Image source: Merlina McGovern
Wow, this recent series of Inktober prompts has me really thinking about ghosts and goblins and all manner of spooky ghoulies. Today’s prompt, Demon, has been one of the more frightening prompts for me. Merriam-Webster notes that the word’s etymology can be traced back to the Greek, daímōn, a “superhuman power, variably evil or beneficent, intervening in human affairs, fate.” It’s interesting that the definition contains the possibility for both good and evil. For me, the word demon always makes my heart quiver in fear.
Though my father was raised Roman-Catholic, he left the church very early in his life. When he was 18, he joined the Marines. My grandmother would buy him cigarettes and beer. Their church found out about this naughty practice, and the priest scolded my mother for being a bad influence on her son. Didn’t she know she was paving the way to hell for him? My feisty grandmother shouted right back that she would get her son anything he wanted—he had signed up to put his life on the line to defend our country; who was God to say that he wasn’t old enough to have a little bit of pleasure in his life? After that, she left the church with my dad, and they never really looked back.
My mother was never very religious. During our talks over the years, she has admitted to believing in a God, but has expressed no desire whatsoever to join any organized religion. It just never meant very much to her. She has always been self-sufficient and not much of a joiner; she doesn’t seem to long for community like I do.
As for my own religious beliefs, my parents had me baptized as a Catholic, but I never regularly went to church. My only memories of anything vaguely religious came from a very vivid bible picture book. I remember the cartoon-like drawings being surprisingly bloody. The image of Daniel fighting off the lions in the den stuck with me, with the ferocious beasts ripping out bloody chunks of his skin. I can still see the blood dripping from the wound David’s stone left in Goliath’s forehead if I close my eyes.
I also remember my mother putting my sister and me into a Pentecostal church because they would pick you up after school, and she needed a babysitter and couldn’t find one. I don’t remember anything that crazy from that church experience except that at the end of every service all the children would walk up to the altar, and we could select either a dollar bill or reach into a chest and choose a toy. I always picked the dollar bill. I was perfectly happy to be bribed to continue going to church.
When I met my husband, he had also been raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, but did not attend church regularly. I loved this man with all my heart, so I decided to go through my first confirmation and take the pre-cana classes we needed in order to have a traditional Catholic wedding. After the marriage though, life simply got in the way, and I never really got into the habit of going to church regularly.
All of this background is to show that religion has always played some part of my life, but really only on the periphery. Despite that, though, the idea of ultimate good and evil has always stayed in my mind. It’s a powerful idea. One that has the world we live in teeming with invisible agents of good and evil. Angels and demons are words that can fill my racing mind with all sorts of images of battles between the true-hearted and the fallen, fiery judgment, and temptation. And for some reason, the idea of demons has weighed more on my mind, scaring me much more than angelic imagery has ever inspired me. Maybe it’s because evolutionarily we’ve developed to focus on negative scary things so that we can always be prepared to save ourselves from danger.
Whatever the reason, demonic imagery has always had the power to scare me. It’s why the movie The Exorcist still terrifies me in a deep and bone-chilling way. The fact that demons are of this world and can know us, know our deepest, darkest secrets and use those to overwhelm our defenses terrifies me. These demonic concepts are what have killed any desire I may have had for rewatching Hereditary or Insidious.
And it’s why I had a fair bit of trepidation to do today’s Inktober prompt. But, I chose Lilith from Diablo IV. Lilith is not some vague demonic force upon which I can hang all of my fears and terrors. She has a backstory and digital wallpapers. I can’t really be scared by that, can I?
So, the drawing is complete, and this post is written. And now, I can stop tempting fate and quit writing and thinking about demons for a while.
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