Devil tongue. Have you ever asked yourself this question: “in what language does the devil communicate with us?” If God communicates with us in the language, then the devil - in the language of hatred and anger. If God communicates with us in the language of art and creativity, then the devil uses black art and black creativity.

After all, there are musicians openly positioning themselves with black power, declaring that they are inspired by the devil. The devil has the same tools of influencing a person as God has - yes, this is a thought, only a dark thought.

How does the devil choose his victims? Here you need to clearly understand that the freedom of choice remains with the person. The art of creation remains with God, while the art of destroying human consciousness is the work of the devil.

Two arts: creation and destruction, always go side by side. Why is art one of the tools of the tool? Because art has the most impact on a person. Art is a materialized thought, descended into a lower hypostasis and embodied in matter. Also, the language of art has a unique ability to remove all language, age and many other barriers.

In other words, if a person does not have a direct connection through the highest hypostasis of thought with God or the devil. Then those people, directly through whom grace or evil descends in the language of art, can universally create an understandable image for everyone, and convey it to a wider circle of people. That is, the struggle or struggle between good and evil begins with the struggle of thought.

And the devil in this struggle for our thought always strives to become God. How can we distinguish art from God and art from the devil? The devil in art has always had his own patented logo, something like this type -

Why exactly this? Because it causes fear, the smell of death. Looking ahead a little, I want to tell you that the soul never ends up there, if only because it is from the flesh, and therefore it simply cannot die with the flesh. But playing on people's fear is a great power associated with the death of the flesh or its threat, it has always been a devilish strong point that works one hundred percent, creating a huge one.

But now, after the release of this article, he, of course, will change it (logo) for the purpose of secrecy. But we can always recognize him. For example, everything that causes positive emotions is from God, everything that works for the negative is from the devil. Each person chooses whom to serve. After all, believe me, if a person has by nature the ability to sing songs, and he sings and writes vulgar songs, then this is just his choice. Also in art, manipulating the consciousness of people, diabolical slogans obviously subconsciously gravitate towards dark colors with a clear predominance of black.

Thoughts are received on request - is it something like a machine: tea, coffee? Make your emphasis on the negative, the devil will gladly help you with this and give out such an insidious plan of action to embody his evil. Still, the devil is a very big tempter, otherwise who would vote for him (I'm talking about Hitler). Ask, think positive, and you will get a good one. The Lord has not left anyone unanswered.

So the main thing that we have is freedom of choice. Everything that is included in the work is further subordinated.

For the sake of objectivity, it should be noted that without the devil, God would probably also be bored in a language that is understandable to us - it's kind of like playing chess with only white pieces. But now that you are more aware of the devil's role in our lives, you can control him. The main thing is to tell him no at the right time. And this is the great will of God. After all, even sitting at the festive table, do not forget that the devil is also sitting with you, and telling him enough is enough on time means keeping the situation under control.

The art of God to create is the art of the devil to destroy, although the evil one at the beginning of the game always strives to be the first to grab the prettier mask in order to mislead us to take possession of our thoughts. But it's just a mask. And now we know one article more about what can be hidden under it.

The purpose of writing this article was my intention to show the complex and distant in simple and close things, everything that worked in the past is always relevant in the present. It is not necessary to look far for what is close. Appreciate your life here and now!

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33 replies to “Devil's Tongue”

Your understanding of the devil is fundamentally wrong. The devil is the one who combines two wills in himself. The devil is not only darkness, but also light (the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not embraced it). And what you choose, light or darkness, this is how you will see your devil. For it is the devil who gives you freedom of choice.

Do not divide God into yours and someone else's. The devil is the essence of the trinity of God. And while you divide the world into good and evil, you give birth to Satan (the enemy) in your mind, and thereby sow evil. And this at a time when Jesus called not to judge! He who judges others judges himself. Judge the devil - judge yourself! You attribute your dark thoughts to another - Azazel - the scapegoat of your sins. But you are still wrong. And while another is paying for your sins, sin will live in your soul.
Do not judge Satan - do not sin! At least be afraid of God, if you are not afraid of the Devil ..)))))))))) Good is not the one who sees evil, but the one who does not produce it! Evil is manifested in the very division of the world into good and evil. Maybe it's time to connect? Taste the fruit from the Tree of Life...

The devil is not only darkness, but also light. Answer: The devil is darkness and God is light, dark forces wander in darkness in error.

And what you choose, light or darkness, - this is how you will see your devil. For it is the devil who gives you freedom of choice. Answer: Even if you take scientific theory big bang– then this is a flash, namely Light and it was the intention of the Lord Light that initially began to bestow freedom of choice. For in the darkness of the devilish darkness is darkness and there is no choice here!

Maybe it's time to connect? Answer: Personally, I do not mind, but that is the will of the Lord. Try to combine day and night together, if that's your will!?
- What is day and what is night? What is darkness and what is light?
  
  Darkness is light that you cannot see for one reason or another. The whole world is woven of light and there is nothing in it except light.
  
  The light of the Sun blinds a person and makes it impossible to see the true nature of things. The material light is the light manifested in matter. And the light is invisible (unmanifested) and is perceived by man as darkness. But the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not embrace it, for there is no darkness (just as there is no day or night).. but what is there?! There is only an eclipse in the human mind! And man perceives his own eclipse (blindness) as darkness.
  
  Matter actually has a completely non-material (informational) structure and is nothing more than a stereotype of human thinking (a dead substance). That is why the Bible says that God created Adam from the dust of the ground. Dust is ashes, dead. Sooner or later the ashes crumble. Therefore, your body is constantly being destroyed, because it is dead from the very beginning. And only the life-giving spirit is able to bind together and keep the dust of the earth from destruction, thereby creating the illusion of life in conditions of real death.
  
  My friend, the earthly world is the world of the “living” dead, in whose faces the breath of life has been breathed. The heavenly world is truly alive. And the earthly, sooner or later, inevitably dies. When you are born in the earthly world, you die for the heavenly world. And your birth here is actually the date of your death there. Death in the earthly world can become the date of your birth again, if you manage to cultivate your Spirit in yourself while you are here. But you must be born again during your "life" in the earthly world. When an earthly personality dies, a new person is born into the world - immortal, who knows no fear of physical death and easily parted with his earthly fetters.
  
  P.S.
  - P.S.
    Tell me, have you had an experience of out-of-body travel?!
    Answer: It depends on what you put into this concept. If we talk about thinking as such, then this is already the beginning outside of bodily time travel, you are modeling your immediate future (wash, have breakfast) or more to come, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. And what will happen in a million years - this is the journey. If you mean traveling to other planets, then I can honestly tell you honestly that I still try to spend most of my time on earth and in my body. All the same, life is a serious thing and does not allow you to leave the body for a long time, until 6-7 in the morning max.

And now about the soul.

You write that the soul of the flesh was never born .. oh.

And God breathed the breath of life into his face, and Adam became a living soul.

What is being said here? That dead flesh came to life! Flesh and soul are inseparable. The soul is living flesh. When the spirit (breath of life) leaves the living flesh (soul), the flesh becomes dead - the soul dies. The soul is mortal by nature, therefore the fear of death lives in the soul! Fear is a beast - the instinct of conservation is an essential quality of the soul.

And only the one in whom the Spirit is strong is not afraid of death, for the Spirit is Eternal. The soul is born and dies and exists only within the framework of earthly life. After the death of the soul - feelings of fear - the Spirit (personality, human consciousness) continues to exist in pure form but devoid of body. For the Spirit is incorporeal (has no image). You never know where he comes from and where he goes, but you always hear in yourself his quiet, silent voice. Spirit is our thoughts that define our personality.

The spirit (thought) is like the wind and breathes wherever it wants. And the soul is tied to the earthly plane of existence and to the system of reincarnations through the wheel of Samsara. The death of the soul occurs much more often, and not only at the time of physical death. For example, the loss of feelings is the death of the soul. Then the feelings return - the soul is reborn.
Sergey, you didn't hear me.

The true identity of a man lies in his Spirit. The soul is secondary in relation to the Spirit. And it’s bad when a person falls into the shackles of his soul and feelings take over him. The beast (soul) in itself is neither good nor bad. But the beast must obey its master - the soul must obey the Spirit (and not vice versa). The spirit is all-seeing and therefore always knows what it is doing, unlike the soul, which is blind by nature.

Truly alive is the Spirit (life-giving thought). Feelings are always secondary to thoughts and are born from thoughts. But feelings, in turn, influence thoughts and can take over them - this process is called the fall of the spirit in a person. And if a person lives more with feelings (puts the life of his soul in the first place), then such a person ceases to see the results of his deeds.

To say why we live, we must first define what should be understood as life. Ultimately, we exist to receive pleasure, but the pleasures of the soul are short-lived and only the bliss of the Spirit is eternal. That is why it is so important to preserve the Spirit in oneself and increase its power, rather than fall into the fetters of the soul, making oneself a mortal being. Whoever lives in one spirit is eternal and is written in the Book of Life. Whoever likened his life to the life of a mortal soul, doomed himself to inevitable death.

And is my thought about death?! Read carefully what I want to tell you. Every word of mine contains the thought of eternal life, and I speak of death solely as the destruction of illusions leading to stereotyped thinking.

What is a stereotype? A stereotype is a dead thought that has become ossified in the mind of a person and does not allow him to move on .. and what does not move is dead. But it is the Devil (whom you so scold and attribute to him all the worst that is in you) who gives life, because he destroys illusions, destroying stereotypes. But the very process of destruction is perceived by man as a negative, and therefore the man scolds the devil for what the white light stands on. And only when all the stereotypes of a person are destroyed in him, only then will he be able to see the true appearance of the brightest among all angels - the beautiful face of the angel of Death, creating Eternal Life, freeing human consciousness from delusions.

It is impossible to be born again without dying for earthly life! Whoever fears the death of the soul is not worthy of eternal life.
- I do not want to offend you, but all that I could read on this moment on your site, then stereotyped judgments prevail in your thinking.
  
  Answer: Okay, this is your phrase:
  And this at a time when Jesus called not to judge! Whoever judges others, judges himself. Judge the devil - judge yourself!
  
  I dare to assume that you learned about Jesus from the Bible.
  And this is your phrase: And the soul is tied to the earthly plane of existence and to the system of reincarnations through the wheel of Samsara.
  
  I vaguely remember that the Bible would talk about the wheel of Samsara, but it’s not even about the consistency of your ideology or faith.
  
  Yes, but - is it not from traditional sources that your knowledge of the world around us is formed? If so, is this not a stereotype in your understanding?
  
  I say get rid of stereotypical sources, get direct information from the Creator. Man has come up with a lot of communications to communicate with each other. Do you think that the Lord, as the Creator of the universe, does not have a direct connection with his offspring, that is, with each of us? Rather, a person does not want to communicate with him directly, but receives information distorted through the prism of time and personality.
  - You dare to assume as you please. This is what free will is about.
    
    I will say from myself: the Bible has absolutely nothing to do with my knowledge of Christ. I took this book in my hands only after He Himself opened it for me. Before that, I had never even read a Bible scripture. All I had in me was the original love for Christ. I have always loved Him from the very first day of my stay in the earthly world. I came into this world with one purpose - to fulfill His Will as my own. Connect the earthly world and the heavenly world and purify the soul of Satan. I came not to judge - I came to reconcile God with Satan. Moreover, Satan, as the Angel of the Lord, served Him faithfully all this time. Satan never went against God. Satan has never been fallen. There are no fallen angels at all, for angels, unlike humans, do not have independent free will. Angels are not separated from God, like a person, and are only manifestations of the very Will of God.
    
    The fallen angel was invented by people who read the words spoken in the Bible, but did not understand their true meaning. The Bible that we can read is not the original source. Christ did not write books! He left all his commandments to people in words. And the one who wrote down His words after Him was the first to distort their true meaning. Then everyone who gave their interpretations of the Biblical Scripture distorted the true meaning of Christ's words even more. Thus, the Lie was born, called religion - a rewritten (distorted) faith. I have the thoughts of Christ Himself in me, because He is directly connected with Him through his Spirit. And I don't use any other sources.
    
    As for stereotypes, it is impossible to judge everything in this world unambiguously and say: this is good; or this is bad. Every essence has two opposites at once. Two sides of the same coin. The world cannot be divided strictly into good and evil, and only one good can be left for oneself (beloved), and all evil can be handed over to the innocent Azazel (Satan), making him an scapegoat for his sins. Only a person who has tasted the forbidden fruit from the tree of good and evil does this, but not God. God does not judge Satan. Satan is judged exclusively by people who have sinned by violating the prohibition of God. This is the main human stereotype, to judge anyone, but not themselves. And if God destroys Satan, then man, who has not rid himself of his own weakness, will invent him again.
    
    As a matter of fact, the image of Satan, which we all know, was invented by people. People throughout the ages have painstakingly pictured the fallen in their minds and endowed them with the most repulsive traits that everyone wore in themselves. And the lower the person himself stood, the more disgusting he sculpted the image of the fallen. Do not create an idol for yourself, but for many Satan has become just such an idol, more than covering all human sins. The hardest thing is to admit to yourself that you yourself are a sinner, and that all your dark thoughts belong only to yourself and no one tried to seduce you from the true path, and you yourself could not resist and departed from God. So it’s all down on Satan, like it’s not me, it’s all him, the demon has beguiled me. A person deprived of the power of the Spirit does not have the courage to admit to himself his weakness. And who is a demon - this is a person without (with) true fortitude, powerless (i.e. weak). And the weak is always to blame for anyone but himself. The one who does evil sees the traces of his deeds outside. He who does not create evil does not see evil and lives in a world of light and goodness. The outer world is a reflection of the inner world of a person. What a person wears in himself, he manifests outside. And when he judges others, he actually judges himself, but does not understand this.
    
    This is the true meaning of the words of Christ: judge not, lest you be judged. Others will not judge you, you judge yourself every time you look at evil in others. If a person should judge anyone in this world, then himself - always - only himself!
First, Satan does not even have the color black.

Satan, as the prince of this world, contains all the colors of the rainbow. The earthly world is a reflection of the heavenly world, but it is only a mold of the past. And if the earthly world is full of colors, then you can imagine how beautiful the heavenly world, the world of living matter.

The true meaning of the word satan (satanna) is the existence of visibly dense matters.. therefore, to reconcile God and Satan is to unite the earthly world and the heavenly world.. and make that which was originally dead become alive.

