Dictionary of all Scriptures & Myths

DEVILS, UNCLEAN SPIRITS

Symbolic of the lower desires, passions, appetites, and instincts, which, so far as they oppose the upward evolution of the soul, constitute the evil impulses of human nature.

“Christ drives out our legion of indwelling vices by His inworking presence and power." - E. GOUGH, Barrowford Treatise, p. 61.

"Certain women which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary that was called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had gone out." - LUKE viii. 2.

“Certain emotional states had been purified of lower desires and errors. Mary" stands for some slumbering affection towards the Christ, but which is entangled in the pursuit of the objects of sense, seeking for satisfaction from without (which is “whoredom ") instead of from within -whence cometh all good. But Love casts out the seven devils" of Greed, Egoism, Hate, Sorrow, Avarice, Lust, and Pride, which are delusions fostered by the lower activities,―or due to the, as yet, not fully purified soul.

"Human sins all show that wonderful activity, mobility, facility, malignity, which we always conceive of as belonging only to a personality. We have almost been driven to a personal phraseology in speaking of them. When we see some force working its way with restless energy against the sluggishness of higher forces, choosing its persons and points of attack with some marvellous discrimination, putting on, when need demands it, the cloak and mask of a diviner power, malignantly, dexterously, with such strange choice and ingenuity doing its work, what better conception can we form of it than that which the sublime language of the Scripture gives us of a personal evil, a Satan, a bad spirit set to the endless work of thwarting God and ruining the hope of man! Reason may find what difficulties she will in the doctrine of a personal Satan, but she has yet to harmonise and arrange, under any other idea, the phenomena of human sin." - PHILLIPS BROOKS, Mystery of Iniquity, p. 14.

See Also

ASURA
DAEVAS
DAIMONS
DEMONS
HEALING
RAKSHASES
SPENTO
WHOREDOM