"Demoniacal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... etc., being offered to the pacific gods, as Vishnu, Krishna, etc.; while Mudar (Asclepias), Bhang (Cannabis sativa), Datura, flesh, blood, and spirituous liquors, are offered to Siva, Doorga, Kali, and other demoniacal deities.] whose strong, sweet odour was borne far through the air, formed a low undershrub beneath every tree, generally intermixed with three ferns (a Polypodium, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... the streets, in the shops, in their homes, and hurried off to prison as if the very existence of the empire depended on their being subjected to every kind of brutal violence and indignity. The yell for vengeance filled the air; the cry for Irish blood arose upon the night-air like a demoniacal chorus; and before morning broke their fury was to some extent appeased by the knowledge that sixty of the proscribed race—sixty of the hated Irish—were lying chained within the prison cells ...
— The Dock and the Scaffold • Unknown
... have little doubt that old Peter Sanghurst, who has spent years of his life amongst the heathen Moors, and is, as all men avow, steeped to the lips in their strange and unchristian lore, has himself the art of thus gaining the mastery over the minds and wills of others, and that it was no demoniacal possession, but just the wicked will of the old man exercised upon that of his helpless victim, which drew the boy back to him when his father had him safe at home (as he thought) once more. In this book ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green
... a moment, Garth suddenly saw revealed a crouching figure, and a hideous, distorted face no more than six feet from his own. In the blinding glare it was outlined with a horrid clearness; in its grossness and bestial hatred, less human than demoniacal. ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... have a reckoning with us at his own time, and in his own way. Forrester, who knew his nature well, inferred from the vehemence of his expression that this reckoning would be carried out in a spirit of calm, demoniacal revenge, against which it would be impossible to set up any safeguards; and that, if we could not, by a legal separation, place Astraea under the protection of the laws, the only course that remained, as a measure of security, was to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... Moses really was, what the heathen legislators pretended to be, under a Divine direction; nor does it yet appear that these pretensions to a supernatural conduct, either in these legislators or oracles, were mere delusions of men without any demoniacal impressions, nor that Josephus took them so to be; as the ancientest and contemporary authors did still ...
— Against Apion • Flavius Josephus
... of Plato, Socrates is represented as saying, "When I was about to cross the river, a demoniacal and usual sign was given me; and whenever this takes place, it always prohibits me from accomplishing what I was about to do. In the present instance, I seemed to hear a voice, which would not suffer me to depart till I had made an expiation; ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... The Monk (1796) it will be remembered that Ambrosio, after having enjoyed Antonia, to whose bedchamber he has gained admittance by demoniacal aid, discovers that she is his sister, and heaping crime upon crime to sorcery and rape he ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume V • Aphra Behn
... whistling, stamping, and yelling together - and nobody taking any notice of the young lady (whose charms are not to be thought of without a shudder) - the noble savage is considered married, and his friends make demoniacal leaps at him by way ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... wolf-like monsters. Mediaeval Christianity retained these conceptions, merely changing the superhuman wolves into evil demons; and finally the occurrence of cases of Berserker madness and cannibalism, accompanied by lycanthropic hallucinations, being interpreted as due to such demoniacal metamorphosis, gave rise to the werewolf superstition of the Middle Ages. The etymological proceedings, to which Mr. Cox would incontinently ascribe the origin of the entire superstition, seemed to me ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske
... thee God? Art thou not the 'living garment of God'? O Heavens, is it in very deed He, then, that ever speaks through thee? that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?... The Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-house with spectres: but godlike and my Father's." "This fair Universe, were it in the meanest province thereof, is in very deed the star-domed City of God; through every star, through every grass-blade, and most through ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... of the prophecies of Isaiah, verse 10 et seq. The precise words of the text, as well as common sense, forbid us to believe that the images so constructed by common artisans became the habitation or resting-place of demons, or possessed any manifestation of strength or power, whether through demoniacal influence or otherwise. The whole system of doubt, delusion, and trick exhibited by the oracles, savours of the mean juggling of impostors, rather than the audacious intervention of demons. Whatever degree of power the false gods of heathendom, ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... pathological science leads me to entertain a very strong conviction that the phenomena ascribed to possession are as purely natural as those which constitute smallpox; everything that I know of anthropology leads me to think that the belief in demons and demoniacal possession is a mere survival of a once universal superstition, and that its persistence, at the present time, is pretty much in the inverse ratio of the general instruction, intelligence, and sound judgment of the population among whom it prevails. ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... V., VI., VII., and VIII., the reader will trace the story of the development of the work, and a wonderful story it is. Chapters XI. and XII., containing first the story of Ai Do, and then a record of demoniacal manifestations, show the reader how these quiet and earnest workers are brought up against the big, naked, awful things of life; and also how being so confronted, they are unafraid and unconquered ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable
... we shall come upon it again and again. During the second stage, characterised by the spiritual love foreign to the ancients, the purely sexual impulse continued as an unimpaired force, but it had lost its prestige and was not only regarded as ignoble and base, but also stigmatised as sinful and demoniacal. The hearts of men were stirred by ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... together. Unconscious cerebration, dreams, hypnotism, hysteria, inspirations of genius, the willing-game, planchette, crystal-gazing, hallucinatory voices, apparitions of the dying, medium-trances, demoniacal possession, clairvoyance, thought-transference, even ghosts and other facts more doubtful; these things form a chaos at first sight most discouraging. No wonder that scientists can think of no other ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... beguiling away from us, even making laugh at us, the woman whom we love. If we are to judge of them by him, this relative who has accosted us and who is himself an initiate in those cruel mysteries, then the other guests cannot be so very demoniacal. Those inaccessible and torturing hours into which she had gone to taste of unknown pleasures—behold, a breach in the wall, and we are through it. Behold, one of the moments whose series will go to make up their sum, a moment as genuine as the rest, if not actually more important ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... towards the two young women, who every moment expected that the supplicant would be suffocated by the blood mounting to her head, and fall backwards; but she sang and sang, while her white teeth glittered in the starlight that fell straight upon her face. Presently, in the midst of the torrent of demoniacal names and magic formulas that she sang and warbled out, a piteous and terrifying sound came from behind the curtain as of two persons gasping, sighing, and moaning: one voice seemed to be that of a man oppressed by great anguish; the other was the half-suffocated ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... herself pensively, the rapt look on her face, that seemed spiritual, like the angels, but which came from torture, gave her a certain poignancy that tore his heart with pity. He saw her bowed head, her rapt face, the face of an almost demoniacal ecstatic. Feeling him looking, she lifted her face and sought his eyes, her own beautiful grey eyes flaring him a great signal. But he avoided her look, she sank her head in torment and shame, the gnawing ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... laughter. A panic seized us, and I found myself standing stock still in the middle of the road, as if stage-struck, the others running like the wind. It was for a moment only, and I followed, the laughter sounding more and more demoniacal to my ears. I was impelled as never before in my life. Was some one striking me from behind? It was that diabolical leathern apron giving me a blow at every step, its violence increasing with my ever-accelerated speed. How grateful the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... time a coat and a waistcoat, with the semblance of a white human head at the top, and for this ghastly figure to come swiftly out of the horizon upon a fleet dromedary, approach them silently and with a demoniacal smile, and drink a deep draught from their water-flask—this was enough to make the Bedouins stare a little; they, in fact, stared a great deal—not as Europeans stare, with a restless and puzzled expression of countenance, but with features ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... wish to give offence—but his threatening me in this manner was so absurd that I gave way to the impression of the moment, and laughed. He stepped up to me, with such an expression of demoniacal rage and hatred in his face that he became absolutely ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... land its crew upon the plateau. And in this they were successful. Pour shot upon them as we might, search every quarter with the flying shells, nevertheless one boat touched the rock in spite of us, one crew leaped up in frenzy towards the turret. So sudden it was, so unlooked for, that great demoniacal figures seemed upon us even while we said that the seas were clear. Whirling their knives, yelling one to the other, some slipping on the slimy weed, others, more sure in foothold, making for the turret's height, the mutineers fell upon us like a hurricane and so beat us down that ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... ripeness, that it gives to the youngest cheek, the tawny tinge as of jungle fauna with which it vitalises every dead-white urban hand, and the enchanting glamour it lends to the plainest head and face,—these are a few of the works of the sun that are surely a proof of its demoniacal glory. Halos, it is true, it fashions as well, and beyond reckoning; but the white teeth that flash from the tanned mask are scarcely those of a saint. Or has a saint actually been known who really had white teeth ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... abbreviations have the striking result that Jesus speaks but one word, the permissive 'Go,' and that thus His simple presence is the potent spell before which the demons cower and flee. They know Him as 'the Son of God'; a name which, on their lips, must be taken in its full significance. If demoniacal possession is a fact, there is no difficulty in accounting for the name here given to Jesus, nor for the sudden change from the fierce purpose of barring an intruder's path to abject submission. If it is not a fact, to make a plausible explanation ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... chat between Cassio, Rodrigo and Jago, in the course of which the latter makes Cassio drunk. Jago's demoniacal nature is masterfully depicted here, where he soon succeeds in ruining Cassio, who loses his ...
