“I dare say,” I reply, turning back to the painting.
“It wasn’t up in the air, like that.”
I had thought that my turning my back on the old man had made it clear I wasn’t interested in continuing the conversation.
“It happened in a cave.”
Intrigued, I peer closer at the laminated label on the wall next to the exquisite Renaissance painting.
Michelangelo
The Torment of Saint Anthony
c. 1487-88.
Oil and tempera on panel
It might be over five hundred years old, but it is still a magnificent piece of work. The image enthrals me. The dream-like landscape, the demons – their grotesque bodies formed from an amalgam of bird and mollusc, fish and mammal, with sphincter mouths and mouth-like sphincters – pulling at the saint’s hair and beard and arms and legs and robe…It draws me in. And it was painted when the artist was only twelve or thirteen years old!
I know a little of the legend myself, how the saint was attacked by all manner of monsters in a cave in the Egyptian wilderness. The young Michelangelo clearly took a few artistic liberties with his subject matter but just the same...
“It’s a magnificent painting,” I say despite myself, forgetting in that moment that I wasn’t going to prolong the conversation any further.
The monk mutters something through his beard. It might be Latin. “Veritas vincit omnia,” and then, “It is not true.”
“So,” I say, turning to the old man, “what really happened?”
***
The quill scratched across the vellum page, the only other sound that disturbed the peace of the scriptorium the crackle of the guttering candle, stirred by the air currents created by the old monk shuffling about the room.
Peering intently at the words as they took form upon the page at his behest, having made his last mark upon the calfskin, the scribe looked up from his work. He blinked myopically, eyes bloodshot and strained from working by candlelight.
The abbot stopped his shuffling and stood still. “You are done? You have finished the task I set you?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“And you have written it all down, just as I instructed?”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
“You have dotted every last ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t’?”
“Yes, Your Grace. Everything has been recorded just as you dictated it to me.”
“Good.” The abbot lingered over the word, as if savouring the taste of it in his mouth. “Good.”
Athanasius eased himself upright cautiously, giving his seized back the chance to relax. He rubbed his eyes and blinked again. The abbot’s face was in shadow, but through the gloom of the scriptorium, the scribe fancied he could still make out the glint of the old man’s eyes in the darkness.
The abbot had been at the monastery for as long as any could remember. When Athanasius had joined as a novice, the abbot was already ensconced, an old man, with a long white beard and balding pate. That had been twenty years ago now. While other brothers aged and went to join God in Heaven, the abbot didn’t seem keen to give up his position here on Earth any time soon.
“Read it back to me, brother.”
Turning back the pages of the book carefully, regarding his handiwork with pride – the illumination of the letters and borders, and the tidy, well-proportioned letters – Brother Athanasius cleared his throat and began.
***
“Is he alive?”
The hermits look from the body laid out on the dusty ground to the old man’s young disciple. One of them gives him a particularly withering look before turning his attention back to the body. “Yes, thank the Lord. He is still breathing, therefore he still lives.”
“Are those bruises? And there” – the youth points with a wavering finger – “claw marks? What could have made those?”
“Wild animals?” says one.
“Or his own ragged fingernails,” suggests another, but that doesn’t sound likely to the boy.
“Do you think he’s going to be alright?”
“We can only pray so,” the first replies, without looking up again.
Macarius stands apart from the group of hermits now examining the old man’s body, even though he had been the one to carry his master from the cave.
He had run from that evil place, the old man no more than a sack of skin and bones limp about his shoulders. Macarius had thought him dead, his own heart trembling within his chest, feeling sick to the pit of his stomach, the tears coming readily in fear for both his master’s life and his own faith.
The other hermits had gathered to mourn his master’s passing, but now they are examining his body instead. They have found a weak pulse, and the master is still breathing, but he remains out of his senses, his eyes closed, oblivious to all that is going on around him.
Lying there, on the dusty ground, he looks so old and frail. Three score years and ten, that was what Holy Scripture said – the lifespan of a man. And yet the master must be at least that, if not older.
Has his time come? Are the fluttering pulse and shallow breathing the last signs of a long-lived life coming to an end at last?
Macarius had gone to his master as soon as he heard him cry out. He had not hesitated for one moment. But had he been too late nonetheless? What had happened to the ascetic there in the cave?
Seeing the old man so pale, his skin having acquired a waxy pallor, Macarius feels the colour drain from his own cheeks, as cold, faithless fear grips him.
The susurrus of a desert breeze raises skittering dust devils from the sandy ground around them. The voice of the rising desert wind is like a rasping cackle to Macarius’s ears.
The master remains motionless.
What was it that had tormented him so within the oppressive darkness of that desert cave? What manner of demons had assailed him there?
The cave is so dark you can no longer see the hand in front of your face. You trip against a stone, your recovering stumble sending pebbles tumbling away into the darkness.
You stop, fearing that your next step might send you tumbling into the yawning abyss too. In this utter blackness the only sense of scale is provided by the hollow echoes that come back at you from the darkness, the sounds of your stumbling steps and the skitter of stones.
