences, famines, and wars; and those which shall take vengeance on them will be blessed by God and will make his anger to cease.  

Bodin’s descriptions of witches’ sabbaths, where they had sex with demons and workshipped the Devil, were particularly vivid. They were so vivid, in fact, that Jean de Léry lifted one directly when he was describing the Tupinambá in his History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil. Lery quotes Bodin exactly, though he doesn’t mention this, and comments: “I have concluded that they have the same master; that is, the Brazilian women and the witches over here were guided by the same spirit of Satan; neither the distance between the places nor the long passage over the sea keeps the father of lies from working both here and there on those who are handed over to him by demons in the just judgment of God.”  The link between European witchcraft and native religion was also portrayed visually. An engraving from the 1580s or 1590s by Crispin de Passe after Martin de Vos shows the god Saturn in his chariot pulled by two dragons through the sky, with different groups and activities over which he holds sway depicted below; on the right are Native Americans mining gold and silver and cooking human body parts on a grill, while on the left a magician casts spells before a cauldron and witches and demons dance through the air.  (Figure 11)

Because European Christians regarded both New World and Old World witches as guided by Satan in the same way, missionaries active in the New World began to define pre-conquest religious practices as demonic rather than simply misguided and attempted to destroy all religious objects. Thus the language of demonology provided a vocabulary for educated Europeans to describe the indigenous people of the New World, so that “thinking with demons” helped them consider the problem of cultural difference and provided a motive for repression.

In the New World as well as the Old, women were viewed as particularly suscetible to demons. The Florentine Codex —  a huge collection of descriptions and illustrations of Mexican life produced under the supervision of missionaries —  shows a procuress attempting to lure a woman into prostitution with a horned and hoofed demon standing right behind her; in the words that accompany the picture, the procuress is described as “truly the eyes, the ears, the messenger of the Devil.”   A later Jesuit described women’s ritual dances as “demonically inspired lascivious and drunken spectacles” designed to promote “indolence, incest, and idolatry.”   According to Jesuit reports from New France, male converts placed in positions of authority as dogiques attempted to force women to comply with Christian norms, commenting “it is you women...who are the cause of all our misfortunes {-} it is you who keep the demons among us...You are lazy about going to prayers; when you pass the cross, you never salute it; you wish to be independent.”  Editions of Jean de Lery’s History showed women as cannibals, posing them in the exact same positions as witches were in engravings that circulated widely. (Figures 12 and 13) Thus demons helped Jesuits and other missionaries and their converts think about gender, providing them with yet another reason why women were clearly inferior and in need of male control.

Campaigns against demons and idolatry in the Americas continued the longest in the Andes, which was more resistant to Christianization than New Spain, with practitioners of indigenous religions, female and male, accused of both magic (hechicería) and the more serious demonic witchcraft (brujería). These campaigns picked up in the seventeenth century, as some Andean residents combatted Spanish policies by returning to earlier beliefs and practices. As they smashed objects regarded as holy in indigenous traditions, Christian clergy in the Andes also handed out pictures of saints, hoping to encourage veneration of individuals who exempified Christian virtues. They favored saints whose relics were housed in Lima, the center of Spanish authority in Peru, so that in this instance thinking with demons served the interests of nation-building, that process so central to “modernity.” 
 
European Christians took their ideas about demons east as well as west, to India, China, and Southeast Asia. Indigenous practices were cast as demonic here as well, but they were also attractive to Europeans, particularly if such practices promised good health, long life, or success in business or love. Europeans — including educated members of the clergy —  bought local charms, spells, and potions and then debated how it was that they worked. “Demons,” wrote one, “cannot advance natural things without natural causes being present.”  Charms and the demonic forces behind them were therefore not strictly supernatural, but acted according to the laws of nature creating effects in the real world, which is what made them believable. Thus thinking with demons helped educated Europeans consider the laws of cause and effect and other workings of the natural order, that is, think about science.

So much, then, for the French colonists in Brazil and the Jesuits at Akbar’s court. What about the others gathered there? Some of them were Parsis,  Indian Zoroastrians whose religion rested on the teachings of the eponymous ancient Persian prophet. (Figure 14) In one of the Gathas, hymns attibuted to Zoroaster, the prophet declares:

There were two primeval spirits, twins renowned to be in conflict;
One good, the other evil in thought, word and deed.
Between them the wise choose rightly; not so the ignorant….
Between the two, the daevas did not choose correctly, for deception
Came upon them while they were deliberating. For they chose the worst intention;
Then they rushed together in fury with which they afflict this mortal existence. 

