THE MYTH OF MONSTERS
We built devils long before we built doctrine.
I. The Human Mind, Before the Story Hardens
Human beings crawled through fear, hunger, storms, and the violence of other humans, and we invented stories to make the chaos negotiable.
Every storm needed a reason,
Every cruelty required intent.
So we carved our fears into shapes we could point to.
Not because they were real, but because uncertainty was unbearable.
The problem is not that those stories existed.
It’s that we froze them in place and told people they were timeless.
We divided the world into “good” and “evil,”
We created a shortcut that bypassed understanding.
We stopped asking why people do harm and started assuming some invisible force whispered in their ear.
That simplification lets cruelty hide behind righteousness.
It grants absolution to anyone willing to blame a demon rather than look into the mirror.
The idea of sin becomes an accounting trick rather than a prompt for change.
II. Why Humans Invented Devils and Angels
When something painful happens—betrayal, violence, cruelty, loss—the mind instinctively looks for a cause that feels bigger than the event itself.
Something intentional.
Something directional.
Something with a face.
That’s where “evil” becomes a character rather than a category.
Devils and demons do three things:
They externalize blame,
simplify moral chaos,
and give us a sense of protection.
If harm comes from an outside entity, then the person who does it isn’t fully responsible.
“The devil made me do it” is crude, but the instinct is real.
Even people who don’t believe in the supernatural still lean on this mechanism.
“I wasn’t myself,”
“I snapped,”
“Stress got the best of me.”
Human behavior is complicated.
Motives conflict.
Needs collide.
Trauma repeats itself.
But a binary framework—good vs. evil—shrinks all that complexity into a simple shape.
It’s comforting.
It’s wrong, but comforting.
If evil is a thing, then good can be a shield.
Angels, gods, and guardian forces soothe uncertainty.
They tell us suffering fits somewhere, even if the map is false.
Humans didn’t invent these concepts because they’re true.
They invented them because the brain wants order more than it wants accuracy.
III. History Gives Those Shapes a Crown
Once you center everything around a god, the question becomes unavoidable:
Whose god decides?
Every civilization has written its own blueprint of the divine,
each one contradicting the last.
People treat their version as a universal truth.
But history shows it is just the one that won a particular battle,
or built the biggest institution,
or survived the longest.
Ancient Roots — Before God Had a Name
Before organized religion, humans lived in a world they didn’t understand.
Lightning, famine, disease, cruelty from rival tribes.
All of it demanded explanation, so early societies personified their fears.
Storm? A spirit.
Misfortune? A curse.
Harm? A malevolent force.
But these forces weren’t “evil” in the moral sense.
They were dangerous.
Nature was chaotic, not wicked.
Early gods and spirits had personalities, moods, flaws.
They harmed because they could,
not because they represented an essence of evil.
Humans projected their psychology outward.
What they feared became a being.
What they hoped became another.
Angels and demons began as reflections of the emotional weather inside us.
Early Civilizations — Order Needs a Narrative
As societies grew, rulers needed moral coherence to control large populations.
Egyptian Ma’at.
Mesopotamian law codes.
Early Zoroastrianism.
All these systems fused cosmic order with human behavior.
“Good” and “evil” start to harden into opposing forces.
Zoroastrianism especially gives us the blueprint:
Ahura Mazda (order, truth)
Angra Mainyu (chaos, destruction).
Suddenly, morality is not just conduct—it’s cosmology.
Choosing the “wrong” side is choosing the wrong universe.
“Evil” is an explanation for why a structured society still contains pain.
Judaism and the Early Hebrew Tradition — No Devil Yet
In the earliest Hebrew texts, Satan is not a rebel leader.
There is no kingdom of darkness,
No demons waging war,
No cosmic rebellion.
Sin is a human undertaking.
Harm comes from human choices.
The devil works FOR God.
He’s an accuser, a prosecutor in God’s court.
He tests, challenges, and investigates.
Second Temple Period — Trauma Creates a Villain
After conquest, exile, and oppression, Jewish communities encountered Persian dualism and Greek mythology.
Under that pressure, the figure of Satan changes.
People need an explanation for why a just God allows suffering, so the devil becomes independent, oppositional, cosmic, malevolent.
Evil takes on a face because history demands a scapegoat.