The earth cannot ascend to heaven on its own, so heaven must come to earth.. the sky will roll up like a scroll and the stars will fall.. this will be a new act of creation (creating everything new) - and new earth will be better than before. There will be no more diseases and everyone will be able to drink enough from His Source.

But who can enter His kingdom eternal life?! And who will close the gates to this wonderful world for himself?! And you are looking for your Satan. There is no love without hate, there is no light without darkness.

How do you divide this world and why suddenly the one who combines two wills (light and darkness) suddenly turns out to be only darkness in you. And God, who is omnipotent and omnipresent, has the right to only walk on a white board?! Who decides for God how to be and how to love Him?! How easy it is for a man to decide for God!

If I were you, I would think: what are you writing about and what knowledge are you trying to convey to people?! Are you not sinning when you distort His truth and His true appearance?! Why do you write about the devil and not about yourself?! After all, everything you write is a reflection of yourself. You are the same devil and it is you, not him. speak the language of the devil. So write in the first person and speak in your own name! Do not lie to yourself and people!

My mission is not to mix all the colors, but to see the beauty in everything. I do not destroy duality as such. To reconcile God and Satan is to eliminate the antagonism between the two opposites. What cannot exist without each other, must interact closely and cooperate mutually beneficially. And such a relationship is possible only on the basis of love. I love both light and darkness. And I see no evil where it has never been since the first day of the creation of this world.

The world was divided into good and evil by man himself, and not by God. The man himself doomed himself to torment. And he can only blame himself.

But without falling, you cannot learn to fly. And who did not fall, he did not fly. The fall of man was inevitable. And the task of man is to ascend again, but to ascend already consciously. And through the freedom of will received from God to choose God.

And what did God do when he saw that the man whom He created had departed from His commandments?! He sent after the fallen Adam, the best of his angels - Satan (himself). And Satan fell from heaven like lightning, and fell in the eyes of man below him, and took upon himself all the sins of the world. This is the true mission of Satan. Doesn't this remind you of anyone? The mission of Christ is the Savior of the human race. But people did not understand and did not discern His true Face and crucified Him when He appeared to them in His true form.

Man is blind by nature. Is it easy to make the likeness of God out of someone who is not God?! Is it easy to make someone who does not have a mind in himself see? The image and likeness is not Adam, but the first Man - the firstborn Son. And Adam, in order to become like God, faced one of the hardest paths, having tasted the forbidden fruit, to know good and evil, and at the end of time, having already tasted the fruit from the Tree of Life, to gain his immortality. But can God, who loves his creation (a sinful man), not share with him all the hardships of his earthly existence?! And expelling Adam from paradise, God left his paradise with Adam. Therefore, the Serpent (Spirit of Genius), which appeared to Eve, fulfilling the Will of the Most High, was punished on a par with Adam and Eve.

The walls moved apart. sparkled before us
The hall decorated with purple fabrics;
Their heavy folds seemed redder,
Bleeding under the brilliance of countless lights.

We arrived late. The ball is over.
But the air from the dance still trembled.
And music sweet and tender, like a dream,
The silver ringing subsided, fading.

We saw a strange meeting:
With people here the fiends of darkness were displaced,
Incubi and larvae, among witches without number
Hovering silently like ghosts of evil.

And ours were here. We recognized them.
Among the drunken, insane, naked,
And those that have long been considered
For the best of wives, daughters and sisters...

Vampires have burned my heart with beauty!
Vampires, like poppies, shone lips,
Like cemetery poppies on marble slabs,
Aleli and reddeli between pale cheeks.

And swollen lips, stained love,
In kisses, drop by drop absorbing blood,
They snaked a smile, teased dreams,
Promised the delight of unearthly beauty ...

We waited. - And the moment unspeakable has come,
And someone, severe, appeared before us,
In a crown and purple, dressed in fine linen,
Surrounded by an ominously purple fire.

And all of us, embraced by one feeling,
Involuntarily in the dust they bowed before him.
But silently and proudly he followed
There. Where the gilded throne shone.

And he took the harp, and played the harp,
And the hall was filled with the sounds of sorrow.
And the sighs of that song grew and grew,
And they took me to the kingdom of sorrow!

He sang about the flowers growing over the abyss,
About heavenly, closed forever, gates,
And he was beautiful, and he was great,
The face of a fallen angel seemed to be in it.

And the heart trembled with a revocable string,
The distant again flashed before me,
As if a veil over my past
The seraph cut with a radiant sword.

And I remembered the time of sinless years
Heavenly dreams, divine dreams,
The dull life of those who barely illuminated, -
And children's prayer holy words ...

And wept, close together like a wall,
In general despair and in torment alone,
Disembodied spirits and children of the earth,
That they could not carry their cross to the end.

Oh, how much suffering has risen around!
Expanded eyes, broken hands ...
And the cry of mothers, and the sobs of widows,
Prayers and curses and gnashing of teeth.

"All the same; I am not touched by their grief! -
Inessa, my friend, said.
“Let us leave the groans of the earthly vale,
We are here for a different purpose." -

And she wrapped the clusters around her forehead,
And poured a goblet of amber wine,
Throwing a golden glass high
And she became, shining with her nakedness.

And everything revived and rushed suddenly,
Clutched, curled jubilant circle -
And tambourines sounded, and laughter was heard
In the midst of the realm of sadness born comforts ...

(M. A. Lokhvitskaya)
I didn't cling to the devil. I don't like it when the true meaning of words is distorted. This is how lies are born! I am against lies.

Whatever meaning you put into this or that word, so you live later. The world was created from the Word. Does this tell you something? Do you know the true power of the word?! Nothing in this world happens just like that and just disappears. And every word that you utter, and even more so immortalize it by imprinting it in the minds of others, will return to you, because you created it - and you will disentangle it. And before you say anything, you need to think carefully about how all this will turn out for you.

The devil has a completely different meaning. The truth must be restored. Do you have something against?!

The power of destruction and the power of creation are one and the same power — the power of transformation. And you share them. Why?! Why did you halve God?! And instead of a single force, they got two, opposing each other?! There is no opposition. But there is only human delusion.

Tell me, can you tame a lion if you whip him with a whip?! And will not this mighty beast devour you, enraged at you because of your own wrong actions?! Woe to the man who is devoured by the lion.
Satan is not just a lion, he is a much more powerful beast. So don’t tease him ..)))))))))))) end badly .. but the beast loves affection and can become quite tame with skillful handling ..)))

Every son of God, but not everyone is like God. And in the end, not everyone is promised eternal life. There is something to think about, isn't it?! In order to rightfully call yourself a son of God, you need to become like your Father.
No parent dreams of dissolute children who do not know what they are doing. Ultimately, the existence of God does not consist in always wiping up after a person.

Free will of choice was given to a person not so that he could do what he wanted, but only so that a person would know God.

Here you write that you know God. And at the same time divide the world into good and evil. And as long as you divide the world into good and evil, you are still far from God.
Are you not afraid to repeat the fate of the king of Babylon, that being a man, he managed to declare that he is similar to the Almighty?! But he wanted in his heart to rise above the stars and put his throne on a mountain in the host of the gods, on the edge of the north.)))))

As for the words of the Nigerian playwright, he did not know God. And if I ask you what is the true meaning of the word "man", you can answer me?!

Man - what is it at all ?! Chelo and age .. what is a brow and what is a century ?!

Man is the eternity of reason. Man is eternal. Man is God. But not everyone living on earth is a Human, and only looks like one. This is the metamorphosis of the earthly plane of being. It seems that in appearance everyone is similar to Him, but each one stands at his own stage of evolution.

But since God wants the man He created to be like Him, so He endowed Adam with divine features.

God is not a human fantasy and He is more real than any of you. The fact that you are able to think independently is your delusion, an illusion born of free will of choice. All your thoughts in your head are capable of being born exclusively according to His highest Will. He is the source of all things in heaven and on earth. And without His Will, not a hair will fall from your head. And if you are able to resist Him, then it is not your will, but His Will. That's all your freedom of choice on this. Your will, in fact, is not and never was. And if he suddenly gets tired of watching how you mediocrely dispose of the freedom given to you, He will simply slam this whole shop, because all your “wisdom” is an abomination in the eyes of God. But He is patient and waits for the foolish child to finally realize his place under the sun and the prodigal son to come to his Father to admonish His Truth.

So did you know God? Are you too quick to say something like that? What does it mean to know God? Is it possible to know infinity?! Wake up, my friend. God is changing much faster than you can imagine. Knowing God is like chasing a rainbow-arc across an endless field.

***
Ancient temple on a rock illuminated by the moon
For hundreds of years it stands, shackled by silence
There, the sacred fire awaits the sacrifice.

The wind beats on the face, wings of rain
A scream flies into the void, I hear an echo - it's me
I grit my teeth and move on
Pulls up like a magnet, the sacrificial flame of the temple
I will become a sea of light, or a handful of ashes. Will finish

Shut up, there is time, I continue.

I see a sign on the wall, someone was waiting for me.
Seven candles, seven shadows dance on the stones.
And the magic dagger shines.
Cursed be this moment, I grabbed the blade,
A choir rang out, bitter darkness, God laughed.
The human race became the last victim,
Life and death sum up
Holy fire gnaws all
Cleansing with light, bitter gray ash, God...

Don't ask, I won't take you with me.
Don't look, I don't know the meaning of life.
Do not wish to find out someone else's secrets.
That's all, I'm just a spirit - I disappear.

God... God...
You see, there is much more truth in your words today. You did not know God. And yesterday, why did you decide to lie to me?!))))))))) Wasn’t it pride in you yesterday that said ..))) No matter how you ai-i-ai .. And you yourself called me here, but you don't remember that anymore..))))) But I haven't forgotten about you.

I have nothing against you knowing God every moment.
And why did you decide that I act differently?! Do you just want to think of me like that?! Is not it?! Again pride speaks in you ..)))

If you saw something superfluous in my judgments, then this does not mean that it is really superfluous. I have stated my point of view as precisely as possible. Specifically, what exactly do you not like? Do you need the Devil?! Do you need someone who will live with hatred?! Because you experience similar feelings?! Let's then make you this devil and immerse you in those dark thoughts that you attribute to another?! Agree?! Not?! Why?! Why should he agree? Because you want to think about it so much?! How can a certain creature in the universe live only by one negative?! It is to whom did you, by the "generosity" of your soul, decide to give all the torments of hell?! And keep only the sweetest for yourself?! Isn't this selfishness on your part?!

What is evil?! This is what you, personally you, perceive as evil. What is bad for one is good for another. One loves heat, another cold, and the third loves to be warm. Everyone has their own understanding of good and evil. The devil sits exclusively in your head. This is your devil. You created it!

This is what I want to say about, write not about the devil, as about some kind of evil force, but about yourself. Why do you perceive certain events in your life as evil. Work on yourself! Always only above yourself and always write only about yourself and on your own behalf. Do not write that the devil is hate. Write that hatred, if you experience it, then it's YOU!!! See how simple it is. Your feelings are only your feelings and no one else's. Only you and no one else should be responsible for your feelings! And no one teaches you to hate or be angry. This is your weakness, you are unable to control your own feelings, so look for a scapegoat. Therefore, write not about yourself, but about the devil. You need it! It is you who needs the evil devil, not you. He has nothing to do with you. He lives his own life and dreams of paradise no less than yours. He wants to love and be loved just like you! Every being in the universe dreams of this. And do not pervert the divine nature. The basis of any life is love! And when you describe the evil power of the devil, you are lying, and, first of all, to yourself.

I understand that it is extremely difficult to give up your views, on the basis of which you have already managed to build a whole theory (a pseudo-theory, I must say). So you cling like a drowning man to a straw. I have already been given advice. Are you used to teaching others? Wean!))))))) You should think about what is wrong in your own reasoning. And then rewrite your miracle treatise on the knowledge of God. Because you didn't know him! It is necessary to write about the knowledge of God after you can know Him! Or do you think that without your help others will not be able to know God?! Or do you think that He, without your help, will not be able to show the way to Him for those who seek Him?! All textbooks must be burned at the stake. For every such textbook lies! Any science is a pseudo faith, i.e. religion, when a person is taught how to know God, the world and himself. And they do it for the person. This is a great sin!

I hope I have made my position clear enough! Stop fooling people's heads. Stop lying (consciously or unconsciously). You need to know God alone with yourself. And do not take on the role of a teacher. Paved with good intentions dearly to hell. Remember this. And often think about what you are doing and why you are doing it. And to what consequences it will lead.

To know God, you need to stop dividing Him into light and darkness, good and evil!

Stop dividing the world and start connecting. And so far you have only learned to separate, but you can’t connect well. For you to combine light and darkness is to get gray. You see, you do not know how to unite without destroying. Because you only know how to share.

When you separate, you see the elephant in parts, but you don't see the elephant itself. And while you separate, but do not unite, you will not see God.

I have come to you to draw your attention to this. But you got stuck. Why?! Are you unable to change your own thinking? Stiffened in your mind?! Stagnation of consciousness leads to death.
mmm .. Sergey, are you sure that God cannot come to you as evil?! This is another one of your delusions. The ways of the Lord are inscrutable .. Your trouble is that you are trying to know God using iron linear logic .. but God does not walk strictly in a straight line and come to you as the Evil One and try to tempt you - this is quite acceptable for Him.

Are you sure you recognize the Messiah?! Do not rush to answer .. to some He will appear as Christ, to others as the Antichrist .. and how will you recognize Him ?! When you have a black and white picture in your head..
Everything is God. And it doesn't matter in what guise he comes to you. If you reject Him, He will reject you. And no amount of time will help you. Eternity can now wait for you, when poor humanity deigns to see the light?! Are you mocking God?! Or do you see the only meaning of His existence only in admonishing the unreasonable?! If I were you, I would not share my thoughts with others, but would take the Bible in my hands and read it until the true meaning of this scripture reached me.

Humanity has been given a deadline. He's running out. Who does not have time, he will be late. And then think what you want. This is your choice.

I came to you and revealed the truth. Now the choice is yours to hear or not. Think about it or not. I did not see in you the desire to hear. I saw in you the desire to resist. Only Satan does that. You are closed and trying to keep your own. But there is nothing for you. Whatever you think is yours does not belong to you. All this you have received in debt from Him. What will you return to him when the hour of reckoning comes?! Your tales of an evil Devil?!

I'm tired. And so, allow me to digress. Shine your erudition yourself, if you care about such things. Only those who carry this devil in themselves write badly about the Devil. Evil is seen only by the one who is this evil. You do not keep His commandments. And I dare say that you do not truly believe in God. Otherwise, you would have already known Him and not violated His commandments.