Scholars of ancient Zoroastrianism generally see the daevas in this hymn as formerly beneficent gods who were to be rejected because devotion was to be directed to Ahuramazda alone, but in later Zoroastrian texts they become more and more evil. The daevas are gods who chose to be demons, who allied themselves with the malevolent deity Angra Mainyu, but who would all be defeated at the end of time by Ahura Mazda.  In the Bundahishn, a Zoroastrian account of creation made up of texts that originated during the eighth through sixteenth centuries, Angra Mainyu creates hordes of demons (in this Persian text they are called “dews” or “devs”) that afflict humans with every possible catastrophe. (Figure 15)

The undifferentiated group of daevas of the Gathas acquire names and specific qualities in these later texts, and become increasingly hierachical: there are arch-demons and lesser demons, many associated each with one particular ill: Apaush with drought, Az avarice, Bushasp sloth, Freptar deception, and so on. Many of the most fearful demons are female: Azi causes uncontrollable lust, Jahi seduces worshippers of Ahura Mazda and even other demons, and Vizaresa drags the souls of those who do not follow Ahura Mazda to hell. Both male and female demons often have anthropomorphic properties such as faces, feet, and hair, and sometimes engage in sexual relations with humans. Angra Mainyu and his demons are powerful, but in Zoroastrian teaching people possess the free will to choose between the forces of creation, truth, light, and order and those of nothingness, chaos, falsehood, darkness, and disorder. It is their responsibility to decide between these, to become followers of light or worshippers of demons. Good behavior in the world, even though it might be unrecognized during one’s life, will be amply rewarded in the hereafter, while evil, no matter how powerful in life, will be punished after death. At the end of time, there will be a final reckoning and cataclysmic battle, after which demons and their followers will be cast into an underworld pit of fire, darkness, and torment. 

In the Shikand-gumanic Vichar, or Analytical Treatise for the Dispelling of Doubts, a ninth-century Iranian Zoroastrian text, those worshippers of demons included practitioners of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. To the author of this work, the fact that these religions disagreed with one another was proof of their demonic inspiration. Truth was uniform, one, and clear; evil was multiform, inconsistent, and perverse. The Bundahishn and the Shikand-gumanic Vichar were both translated into Sanskrit in the twelfth or thirteenth centuries, so that they could be —   and were — read by educated Parsis.  Although we cannot be sure that the Parsis at Akbar’s court agreed that the followers of other religions were allied with the forces of darkness — they left no records of these meetings, or at least none that survive —  we can be relatively sure that they regarded demons as real, and as important forces in the world. As the contemporary scholar of Zoroastrianism Dale Bishop has commented,

It was in the making real of evil, of its having been placed in the temporal and spatial limitations of Finite Time and the created world that evil could be once and for all overcome. Otherwise the coexistence of good and evil would be eternal and unresolved. In this scheme of things there are no beneficent demons and few tragic figures. The choice of the gods to become demons set in motion history, a history which would finally be redeemed through the demons having been rendered powerless and the final victory of the Lord Wisdom [Ahura-Mazda].

For Zoroastrians, then, “thinking with demons” was just as useful as it was for Christians. It helped them consider other issues, including gender, human nature, the course of history, and God’s purpose in the world, and provided motivation to remain distinct when surrounded by persons of other religions. Zoroastrian ideas about demons may have influenced those of others gathered at Akbar’s court, including Jews, Christians, and Muslims. 

Jewish ideas about demons, like Jewish ideas about many things, evolved over the nearly one thousand years that Hebrew Scripture was written down — from about 950 BCE to 150 BCE — and continued to change after that as well. The word concept of a malevolent supernatural being became sharper, especially during the time of the Apocalyptic Jewish writers (200 BCE-100 CE), when scripturalists  became particularly concerned about the significance and role of evil and the coming end of the world. The evil force evolved from being a ‘satan,’  a word derived from the Hebrew word for “oppose” or “obstruct,” to a personified Satan, who opposed both humans and the kingdom of God, and was assisted by a horde of evil spirits. (Figure 16) In Zechariah, the second to last book in the Old Testament — and one of the last to be written  Satan is an actual figure, standing at the right hand of the angel of the Lord  to oppose him. The Greek translation of the Old Testament,the Septuagint,was made at about this time, and it is from this that many of our words to describe the figures I am talking about come: diabolus (from the Greek word for “slanderer” or “opposing witness”), which later goes directly into Latin and many of the Romance languages and becomes devil in English, and daimonia, the Greek word used by the Bible translators for the evil spirits of the Old Testament.

Jewish prophetic and apocalyptic writers built especially on certain verses in Hebrew Scripture. One of these is the very brief mention in the book of Genesis of sexual relations between the “sons of God” and the “daughters of men” : “The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose….The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterward — when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.” (Genesis 6: 1 and 4).  These verses immediately precede the story of Noah and the flood, so they have been linked to human wickedness and God’s wrath, but what they mean is obscure, to say the least. (They also suffer from what I call the Second Amendment problem, that is, the grammatical structure is odd and the referents unclear, which compounds the debate about what they mean.)