— The Standard Operaglass - Detailed Plots of One Hundred and Fifty-one Celebrated Operas • Charles Annesley
... fanatics were such enemies of all that was beautiful, that they not only persecuted every liberal mental entertainment, calculated in any manner to adorn life, and more especially the drama, as being a public worship of Baal, but they even shut their ears to church music, as a demoniacal howling. If their ascendency had been maintained much longer, England must infallibly have been plunged in an irremediable barbarity. The oppression of the drama continued down to the year 1660, when the free exercise of all arts ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... became very necessary to arrange a well-timed intervention (whether in the nature of bodily disorder, fire, or demoniacal upheaval, a warning omen, or the death of some of our chief antagonists), but before doing so I was desirous of understanding how this contest, which had hitherto remained outside my ...
— The Mirror of Kong Ho • Ernest Bramah
... shoes in this celestial sheen, and her face in that demoniacal glare, was enough to knock the ...
— White Lies • Charles Reade
... for a former age was the tonus primus, the one particularly expressive of manly dignity and strength. And, to cap the climax, the ear of the musical Romanticist of our day has become quite accustomed also to hear in D-minor devilish rage and revengeful fury, as well as all sorts of demoniacal terror and dreadful, midnight, musical vampirism, as, for example, we find the Queen of Night giving vent in D-minor to the "hellish revenge" which boils in her heart, and in the Freischuetz hell triumphs in D-minor. In the seventeenth century, Sethus Calvisius, speaking of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... was the most effective blow I could deliver; yet, although it took him off his feet, it did not disable him. I had not succeeded in placing it as I had intended, and it had only the effect of rendering him demoniacal. In an instant he was again upon his feet, and unsheathing a long knife. I knew it meant death for me if he were able to close with me. It was useless for me to call for help, for in those days this ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... reeled back, and sunk down under the smooth water; others were pierced as they floundered under the canvas. In a few minutes, the work of carnage was complete. Schriften meanwhile looked on, and ever and anon gave vent to his chuckling laugh—his demoniacal "He! he!" ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... glanced with a hard grind on a rock and shot down a long yellow incline; a great curling wave whirled back on Lane; a heavy shock sent him flying from his seat; a gurgling demoniacal roar deafened his ears and a cold eager flood engulfed him. He was drawn under, as the whirlpool sucks a feather; he was tossed up, as the wind throws a straw. The boat bobbed upright near him. He grasped the gunwale and ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... the moment, even more at the demoniacal ferocity displayed by the combatants than at the weird ghastliness of the manner in which the fight had ended, I signed to Piet, and, wheeling our horses, we galloped away from the scene of the tragedy, nor drew rein again until we reached the wagon, which was in the act of being outspanned. ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... forms into all kinds of obscene attitudes, and uttering words to repeat which were an abomination. In a corner of the apartment capered the while Sebastianillo, a convict Gypsy from Melilla, strumming the guitar most furiously, and producing demoniacal sounds which had some resemblance to Malbrun (Malbrouk), and, as he strummed, repeating at intervals the Gypsy ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... money, his fancy bows, painted arrows, &c. When the torch was applied they set up a mournful ululation, chanting and dancing about him, gradually working themselves into a wild and ecstatic raving, which seemed almost a demoniacal possession, leaping, howling, lacerating their flesh. Many seemed to lose all self-control. The younger English-speaking Indians generally lend themselves charily to such superstitious work, especially ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow
... conductors of society," said the abbe, with great energy. "They draw on themselves the demoniacal fluid, they absorb temptations to vice, preserve by their prayers those who live, like ourselves, in sin; they appease, in fact, the wrath of the Most High that He may not place the earth under an interdict. Ah! ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... Popolo, and I may name as a few of its attractions for investors the facts that it was here Sulla's funeral pyre was kindled; that Nero was buried on the left side of it, and out of his tomb grew a huge walnut-tree, the haunt of demoniacal crows till the Madonna appeared to Paschal II. and bade him cut it down; that the arch-heretic Luther sojourned in the Augustinian convent here while in Rome; that the dignitaries of Church and State received ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... nearer and more vivid than any preceding, lighted for an instant the whole landscape. Then, the mighty crash of thunder, and the long, hoarse moan of wind, and in the midst of it, that other sound—the horrible sound that once before had sent her dashing breathless from the night—the demoniacal, mocking laugh of ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... fly toward Lothar, after pushing Thuvia bodily into the face of the man-eater. But his flight was of short duration. In a moment Komal was upon him, rending his throat and chest with demoniacal fury. ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of her. Something of the half-hypnotic spell which she had exercised over me when I was a child asserted itself again, but now it seemed to me to be always evil and sometimes almost demoniacal. ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine
... affections which even the dramas of Euripides can furnish. To the English reader it may be necessary to say that the situation at the opening of the drama is that of a brother attended only by his sister during the demoniacal possession of a suffering conscience (or, in the mythology of the play, haunted by the Furies), and in circumstances of immediate danger from enemies, and of desertion or cold regard from ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... who were the victims of senile dementia and kindred ills, were accused of witchcraft and intercourse with the devil, here in the United States, not a century ago. Witches were executed in England and men burned at the stake in Spain, not two hundred years ago, for the crime of demoniacal possession. Even in this enlightened age men are accustomed to consider insanity rather from its psychical standpoint than from its physical aspect. They do not take into consideration the fact that insanity is due to a physical lesion, and that ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... was leprosy, the spotted plague, or acute demoniacal possession, the degraded Shen Heng maintains an unworthy silence. Indeed, at the mention of Hsi Min's name he wraps his garment about his head and rolls upon the floor—from which the worst may be inferred. They of Min's house, however, are ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... Berry, unsatiated with this demoniacal act, summoned up two hundred persons in the town of Aylesham, whom he compelled to kneel to the cross at Pentecost, and inflicted other punishments. He struck a poor man for a trifling word, with a flail, which proved fatal to the unoffending object. He also gave a ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... the island was something indescribable. At about midnight, just after a lull succeeded by a heavy fall of rain, the wind hauled round two or three points to the southward, and, if possible, blew with still greater violence. The crashing of trees mingling with the demoniacal shriek of the hurricane, was enough to disturb the mind of the bravest; but my companion lay quietly beside the fire, smoking his pipe and talking to me as he would had we been seated at the supper table ...
— Yorke The Adventurer - 1901 • Louis Becke
... that he induced many of the nuns to imagine themselves a prey to the evil one, and to assume all the appearance of suffering from the influence of some occult power. His pupils became quite expert in tricks of demoniacal possession, falling into convulsions and trances, and going through all the absurdities occasionally practised at the present day, by the disciples of Mesmer. These foolish, rather than wicked, women, were led to believe that, by ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... though vicious, was no fool, and such excessively absurd conduct may appear to you inconsistent with his character. But that is because you do not know the rapidly enervating and at the same time fascinating mastery which gambling has on the mind of one who gives way to it. It is a sort of demoniacal possession; the kind-hearted, amiable man becomes hard and selfish, the generous man mean and grasping, the strong-minded superstitious under its influence. It may seem strange to enact laws to prevent people from risking their own money if they choose, but every ...
