Wine-Dark, See?

Who knew that Helen of Troy could cause such a fuss? And who knows what colour would be the product of the union between a woman and a god disguised as a swan? Sticklers for strict historical accuracy would have found that Helen’s pigmentation was the least of their problems with the film The Odyssey. If they had ever read the book.

Yet Saint Paul’s elemental spirits are Saint John’s fallen angels, and the human race worships them in the absence of Abrahamic monotheism, not as worthy of worship, which they are not, but as deserving of fear, which to an extent they are. They are real, and the startlingly similar accounts and depictions of demons on different sides of the world arise from different people’s and different peoples’ encounters with the same ones. Such worship always ends the same way:

But the crowning point of the tyrant’s wickedness was his having recourse to sorcery: sometimes for magic purposes ripping up women with child, at other times searching into the bowels of newborn infants. He slew lions also, and practised certain horrid arts for evoking demons, and averting the approaching war, hoping by these means to get the victory. In short, it is impossible to describe the manifold acts of oppression by which this tyrant of Rome enslaved his subjects: so that by this time they were reduced to the most extreme penury and want of necessary food, a scarcity such as our contemporaries do not remember ever before to have existed at Rome.

Eusebius, Life of Constantine, Book I, Chapter XXXVI

That was Maxentius in 312, on the eve of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the eve on which Constantine received his famous vision of the Cross. In that Sign, Constantine conquered, and Christendom began, so that the recapitulation in Jesus Christ and His Church of all three of the Old Israel, Hellenism and the Roman Empire brought at least some degree of restraint to intercourse with the forces of darkness. But those forces always return to the fore when the Faith is in retreat. See the Epstein Files. In hoc signo vinces.