Christianity — Myth Solidifies
Early Christian thinkers needed a universal explanation
for sin, suffering, and Rome’s brutality.
They construct a cosmic drama:
A fall,
A war in heaven,
Demonic hierarchies,
And a coming judgment.
The binary cements.
Angels = perfect obedience
Demons = perfect rebellion
The story is powerful, simple, portable.
Easy to weaponize.
Medieval Christianity — Fear Becomes Policy
After Rome collapses, the church fills the power vacuum.
Dualistic morality becomes a governing tool.
Demons justify witch hunts, inquisitions, crusades, torture as purification, and absolute obedience to the clergy.
A rigid hierarchy is easier to maintain when people believe a cosmic enemy prowls outside the walls.
Fear becomes infrastructure.
Enlightenment — Cracks Form
As science, psychology, and reason spread, supernatural explanations lose power.
People begin to recognize mental illness is not possession,
Lightning is not punishment,
Political cruelty is not divine will,
Moral failure is not demonic influence
Human behavior becomes something to study, not exorcise.
The devil begins to shrink into metaphor.
Modern Era — The Binary Returns in New Clothes
Even as formal religion declines in some regions, the good/evil framework survives in politics, propaganda, and culture.
Any ideology that wants simplicity resurrects the old pattern:
“We are righteous.”
“They are wicked.”
“Harm we do is justified; harm they do is proof of evil.”
Today, the supernatural language often drops away, but the structure remains.
It’s moral dualism without angels or demons—a psychological echo.
IV. How Politics Hijacks Old Patterns
Once the history is clear, the modern use becomes obvious.
We watch religion hijacked as a political operating system.
Leaders cast themselves as chosen.
Opponents become demonic threats.
Complex policy debates collapse into moral panic.
“Good vs evil” gets deployed to shut down nuance.
Religion becomes a filter, not a foundation.
The psychology returns to its oldest instinct.
The world must be simple, binary, blessed, or cursed.
Nuance is unpredictable.
Binary thinking is controllable.
The devil becomes whoever the movement needs to fear.
Social inequality? Immigrants.
Economic stagnation? Bureaucrats.
Crime? “Moral decay.”
Climate events? God’s judgment.
Domestic terrorism? “A few bad apples.”
Political violence? “Provocateurs.”
Black-and-white thinking turns disagreement into a threat,
Policy into purity, opponents into enemies.
Anything to avoid confronting the structural or human causes.
Once that shift happens, any action becomes justifiable.
But the truth—the human truth—is this:
We don’t need a devil to explain cruelty.
We don’t need an angel to explain kindness.
We don’t need a cosmic war to justify our politics.
Human beings are enough to account for everything we call good or evil.
V. The Devil Becomes Unnecessary Once You Tell the Truth
Free will dissolves the entire myth.
If people can choose,
If institutions can corrupt,
If systems can incentivize cruelty
Then the supernatural villain becomes redundant.
Accountability increases.
Institutions must answer for their failures.
Leaders lose the ability to blame “evil influences.”
Citizens must acknowledge their own complicity.
Humans cause the damage.
Humans repair it.
Everything else is costume.
This is the truth fundamentalists fear most:
Evil has no kingdom—it has a mirror.
Real Life Lives in the Grey
Authoritarians need simplicity.
Democracies need complexity.
Humans are complexity.
We are contradictory.
We are patterned.
We are capable of cruelty without needing a demon,
and capable of compassion without needing a god.
Complexity forces people to think.
And thinking breaks spells.
Nuance is not weakness.
Nuance is freedom.
The moment we understand that, the old myths lose their teeth.
The world isn’t black and white.
It never was.
Only stories are, and stories are how power keeps itself alive.
Once we stop believing in monsters,
We can finally see the people who built them.
Ether Steps Onto the Wire
The whisper in the static.
We were told the shadows moved because a demon walked behind us.
We never checked the lantern.
We never asked who placed it,
who trimmed the wick,
who shaped the flame so the silhouettes bent just right.
Monsters are useful.
They keep the crowd in formation.
But peel back the veil, and you find no hoofprints,
no sulfur,
no serpent coiled beneath the floorboards.
Only a hand holding a torch,
casting a shadow that looks nothing like its owner.
The devil never lived in the world.
He lived in the story.
And once you know how the story works,
You can write your own ending.