I said everything. AZ.
Five points, brother!

Who has rectangular pupils. Rectangular pupils: who

With atana whispers, “Don't worry so much about this sin, this behavior, this temptation. It's the little things."

Then when you get it he screams "You ruined everything! Scoundrel! God won't hear you now for at least a couple of weeks. Until you fix it."

But it can't be corrected. And the whisper resumes: "It's hard, isn't it? Well, what did you expect? Sin is in your genes - you can't eradicate it, no matter how hard you try. God programmed you to fail! It's just a set of rules that can't be followed."

You plug your ears and try to keep moving forward. But here again this voice, louder than usual: "Are you back on the battlefield? Do you still call yourself a Christian? Here is the death. True Christians do not have such problems. They just build up their faith, repent and move on.”

And you think he's right. And you return to despair and darkness.

More lies

He takes over again. "Take care of yourself; no one is going to do that anymore. Live in the moment, live for yourself - nothing else matters. But when you put yourself first and it's still not satisfying, his whisper builds up: “Oh yes, you are now at the center of your life. Full of selfishness. And still pathetic."

You look around for help, and he hisses: “You were not made for the church; you are too weird. Better not even try; you won't fit in." When ministering or in a home group, he tries to drown out the others: “They don't understand you. They don't like you! The church is not for you."

So you take a step back and withdraw into yourself. You go back to his lies.

“Real Christians have an amazing personal time with God—they spend hours above Scripture and on their knees before Him. You can't remember the last time you prayed even a couple of sentences." You open your Bible and he scoffs: “Just look at all these rules. You are not strong enough to carry this burden. You're just pathetic."

Two voices

Satan has a forked tongue. He speaks with two voices, not one. He is the tempter and prosecutor. He is a libertine and lawyer. He provokes us to shame and for pride. And when it seems to you that you have coped with one, the second grabs you from behind.

But no matter what kind of lie he lies, Satan's strategy remains the same: to take our focus away from Jesus. In temptation, he distracts us from the beauty of Christ. When we sin, he distracts us from the grace of Christ. His sole purpose is always to lead us away from Jesus.

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In temptation and guilt, in shame and pride, in self-pity and self-confidence, let us not look to ourselves, to our depravity or our virtues. Here is what Martin Luther advised.

The well-known mayor from Gogol's "Inspector" used to say: "But without lying, no speech is said!" Many now live by this principle, do not feel any embarrassment, telling a lie. Just remember the story of a military missile hitting a residential building in the city of Brovary. At first, this fact was denied by the Ministry of Defense as essentially impossible. It took a long time for the Department of Defense to admit its involvement in what happened. Or an election campaign in which participants pour “true” information on each other, in which something is true, something is a lie. Lying has become a way of life. Some people lie because they need to feed their families; someone covers the "honor of the uniform"; someone justifies the lie in the interests of the state. AT religious world not better. How easy it is to call each other brothers and sisters and talk about love (we are talking about denominations).

And try to start a conversation about when a person's sins are forgiven: after repentance or after a person obeys God's plan of salvation (faith, repentance, baptism). After all, many religious groups teach that sins are forgiven immediately after repentance. Isn't this a distortion of the truth, simply speaking a lie?

And in the church of the Lord? If we hear a lie, but stand aside and keep silent. After all, the connivance of lies is tantamount to the fact that we ourselves lie. If we do nothing to protect the brother or sister who is being slandered, we are helping to spread lies. After all, lies can be stopped with one simple: “I don’t believe in this!”. We repeat what one said about the other, even if the motive was the most correct. Does any of us talk about something else without the right motive? After all, we almost always say, motivating our act with the desire to help a “stumbled” brother or sister. The only problem is that the stumbler, as a rule, does not know anything about his “difficulties”. What is gossip - false testimony that kills a person's good name. "A good name is better than great wealth, and good fame is better than silver and gold"(Prov. 22:1). Lies are not for Christians: "Therefore, laying aside falsehood, speak the truth, each one to his neighbor, for we are members of one another"(Eph. 4:25).

Remember whose language is the language of lies? Who is the father of lies? “Your father is the devil; and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and did not stand in the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks his own, for he is a liar and the father of lies» (John 8:44).

No need to feed on illusions, any lie indicates whose children we are. Lies harm everyone, but above all, lies harm ourselves. The Bible warns us not to deceive ourselves: “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith; explore yourself. Or do you not know yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you? Are you not what you should be"(2 Corinthians 13:5).

Is there a connection between not attending meetings, lying, and idolatry? There is. “So, my beloved, flee from idolatry. I tell you how sensible; judge for yourself what I say. The cup of blessing that we bless is not the communion of the blood of Christ? Bread that we break Is it not the communion of the Body of Christ? One bread, and we many are one body; for we all partake of the same bread» (1 Cor. 10:14-17). Idols are not only wooden idols, they are what stands between us and God. What we prefer. An idol can be money, family, work, if they are put in the first place, and God in the second place. Does not the fruit of the vine, for which we give thanks, join us to the sacrificial blood of Christ? Does the bread that we break unite us with the body of the Lord that was sacrificed on the cross? Paul makes clear that Christians became partakers of one body, the body of Christ, the church, when they took the Lord's Supper: “One bread, and we many are one body; for we all partake of the same bread."(1 Corinthians 10:17).

If you're still thinking, "Where will you be in the day of the Lord?" reread these verses. God has already given the answer. The faithful child of God must be in the congregation of the saints and partake of the Lord's Supper. And there is no need to lie to ourselves and indulge in illusions, saying: “Lord, I do so many good deeds, so what if I miss the Sunday service?”.

There is no need to drive God into the framework of human righteousness: “... you thought that I was the same as you. I will convict you and present you [your sins] before your eyes.”(Ps. 49:21). By the works of our righteousness we cannot earn holiness in the sight of God. Holiness is the result of unconditional devotion to God, and the reward for holiness is eternal life . “But now that you have been freed from sin and have become servants of God, your fruit is holiness, and the end is eternal life”(Rom. 6:22,23). There is a remedy for lies: to know the truth, to love the truth, to live by the truth. Reject lies - the language of Satan.

Igor Olefira

Devil- a religious and mythological character, the supreme spirit of evil, the lord of Hell, an instigator of people to commit sin. Also known as Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, Woland; in Islam - Iblis. The younger devil in the Slavic tradition is called the devil and demons obey him, in English and German the demons are a synonym for the devil, in Islam the younger devils are called shaitans.

The History of Belief in the Devil

Belief in the devil is an essential part of the doctrine of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and a number of other religions.

Belief in the devil is not only a matter of history. The question of the existence of the devil has become the subject of discussion, which has been and is being carried out by theologians. Also, this issue was raised during public speeches by leading church leaders, who, as a rule, defend the doctrine of the real existence of the devil as a personal being, which has a huge impact on everything that happens in the world. By referring to the devil, to Satan, "evil spirits" as the perpetrators of all world disasters, they shielded the real perpetrators of disasters. Therefore, it is necessary to talk about how faith in the devil arose, what place it occupies in the system of some religious teachings. Belief in the existence of evil supernatural beings (devils, demons) is as ancient in origin as belief in the existence of good ones - gods.

The early forms of religion are characterized by ideas about the existence in nature of many invisible supernatural beings - spirits, good and evil, useful and harmful to humans. It was believed that his well-being depended on them: health and illness, good luck and failure.

Belief in spirits and their influence on people's lives is still an essential element of some religions. Belief in good and evil spirits, characteristic of primitive religions, in the process of evolution of religious beliefs, took on the character of belief in gods and demons, and in some religions, for example, in Zoroastrianism, ideas about the struggle between evil and good principles in nature and society. The good beginning is represented by the creator of heaven, earth, man, he is opposed, the god of the evil beginning and his assistants. Between them goes constant struggle, which in the future should end with the death of the world and the defeat of the evil god. This system had a huge impact on Christianity and Judaism. In the process of changes that have taken place over thousands of years in human society, religious beliefs also changed, a system of ideas and ideas of modern religions took shape. Modern religions often include, in a modified form, much of the primitive beliefs, in particular the belief in good and evil spirits.

Of course, in modern religions, belief in good and evil gods is very different from belief in primitive man, but the origins of these ideas, of course, should be sought in the beliefs of the distant past. Ideas about good and evil spirits were also subjected to “further processing”: on the basis of these ideas, in the changed social conditions, with the formation of a social and political hierarchy in society, a belief arose in the main good god and his assistants, on the one hand, and the main evil god ( Satan) and his helpers on the other.

If belief in spirits arose spontaneously as one of the earliest forms of religion, then belief in the devil in the process of the evolution of religion was largely the result of

creativity of church organizations. One of the main original sources of the teachings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam about God and the devil was the Bible. As the biblical god became the main god of these religions, so the devil, which is spoken of in the Bible, became next to God, and the evil spirits of primitive religions - the fruits of popular imagination - became devils, brownies, watermen, etc. However, it is worth noting that a big role in creating the image of the devil. Belief in the devil occupies a significant place in Christian theology. “The Church could not do without Satan, as well as without God himself, was vitally interested in the existence evil spirits for without Satan and the host of his servants it would be impossible to keep the believers in subjection.” Belief in the devil as a real being - the source of all evil in the world, influencing the lives of individuals and all of humanity, is preached by churches of all religions now just as hundreds of years ago.

Devil in Christianity

In the Old Testament

In its original meaning, “Satan” is a common noun, denoting one who hinders and hinders. As the name of a certain angel, Satan first appears in the book of the prophet Zechariah (Zech. 3:1), where Satan is the accuser at the heavenly court.

According to Christian tradition, the Devil first appears on the pages of the Bible in the book of Genesis in the form of a serpent, who seduced Eve with the temptation to eat the forbidden fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, as a result of which Eve and Adam sinned with pride and were expelled from paradise, and doomed to earn their bread in sweat of the face with hard work. As part of God's punishment for this, all ordinary snakes are forced to "walk on their belly" and feed on "the dust of the ground" (Genesis 3:14-3:15).

The Bible also describes Satan as Leviathan. Here he is a huge sea creature or a flying dragon. In a number of books of the Old Testament, Satan is called an angel who tests the faith of the righteous (see Job. 1:6–12). In the book of Job, Satan questions Job's righteousness and invites the Lord to test him. Satan is clearly subordinate to God and is one of his servants (bnei Ha-Elohim - "sons of God", in the ancient Greek version - angels) (Job 1:6) and cannot act without his permission. He can lead the nations and bring down fire on the Earth (Job 1:15-17), as well as influence atmospheric phenomena (Job 1:18), send diseases (Job 2:7).

In the Christian tradition, Isaiah's prophecy about the king of Babylon is referred to Satan (Is. 14:3-20). According to the interpretation, he was created as an angel, but having become proud and wishing to be equal to God (Is. 14:13-14), he was cast down to earth, becoming after the fall the “prince of darkness”, the father of lies, a murderer (John 8:44) - the leader of the rebellion against God. From the prophecy of Isaiah (Is. 14:12) the “angelic” name of Satan is taken - הילל, translated as “Light-bringer”, lat. Lucifer).

In the New Testament

In the Gospel, Satan offers Jesus Christ: “I will give you power over all these kingdoms and their glory, for it is given to me, and I give it to whom I want” (Luke 4:6).

Jesus Christ says to people who wanted Him dead: “Your father is the devil; and you want to do the desires of your father. He was a murderer from the beginning and did not stand in the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks his own, for he is a liar and

father of lies” (John 8:44). Jesus Christ saw the fall of Satan: “He said to them: I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning” (Luke 10:18).

The Apostle Paul indicates the habitat of Satan: he is “the prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2), his servants are “the rulers of the darkness of this world”, “spirits of wickedness in high places” (Eph. 6:12). He also claims that Satan is able to outwardly transform (μετασχηματίζεται) into an angel of light (άγγελον φωτός) (2 Cor. 11:14).

In the Revelation of John the Theologian, Satan is described as the devil and "a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and on his heads seven diadems" (Rev. 12:3, 13:1, 17:3, 20:2). Following him will follow a part of the angels, called in the Bible "unclean spirits" or "angels of Satan." Will be thrown to earth in a battle with the archangel Michael (Rev. 12:7-9, 20:2,3, 7-9), after Satan tries to eat the baby, who should become the shepherd of the nations (Rev. 12:4-9 ).

Jesus Christ completely and completely defeated Satan by taking upon himself the sins of people, dying for them and rising from the dead (Col. 2:15). On the Day of Judgment, Satan will fight the Angel who holds the key to the abyss, after which he will be chained and thrown into the abyss for a thousand years (Rev. 20:2–3). After a thousand years, he will be released for a short time, and after the second battle he will be forever cast into the "lake of fire and brimstone" (Rev. 20:7-10).

Belief in the Devil in the Quran and Islam

Islam arose at the beginning of the 7th century. n. e. In the pre-Islamic religious beliefs of the Arabs, faith in spirits - jinn, good and evil - occupied a large place. The well-known Soviet Arabist E. A. Belyaev writes: “... Belief in genies was almost universal, which Arab fantasy represented as intelligent beings created from smokeless fire and air. These creatures, like people, were divided into two sexes and endowed with reason and human passions. Therefore, they often left the deserted deserts in which the imagination of the Arabs placed them, and entered into communication with people. Sometimes from this communication, offspring were obtained ... "

The pre-Muslim belief in the existence of jinn also entered the creed of Islam. They and their activities are mentioned in the Koran - the holy book of Islam - and in legends. Some of the jinn, according to the Qur'an, betrayed themselves to Allah, while others retreated from him (LXXII, 1, 14). The number of jinn is very large. In addition to Allah, King Sulaiman (Solomon) disposes of the jinn: by the command of Allah, "they do to him what he wishes" - altars, images, bowls, cisterns, cauldrons (XXXIV, 12).

In the pre-Islamic period, the religions of the neighboring peoples, chiefly Christianity and Judaism, spread among the Arabs. Many biblical stories, for example, about the creation of the world and man (about Adam and Eve and others), were included in the Koran in a slightly modified form, some characters of the Bible also appear in the Koran. Among them are Musa (Moses), Harun (Aaron), Ibrahim (Abraham), Daud (David), Ishak (Isaac), Isa (Jesus) and others.

The commonality of Muslim religious ideas with biblical ones was facilitated by the fact that, as Engels noted, the main content of the religious and tribal traditions of the ancient Jews and ancient Arabs “was Arabic or, rather, general Semitic”: “the so-called Jewish scripture is nothing but a record ancient Arab religious and tribal traditions, modified by the early separation of the Jews from their neighbors - kindred to them, but remaining nomadic tribes.