The Book of Enoch, written probably about 300 BCE, provides one example of how Jewish prophetic thinkers elaborated on these short and enigmatic verses. Enoch describes the “sons of God” as Watcher Angels, so called because they stare leeringly at mortal women before they have sex with them. (Figure 17) The Watcher Angels prompt God to send the deluge, and are ultimately cast by avenging archangels into a hell of darkness. Their mixed-race children, the Nephilim, are giants and evil spirits:  "And now, the giants, who are produced from the Angels and flesh, shall be called evil spirits upon the earth, and on the earth shall be their dwelling…. And these Evil spirits afflict, oppress, destroy, attack, do battle, and work destruction on the earth, and cause trouble.” (Enoch 15: 8 and 12) The Book of Enoch is not part of Jewish or Christian Scripture, though its ideas have been taken up by certain segments of both religions. It is regarded as canonical in the Eritrean and Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, churches that may be the origins of the Malabar Christians of India. Thus these ideas could have had special relevance for the Malabar Christians at Akbar’s court.

The more personalized and apocalyptic view of demons present in Judaism during the last centuries BCE clearly shaped Christian notions (and continues to do so), but Jewish thought continued to evolve.  There were many Jewish folk traditions about demons and the Talmudists and most later medieval rabbinic writers regarded demons as real, but they were not as interested in them as the Jewish apocalyptic writers had been. A few, including the twelfth-century scholar and physician Maimonides, doubted whether demons existed as all. Humans themselves, according to Maimonides, are the source of evil in the world, which he sees basically as the absence of good, and ethical and practical issues in the real world of today are more important than worrying about the end of the world.

At about the same time that Maimonides was writing, other Jewish thinkers began to center their studies on the Kabbalah, a group of mystical texts that examine the nature of God, the origins of evil, and the human soul. Kabbalah originated in what is now southern France and northern Spain, but in the early modern period Kabbalistic writings and practices spread throughout the Mediterranean, largely as a result of Christian persecution of Jews. Many Jews fled from the Iberian peninsula to the Ottoman Empire, and a group settled in Safed in Palestine, which in the 1530s became a center of Kabbalistic study and intense religious practice under the rabbis Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria. Kabbalists were much more concerned with the transcendent and spiritual world than were philosophers such as Maimonides. Like Maimonides, some (including Luria) emphasized human ethical action, but others developed a complex demonology of evil spirits and evil qualities that paralleled the ten qualities of the Divine known as the sefirot, the central teaching of Kabbalah.  They also elaborated on the story of Lilith, Adam’s first,  rebelious, wife, who was seen as wandering around at night, tempting men and expanding the powers of darkness. (Figure 18)

Because the Jews at Akbar’s court have left no records, or at least none that have been discovered, we don’t know exactly which strand of thinking about demons they followed. Kabbalistic ideas were certainly spreading in the sixteenth century with the diaspora out of Spain, and as Jews were active players in the western Asian/Indian Ocean trading networks, they may very well have reached western India along with the traders. On demons, kabbalistic mysticism fit with the more traditional teachings of the Talmud and other rabbinical commentaries, so it is very likely that for these Jews, “thinking with demons”  helped them consider other issues.

What about Muslims? In the Quran, Allah creates three kinds of beings: angels, humans, and jinn, a word that is sometimes translated as “demons,”  though this is not quite right. (Translating jinn as “genie” is even more wrong, both etymologically and substantively.) Jinn are beings created out of fire, thus generally do not have a material existence so can travel long distances quickly and are unseen by humans. (Figure 19) They are not uniformly evil, however. Like humans, they have free will, and, as a demon comments in Sura 72 — the Sura al-Jinn — of the Quran:

There are among us some who have surrendered [to Allah] and there are among us some who are unjust. And whoso hath surrendered to Allah, such have taken the right path purposefully. And as for those who are unjust, they are firewood for hell. 

Among the unjust jinn is Iblis, a being who refused to obey Allah’s command to bow down to humans, and so merited eternal punishment. (Figure 20) (“Iblis” is often translated as “the Devil,” as is the word “Shaytan,” which also appears in the Quran, but again these are not exactly the same.)  Iblis and the other unjust jinns have some power over humans — they are described as “whisperers” who urge people to sin — but those people who recognize Allah will be able to withstand them:  "As for My servants, no authority shalt thou have over them" says Allah in Sura 17. Among the miracles attributed to Sufi saints was the ability to withstand or combat jinns, and the Sufi brotherhoods that were a central feature of the sixteenth-century Muslim world included fighting their temptations as part of the pious living expected of members. 

