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Trauma Hounds presents...

                                   G O D
                                     &
                             T H E   D E V I L
                             M Y T H O L O G Y


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By The Beast of The Ring of Shadows...     Scribed on February the 16th, 1992.
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     Most religions have their own view of heaven and hell.  To Christians,
heaven is everlasting bliss, while hell is everlasting spiritual agony.  God
and His angels sit in glory in heaven, Satan and his devils occupy hell.  The
universe in which we physically live is the battlefield between the forces of
heaven and hell - each of which strives to "occupy" the souls of men and
women.  Although early and medival Christians saw heaven and hell as physical
places to be enjoyed or endured for eternity, from the very beginning of
Christianity the idea existed that true hell was the spiritual agony of being
cut off from God, and true heaven was the ecstacy of being in God's Kingdom.
     One of the earliest civilizations to have believed in an afterlife was
that of ancient Egypt. They concentrated on the rewards enjoyed in the after-
life, rather than the punishments.
     Other religions have their own view of heaven and hell. For Buddhists and
Hindus, for example, hell and heaven are not eternal states; rather they are
part of a cycle of re-birth.  In Islam, heaven is seen as a place of unlimited
food, wine, and sensual delight.  The Red Indians of America believe in the
"happy hunting ground" to which all the dead will go and which represents a
better way of life than that on earth.  In the minds of most believers, the
idea of heaven and hell were part of folklore.  If a good man or woman had an
unexplained run of bad luck, it would invariably be blamed on Satan or one of
his imps.  If a house was troubled by what would now be termed poltergeist
phenomena, then blame would be laid on one of Satan's dark angels or, maybe,
one of Satan's many allies such as a witch.  Ghostly phenomena and uncanny
happenings associated with death, corpes, and funerals, were almost invariably
looked upon as the work of God or the Devil.  Sometimes, however, they
resulted from the activities of the spirits of the dead who sought prayers of
saintly men.
     Although devils and angels belong primarily to the regions of hell and
heaven, they do, according to folklore, occasionally, stray into the mortal
world.  In medival England, for instance, it was believed it was possible to
summon devils, or even the devil himself.  If a knight wished to challenge a
devil to a duel, he had to ride into a particular fort and call for the devil
to appear.  A demon would then manifest itself in human form as a knight ready
for battle.
     According to the medival Gesta Romanorum, a warrior named Albert managed
to defeat a spectral visitant from hell and temporarily capture his steed.  At
dawn the latter, "foaming and .... furiously striking the ground" managed to
escape.  It was pursued but "vanished in an instant".  It is by no means clear
whether the phantom knight was a true demon - a devil who had followed Lucifer
in his rebellion against god - or a lost soul, a human being who had been
damned and had taken on human attributes.  Such an ambiguity was very common
in medival and Renaissance accounts of supernatural phenomena.

                           The Beast
                                The Ring of Shadow