The demonology of the Koran is very similar to the biblical one. Along with the army of genies, the head of the demons, Iblis, occupies a place in the creed of Islam. All the evil in the world comes from him. According to the teachings of Islam, “when Adam appeared, Allah ordered the angels to worship him. All the angels obeyed, except for Iblis (distorted diabolos), the devil (sheitan, from "satan"; borrowed from Judaism). Iblis, who was created from fire, refused to bow down to the one who was created from dust. Allah cursed him, but he received a reprieve that will last until the Last Judgment. He uses this reprieve to corrupt people from Adam and Eve onwards. At the end of time, he, along with the demons who serve him, will be cast into hell."

In Islam, the devil turns out to be either a single being, an opponent almost equal to God, or a combination of subordinate spirits of darkness. "The image of the devil, like the image of Mohammed, stands at the center of religious consciousness."

Belief in demons is also associated with belief in people being "possessed" by them. Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, promotes savage ideas about demons possessing people and about their expulsion by the servants of Allah. “Folk beliefs attribute evil deeds to demons both in the East and in the Muslim West. As in the period of the Christian Middle Ages, an evil spirit is expelled from the possessed (majnun). Spells, amulets and talismans serve to drive away or appease these forces of darkness, which are especially life-threatening during childbirth and for newborns.

Thus, in Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, belief in a good god is inextricably linked with belief in evil spirits - demons and the devil.

In Slavic mythology

In the pantheon of Slavic gods, evil forces are represented by several spirits, there is no single god of evil. After the advent of Christianity among the Slavs, the word devil becomes synonymous with the word devil, with which, from the 11th century in Russia, Christians began to collectively call all pagan deities. The younger devil stands out - the devil, to whom the demons obey. The word demon was translated in the Bible in Greek. δαίμον (demon), however, in the English and German Bibles it was translated by the word devil (English devil, German teufel), and is still a foreign language synonym for the demon.

In Christian folk mythology, long-standing and stable ideas have developed about the appearance of devils, or rather their bodily image, since devils are also evil spirits. In the ideas about the devil, the remnants of Indo-European mythology have been preserved, with the imposition of the later Christian idea that all pagan deities are demons and personify the evil inclination, and mixed with Judeo-Christian ideas about the Devil and fallen angels. In the ideas about the devil, there is a similarity with the Greek Pan - the patron saint of cattle breeding, the spirit of fields and forests, and Veles (Baltic Vyalny). However, the Christian devil, unlike its pagan prototypes, is not the patron of cattle breeding, but is a pest to people. Devils in beliefs take the form of animals of the old cult - goats, wolves, dogs, ravens, snakes, etc. It was believed that devils have a generally human-like (anthropomorphic) appearance, but with the addition of some fantastic or monstrous details. The most common appearance is identical to the image of ancient Pan, fauns and satyrs - horns, tail and goat legs or hooves, sometimes wool, less often pig snout, claws, wings bat etc. Often they are described with eyes burning like coals. In this form, devils are depicted in numerous paintings, icons, frescoes and book illustrations both in Western and Eastern Europe. In Orthodox hagiographic literature, devils are described mainly in the form of Ethiopians.

Fairy tales tell that the devil serves Lucifer, to whom he instantly flies to the underworld. He preys on human souls, which he tries to get from people by deceit, sinning, or an agreement, although in Lithuanian fairy tales such a plot is rare. In this case, the devil usually turns out to be fooled by the hero of a fairy tale. One of the famous ancient references to the sale of the soul and the image of the character contains the Giant Codex from the beginning of the 13th century.

Satanism

Satanism is not a homogeneous phenomenon, but a concept that refers to several heterogeneous cultural and religious phenomena. Good analogue Protestantism can serve to understand this phenomenon. Protestants, in principle, also do not exist in nature: people who identify themselves with this branch of Christianity will either be Lutherans, or Baptists, or Pentecostals, and so on.

We can talk about at least five terms that are used when trying to define Satanism. With the exception of the very concept of "Satanism", these are: anti-Christianity, devil worship (or devil worship), Wicca, magic, and even neo-paganism in general. Somewhere between these concepts, which we will describe, is the "real" Satanism.

Devil Worship

The term "devil worship" refers to the worship of Satan in the form in which this image is recorded in Christianity, primarily medieval. Researchers do not designate such worship of the forces of evil with the concept of "Satanism". Devil worship is, in a sense, one of the Christian inversions. In any system of values there is a place for anti-values - what in Christian civilization we call sins, in modern ethics - misconduct, mistakes, and in modern depth psychology- "terrible and dark" unconscious. In any of these systems, inversion is possible, when anti-values take the place of values.

A person looks at the dualistic picture of the world and comes to the conclusion that he does not want to be "good", and for a number of reasons - aesthetic, biographical, psychological, and so on - he is attracted to the world of anti-values. But anti-values can only be taken from the world where they are created, and in this regard, the devil-worshipper, although he is not a Christian, exists in the Christian system of thought. He may recognize a number of Christian dogmas, but they mutate in his mind. For example, he may believe that the devil will win in the end, and then we can talk about hidden Zoroastrianism in its very simplified form. But it is important to understand that the logic of devil worship is the logic of the Christian worldview turned inside out.

Wicca

Wicca is a tradition in its own right that can be mislabeled as "Satanism" and is often confused with neo-paganism in general. Its founder, Gerald Gardner, reformulated the European witchcraft and magical tradition associated with covens, reformulating it into a standardized complex based on religious polytheism. When the Wiccan priest and priestess address the god and goddess, they allow the existence of magic as the control of supernatural forces. Wicca is a religion first and a magical practice second. Wiccans may worship various gods that personify the forces of nature, some human abilities, or the functions of the world. But at the same time, Wiccans will try to maintain harmony and will not worship only dark forces.

Anti-Christianity

The backbone of anti-Christianity is made up of people from whose point of view Christianity cannot give anything good. Christian values do not suit them. God as described by the Christian tradition does not exist. But anti-Christianity is not atheism, but precisely an attempt to point out the negative role of Christianity in history or the modern world and, because of this, to abandon the Christian worldview and the world of Christian values.

The image of Satan / the devil, which expresses the rejection of Christian values in anti-Christianity, is in fact not affiliated with Christian teaching. In this case, people, using the language developed by tradition, call their personal ideas the Christian terms "devil" and "Satan". It can be dark gods, dark forces, spirits. For example, for the world of the series "Charmed" this situation will not seem strange or illogical: it has angels, there are demons and there is no God, because in this world he is completely unnecessary.

In the case of anti-Christianity, we are not talking about Christian inversion. The meaning of this movement is to preach the ideals of absolute freedom, including from ethics. Simplifying, we can say that it is from anti-Christianity that grows what we today can define as Satanism. But in Satanism, the idea of the effectiveness of magic is added to the ideals of anti-Christianity. Although it is impossible to say that all Satanists are magicians, anti-Christian-Satanists may well engage in magical practices (unlike the followers of the new age, who believe in magic, but almost never practice it themselves) and rely here on a gigantic heritage, first hermetic, and then the occult European tradition.

Church of Satan

Anton Szandor LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, made an attempt to commercialize Satanism and develop it along the lines of an interesting religious tradition that already existed at that time - Wicca, described above.

LaVey saw the potential of Satanism as a religion and created his own "commercial" version. First of all, we are talking about the Church of Satan - the Church of Satan with the original center in San Francisco, which in 2016 turns 50 years old. In many ways, of course, this is an artistic project. So, famous figures cultures are members of the church, such as the singer Marilyn Manson.

After the opening of the Church of Satan, the number of satanic organizations began to grow. But the real known satanic organizations that exist are either commercial, or artistic, or semi-criminal, which was Michael Aquino's Temple of Set, and, of course, in many ways atheistic. A huge number of atheists with a good sense of humor, with the idea of challenging conventional ideals, organize satanic temples and enter into controversy in the religious discourse market - primarily in the United States.

"The Satanic Bible" and texts by Aleister Crowley

The textological tradition of Satanism is fixed around two poles. The first is the texts of Aleister Crowley. We can say that the figure of Crowley exists in the format of "magician, occultist, in a sense, also a Satanist." That is, it is impossible to argue that Crowley is primarily a Satanist: it would simply be inaccurate. At the same time, Crowley was a Satanist not in the sense of “devil worshiper”, but precisely in his respect for the ideal of absolute freedom, which for Crowley is expressed in the form of not only Satan, but also the dark demonic principle in general. Crowley's demonology and himself is a separate huge topic, far from completely coinciding with Satanism and modern culture.

The second pole is the texts of Anton Szandor LaVey. First of all, this is the "Satanic Bible", which many unjustifiably call "black", but LaVey has other texts that are less well-known. LaVey's "Satanic Bible" is a peculiar, perhaps even poetic, view of the world, preaching the value of absolute freedom in a completely anti-Christian, although not too harsh denial of values. Christendom. It has commandments, stories - everything that should be in a text that is supposed to be considered sacred. Although, since LaVey conceived the church as part commercial, part artistic project, Satanists usually do not have much reverence for the "Satanic Bible".

In addition, there are a large number of occult texts that often act as a "substrate": from Papus' "Practical Magic" to Eliphas Levi's "Teachings and Ritual of Higher Magic". This is a large body of literature. There is also modern literature - a variety of textbooks on black and white magic, including in Russian. It cannot be said that people who identify themselves as Satanists seriously study this whole literary complex.

Image transformation in culture

The first surviving images of Satan date back to the 6th century: a mosaic in San Appolinare Nuovo (Ravenna) and a fresco in the Bawit church (Egypt). In both images, the Devil is an angel, which in its appearance is not fundamentally different from other angels. Attitudes towards Satan changed dramatically at the turn of the millennium. This happened after the Council of Cluny in 956 and the development of methods to tie believers to their faith through influence on the imagination and intimidation (even Augustine recommended portraying Hell "for the education of the ignorant"). In general, until the 9th century, the Devil, as a rule, was depicted in a humanoid image; in XI he began to be portrayed as half-human, half-animal. In the XV-XVI centuries. artists led by Bosch and van Eyck brought the grotesque into the image of the Devil. The hatred and fear of Satan, which the church inspired and demanded, demanded that he be portrayed as disgusting.

From the 11th century in the Middle Ages, a situation developed, marked by the creation of sufficient conditions for the formation of the cult of the devil. Medieval dualistic heresies became a powerful catalyst for realizing these conditions. The "epoch of the devil" begins, marked by a decisive turning point in the development of European religiosity, the peak of which falls on the 16th century - the time of widespread demonomania and witchcraft.

The hard life of a commoner of the Middle Ages, squeezed in a vice between the oppression of the barons and the oppression of the church, drove into the arms of Satan and into the depths of magic whole classes of people seeking relief from their endless misfortunes or revenge - to find, though terrible, but still a helper and friend. Satan is a villain and a monster, but still not the same as the baron was for a medieval tradesman and villan. Poverty, hunger, serious illnesses, overwork and cruel tortures have always been the main suppliers of recruits to the Devil's army. The Lollard sect is known, who preached that Lucifer and the rebellious angels were expelled from the kingdom of heaven for demanding freedom and equality from the despot-god. The Lollards also claimed that the Archangel Michael and his retinue - the defenders of tyranny - would be overthrown, and people who obeyed the kings would be condemned forever. The terror brought down on diabolical art by ecclesiastical and civil laws only exacerbated the eerie charm of diabolism.

The Renaissance destroyed the canonical image of the devil in the form of an ugly monster. The demons of Milton and Klopstock retain, even after the fall, a considerable share of their former beauty and grandeur. The 18th century finally humanized Satan. P.B. Shelley, regarding the influence exerted by Milton's poem on the world cultural process, wrote: "Paradise Lost" brought modern mythology into the system ... As for the Devil, he owes everything to Milton ... Milton removed the sting, hooves and horns; endowed with the greatness of a beautiful and formidable spirit - and returned to society.

In literature, in music, in painting, a culture of "demonism" began. Since the beginning of the 19th century, Europe has been fascinated by its anti-divine appearances: the demonism of doubt, denial, pride, rebellion, disappointment, bitterness, longing, contempt, selfishness and even boredom appears. Poets depict Prometheus, Dennitsa, Cain, Don Juan, Mephistopheles. Lucifer, Demon, Mephistopheles become favorite symbols of creativity, thought, rebellion, alienation. In accordance with this semantic load, the Devil becomes handsome in the engravings of Gustave Doré, illustrating Milton's Paradise Lost, later in the paintings of Mikhail Vrubel ... New styles of depicting the Devil spread. One of them is in the role of a gentleman of the gallant era, in a velvet tunic, a silk cloak, a hat with a feather, with a sword.

DEVIL'S NUDE LANGUAGE AS AN ICONOGRAPHICAL MOTIF

Odysseus. Man in history. 2003 . M., 2003, p. 332-367.

A protruding tongue evokes in a modern person, perhaps, only one association: children “tease” with their tongue; this gesture is childish or, if an adult sticks out his tongue, childish, foolish, stylizing children's "teasing" 1 . However, the European iconography of the XI-XVII centuries. reveals a much more complex and in any case completely different semantic correlation in the exposure of the tongue: the protruding tongue, which turns out to be a stable attribute and characteristic gesture of the demon here, willy-nilly draws the researcher into a real semantic journey - and a journey not into the world of innocent children's play, but into the area where evil reigns and such of its companions as fear, sin, deceit. An analysis of the possible meanings of baring the tongue will force us to turn to each of these three (and, of course, far from being the only) hypostases of evil.

The motif of a naked tongue is by no means an exclusive property of European iconography: it is found in the art of the Etruscans and Indians, among North American Indians 2 ; a verbal description of this gesture is given in the Old Testament, in the book of the prophet Isaiah 3 . In some cases, we can talk about the connection of the motive with the demonic characters of non-Christian pantheons. Such, for example, are the Etruscan images of the Gorgon with his tongue hanging out, or the Hindu statues of the goddess Kali, from whose open mouth hangs a tongue stained with the blood of her victims: in both cases, the motif of the protruding tongue is correlated with mythological killer characters who embody the idea of "hostility of life" and in this capacity they correspond to the Christian devil - the enemy of being, "a murderer from the beginning" (John 8:44).

However, only in Christian iconography is the motif of the protruding tongue correlated with the image of the devil in a completely systematic and motivated way (which we will try to show below), "the exposure of the tongue" becomes a symbol included in the conceptual and figurative system of Christian demonology.