In Islam, as in Zoroastrianism and Christianity, the world is heading toward a final apocalypse, in which humans will be judged and join the demonic forces in hell or the angelic ones in paradise. This coming Day of Judgment was discussed several times at Akbar’s court. Monserrate reports that Akbar “made detailed inquiries about the Last Judgment” and spoke about “he who is to appear at the end of the world as the adversary of all mankind (that is he whom the Musalmans calls Dijal).”  “Dijal” is a reference to the masih ad-dajjal, a one-eyed false Messiah figure who is not mentioned in the Quran, but who various hadith see as coming in the Last Days. Masih ad-dajjal is ultimately defeated, by Isa (Jesus) in the Sunni tradition, and by Muhammad al-Mahdi in the Shia, so he can be equated with the Antichrist in Christian tradition. He is not Satan, but will be assisted in this final battle by demons of all types.

Akbar wants to know — and who doesn’t? — when this apocalypse will happen. Monserrate answers that “God alone knows the time when the judgment will take place,” which fits with Islamic belief, but also comments that it would be known by certain signs, especially “wars and rebellions, the fall of kingdoms and nations, the invasion, devastation and conquest of nation by nation and kingdom by kingdom.” And then he adds the kicker:  “these things we see happening very frequently in our own time” a statement to which Akbar listened “most attentively.”   

Monserrate’s view that the end-times were close at hand was a common one among European Christians of the late sixteenth century. (Figure 21) It is in almost all of the demonological works, and in a letter sent just a few years before the meetings at the Mughal court, Philip II of Spain wrote, “If this is not the end of the world, I think we must be very close to it.”  Franciscan missionaries thought that missions in the New World might help bring about Christ’s millennial kingdom, an idea that Columbus appears to have accepted as well, as he asked to be buried in the habit of the Franciscans. Christian preachers throughout Europe thundered that the Ottoman Turks were the demonic forces of Gog and Magog foretold in the book of Revelation, sent to scourge Christendom before the Last Judgment.

The Ottomans did not agree, of course, but they had their own millenarian ideas, particularly because the actual Islamic millennium was soon approaching (1591-/92 is the year 1000 in the Hegiran calendar).  Supporters of the Ottoman Sultans Selim and Süleyman called them “Last Messiah of the Age,” a title similar to that given to the Sayyid ruler of Morocco at the same time, “the one who would appear at the end of time.” The Ottomans and the Sayyids were Sunni, and messianic thinking was even more powerful among the Shia Safavids, whose founder Shah Isma’il surrounded himself with eschatological expectations as he set about to build a state. Islamic millenarianism extended into South and even Southeast Asia, where legends about Alexander the Great (Persianized as Sikandar or Iskander) portrayed him as a ruler destined to protect civilized Islam against (who else) the demons of Gog and Magog. (Figure 22) Officials at the court of Aceh translated the story of Sikandar into Malay in the late sixteenth century, and their ruler, the twelfth sultan of Aceh, took his name from it: Iskandar Muda, or “Young Alexander.” In stories and visual representations, Sikander battles demons. Thus in early modern Islamic thought as well as Christian and Zoroastrian, demons are agents of decline, discord, and disorder active in the world, and rulers move the course of history forward by fighting them.

We often focus on those rulers when teaching world history, and ascribe their success to their ability to use new forms of weaponry, expanded bureaucracies, more efficient taxation structures, and similar tools. “Gunpowder empires,” we call their realms, or “the first modern nation-states.” We rarely attribute their success to their ability to fight demons. Perhaps we should. To return to the events with which I began, the Catholic Villegaignon and the Calvinist Lery fought the demons that opposed true Christian teachings (as each defined these), but Akbar fought demonic enemies as well.  (Figure 23) At about the same time he was calmly discussing religious differences at his court, he was ruthlessly suppressing a rebellion against him by more orthodox Muslims, and ordered all Muslim leaders to sign a declaration that he was the caliph of the age, thus ordained by God, as rightful rulers had been since the beginning of time.  Jean Bodin would not have agreed that God would ordain a Muslim, but he would have understood Akbar’s actions, for rulers who did not punish those who rebelled against divinely-sanctioned authority “will be abandoned by God to the mercy of witches and demons.” (Figure 24) Bodin also would have understood, and be unsurprised by, the regular invocation of demons as sowers of discord and agents of decline in today’s political rhetoric. Demons helped people to think in the early modern world, and continue to do so in the post-modern one.

[Keynote lecture at the Second Annual MWWHA Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.]

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Edited by Rebecca A. Nedostup

(c) 2012 The Middle Ground Journal, Number 4, Spring 2012.