No Sympathy for the Devil

Exploring some of the religious, mythological, and symbolic manifestations of evil, the shadow of patriarchy, and all the ways we're vulnerable to evil (and how to protect ourselves from it).

I think it’s best to begin this essay by admitting that my head kind of hurts when I think about this. I’m writing today in an attempt to create some understanding, because historically I’ve been naive about this–and we can’t afford to be naive about evil. I’m hoping that by putting some of my thoughts in order I help open up a larger conversation about how we all encounter evil and what we might do about it.

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Evil: where do we start?

While discussing the concept of shadow at a recent lecture, I noticed how uncomfortable most of us are discussing evil. In an attempt to soothe ourselves, many of us fell into simplistic viewpoints that avoided deeper exploration, despite having four years of academic training in psychotherapy and (supposedly) knowing better. Yes, we could all admit that we sometimes lie or act selfishly, but we couldn’t look at the much darker aspects of our collective shadow. It was almost as if digging into it would somehow contaminate us.

It made me realise that the question of evil is not only a psychological one. To consider the evil manifestations of an individual, we have to take into account issues like temperament, intra-uterine experiences and birth trauma, early life bonding, childhood experiences, generational trauma, socio-cultural conditions and codes of conduct, religious ideology, and (if we’re transpersonally oriented) things like astrological placements, karma, past lives, reincarnation and so on.

There are no simple answers to what makes an individual capable of evil or why evil exists amongst us. In fact, they’re often the result of lazy thinking or the avoidance of truly confronting something very uncomfortable: that evil lurks in all of us. We are the ones creating the conditions for evil and acting it out.

Plus, we also have to agree on what evil is within the same conditions. For example, we might agree that killing children is always and irrevocably evil. But we may have different opinions about acts like adultery, money laundering, lying, or even parental abuse or neglect. Beyond personal preferences, where we draw the line with evil and how severely it should be punished currently depends largely on what the culture has agreed on as a whole.

The Punishments of the Damned, a detail from “The Last Judgment” Byzantine Mosaic in the Florence Baptistery

Evil as a religious problem

We can argue that one of the greatest functions of religion was its provision of a collective ethical code to hold us when our inner moral compass fails. After all, evil is and it has been for a long time a religious problem. Our scriptures inform much of our super-ego, helping us keep our rowdier instincts in check when consciousness isn’t a good enough mediator.

Religion, ritual, and myth have helped humanity coexist with evil since ancient times. Our first ancestors associated evil with darkness and the night, assuming that evil spirits lurk in the shadow. In ancient Egypt, evil was represented as the god of war, the desert, and storms, Set–the counterpart to the solar god Osiris. In Persian mythology, a similar duality was found in the fight between the life-force and light-bringer against the force of darkness, deceit, sickness, and death.

In Ancient Greece, our Western mythology, the gods were culpable of great acts of kindness, as well as betrayals, adultery, unfair punishments, and plain cruelty. All of these examples show us that our pre-Christian ideas of divinity did not exclude evil: everything was divine. People dealt with evil through ritual and taboo, but didn’t exclude it from their lived reality.

However, the Greek origin story of evil, shared by Hesiod around the 8th-7th century BC, is a good illustration of a change in humanity’s conception of evil.