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The protruding tongue has been part of the characteristic attributes of the demon since about the 11th-12th centuries. and remains in this capacity until the decline of "scientific demonology" in the 17th century. 4 Later, the connection of the motif with the sphere of the demonic is clearly weakened: for us, the naked tongue no longer belongs to the set of such standard features the devil like horns, hooves, puffs of smoke, etc.; from the infernal realm, the motif is clearly forced out into the infantile realm, becoming a sign of childish or "childish" behavior 5 , however, does not completely disappear from the sphere of demonic ideas and images. Thus, the devil and demonic characters similar to him are often depicted with their tongues out in the Russian lubok of the 18th - early 20th centuries. 6 Devilish masks with protruding tongues (transformation of gothic chimeras?) are found in the architectural decor of the Russian estate of the 18th century. 7 A distant memory of the medieval demonic symbolism of a protruding tongue is obviously the famous drawing by Pushkin (1829) in the album El.N. Ushakova, on which the demon teases with the tongue of a poet in a monastic klobuk 8 , and lines about V.A. Zhukovsky in the satire of A.F. Voeikov "House of lunatics" (1814-1817):

Here is Zhukovsky, in a long shroud
Skutan, paws with a cross,
Stretching out your legs tenderly
The devil teases with his tongue... 9

Visual images and textual descriptions of the protruding tongue coexist in medieval culture with theological interpretations of the symbolism of the language as part of human body. In this article, we will try to correlate the visual component with the textual one and outline the range of meanings associated with naked language.

The motif of language appeared in the demonological texts of Christian authors long before there was a specific iconography of the devil; already St. Augustine, in describing the devil, resorts to this motif: "He scatters murders everywhere, puts mousetraps, sharpens his many twisted and crafty tongues: all his poisons, conjuring in the name of the Savior, cast out from your hearts" 10 .

The expression "insidious tongue" (lingua dolosa), which in the Psalms of David is often applied to enemies "" and which St. Augustine turned it into a characterization of the devil, subsequently to such an extent it becomes a commonplace of demonology that sometimes acts as a metonymic designation of the devil. This is the case in an anonymous treatise of the twelfth century. "Dialogue about the struggle between the love of God and the Evil Tongue" 12 : here the allegorical characters - God's love and the Evil tongue (Lingua dolosa) - are arguing about whether it is worth undertaking the painful labors of the righteous for the dubious hope of bliss. "Cunning tongue", in particular, speaks of the "stupidity" (stultitia) of Christian exploits: no matter how hard you work, all the same, "those to whom life is predestined will be saved to life, and those who are destined for punishment will be punished" 13 . Who is this "Cunning tongue", the author does not explain, apparently believing that the answer is self-evident; however, the memoirs of "The Evil Tongue" about how he "got Adam through Eve" 14 , nevertheless, are called upon to dispel possible doubts: before the reader, of course, is the devil himself.

It might be assumed that language is included in the realm of the devil mainly because of its sinfulness. There is no doubt that the tongue was indeed understood as a part of the body especially subject to sin (this will be discussed below). However, the sinfulness of language as such is not at all as obvious as it might seem at first glance. The formula "my sinful tongue" (according to Pushkin's expression in the "Prophet"), as applied to Christian ideas, simplifies the real state of affairs, since the Church Fathers constantly emphasize that language in itself is not sinful. "Only a guilty soul makes the tongue guilty," says St. Augustine 15 . On the other hand, another circumstance is absolutely unconditional and generally recognized: language is dangerous; he, like no other member of the body, needs restraint and control. "There is no such member in my body, which I would be so afraid of, like a language," - this statement of one of the desert fathers accurately expresses the essence of the current situation. 16 .

The imagery associated with the gesture of the protruding tongue is largely subordinated to the ideas of fear and sin - ideas that, in turn, are most closely connected with the sphere of the demonic.

Let's start with the idea of fear. There was a fear of language, and this fear was fueled by the corresponding mood of the Old Testament books. Comparisons of the tongue with a weapon - with a scourge: "The blow of the scourge makes scars, and the blow of the tongue will crush the bones" (Sir. 28, 20); with a sword: "... the tongue is a sharp sword" (Ps. 56, 5), with a bow: "Like a bow, they strain their tongue for a lie" (Jer. 9, 3) - were sympathetically perceived and deeply developed by medieval authors. Caesar of Arelat (VI century), urging the monks to tirelessly fight against their own vices, offered to "sheath the swords of tongues" so as not to injure each other in this fight 17 . Palladius in "Lausaic" (419-420) likened the sharp reproaches addressed by Anthony the Great to some wicked, "flagellation of the tongue" 18 .

The motif of the "naked" and wounding, like a sword, language was introduced into the inscriptions of the Passion of Christ. The idea of "double wounds" of Christ, external and internal, arose: the first were inflicted on him by real weapons, the latter - by the tongues of those who blasphemed and mocked him. As Bernard of Clairvaux wrote, who comprehended with special depth "the problem of the "internal wound" of the Son of God, Christ," humble to the blasphemy of the Jews, patient to wounds, struck inside with tongues, outside - with nails " 19 .

“Do not be afraid to say that this tongue is more cruel than the spear that pierced the Lord’s side,” Bernard of Clairvaux convinced the parishioners in one of his sermons. “After all, he also pierced the body of Christ ... give up his spirit"; the tongue is "more harmful" than the thorns that stung the forehead of Christ, and the iron nails that pierced his limbs. And further, Bernard drew attention to the contradiction between the outward harmlessness of language and the terrible danger that lies in it: "Language is a soft member, but can be restrained with great difficulty; matter is fragile and insignificant, but in use it turns out to be great and powerful. The member is small, however if you are not careful, the sinister 20 . The English student of Bernard, Gilbert of Holland, even Christ himself shared the fear of the tongue as a deadly weapon: "Christ is more afraid ... the sting of tongues than thorn thorns" 21 .

In this context, the meaning of the motif found in the images of the Passion is quite clear: the enemies of Christ stick out their tongues towards the Crucifixion. The tongue appears here on a par with the swords and spears of the soldiers surrounding the Crucifixion, and its exposure does not mean "teasing", but inflicting the most terrible wound on Christ - a mortal, "internal" wound. It can be assumed that the images of demons with protruding tongues reflected the idea of language as a weapon that inflicted an "internal wound" on Christ: after all, according to medieval ideas, the accusation and execution of Christ were set up by the devil, and the blasphemers who surrounded the dying God were the devil's disciples. 22 . Demons, like their disciples, do not "tease" with their tongues, but threaten and hurt them.

If we move from the motive of fear (and the understanding of language as a “naked weapon” associated with it) to the motive of sin, we will find here a much more complex imagery: the bodily “areas of sinfulness”, highlighted by Christian anthropology, in the visual thinking of the Middle Ages enter into intense interaction, into a game of roll calls , and language, which, by virtue of its versatility, can be correlated with various sins (its correlation with idle talk and gluttony is quite obvious), plays a crucial role in this game.

"Dominate, as over the dissolute slaves of the soul, over the tongue, the womb and lust," advises Martin of Braga (VI century) 23 . Language, womb, "lust" - lingua, venter, libido - three spheres of sin, which form in the human body a kind of axis of sinfulness. Medieval imagination established between these

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spheres constant "figurative interchange"; pictorial motifs moved along the axis of sin - mainly downwards, in order to demonstrate the deep identity of all three sinful spheres - the identity acquired in the area of the bodily bottom, the sinfulness of which is quite unconditional: for example, the displacement of the language of the devil's images to the place of the phallus (this motif will be discussed below) was supposed to show that a "sinful tongue" is no better than a "shameful penis."

The "playing with language" played by the medieval imagination was probably designed to overcome the ambiguity inherent in language as a bodily member, to visually distinguish between the language of sin and the language of the righteous. The language of the righteous and the language of the demon are outwardly the same, but the artist's imagination strove to find a difference in them at the visual level.

In fact, of the three areas of sinfulness named above, it is the "region of the tongue" that stands out for its special ambiguity. 24 , which could be perceived as a disturbing difficulty that needs to be overcome. This ambiguity of the language is visible, for example, from the treatise "Allegories to all Holy Scripture" attributed to Hraban Maurus, in which the author singled out the following allegorical meanings of the word lingua in the Bible: 45, 2), i.e. My son, along with the Holy Spirit, is my collaborator. The tongue is the voice of Christ, as in the psalm: "My tongue clings to my larynx" (Ps. 22:16), i.e. my voice was silent in the presence of the Jews. The tongue is a heretical teaching, as in the book of Job: "You will bind his tongue with a rope" 25 (Job 40:20), i.e. by means of Holy Scripture you will bind the heretical doctrine. The tongue is the soul, as in the Psalm: "All the days your tongue invents unrighteousness" (Ps. 52, 4), i.e. always your soul invents unrighteousness ... The tongue is the learning of this world, as in the book of Isaiah: "And the Lord will destroy the tongue 26 the sea of Egypt" (Isaiah 11:15), i.e. destroy the dark learning of this world" 27 . Language (we note that Hraban always speaks of "material" language, and not of language as speech) can mean opposites: both the Son of God and "heretical teaching." The language may be the metonymy of the devil (lingua dolosa), but it can also be a metonymic designation of the holy apostle, as in the Golden Legend, where St. Bartholomew is called "the mouth of God, the fiery tongue that spreads wisdom" 28 .

The tongue is a bodily region from which both sin and holiness can come, although the latter happens less often - and less often just as much as holiness is less common than sin. If the tongue is the last weapon with which Christ was wounded "inside", then it is at the same time the last weapon with which

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Christ took advantage. The motif of language as "the last weapon of Christ" was developed in the "Golden Legend" by Yakob Voraginsky. All members of Christ's body were in one way or another amazed: "the head before which the angelic spirits bowed was pierced by a forest of thorns", the face was defiled by spitting, "the eyes that are brighter than the sun were closed by death, the ears, accustomed to the singing of angels, heard the insults of the wicked", the mouth was forced to drink vinegar and gall, the feet and hands were nailed to the cross, the body was scourged, the ribs were pierced by a spear. In a word, "there was nothing left in him but a tongue to pray for sinners and to entrust his mother to the care of a disciple" 29 . In the Golden Legend, this motif is applied to the saints, who, in imitation of Christ, also often resort to language as a last weapon. A young Christian "from the time of Decius and Valerian" is tied to a bed and a harlot is brought to him so that she can "induce him to debauchery" and destroy his soul; however, the bound young man, at the approach of the harlot, "bit off his tongue with his teeth and spat it out in the face of the harlot", thereby "overcoming temptation with pain" 30 . They cut off the tongue of St. Christina, but she, taking her tongue in her hands, throws it in the face of the judge, who immediately loses his sight 31 .

In the circumstance that the Holy Spirit appeared to the apostles precisely in the form of a tongue 32 , Jacob Voraginsky saw a special meaning: "The tongue is a member that is inflamed by the fire of hell, it is difficult to control it, but when it is well controlled, it is very useful. And since the tongue was inflamed by the fire of hell, it needed the fire of the Holy Spirit ... he, more than the other members, needed the grace of the Holy Spirit" 33 . The duality of language finds expression here in a visual image: human language it looks like a tongue of flame, but this fiery tongue can be both a part of the hellish fire and a reflection of the fiery tongues in which the Holy Spirit descended on the apostles. Jacob Voraginsky relies here on the argument about language from the epistle of the Apostle James: "And the tongue is fire, the universe ( ὁ κόσμος , which is understood by the Vulgate as universitas) of unrighteousness ... defiles the whole body and inflames the circle of life, being itself inflamed from hell "(James 3, 6). However, the unequivocally negative attitude towards the "fire of the tongue" inherent in the apostle is removed from Jacob Voraginsky: "the fire of the tongue" can also be holy if it is ignited not by hell, but by the Holy Spirit.

The thinking of a medieval artist took into account and played with this analogy of two languages, fiery and bodily. In the images of demons, the motif of the tongue is often given, as it were, in a double presentation: the tongue hanging from the mouth is "repeated" by hair sticking out on end and wriggling like tongues of hellish flame; the demon carries hellish fire on his head, and the "sinful tongue" falling down isorta is only a separate tongue of this fire.

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Another variant of the double implementation of the motif: in the depiction of the torments of Hadi, sinners in cauldrons, surrounded by flames, themselves show their tongues. Their tongues, with which they surely spew blasphemy against the Lord 34 , serve here, on the one hand, as a metaphor for "untrue", sinful speech, a false logos (this will be discussed below), and on the other hand, they enter into a kind of polyphonic roll call with the tongues of the Vadsky flame. The visual motif of the language unfolds simultaneously in two overlapping plans: the "sinful language" of a person, the language of crime, and next to it, as an answer, the language of hellfire, the language of punishment.

The ambiguity inherent in language and speech as such forced us to look for some clear distinguishing mark of the "sinful language." The exposure of the tongue has become such a sign. It is easy to see here full compliance with the general principle of demonic imagery, which consists in parodying the sacred, accompanied by its shift towards the material, carnal, base. The devil, according to Tertullian, "competes with the truth" 35 and tries to create a perverted copy of the Divine order, however, he does this by means of the material, base world accessible to him, the "prince" of which he is temporarily (John 12, 31). As a result, “what God, creating, called clean, the enemy, infecting, makes unclean” (Peter Zlatoslov) 36 . This demonological idea at the figurative level is manifested in the fact that the spiritual functions in the iconography of the devil, as it were, materialize, become roughly visible and at the same time "shift down". The contemporary researcher of medieval imagery Jean Wirth, speaking of parallelism in the development of sacred and demonic motifs, notes that "images of evil", imitating the sacred to a large extent, at the same time, as it were, "take the spiritual into the sphere of devouring and sexuality, shift it towards the bodily and base... If creatures created in the likeness of God are usually depicted with their mouths closed, even when they speak, then the grimacing masks of the devils open their mouths wide.This is how the effect of the degradation of the word, a spiritual function, which is equated to devouring, or, depending on the position of this mouth, is achieved. on the body, to sexual intercourse or to defecate" 37 .

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However, the naked tongue is not only a symbol of the outward and already degraded word. The protruding tongue of the demon and his servants and "imitators" - sinners, possessed and demonomaniacs - appears in all three areas of sin mentioned above. 38 : as a metaphor for the phallus, as part of a gnawing mouth and as an instrument of idle talk (i.e. as an attribute and sign of untrue speech, a false logos).