You freeze, your body tensing, arms out before you like a blind man – for a blind man is surely what this oppressive darkness has made you.
What was that?
The skittering slither of more shifting shingle? Or was it giggling? Voices in the dark?
And there’s something else.
You sniff. Once. Twice.
The desert dryness of the air, the scent of sand carried on its warm breath, is gone now. Your nose wrinkles at the acrid stink of faeces and decay, brimstone and blood.
The gibbering voices come again then, and now you’re in no doubt as to what they are.
Demons have plagued you ever since you retreated from the world, quitting civilisation and all its temptations, embracing the solitude of the desert. And yet, for such an arid, lifeless place, the desert veritably teems with devils.
You had thought to escape their pernicious influence by hiding in the cave, but they have only followed you here; your own, personal demons.
Accompanied by the susurrus of beating wings and the scratching of dew-claws, making their way across the rocky roof of the cavern, they come at you then.
Your doubts regarding their existence were the last barrier holding them back, and keeping them from attacking you directly.
You tense, litanies bubbling from your lips, as you hear the scrape of scaled-bellies sliding across the ground, the mashing of mandibles and a disgusting slurping sound, like a drowning man gasping for air through flooded lungs, knowing that you cannot escape the inevitable now.
Invisible in the oblivion blackness of the cavern, you see the demons quite clearly within your mind’s eye.
Antelope, their human
eyes as discomforting as the way they tug at your cloak with hooves-become-hands. Unbearable spiny fish-things, surely an impossibility so far from any water source. Hooked beaks, mouths misshapen by protruding fangs, ram’s horns curling from thick manes of hair, feet that are more like cloven hooves than toes. Screaming cat faces, skin mottled like a butterfly’s wings, trailing gelatinous, cephlapodic growths. Snarling scaly things, with blunt vespertilian faces, waspish stings and talons of black bone, gleaming like whetstone-sharpened sickles.
They grunt and gibber and hoot and howl, screaming obscene abuse with shrill shrieking voices, tearing at skin, pummelling your body with savage blows.
The touch of fish-like lips, turning your arms to goose-flesh, even in the residual warmth of the sandstone caves.
They claw at you, pulling at your limbs, as your gabbled prayers become louder, your voice stronger, your faith all that can save you now.
In raptures, your mind breaks free of your famished body. The devils cannot hurt you now. The sensation of floating fills you, as if you are rising into the air. You feel as if you could stretch out your fingertips and touch the gilded clouds of Heaven itself.
And yet still there is a part of you that is aware of the strain your physical form is being put under. Although disconnected from the pain, your mind can still interpret what the body feels, and it feels as if it is being beaten with burning brands.
It comes then, the arch-devil, the leader of this mob of grotesques. Your body is in mortal peril, and to resist the monster you must be clothed in flesh once more.
With an effort of will, you reunite mind and body. As you do so, you cry out in pain, the scream cut off just as quickly as it came, as agony overwhelms you.
You find yourself lying on the ground, floored by the demons’ savage attacks. You struggle to open your eyes, but are met by nothing but the blackness of the cave. But you can feel the horrors still, battering your body.
You try to cry out but another blow to the midriff leaves you winded and gasping for breath, unable to give voice to another cry of pain.
Beyond this hellish pit – this domain of demons – your servant waits. One cry, one scream, is all it would take to have him running to your aid. If only it were that simple.
You attempt to call your disciple’s name, but your breathless cry dies in your throat. “Macar…”
Something hisses in the darkness, as if mocking your attempts to call for aid.
That sibilant sound comes again and you sense that somewhere within that rasping sibilance there is a name.
“Jerobaal...”
With that infernal utterance a vision of ugly wickedness is conjured within your mind. So like a man and yet not a man: a baboon’s snout; elongated bat-like ears; lips curled back from pin-points of needle-sharp, yellow fangs. A misshapen body that capers towards you in mockery of human movement, knuckles scraping the floor of the cave along with its swollen genitalia, legs bent horribly backwards like a bird’s, and the eyes…so human and yet blinking from a face of thick fur, streaked green with mould.
And the voice; so inhumanly human – so like your own – and yet at the same time, brutish and bestial. A mockery of a man. A perversion of what it is to be human. A contradiction. An abomination.
The creature comes closer, encircling you in an embrace as strong as steel. The vile stink of it is in your nose now. You struggle to free yourself from its clutches, but the creature only squeezes tighter.
You can feel its breath on your face, the rotten fish-stink of it coming in infernal gusts. You recoil in revulsion, gagging on the bittersweet taste of it upon your tongue.
The creature giggles, wrapping its legs about you, like a lover. A tongue – warm and sticky, and rough with lesions – snakes from between those needle teeth. The writhing muscle caresses your mouth, even as you whimper in fear and disgust, probing at your sealed lips, although they remain tightly closed.
The reek of it is even stronger now and yet you are dimly aware that the abuse your body has been forced to endure at the hands of the devils has abated, leaving behind only an all-pervasive throbbing ache, like the memory of worse pains already inflicted.
