Unspeakably horrible things have happened to people throughout history. I refer here to everything from the genocide of political regimes to the wilfully wicked acts of individuals. This category of behaviour and experience is generally what we refer to as evil: the worst acts of humans upon each other, the inhumanity of man to man, or in more prosaic terms, the conduct least preferable.

It became the habit for reasons of religious belief and as a way of coming to terms with these terrible events to personify evil and thereby to create an entity, a supernatural being called the Devil (capital ’D’!). It was the Devil wot did it! He got inside and defiled his victims making them do despicable things. Only rigorous adherence to religious doctrine could free a person from this bondage.

Now, despite my using the concept of demons in the previous piece as a way of discussing the dark-side of personality, to make a mythology of evil I believe does more harm than good. Although any attempts at alleviating the ills of bad experience are understandable, the practice of myth-making taken too literally is harmful because it psychologises bad acts in a different way than does simply just accepting them as the conduct least preferable. By inventing a fantasy figure, the Devil, a relational dynamic is set up that often empowers the very force within we are trying to subjugate resulting in the opposite being achieved from the original attention.

Better to accept responsibility for the innate capacity to commit bad acts and deal with the matter in that way. Rather this than resort to the infantile invention of imaginary creatures who take the blame. When responsibility is passed over in this way we tend to remain free of admonishment and the corruption continues to perpetrate.