Preface.

...made the spiritual activity and its products the subject of his intellectual operations? This present writing is an attempt to represent the idea of an evil being, of the Teufel Devil, in connection with nature, historical phenomena, and their conjunctions. It seeks to present the history of the Devil according to his origin and further development from the perspective of cultural history. It aims to point out the moments that generally stimulate the notion of an evil being; it intends to demonstrate the religious Dualismus dualism among the nature-peoples and the civilized peoples of antiquity; and it wants to show how, within the Christian world, the idea of the Devil gained ground and, in the course of history, attained a power that dominated all minds. The history of the Devil seeks to solve certain main questions, such as: how does man arrive at the idea of the existence of a superhuman evil being at all, or how is religious dualism formed? Whereby the starting point is given by human consciousness. In the Christian-ecclesiastical conception of the Devil, the concern is with the factors that promoted the general dissemination of this idea. Linked to this is the question: why did this idea become so powerful at a specific time, what changes has it experienced, why does it decrease again, and what might the causes of its decline be? And so on. Many, and perhaps important, moments that intervene in the history of the Devil may have escaped the author, which is why his writing may only claim the significance of an attempt. For it is certain: "in the historical connection of things, one step strikes a thousand threads, and we can only follow one at a time. Indeed, we cannot always even do this, because the coarser visible thread branches into countless threads that occasionally withdraw from our view." ¹

¹ Fr. Alb. Lange, History of Materialism (1866), p. 282.