But this lascivious rape at the hands and probing instrument of this demon – this Jerobaal – is far worse, making you wish that the beatings would resume. Anything but this…
It feels as if the horror is trying to seduce you, wanting to unite its flesh with yours, trying to possess every part of you.
It is then that you find your voice again, and nothing can stop the scream that howls from the very core of your being, even as the slug-like mass of the demon’s probing tongue forces its way inside your mouth.
***
“Take me back,” the old man says, the others helping him to his feet.
“What?” Macarius can hardly believe his ears.
“Take me back to the cave!” his master snaps.
After all that has happened, he would go back to that place of testing?
“Master,” one of the hermits says, “you should rest. You were at Death’s Door not two heartbeats ago.”
“And the Lord saw fit to drag me back from its threshold. For he has a purpose for me to fulfil, and that purpose is to rid this place of its demons.”
“But master...“ Macarius begins plaintively before his master cuts him off.
“Silence! The fire of holy zeal burns me from within that I might accomplish this task that the Lord has set me.” The old man, as if dead only moments before, now pulls himself free of the concerned hands of the other ascetics. “Either help me, or begone from my sight. But do not hinder me as I go about God’s work!”
The hermits watch as the old man hobbles back towards the gaping, sloping mouth of the cave, his habit dark as the shadows at twilight against the red-orange rocks of the dusty gorge. They say nothing. They do not need to.
With one last backward glance at their expressions of stern consternation, Macarius hurries after his master, his leather sandals slapping and scuffing on the sandy stone of the dry valley bottom. He has to run to catch up with the old man. Truly God’s inspiring divine fire burns hot within him, for him to move so quickly.
The cave mouth looms large and intimidating before them, larger than all but the very largest man-made structures erected by the ancients when mankind worshipped pagan beast-headed deities, before the rise of the God of the Jews.
The vast opening in the ground dwarfs the monk, but this fact does not dampen his ardent rage. And he calls to the demons within the cave, their gibbering taunts coming back at him from the lightless depths beyond, in the echo of his own proclamation.
“I am here again, come to challenge you, unbowed in the face of your evil, Anthony of Cooma, to some Anthony the Great. But to you I am,” he growls, his voice becoming a guttural, animal snarl, “Master of Demons!”
Macarius feels the icy hand of fear take hold of his guts then, and twist.
***
“All of a sudden a brilliant light flashed, and at its coming the demons fled. The saint knew then that the light must have come from the Almighty. And he asked the Lord, ‘Where were you, O God, when the demons attacked me before?’ And the Lord said, ‘I was here, but I would see and abide to see thy battle, and because thou has manly fought and well maintained thy battle, I shall make thy name to be spread through all the world.’”
Brother Athanasius finished reading and cleared his throat again.
“Good. Very good,” the abbot exulted. He resumed his pacing of the cell, running a hand through the thick beard unwinding from his chin.
The scribe leant back upon his stool. “Can I ask you something, Father Abbot?” he dared.
“Ask away, my son.”
“Do you think that is how it really happened?”
The abbot ceased his pacing. “And why wouldn’t it be?”
“Well…” The scribe hesitated before resuming again. “It just sounds so… incredible.”
“Last Peter’s-Tid
e, did not a man descend from the clouds upon a ship’s anchor, before climbing back up into his sky ship? Are there not races of dog-headed men living beyond the Indus River in far Asia?”
“Well, yes, Your Grace.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because the chroniclers have written that it is so.”
“In books.”
“Yes, in books.”
“Just as we have set down the story of the saint’s encounter with the devils in the cave, in words most wondrous.”
The scribe bowed his head in shame. “Yes, Your Grace.” But Brother Athanasius could not leave the matter there. “It’s just that we are describing events that occurred over a hundred years ago,” he persisted.
“You would doubt the word of God, brother?” the abbot challenged. There was something of a snarling canine quality to his voice that made Athanasius think carefully before answering.
“No, my Lord Abbot, of course not.”And yet still he could not help himself. It was as if something other – some unknowable force – would have him uncover the truth. “But you were not there, Your Grace, so how can you be sure.”
The abbot fixed him with those glittering eyes of his. “How do you know that I was not there?”
“But… how?”
“Because nothing is impossible for the Lord of this world,” the abbot said in a voice as low and as cold as Lake Cocytus itself.
***
I stare in unashamed shock at the malodorous monk. Common sense tells me his story is rubbish, an utter fabrication. But gut instinct disagrees. It suggests that there might be more to this wizened wretch than logic and reason might otherwise have me believe.
His tale of demonic horrors and possession – of a life lived down through the ages, denied that which he strove so hard to achieve by the cruel whim of something all too human in its inhumanity, and its ability to inflict such torment upon a mortal soul – has ignited the spark of belief within me. It is not that I believe the story he has told me is anything more than a fanciful folk-tale, but that he has managed to make me want to believe.
The Demonologia Biblica Page 13