Jean Bodin's demonological treatise "On the Demon Mania of Witches" demonstrates how the theme of "untrue speech" (which, undoubtedly, is the speech of the possessed - demonomaniacs) establishes a figurative relationship between the three spheres of sin, weaving into this roll call and the motif of the protruding tongue. Boden describes the speech of the possessed as follows: "When an evil spirit speaks (from inside a woman who is possessed. - A.M.), he sometimes speaks as if in the stomach, and the woman's mouth remains closed, sometimes with her tongue sticking out from her mouth to her knees, sometimes with shameful parts" 37 .

Speaking "with the tongue hanging out", speaking with the belly-womb, speaking with the genitals - three metaphors for the same thing: untrue speaking, false speech. The protruding tongue is put here on a par with the "lower" spheres of sinfulness, the exposure of the tongue is interpreted as a variation on the themes of the "bodily bottom" and its sinful manifestations.

The figurativeness of the demonic sphere indicates the close interweaving of the motif of a naked tongue with the motifs of two other, "lower" areas of sinfulness. The protruding tongue has a kind of figurative correlate in these areas: in the sexual sphere, it is put in place of the phallus; in the sphere of devouring, it is comprehended as part of an open mouth leading to the womb. But even being "in its own area" - in the sphere of false speech, the naked tongue interacts with the images of "grassroots sinfulness": the motive of the "talking ass" arises, the "speech" of which is practically identical to the false speech of the sinful language. In the following, we will take a closer look at all three areas.

1. Area of voluptuousness. A protruding tongue is equated to a phallus 40 ; on the visual level, this is achieved by placing one of the devil's faces (which, as you know, have many faces) in the belly or in the groin area, and the protruding tongue is in place of the phallus, as its substitute and analogue. Depicted in this way, the speaking of the devil is likened to the work of the genital organs and is thereby exposed as false, "reduced to nothing" by purely visual means.

2. The area of the womb. The protruding tongue is associated with the motive of gluttony and, in general, devouring, grub. With regard to the devil, the motive of devouring undoubtedly has a symbolic meaning: the devil is a devourer of the souls and bodies of sinners; “like a roaring lion,” he is looking for “someone to devour” (I Pet. 5, 8 ). The devouring of a sinner means the communion of sinners with the body of the devil, which is analogous to the communion of the righteous with the body of Christ. Sinners are members of the devil's body just as the righteous are members of Christ's body 41 . This analogy, however, is violated on at least one point: the representation of the very communion of the righteous and sinners to the corresponding body. If the righteous person communes with the body of the Church in some mystical non-material way, then the sinner's communion with the devil's body is comprehended as a grossly material process: the devil devours the sinner, directly taking him into his huge body (womb). This is not surprising: after all, the devil, being the "prince of this world", is able to parody the unio mystica of God and the righteous only with the material means available to him.

And here, in the images of the diabolical unio profana - taking in and devouring a sinner - we again encounter the motif of a protruding tongue. The sculptural group of the cathedral in Chauvigny (XI-XII centuries) depicts the devouring of a sinner by a certain monster, which, of course, means the devil. We see two open "mouths" - the devil and the sinner - and only one protruding tongue: this is the tongue of the sinner himself. However, the image can be understood in another way, since the head of the sinner, which has a clearly expressed "linguistic" form, allows for a double reading, it can also be read as the "tongue of the devil", and in this case we have here two heads, two mouths - and two tongues. The sculptor himself captured the moment when the sinner merges with the devil, the moment when the sinner's head literally becomes the devil's tongue. Such a reading is confirmed by the metaphor "the sinner is the tongue of the devil." We meet her in the "Golden Legend" when St. Vincent calls his tormentor Dasian "the tongue of the devil": "Oh, the poisonous tongue of the devil, I am not afraid of your torment..." 42 .

The tongue is the place where the fusion of the devil and the sinner takes place; if it is the language of the devil, then we see how the sinner literally turns into this language; if it is the tongue of a sinner, then we are shown how the devil, seizing it, takes possession of the whole sinner. The second option, long before being developed at the visual level, is verbally embodied by St. Augustine: "you [children of the light, children of the world] are in danger among those ... whose tongues are in the hand of the devil" 43 .

French miniature, late 15th century. is an intricate play of variations on the theme of tongue and open mouth. Sinners are punished here by the fact that they must absorb disgusting food and drink: demons with their tongues hanging out regale sinners with toads and lizards that stick out of the sinners' mouths in the form of some kind of "quasi-tongues" parodying the real language. The central group is the culmination of the repeated motif of language: the devil and the sinner intertwine their tongues in an obscene kiss; the interweaving of their tongues apparently symbolizes their complete union in sin, the emergence of a single "devil's body."

Since the images of the "devil's meal" are intended to capture the moment of the transformation of the sinner from the "image of God" into a part of the devil's flesh, they are characterized by a special kind of variability. It is not the tongue that can stick out of the devil's mouth, but the body of the sinner, which in this case is equivalent to the tongue, but captures another phase of the process: the body of the sinner has not yet had time to become the tongue of the devil.

The sinner and the tongue in the devil's mouth are equivalent and divorced only in time: the tongue is a sinner who has already become the devil's body; the sinner sticking out of the mouth is on the way to this stage. In the sculpture from Chauvigny mentioned above, a unique technique was found to merge these two stages.

So, the protruding tongue can be associated with the metaphor of devouring-absorbing: the devoured sinner, climbing into the devil's womb, becomes part of the devouring mouth (it is clear that the whole hell was often portrayed as a mouth). The tongue that the devil sticks out is at the same time the sinner that sticks out of the devil's womb.

3. The area of the language proper is the area of speech. The protruding tongue is a sign of speaking, speech, and speech is untrue, a false logos. A series of images showing the devil baring his tongue clearly showed him speaking. The effect of "depicted speaking" is complemented by the gestures with which the devil accompanies his speech.

The words spoken by the devil themselves can be deciphered. So, in the image below, the devil bares his tongue, delivering a boastful speech about his victory over God: "I will exalt my throne above the stars of God." -Is. 14, 13) 44 .

A textual parallel to the motif of "represented speaking" - speaking as a tongue-out - we find in the "Golden Legend", in the life of St. Dominica. The devil appears to the saint, and Dominic leads him around the monastery, forcing him to explain to what temptations he exposes the monks in one place or another. “Finally, he brought him into the common room and asked him how he tempted the brothers here. And then the devil began to quickly turn his tongue in his mouth and made a strange unintelligible sound. And the saint asked him what he meant. And he
said: "This place is all mine, for when the monks are going to talk, I tempt them to talk disorderly and interfere with the words without any benefit..." 45 .

Thus, in some cases, we may well interpret the naked tongue of the devil as a sign of speaking. In order to fully understand the meaning of this depicted speaking, one should take into account the fact that in other cases, in relation to "righteous" characters not associated with the demonic sphere, oral speech is in no way subject to depiction: not only Christ, but also ordinary it is impossible to imagine a righteous man depicted at the moment of speaking with his mouth open and his tongue hanging out.

The devil is a parodist in everything, an imitator of God; among other things, it imitates the Divine word, but if the true logos is spiritual and invisible, then the false logos of the devil, like his other parodies-fakes, is grossly material. The contrast between untrue and true speech as a material pseudo-logos and the invisible "Word" is deepened by the introduction of another paradoxical motif related to language: for genuine speech, language as a bodily member is not needed at all. language, but he continued, as before, to say "for the defense of the truth." According to Gregory, there is nothing miraculous in this: if, as the Gospel says, "In the beginning was the Word" and "All things came into being through Him," then "is it surprising if the Word, which created the language, can give rise to words without language?" 46 In the Golden Legend, St. Christine (in the episode quoted above), St. Leger 47 , St. Longinus 48 cut off tongues, but they continue to speak: Leger "preaches and exhorts" as before, Longinus is in dialogue with the demons and with the executioner, who must execute him.

The demonstration of language means the emphasized materialization of the word in devilish speaking - this parody of the true logos, while the Divine word does not need language at all as a material organ. 49 .

The opposition between the genuine and the counterfeit word includes in its sphere another motif that is important for us: sound, vocal beauty/ugliness. Despite the fact that the devil is a wonderful rhetorician who fully owns the art of persuasion, he is denied the pure, sonorous fullness of the Word - the fullness of sound, breath, "pneuma". According to the apostolic definition, pagan idols - the same demons - are "silent" (1 Corinthians 12:2). The demon speaks in a "hoarse voice" 50 - a voice in which there is no main thing - the spirit-breath; while the voice of Christ, according to Gilbert of Holland, is "powerful", like music, just as Christ himself is like a musical instrument: "all his strings are taut and sonorous" 51 .

The vocal ugliness inherent in the speech of the devil is conveyed with the greatest clarity in the obscene motive, which sometimes arises in connection with the protruding tongue, sometimes independently of it: it could be called the motive of a sounding or speaking backside. The backside of demons often produces sound gesture, described, in particular, by Dante: "And that [one of the demons] depicted a pipe from the back" (Ad. 21, 139; translation by M.L. Lozinsky). This motif is characteristic of the mysteries, in which the disgraced and exposed devil accompanies his departure from the stage with the appropriate sound: "Now I am making my way to hell, where I will be betrayed to endless torture. Out of fear of fire, I loudly spoil the air" 52 .

We find perhaps the first appearance of the "talking ass" motif in Gregory of Tours (6th century) in the "Lives of the Fathers": in the cell of St. Kaluppanu is crawled by a huge snake; the saint, suspecting him of the devil, turns to the serpent with a lengthy exorcism-exorcism speech. Having silently listened to the words of the saint, the serpent departed, but at the same time "issued bottom powerful sound and filled the cell with such a stench that it could no longer be considered by anyone else but a devil" 53 .

The ugly sound emitted by the devil's ass is, as it were, the quintessence of all his speeches, a sign of their complete emptiness, of that "nothing" to which they are reduced. From the point of view of the devil's body arrangement, this sound gesture brings the mouth and buttocks together: the speaking mouth of the devil seems to be shifting towards the buttocks, becoming a speaking buttocks.

An episode from the life of St. Dominica in the "Golden Legend" indicates the connection between the motif of a talking backside and the motif of a naked tongue: at the moment Dominic exorcised the devil from a group of heretics, "a terrible cat jumped out of their very middle, the size of a large dog, with huge burning eyes and a long, wide and bloody tongue hanging down to the navel He had a short tail, pulled up, so that you could see his ass in all its ugliness ... from which a terrible stench emanated " 54 .

We see the roll call of a naked tongue and a naked backside in the engraving by A. Dürer (1493) to the “Book of the Knight” by J. de la Tour Landry, the engraving has the title: “About a noble lady, how she stood in front of a mirror and preened, and in the mirror she saw the devil, who showed her ass 55 . The motif of the naked tongue is given here in multiple conduct-reflection: an open mouth and a naked
the devil's tongue is duplicated in his own open backside with a naked tail (as if reflecting the tongue), while the backside, in turn, is reflected in the mirror instead of the beauty's face. A possible acoustic component of this scene - the "word" of the devil addressed to the beauty he is playing - is not difficult to imagine: it is quite possible to assume that this engraving also depicts the devil's speaking, shifted to the area of the bodily bottom.

A bare tongue and a bare, stinking ass are the compared attributes of the devil, testifying to the materialization, decline, turning into emptiness and "nothing" of the word, when it is parodied in the sphere of the demonic, "recreated" by means available to the devil.

Above, it was mainly about the naked tongue as an attribute of the devil's corporeality, as a certain property of his bodily structure. The exposed tongue testifies to the distortion that the “normal” body structure undergoes in the demon: the natural position of the tongue is inside the mouth; protruding, "wandering" tongue is a violation of the Divine body arrangement. "The world of all things is the peace of order (tranquilitas ordinis)", wrote St. Augustine; the devil "did not stand in the truth" (John 8:44), which means that he "does not rest in order" 56 . The devil's body itself is not "orderly in order" in the same way as the human body is in order: its members are in restless and disorderly movement, as if wandering. It is no coincidence that numerous faces of the devil are often depicted on the bends of the knees and elbows, i.e. on the most restless, unstable place of the body.

The language of the devil also violates the bodily order, lives "out of order." Abbot Sisoy, one of the characters in the "Sayings of the Elders" (IV-V centuries), asks the question: "How can we save our soul if our tongue often breaks out through open doors?" 57 The inside of the mouth is the house of the tongue, the mouth is the open doors; the tongue wandering outside this house is likened to the devil himself, who left "his dwelling" (according to the message of the Apostle Jude, 1, 6) and is doomed to restless wanderings outside the "peace of order" .

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Protruding tongue as a sign of a disturbed body structure is attribute the devil, but gesture in the strict sense of the word, it will be possible to name it only when we include it not only in the system of diabolical body arrangement, but also in the system of diabolical behavior - when we show that the devil, sticking out his tongue, implements a certain behavioral model.

Let us now try to return to the problem of the naked tongue as a gesture, for which we will have to turn to those cases where we have reason to assume that the devil actually gestures with his tongue.

Some observations in this aspect have already been given above: in particular, in connection with the motive of fear, it was said that the devil and his servants do not "tease" with their tongues (like modern children), but "threaten" them. But does this distinction exhaust the question of the relationship between the naked tongue of the devil and the gesture of "teasing" in the modern sense?

It seems to us that the diabolical protruding tongue is related to the modern gesture of teasing through the theme of "deception game", which is extremely relevant to demonology. Child teasing is a special case of play behavior; but the devil, sticking out his tongue, "plays", although in a very specific early Christian sense of the word.

Let us turn to the main text for the circle of images under consideration - to the book of the prophet Isaiah cited above, where the following is said in the Latin text of the Vulgate about the "sons of the sorceress": Super quem lusistes, super quem dilatastis os et ejecistis liquam(57, 4). The verb ludere, here correlated with the gesture of sticking out the tongue, carries a complex combination of meanings: "mock" and "tease", but at the same time both "play" and "deceive". Jerome, in a commentary on this verse of Isaiah, deciphers the scene described by the prophet as follows: "the sons of the sorceress" - an allegory of the blasphemer Jews who surrounded the crucifixion of Christ, over which they "mocked, spitting in the face and pulling his beard, and over which they expanded and opened their their mouths and stuck out their tongues, saying to him: “You are a Samaritan and are in You” (John 8:48), and again: “He does not cast out demons except by the power of Beelzebub, the prince of demons” (Matt. 12:24) ” 58 . In the future, this place could also be understood as a description of the "impious" behavior of the demons themselves, as evidenced by the image of the descent of Christ into hell, on which the demon not only sticks out his tongue, but also "expands his mouth", in strict accordance with the text of the prophet.