— Dr. Jolliffe's Boys • Lewis Hough
... very rare that this particular word can be applied to Byron at all, while even his staunchest champion must admit that it applies to glorious John and to dear Mat Prior. He helps, unconsciously no doubt, to spread the very contagion which he denounces, by talking about Byron's demoniacal power, going so far as actually to contrast Manfred with Marlowe to the advantage of the former. And he is so completely overcome by what he calls the "dreadful tone of sincerity" of this "puissant spirit," that he never ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... gas; and comprehended that these were the hoarse responses of the 32 and 64 foot pipes, laid horizontally along the roof of the screen, to the summoning fingers of the organist. It was all uncanny, weird, supernatural, demoniacal if you will—it was part of the secret and unsuspected mechanism of a vast emotional pageant and spectacle. It unnerved Priam, especially when the organist, a handsome youngish man with lustrous eyes, half turned and winked at ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... arms had been severed at the ends when suddenly the octopus came out of his den to fight for his life. He was a reddish-purple globe of horrid flesh, horned all over, with a head not unlike an elephant's, but with large, demoniacal eyes, bitter, hating eyes that roved from one to another of us as if selecting his prey. Eight arms, some shorn of their suckers, stretched out ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... genius—in the midst of this crowd; and you instantly perceive something almost incredible. It is as if this genius, in his lightning transmigration, had entered into these mechanical, lifeless bodies, and as if only one demoniacal eye gleamed forth out of them all. Now look and listen—you can never listen enough! When you again observe the orchestra, now loftily storming, now fervently wailing, when you notice the quick tightening of every muscle and the rhythmical necessity of ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche
... generally present on these occasions, with the appeal, 'Pas vrai, Dillen?' after each broken sentence,—would have been inexpressibly droll, had not the low-comedy actor of the scene been an autocrat who might, at a wink, have transformed laughter into tears. But there was a demoniacal comicality about the performance, which, if it did not convulse the spectator, made him shudder ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... the girls that morning as though they would never finish dressing. Their clothes, their hairpins, even their combs and brushes, evaded them with demoniacal persistence, hiding under things, falling under the berths, rolling into corners, and otherwise misbehaving themselves, until the girls' nerves were all on edge and they were dangerously near the ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... what you will), as our dull, modern narratives contain, we can regard these facts, or things like these, as the nuclei which our less critical ancestors elaborated into their extraordinary romances. In this way the belief in demoniacal possession (distinguished, as such, from madness and epilepsy) has its nucleus, some contend, in the phenomena of alternating personalities in certain patients. Their characters, ideas, habits, and even voices change, and the most obvious solution of the problem, in the past, ...
— The Book of Dreams and Ghosts • Andrew Lang
... above him dimly through the deepening mist; it seemed demoniacal, inhuman, reaching up to the ceiling—a yellow ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... said the woman, with a more piteous wail than ever, as she held out the small mummy, which had its head completely concealed by dingy drapery wound round the head of the portable cradle, but seemed to be struggling and crying in a demoniacal fashion under this imprisonment. "The fit is on him! Ohime! I know what colour he is; it's the ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... lightning-flash, a quiver of rage so rabid that he looked scarcely human, but like some Greek presentment of the Furies or Revenge. Never, so thought his old friend, had he seen such glorious youthful beauty so instinct and inspired with hate. It was the demoniacal force of that which lent such splendour to it. But it passed in a second, and Morris still very pale, very quiet ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... separated. It was not long before Katharine had informed her mother that, God willing, she would never again look upon the King of England's face uncoffined. Isabeau found her a madwoman. The girl swept opposition before her with gusts of demoniacal fury, wept, shrieked, tore at her hair, and eventually fell into a sort of epileptic seizure; between rage and terror she became a horrid, frenzied beast. I do not dwell upon this, for it is not a condition in which the comeliest ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... the quirt transformed Diablo. If he had fought hard before, he now fell into a truly demoniacal frenzy. The long flashing legs were springs indeed, and the moment his hoofs struck the earth he was flung up again to a greater height. He was sunfishing now in that most deadly manner when the horse ...
