"The Devil is, almost without exception, a reflection of the institution that defines him" is the sentence this whole survey was building toward, and it happens to be the same argument I keep making across a lot of very different traditions lately, just delivered with more scholarship behind it.
Mara gets singled out correctly as "the only one with a clear use case" because he's the one tradition that never bothered dressing distraction up as an external army. Three daughters and some bad advice during meditation is a much more honest description of what actually derails most people than horns and a pitchfork ever were.
But dissolving him into metaphor doesn't actually kill him, it just proves the thesis. A being who only ever existed as whatever a given institution needed him to represent was never going to need to be literally real to keep doing his job.
Great comment - the idea that certain institutions actually needed a Devil - if only to account for the shadows cast by whatever light was being celebrated or worshiped.
"The Devil is, almost without exception, a reflection of the institution that defines him" is the sentence this whole survey was building toward, and it happens to be the same argument I keep making across a lot of very different traditions lately, just delivered with more scholarship behind it.
Mara gets singled out correctly as "the only one with a clear use case" because he's the one tradition that never bothered dressing distraction up as an external army. Three daughters and some bad advice during meditation is a much more honest description of what actually derails most people than horns and a pitchfork ever were.
But dissolving him into metaphor doesn't actually kill him, it just proves the thesis. A being who only ever existed as whatever a given institution needed him to represent was never going to need to be literally real to keep doing his job.
Great comment - the idea that certain institutions actually needed a Devil - if only to account for the shadows cast by whatever light was being celebrated or worshiped.