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Blasphemers not only "mock" Christ, but also "taunt" him, spitting in his face and pulling his beard. In the texts of the Church Fathers, the verbs ludere, illudere (and various formations from them), describing the behavior of demons and their servants, often acquire an even more complex meaning, including the moment of "play" in the specific meaning of this word. It would be more correct to speak here of a special "game-deception", since the demon's play necessarily also means deception - and at the same time, this deception is not exhausted by the concept of lies, untruth. To "deceit" as such, to deception as a lie here, in the sphere of the demonic, a special playful moment is added: the demon creates a kind of illusory situation (illusio - a derivative of the verb illudere), in which a person loses himself, is distracted from the path of righteousness; this is an illusory "pseudo-creation" and constitutes the actual game component in the demonic game-deception. In the "History of the Monks" (c. 400), Macarius of Alexandria, having come to the church, saw that "all over the church, running back and forth like little ugly Ethiopian boys"; "flirt" with the monks sitting there, "playing with various guises and images." Images (of a woman, of any rank, etc.), which "the demons created as if playing", fell into the souls of the monks and distracted them from prayer 59 . The verbs of the game - ludere and illudere - are repeated in this text with exceptional persistence, denoting not just a deception, but a deception-illusion, suggesting the playful creation (of course, parodying Divine creation) of some imaginary reality that diverts the "acted out" from the path of truth.

In the anonymous life of St. Lupicina (c. 520) a certain monk, entering the basilica of St. Martin in Tours, heard a greeting addressed to him by one of the energumen (possessed): "He is rightfully one of our monks ... Are you healthy, O Dative, our comrade?" The frightened monk realized that he was "playing the devil" (inlusum se a diabolo), and hastened to repent. 60 . Here the verb "play" is the most accurate equivalent of the Latin illudere: after all, no one deceives the monk, they literally "play a game" with him; the source of his fear is the consciousness that the devil involved him in his game, chose him as his toy.

The correct behavior in such a case is not to get involved in this game. Relatives who once came to visit St. Anthony in his solitude, were frightened by a terrible roar and voices resounding from his skete; Antony advised them to cross themselves and not pay attention to the sounds: "Let them [the demons] play with themselves" b1 .

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The illusions created by the demons could be quite bizarre and relatively harmless. In the life of St. Pachomius demons tempt the saint with the following "performance": "it was possible to see how they, gathered together in front of him [Pachomius], tied a tree leaf with huge ropes and pulled it with great difficulty, in two lines, encouraging each other ... as if they were moving a stone of enormous weight "; the purpose of this performance is "to relax, if they can, his soul with laughter" 62 .

Cassian distinguishes a special class of demons whose purpose is to cause laughter: these demons ("the people call them fauns, Faunos"), "satisfied with laughter and deceit alone, tend to tire rather than harm ..." 63 .

The ability to "play" - no matter how dangerous and destructive the demonic game may be - brings the demon closer to the child. Characteristically, in early Christian texts, demons often look like children or appear in the guise of a child. 64 . There is nothing surprising here, given that Augustan theology did not at all consider the child as the quintessence of innocence, but, on the contrary, believed that children were "subject to the devil" because of their inherited original sin. 65 .

I have not been able to find a text in which the reference to the demon's "play" is accompanied by a description of its naked tongue; only the initial text of the tradition can be considered as such a text - the place quoted above from the book of the prophet Isaiah, in which the motif of the "play-mocking" and the naked tongue are actually placed side by side. Nevertheless, everything that has been said above about the "play" of demons gives us some grounds to connect this play with those childish-playful moments that are present in the gesture of exposing the tongue (a gesture that in other contexts already described above could also figure as a non-playful gesture of outright threat). The naked tongue of a demon may indicate the illusory-playful nature of the situation he creates, it may be a sign of a demonic "game" aimed at creating an illusion that, parodying reality and truth, distracts a person from them and leads him to death. A naked tongue is a visual equivalent demonic illudere, a sign that the demon is "playing" - but still playing not like a child, but in a special, "terrible" and destructive sense.

Some images make it possible to interpret the naked tongue of the devil in this way - as a sign of a destructive game of deception. In the miniature from the treatise "Ars moriendi", depicting the temptation of the dying "vain glory", the demons (two of them bared their tongues) offer crowns to the dying. This whole coronation situation is, of course, completely false; before us is a typical illusio, created by the demons as a result of their game, quasi ludendo, and the protruding tongue is a sign of this game-deception.

On the illustration from the City of God edition of St. Augustine (end of the 16th century), demons gallop around the saint, holding books in their hands; one of them bared his tongue. Are not these demons surrounding the holy saint parodying that passage from the eighth book of the Confessions, where God, in a voice "like a boy or a girl," commands St. Augustine to take the book and read from it: "Lift up, read; lift up, read," and St. Augustine can't remember that it was common for a child in "some form of play" to sing such words? The demons really "raise" the books, either offering them to St. Augustine, roofing felts, on the contrary, pretending that they are being carried away. In all likelihood, the demons are thus trying to distract St. Augustine from his concentrated occupation; perhaps they are trying to make him laugh and bare their tongues as a sign of this "game" of theirs.

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In a 15th-century German engraving depicting the pseudo-resurrection of the Antichrist, a certain satanic bird sticks out its tongue, undoubtedly parodying the Holy Spirit, allegedly descending on the Antichrist. A naked tongue is a sign of the same deceitful game ( ludus turns into illusio) that the devil and his servants play with a person, a sign of the illusory nature of the "false miracle" shown here.

The principle of the game-deception, ludus-illusio, which regulates the attitude of the devil to a person, remains valid in the opposite direction: in order not to succumb to deception, a person must answer the devil with the same - a deception-game. We find a clear formulation of this reciprocity-reversibility of deceit in the "History of the Monks", where one of the monks says to some rich people: "Those who follow God deceive the world (play with the world - illudunt mundo), but we pity the ovas, for you, on the contrary , the world is deceiving (the world is playing with you)" 67 .

In this confrontation between the "two deceptions", the winner, of course, remains with God and the righteous person: the common place is the position that the devil, who imagines himself to be a successful deceiver of the whole world, has actually been deceived long ago.

He is deceived primarily by God the Son, for the entire behavior of Christ in his struggle with Satan is regarded by the church fathers as a successful deceitful tactic, as pia fraus - "pious deceit", in the words of Ambrose of Milan: the devil tempts Christ in the wilderness, mainly in order to find out for sure. They are God or man, but Christ does not reveal his divinity to the devil until the very end. 68 and forces him to destroy a hopeless man over whom the devil had no claim. Thus, the devil violates Divine justitia and loses his rights to humanity. It turns out that the devil also deceived himself: "How can [the devil] be the winner and deceiver of man if he deceived himself?" - asks St. Augustine 69 .

The saint, imitating Christ, also deceives, "beats" the devil: "He who imagined himself like God, was now deceived (beaten, ridiculed - deludebatur, in the original Greek ἐ παίζετο ) as a teenager," says Athanasius about the first youthful victories of St. Anthony 70 .

Moreover: the idea arises that the devil is “bound” by God for this, so that we can “play” with him. The devil is "bound by the Lord like a sparrow, so that we can play with him," says St. Anthony 71 , referring to the line from the book of Job: "Will you become afraid of him [Leviathan] like a bird, and will you bind him for your girls?" (Job 40:24).

The devil is Leviathan, who became a "bound sparrow" as a result of the Divine game-deception. About the same Leviathan, intended for the game, it is said, according to St. Augustine, and in the 104th psalm: line 26, which in the Synodal translation reads: "Leviathan, whom you created to play in it (in the sea. - A.M.)", in the Vulgate it was read: " Draco hic quem finxisti ad illudendum ei", which can be understood as: "The dragon that you created to play with him (deceive him)". This is how St. Augustine understood this line: "This dragon is our ancient enemy ... So he was created to be deceived, this place is assigned to him ... This throne seems great to you, for you do not know what the throne of the angels is, from where it fell; what you think is his glorification, for him it is a curse" 72 . The greatness and power of the "dragon" - Leviathan, the vastness of his kingdom - are imaginary; for himself, this earthly hypostasis of his is a humiliation and a prison. Such is the illusio, this time created by God himself.

Another metaphor for the "imprisonment" of the devil, his enslavement as a result of the game that the devil lost to God, was found in the verse from the book of Job: "Can you pull out Leviathan with a fish hook and grab his tongue with a rope?" (Job 40:20). Here we encounter for the last time the motif of the devil's tongue: the devil-leviathan sticks out his tongue, and for this tongue he is seized.

The image of Leviathan the devil, caught by the tongue, becomes an allegory that contains the whole history of the game of deception, which was played by God and the devil. We find a visualization of this allegory on a miniature from the "Garden of Pleasures" by abbess Gerrada (XII century), and its exhaustive explanation is given by many fathers

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church, in particular, Honorius Augustodunsky: "This age is meant by the sea ... The devil is circling in it, like Leviathan, devouring many souls. God from heaven throws a hook into this sea when he sends his Son to this world to catch Leviathan. Forests of the hook - the genealogy of Christ ... The tip of the hook is the divine nature of Christ; the bait is his human nature. The shaft by which the fishing line is thrown into the waves is the Holy Cross on which Christ is hung to deceive the devil." 73 ; Attracted by the smell of flesh, Leviathan wants to grab Christ, but the iron of the hook tears apart his mouth.

The devil's tongue, no matter how much he threatens them, no matter how much he exposes it as a weapon, is nevertheless torn apart by the "iron" of the Divine "hook". With all his claims to become a sword - a smashing weapon, the devil's tongue in the end remains nothing more than flesh - something over which the devil really has power. The sinful tongue, even when it is used as a stinging weapon, still remains vulnerable: it is no coincidence that in the images of hellish torments, the tongue of sinners is often subjected to torment 74 .

Therefore, the naked tongue of the devil is not afraid of the righteous. Paulin of Nolan speaks of the servants of the devil, "trusting in their strength and boasting in their abundance of wealth" (Ps. 48:7): the Lord will answer for us" 75 .

How will the Lord "answer" such an unholy outpouring of tongues? The gesture of a naked tongue is a mutual gesture, and God is also able to bare his tongue - while the tongue of God is a real sword; being naked, he really strikes on the spot. The power of this "sword" coming out of the Divine mouth is spoken of by the Revelation of John in the vision of a man "like the Son of Man", from whose mouth "came out a sharp sword on both sides..." (Rev. 1:16).

We have already seen that the language is ambiguous, it can mean the devil, and the apostle; now we see that not only the devil, but also God can bare his tongue. However, the naked tongue of God - the most terrible of all tongues protruding - is no longer a language, but something more than a language. Complete sacralization of language - naked tongue! - coincides with its complete transition into a different quality, a different look. The naked language of God is sacred, but it has already ceased to be a language, but has become something else, namely, a sword, and an invincible sword. From the idea that a different material organ of speech, different from a soft and weak language, should correspond to the true Word, the motive arises to replace the “natural” language with a genuine, better language: Father Equity, the hero of the “Dialogues” of Gregory the Great, explains his preaching vocation by that a certain beautiful young man (of course, an angel) inserted a medical instrument, a lancet, into his tongue at night - since then, the father "cannot be silent about God, even if he wanted to" 76 .

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Language as a material organ that exists at the intersection point of various spiritual and material functions reaches its truth, sinlessness and invincible power only at the moment when it ceases to be itself. But, of course, in fact, the external transformation of a soft language into something else, hard and inflexible, is only a medieval metaphor for its internal purification; language-"sword", language-"lancet" - plastic symbols of the miracle of transformation that language undergoes when, remaining itself, remaining part of the human body, it becomes an instrument of salvation from an instrument of death.

1 This is how the famous photograph of Albert Einstein with his tongue hanging out is perceived: the old man is “childish”, behaves like a child, in the spirit of E.R. Curtius topos "puer-senex" (see:Curtius E.R. La litterature europeenne et l e Moyen age latin / Trad. par J. Brejou.P., 1956. P.122-125).
2 Tlingit shaman masks and rattles kept in the Kunstkamera collection stubbornly vary the motif of the protruding tongue.
3 "But draw near here, you sons of a sorceress, seed of an adulterer and a harlot! Whom do you mock? Against whom do you widen your mouth, stick out your tongue? clefts of rocks? (Isaiah 57:3-5). Thanks to O.L. Dovgy, who pointed me to this place that is fundamentally important for me.
4 We note the appearance of this motif in Russian icon painting: on the icon "Descent into Hell" (the school of Dionysius, the beginning of the 16th century, the Russian Museum), Satan, strangled by the archangel, sticks out his tongue.
5 For example, L.N. Tolstoy: "Natasha, red, animated, seeing her mother in prayer, suddenly stopped on her run, sat down and involuntarily stuck out her tongue, threatening herself" (War and Peace. Vol. 2, part 3. Ch. XIII).
6 The devil sticks out his tongue on the popular print "Punishment to Ludwig landgrafuse the sins of acquisition" and on many others (see: Russian drawn popular print of the late 18th - early 20th centuries from the collection of the State Historical Museum / Compiled by E.I. Itkina. M., 1992. C 83 passim). With naked tongues, Baba Yaga is depicted (see: Lubok: Russian folk pictures of the 17th-19th centuries in. M., 1968. S. 22-23) and Death (on luboks about Anika the Warrior).
7 Manor house (second half of the 1720s) in the Glinka estate (near Moscow city of Losino-Petrovsky); images of demons with naked tongues adorn the keystones of the windows on the first floor. The estate belonged to Ya.V. Bruce, associate of Peter 1.