— Bull Hunter • Max Brand
... of my patient showed a slight improvement. It was eight o'clock in the evening when I came on duty again, and, the weather having changed during the day, the whole room echoed and re-echoed with the howling of the wind, which was raging round the house with demoniacal fury. ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... tyros in the art. Du Meresq had that deceptive countenance apparently created for the shipwreck of female hearts. Sometimes men called him an ugly fellow, but no woman ever thought so. There was expression enough in those luminous eyes to have set up three beauty men. They could look both demoniacal and seraphic,—tender often, but scarcely ever true; add to this a magnificent physique, a soft manner, a winning voice, and, what gave him an almost superstitious interest to women, that fey look attributed to the Stewarts. He had read and studied hard by fits and starts, for whatever possessed ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... believed by the Arabs to be majnun, possessed by a Jin or Genie. Devils also are cast out in Abyssinia to this day. Having fallen in with Farmer's treatise on the Demoniacs, I carefully studied it; and found it to prove unanswerably, that a belief in demoniacal possession is a superstition not more respectable than that of witchcraft. But Farmer did not at all convince me, that the three Evangelists do not share the vulgar error. Indeed, the instant we believe that the imagined possessions were only various forms of disease, we are forced to draw ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... wonderful and mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the author of his physical being. She is to the savage a miracle to be alternately adored and dreaded. He dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, which often takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous; her quicker instincts, her readier wit, which seem to him to have in them somewhat prophetic and superhuman, which entangle him as in an invisible net, and rule him against his will. He dreads her very tongue, more crushing than his heaviest ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... must be," she cried, with a fierceness that held the other in something like astonishment. "There must be," she reiterated desperately. "No God could be so cruel—so—so wicked. What have I done to deserve this? The injustice is demoniacal. Far better go and throw myself before a passing train than live to carry such a pestilence with me wherever I go through life. If you can read these things—read on. Read on and tell me, for I swear that I will not live with this curse forever tied ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... a religion attained the mastery which corresponded to a pre-Greek condition of mankind: belief in witchcraft in connection with all and everything, bloody sacrifices, superstitious fear of demoniacal punishments, despair in one's self, ecstatic brooding and hallucination, man's self become the arena of good and evil ...
— We Philologists, Volume 8 (of 18) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... the land leaving the women on the raft. For some time the latter kept their position, waiting until the boat got quite near, when they gave utterance to a dreadful yell, and assuming at the same time a most demoniacal aspect, plunged into the water as if about to abandon the children to ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... death's-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted, misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease and all the horrors of chronic innutrition—the refuse and the scum of life, a raging, screaming, screeching, demoniacal horde. ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... quite allowably heighten the above picture by supposing that the person in her trance, in addition to being mad, might have displayed some of the perceptive powers occasionally developed in trance; and so have evinced, in addition to her demoniacal ferocity, an "uncanny" knowledge of things and persons. To be candid, Archy, time was, when I should myself have had my ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... plea of "delusion" will not excuse it, except to those who have not investigated its studied cruelty and malice. Sheer, unadulterated wickedness had its full share in the persecution; and that wickedness can only be partly extenuated by the plea of possible insanity or of demoniacal possession. ...
