All of these concepts are, as noted above, culturally specific. There are still many cultures in the world where ancestor worship and spiritist practices are part of the everyday lives of people, as in, for example, Japanese Shinto. This includes, of course, the Americas where Voudon, Santaria and other religions include doctrines that fall under our definition here. There is, too, a resurgence of interest in the opposite side of the equation; the various charismatic Christian movements in the United States are practically obsessed with demons and the Devil. Hardly a week goes by without a news story about an exorcism gone wrong, the victim, often a child, is subjected to confinement, starvation and torture in an effort to drive out the ‘demon’ he or his guardians believe is possessing him. These cases often result in death. Therefore it is safe to conclude that the subject is very much a concern today and, at least in the level of interest, almost as relevant as it was in Antiquity or the Middle Ages.

There is an important issue that should be addressed: the fact that, while many of the practices concerning daimonic beings are classified as magic in the West, for many, particularly in the past, these rituals are religious in nature. The distinction between religion and magic is still a matter of contention in the Social Sciences. While such matters are important insofar as the objective study of such phenomena is of interest, we will not address them here. Rather, I will take the position, for better or worse, that religion and magic are matters of degree and perspective, operating as end points of a continuum, and therefore we shall not exclude, a priori, any relevant data, irregardless of classification. Though, as mentioned, we will not try to categorize any practice or belief as either religious or magic, it may be useful to take as a rule of thumb the distinction that Social Science often makes, which is that often the classification of religion and magic is a product of cultural differences and social relationships. That is to say, ones own practices are religion and practices of others that are not part of your group, even if comparable, is sorcery. We must, keeping this in mind, consider the source of our data in order to avoid accepting slander and social conflict as fact. This can be easily demonstrated by considering the relation ship between early Christianity and pagans, both before and after Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. Christians, refusing to sacrifice to the emperor, were labeled atheist and criminal (backed up with libelous stories about infanticide, cannibalism and the rest of the stock slurs used by those in power against some group they were hostile too. Once Christianity became dominant, the Church was only too happy to return the favor.

Another, related issue is the disconnect between the perception of ‘foreign’ religions and their actual practices. Of particular importance is this concept applied to the practitioners of rites that are properly categorized as actual magic and popular perception of them. For example, as noted above, the archetypal story of demonology, the legend of Faust is, for the most part, only vaguely in accord with the descriptions of magic from the grimoires that were written as textbooks in the Middle ages of those who trafficked with the demonic. Indeed, this comparison illustrates our point concerning dichotomy between magic and religion, as the grimoires are often very religious in tone and rarely deliberately blasphemous.

This brings us to the problem of philosophical foundations in considering demonology; in the Middle Ages, the world was seen as a vast battleground between Satan and God. The reigning point of view was that any of these practices, from May Day survivals in rural communities to committed devil worship were all equally erroneous and had a common source . As such, there is a tendency to lump all of these things together, as in the practice of labeling any of the above practices as Witchcraft and Demonology.

If there is any word that we will encounter in our study that is more problematic than demonology, it is certainly witchcraft. While witchcraft, as it was understood in the Middle Ages, was not a synonym for demonology but instead was a part of the over all witch ‘religion’, its use in this manner implies that all forbidden practices, by way of their patron, Satan, were in some way under the tent, so to speak, of witchcraft. Witchcraft is treated in much detail the next section.

It is vital, therefore, that we keep in mind the worldview of the practitioner (as far as they can be discerned) when considering such matters. This will keep us from carelessly applying our own presumptions to the analysis of our subject. If we can achieve that it will, hopefully, allow us the look more clearly at contemporary thought on the subject if we can discern something of the evolution of the various ideas we will encounter. In fact, interpreting cultural and religious practices by –usually negative- comparison to ones own (whether Christian or ‘rationalist’ or something else seems to make no difference) is an inherent danger that seems to befall with regularity the study of practices that fall within the subject we are now considering. This is most apparent when considering the history of Witchcraft, or rather, the history of thinking about witchcraft, which I will now turn to.