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8 Zhuikova R.G. Portrait drawings by Pushkin. SPb., 1996. P. 61. As a distant reminiscence of the demonological motive, one can also interpret the monologue of Prince Valkovsky from the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky's "Humiliated and Insulted" (1861): "... one of the most piquant pleasures for me has always been ... to caress, encourage some eternally young Schiller and then ... suddenly raise a mask in front of him and make him a grimace from an enthusiastic face , show him your tongue ... "(Part 3. Ch. X). The prince has a number of undoubtedly demonic traits: power over the material (in this sense, he is literally the "prince of the world") and contempt for everything spiritual, with the ability to perfectly imitate "high feelings", the skill of a rhetorician, combined with complete cynicism and deceit - all these qualities resemble about many biblical and medieval definitions of the devil (a liar - mendax, a distorter - an interpolator, a clever enemy - callidus hostis, a false ruler of the earth - dominator terrae fallacissimus, etc.). In this context, Valkovsky's admission of an irresistible desire to "show someone his tongue in a certain case" is perceived as a variation of the demonic "baring of the tongue."
9 Voeikov A.F. House of lunatics // Arzamas. Sat: In 2 books. M., 1994. Book. 2.C. 171.
10 Augustinus, Sermo CCXVI // Patrologiae cursus completus. Ser. lat. Vol. 38.
Col. 1080. (hereinafter: PL).
11 For example: "You love all sorts of disastrous speeches, insidious tongue" (dilexisti omnia verba praecipitationis, linguam dolosam) (Ps. 51.6); "Lord, deliver my soul from a lying mouth, from an evil tongue" (Domine libera animammeain a labiis iniquis, a lingua dolosa) (Ps. 119, 2).
12 Dialogus de conflictu Amoris Dei et Linguae dolosae // PL. Vol. 213. Col. 851-864.
13 Ibid. Col. 860.
14 Ibid. Col. 856.
15 Augustine. Sermo CLXXX // PL. Vol. 3.8. Col. 973.
16 Peter Cantor (XII century) attributes it to Abba Serapion: Petrus Cantor. Verbum abbreviatum. Cap. LXIV. De vitio linguae // PL. Vol. 205.Col. 195.
17 "Linguae gladios recondamus... ut non... invicem non inferamus injurias" (Caesarius Are!atensis. Homilia VII // PL. Vol. 67. Col. 1059).
18 "...Magnus Antonius incipit lingua flagellare mutilatum..." (Palladios. Historialausiaca. Cap. XXVI. De Eulogio Alexandrino // PL. Vol. 73. Col. 1125).
19 Bernardus abhas Clarae-Vallensis. In die sancto Paschae sermo // PL. Vol. 183.Col. 275.
20 Bernardus abbas Clarae-Vallensis. Sermones de diversis. Sermo XVII (De triplici custodia: manus, linguae et cordis). Part. 5 //PL. Vol. 183.Col. 585.
21 Gillebertus de Hoilandia. Sermones in canticuin Salomonis. Sermo XX // PL.Vol. 184.Col. 107.
22 In the comments attributed to Haimon, Bishop of Halberstadt, to the above-mentioned verses of Isaiah (Isaiah 57, 3-5), which describe the "exposing of the tongue", the whole scene is often interpreted allegorically, as a "prototype" of the future Passion: "the sons of the sorceress" are the Jews, sticking out their tongue "for blasphemy" (ad blasphemandum) over the Son of God; they are "children of the devil," but "not by nature, but by virtue of imitation" (non per naturam, sedper imitationes) (Coinmentariorum in Isaiam libri tres. Lib. II. Cap. LVII // PL. Vol. 116. Col. 1012 -1013).

23 Martin Dumiensis. Libellus de moribus. P.t. I // PL. Vol. 72.Col. 29.
24 Venter and libido could also be justified in a certain context and from a certain point of view. Thus, in the prosimeter of Bernard Silvestris (mid-12th century) "De universitate mundi" we find the praise of the male genitalia, unique for the Middle Ages: they fight death, restore nature, prevent the return of chaos (for an analysis of this work, see: Curtius E.R. Op. cit. P. 137). Venter is freed from all sinfulness when it comes to the womb of the Mother of God. However, these examples are still too isolated (the first - historically, as a unique monument of humanism of the XII century, the second situationally - in the context of the unique and inimitable miracle of the Immaculate Conception) and cannot serve as a counterbalance to general sinfulness womb and genitals; as for the language, its ambiguity is predetermined by its inevitable participation in both sinful and righteous speeches: language is a common tool for both.
25 Biblical quotations are given in translation from the Latin text of HrabanMaur, deviations from the Russian Synodal translation are not specified.
26 Here "tongue" is called the bay of the sea.
27 Rabanus Maurus. Allegoriae in universam sacram scripturam // PL. Vol. 112.Col. 985.
28 Jacques de Voi-agine. La legende doree / Trad. de J.-B. Rose. P., 1967. Vol. 2. R. 133. Jacob Voraginsky retold here the sermon of Theodore the Studite in the translation of Anastasius the Librarian (see: PL. Vol. 129. Col. 735).
29 Jacques de Voragine. Op. cit. Vol. 1. P. 260: "Passion of the Lord". This reasoning is given by Jacob Voraginsky as a quotation from St. Bernard of Clairvaux, but I, as well as the French translator of the Golden Legend, failed to identify it.
30 Ibid. R. 121: "Saint Paul, the hermit."
31 Ibid. R. 471: "St. Christina".
32 "And tongues as of fire appeared to them, and rested one on each of them" (Acts 2:3).
33 Jacques de Voragine. Op. cit. Vol. 1. P. 376: "The Holy Spirit".
34 After all, sinners in hell are in statu termini - "in the final state": they are no longer capable of repentance, but can only assert themselves in their sinfulness (see: Makhov A.E. The Garden of Demons - Hortus daemonum: Dictionary of Infernal Mythology of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Moscow, 1998, p. 16).
35 Tertullian. Adversus Praxeam // PL. Vol. 2.Col. 154.
36 Petrus Chrysologus. Sermo XCV1 // PL. Vol. 52 Col. 470-471.
37 Wirth J. L "image medievale. Naissance et developpements (VI-XV siecle). P., 1989. P.341. ,

38 Areas, the sublimated reflection of which we find in the sphere of the sacred. “At the center of the medieval sacral,” writes Jean Wirth, “we are confronted with a series of symbolic analogies between feeding, sex, and speech.
39 That is the genitals. Bodin J. De la demonomanie des sorciers. P., 1587 (repr.: La Roche-sur-Yonne, 1979). Liv. 2. Ch. 111 (Des invocations expresses desmalins esprits). P. 83.
40 The naked tongue and naked "shameful places" are compared with the depiction of Judas, the chief adept of the devil: in a diptych on the theme of the Passion (France, first half of the 14th century, bone carving; State Hermitage Museum), Judas hanging himself stuck out his tongue, and the parted hems of his clothes opened lower body with protruding insides.
41 "Those who are rejected by the body of the Church, which is the body of Christ, as strangers and strangers to the body of God, are handed over to the power of the devil" (Hilarius, episcopus Pictaviensis. Tractatus in CXVIII psalmum // PL. Vol. 9. Col. 607). Transmitted in the power of the devil are attached to his body: "The devil and all sinners are one body" (Gregorius Magnus. Moralia ... lib. XIII. Cap.XXXIV // PL. Vol. 75. Col. 1034). A variant of the same metaphor: Christ the devil - the "heads" of bodies, and the bodies themselves - the totality of the righteous and sinners, respectively (Gregorius Magnus. Moralia ... Lib. IV. Cap. XI // PL. Vol. 75. Col. 647).
42 Jacques de Voragine. Op. cit. Vol. 1. P. 145: "St. Vincent".
43 Augustine. Enarratio in Psalmum. CXL III. § 18 // Sancti Aurelii Augustini enarrationes in psalmos CI-CL (Corpus Christianorum. Ser. lat. Vol. 40). Turnout, 1990. Col. 2085.
44 We find the same technique on Russian luboks as early as the beginning of the 20th century. On the lubok "The parable of St. Antiochus about bribery" (art. S. Kalikina), scrolls come out of the mouths of the speaking characters, where the words they utter are written; however, only from the mouth of Satan, together with the scroll, does the tongue come out (see: Russian drawn popular print of the late 18th - early 20th centuries from the collection of the State Historical Museum, p. 120).
45 Jacques de Voragine. Op. cit. Vol. 2. P. 57-58 ("St. Dominic").
46 Gregorius Magnus. Dialogorum lib. III. Cap. XXXIl // PL. Vol. 77 Col. 293.
47 Jacques de Voragine. Op. cit. Vol. 2. P. 252: "St. Leger".
48 Ibid. Vol.. 1. R. 234: "St. Longinus".
49 The phraseology of the modern Russian language, in essence, testifies to the same thing: the material nature of speech, its connection with language as a bodily member, is emphasized in those cases when it is necessary to designate untrue speech: idle talk means "talk with the tongue", "scratch with the tongue",
50 This motif appears already in the "Sayings of the Fathers": one of the demons here says "azrega wose". Verba sepulchnim "aspera voce". Verba seniorum (Vitae patrum. Lib. VI). Libell. 1.15 //PL.Vol. 73.Col. 996. Dante Plutos - "hoarse-voiced" (Ad. 7. 2). Back in the 16th century. in the demonologist Johann Weyer, demons say rauce voce (see about this: Makhov A.E. Decree. Op. P. 198).
51 Gillebertus de Hoilandia. Sermones in canticum Salomonis. Sermo XLII. 4//PL.Vol. 184.Col.222.
52 "The Fall of Lucifer" from the cycle Ludus Coventriae; cit. by: Russell J.B. Lucifer. The Devil in the Middle Ages. Ithaca; L., 1984. P. 252.

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53 Grigorius Turonensis. Vitae patrum. Cap. XI: De sancto Caluppane reclauso//pl. Vol. 71.Col. 1059-1060.
54 Jacques de Voragine. Op. cit. Vol. 2. P. 55 "St. Dominic".
55 Chap. XXI: "About the lady who spent a quarter of the day preening." The text, which does not say anything about the protruding tongue, reads as follows: "And when she looked in the mirror this time, she saw in front of the enemy ... who showed her his behind, so ugly, so terrible that she fainted, as if possessed by a demon "(La TourLandry J, de. Le Livre du chevalier. P., 1854. P. 70).
56 Augustine. Decivitate Dei. lib. 19. Cap. XIII // PL. Vol. 41 Col. 640-641.
57 Verba seniorum (De vitis patrum lib. VII). Cap. XXXII, 2 // PL. Vol. 73.Col. 1051.
58 Hieronymus. Commentariorum in Isaiam libri octo et. decem. lib. XVI. Cap.LVII // PL. Vol. 24.Col. 549.
59 Latin version of the Greek collection traditionally attributed to Rufinus Tyrannius: Rufinus Tyrannius. Historia monachorum. Cap.XXIX//PL. Vol.21.Col.454.
60 Vita S. Lupicini // Vie des peres du Jura (Sources chretiennes. Vol. 142) / Ed. F.Marline. P., 1968. P. 334.
61 Athanasius. Vita S. Antonii. Cap. XIII // Patrologiae cursus completus. Seriesgraeca. Vol. 26 Col. 863. (hereinafter: PG).
62 Vitae patrum: Vita sancti Pachomii // PL. Vol. 73.Col. 239-240.
63 Cassianus. Collations. Coll. VII. Cap. XXXII // P.L. Vol. 49 Col. 713.
64 The demon looks like a black child, niger scilicet puer (Athanasius. Vita S. Antonii. Cap. VI // PG. Vol. 26. Col. 830-831); appears in the form of a twelve-year-old boy (Palladius. Historia Lausiaca. Cap. XVIII: Vita abbatis Nathanaeli // PL. Vol. 73. Col. 1108); in the guise of a teenager (in habitu adolescentis) (Vitae patrum: Vita S. Abrahae eremitae // PL. Vol. 73. Col. 290).
65 "Obnoxii diabolo parvuli". Prosper Aquitanicus. Pro Augustino responsiones adcapitula objectionum vincentianarum. Cap. IV//PL. Vol. 51 Col. 180.
66 Augustine. Confessiones. VIII, XII. 29.
67 Rufinus Tyrannius. Op. cit. Cap. XXIX // PL. Vol. 21.Col. 455.
68 Thus, according to the logic of Ambrose of Milan, Christ “hungry” in the wilderness (Matt. 4:2), which neither Moses nor Elijah allowed themselves, in order to manifest human weakness disorienting the devil: “The hunger of the Lord is a pious deception” (Ambrosius Mediolanensis Expositio Evangelii secundum Lucam, Lib IV, Cap 16, PL Vol 15 Col 1617. According to Leo the Great, the devil, deluded by the extreme humility and humiliation of Christ, incited the Jews to crucify Christ; he does not believe in his Divinity, in accordance with the verse of the apostle: "if they had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory" (1 Cor. 2, 8) (Leo Magnus. Sermo LXIX. Cap. IV // PL. Vol. 54. Col. 378).
69 Augustine. Contra adversarium legis et prophelarum // PL. Vol. 42 Col. 6.15.
70 Athanasius. Vita S. Antonii // PG. Vol. 26 Col. 847, 849, 850.
71 Ibid. Col. 879.
72 Augustlinus. Enarratio in Psalmum CI1I. § 7, 9 // Sancti Aurelii Augustini enarrationes in psalmos CI-CL (Coipus Christianorum. Series latina. Vol. 40). Turnhout, 1990. P. 1526, 1529.

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73 Honorius Augustodunensis. Speculum ecclesiae: De paschali die // PL. Vol. 172.Col. 937. Similar discourse on the devil-Leviathan and the hook of Divinity on which he fell: Gregorius Magnus. Moralia ... lib. XXXIII. Cap. IX // PL. Vol. 76 Col. 682-683; Isidorus, episcopus Hispalensis.Sententiarum lib. I Cap. XIV. 14 // PL. Vol. 83 Col. 567-568.
74 Already in the Life of St. Macarius of Rome from the "Vitae patrum": monks who have fallen into hell see here a certain "wife with loose hair, whose whole body was entwined with a huge and terrible dragon; as soon as she tried to open her mouth to speak, the dragon immediately put his head into her mouth and bit her tongue" (Vitae patrum: Vita sancti MacariiRomani. Cap. IX // PL. Vol. 73.Col. 418-419).
75 Paulinus Nolanus. Ep. XXXVIII //PL. Vol. 61 Col. 360.
76 Gregorius Magnus. Dialogorum lib. I Cap. IV //PL. Vol. 77 Col. 169. This New Testament-medieval motif of "replacing the language" survived until the 19th century. and was embodied in Pushkin's "The Prophet", where the symbolism of the language is again experienced with new force as a tense-dual, demonic-divine: "idle and crafty" language, given to man from birth, is replaced by the "sting of the wise snake", erected by Pushkin into the true instrument of God's "Verb"; However, Pushkin could not help but know that the "serpent", "the wisest of all the animals that exist on earth" (Genesis 3, 1), once destroyed the human race with this very sting! At the same time, it was precisely at this point that a medieval theologian would probably have understood Pushkin well: salvation only truly “cancels” death when it repeats its path, uses its tools (the virgin Eve destroyed the world, the virgin Mary must bring salvation into the world , argues Irenaeus in the treatise "Against Heresies" (III. 22.4); in the same sense, death tramples death in the event of the Crucifixion). The "sting" that destroyed humanity will now save it.