— Dulcibel - A Tale of Old Salem • Henry Peterson
... be applied to the work before us, with the qualifying clause, that in this instance the Genius is less obvious, and the false taste more glaring. No writer of good judgment would have attempted to revive the defunct horrors of Mrs. Radcliffe's School of Romance, or the demoniacal incarnations of Mr. Lewis: But, as if he were determined not to be arraigned for a single error only, Mr. Maturin has contrived to render his production almost as objectionable in the manner as it is in the matter. The construction of his story, which is singularly ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... the consecutive injustices in the cavils of the police administration, develop in society a reciprocal fear and distrust. From feeling themselves in danger of being denounced and menaced in their liberty, men rapidly become the prey of terror. And the terrible life, sooner or later, awakens demoniacal terror among the weak. But people of this sort are legion in Russia, and Peredonov, the hero of "The Little Demon," represents this class so graphically that to-day Russian historians and authors designate the era from 1880 to 1905 by the name "peredonovchina." The following is ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... certain one always suffered thus on those feast-days on which he had to receive Communion, his superiors, discovering that there was no fault on his part, ruled that he was not to refrain from communicating on that account, and the demoniacal ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... long course of events, the victim of ravenous vultures that had torn into his vitals and devoured him; of fiends that had racked and tortured him, mocking him, meantime, jeering in his face. Ah, God, the horror of it, the monstrous, hideous, demoniacal wickedness of it! He and his family, helpless women and children, struggling to live, ignorant and defenseless and forlorn as they were—and the enemies that had been lurking for them, crouching upon their trail and thirsting ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... oftentimes is, the musical equivalent for the massive and violent forms of archaic Greek sculpture that Strauss intended it be. Elektra herself is perhaps more truly incarnate fury than Salome is incarnate luxury; ugliness and demoniacal brooding, madness and cruelty are here more sheerly powerfully expressed than in the earlier score; the scene of recognition between brother and sister is more large and touching than anything in "Salome"; Elektra's paean and dance, for all ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... began, as though the roused spirit of the jungle were trying to drown out this cry. The drum music swelled louder and louder in the breathless night, its mingled rhythms combining into a thunder. But once more the cry, "Hear me!" rose to contest with that demoniacal uproar. ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... of Christ. He uses the word for the Jewish hell but once, and then, undeniably, in a figurative sense, saying that a "curbless and defiling tongue is set on fire of Gehenna." He appears to adopt the common notion of his contemporary countrymen in regard to demoniacal existences, when he declares that "the devils believe there is one God, and tremble," and when he exclaims, "Resist the devil, and he will flee from you." He insists on the necessity of a faith that evinces itself in good works and in all ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... faith in the operators, or the growth of a new and obstinate assortment of hazel twigs, threw discredit on the mummery and the mummers. Still the passion existed; and in no case was it more observable than in that of the celebrated witch-finder. An actual presence at the demoniacal rites of the broom-riding sisterhood would have been attended with much danger and considerable difficulty; indeed, it has been asserted that the visitors, like those at Almack's, were expected to be balloted for, ticketed, and dressed in a manner suiting the occasion. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 20, 1841 • Various
... towards us, when I saw that it was none other than the general himself. His beard was all a-bristle with fury, and his deepset eyes glowed from under their heavily veined lids with a most sinister and demoniacal brightness. ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... in the prelude which has been here given. He stated the facts of the Cumberland marriage, apologizing to his learned friend the Serjeant for taking, as he said, the very words out of his learned friend's mouth. He expatiated with an eloquence that was as vehement as it was touching on the demoniacal schemes of that wicked Earl, to whom, during the whole of his fiendish life, women had been a prey. He repudiated, with a scorn that was almost terrible in its wrath, the idea that Josephine Murray had gone to the Earl's house with ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... of Zion the whole of Jerusalem, gaunt, dying and demoniacal, was packed in the ruins of ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... about which the boy beheld a halo. Clearly this was his day; heaven showed its approval of his conduct by an outpouring of imperishable riches. And yet the oath misliked him; there was a savor of the demoniacal contract; still that was to be borne and the plunge taken, for there fluttered the huge sum before his dazzled eyes. He took a deep breath. "'God strike me dead' "—he began, slowly—"' ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington
... minister, wrote with much simplicity that "these things occurring in the time of public worship did something interrupt me in my first prayer, being so unusual." But he braced himself up in spite of Ann and the demoniacal yellow-bird, and finished the service. These disorderly interruptions occurred on every Lord's Day, growing weekly more constant and more universal, and must have been unbearable. Some few disgusted members ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... descriptions of scenery scattered throughout are admirable. Each tale is, in fact, a cabinet picture, combining history and romance with landscape. Mr Roby excelled in depicting the supernatural; and one German reviewer declared his story of Rivington Pike to be "the only authentic tale of demoniacal possession the ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... minstrels' gallery, had reached the floor of the hall, and was approaching the western door, which was open, in order to cross the court to his lodging near the watch-tower, when a hellish explosion, followed by the most frightful roaring, mingled with shrieks and demoniacal laughter, arrested him; and the same instant, through the open door, he saw, as plainly as he now saw his noble master, a torrent rush from the archway, full of dim figures, wallowing and shouting. The same moment they all vanished, and the flood poured ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... vital process. It is a function, and not an entity. It must be studied as a section of anthropology. No preconceived idea must be allowed to interfere with our investigation of the deranged spiritual function, any more than the old ideas of demoniacal possession must be allowed to interfere with our study of epilepsy. Spiritual pathology is a proper subject for direct observation and analysis, like any other subject involving a ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... English, for poor English was the only father I knew, and he was good to me. I never shall forget what I saw in that little room that night. I found a dozen friends and the McCartys there, forming a half-circle of curious and demoniacal faces, peering over the body of English, whose face, I thought, formed the only repose in the picture. There were two small pictures-one of the Saviour, and the other of Kossuth-hung at the head and feet of the corpse; ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... side of a ship, and the other out of a third story window," said Titbottom, fitting a broad blade between his thumbs and blowing a demoniacal blast. ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... of horror escaped him, for he saw that the heap of shavings had been set on fire during his momentary absence, and Gorman stood watching them with a demoniacal grin. ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne
... the bitterness of self-upbraiding, and a contortion of visage absolutely demoniacal. Butler, though a man brave by principle, if not by constitution, was overawed; for intensity of mental distress has in it a sort of sublimity which repels and overawes all men, but especially those of kind and sympathetic dispositions. The stranger turned abruptly ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... tense to detach the sounds of this tragedy from that other, jangling from without. She heard the footsteps of the ruffians overtaking him; she heard their demoniacal cries, echoing back;—his faint words—"What have I done that ye seek my life,"—but the voice came no more—only sounds of struggle, growing dimmer, as they dragged him farther away upon the ramparts—then silence—and the misery of it ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... that he has experimented in this direction with patients of his. Says he: "They have the ability to resist the state or to bring it at will. Many of them describe beautiful scenes from nature, or some mighty cathedral with its lofty dome, or the faces of imaginary beings, beautiful or demoniacal, according to the will and ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... unacquainted with the milder feelings of piety, but addicted to a certain sort of devotional habits and practices by no means inconsistent with implacable vindictiveness," fearfully avenged his murder. This woman appears to have been seized with a perfectly demoniacal mania for blood and revenge. Aided by those in authority, who feared lest a widespread conspiracy had been formed, she seized, on the slightest suspicion, hundreds of innocent victims and put them to death with all the ferocity ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... chains, with the roar of the great cascade outside. He saw me and recognized me on my approach, but he could not speak for some time. It was most monotonous work, I thought. No conversation allowed, not even possible; the truly demoniacal noise, yet just outside on the other side of a small window, the open country, the mighty waters of the ever-boiling "Kettle," or Chauldron, and the steep spray-washed cliff. Standing on my toes I could, looking out of Netty's ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... supposed to live in streams, while trees afford a shelter to the souls of the unmarried, who become bhuts or malignant spirits after death. Nag Deo or the cobra is supposed to live in an ant-hill, and offerings are made to him there. Demoniacal possession is an article of faith, and a popular remedy is to burn human hair mixed with chillies and pig's dung near the person possessed, as the horrible smell thus produced will drive away the spirit. Many and weird, Mr. Low writes, ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... emissary, Councillor Laubardemont, to Loudun, who renewed the accusation against Grandier. The amiable cleric, who had led a pious and regular life, was declared guilty of adultery, sacrilege, magic, witchcraft, demoniacal possession, and condemned to be burned alive after receiving an application of the torture. In the market-place of Loudun in 1643 this terrible sentence was carried into execution, and together with his book, Contra Caelibatum Clericorum, poor Grandier was committed to the ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... it without understanding it, which touches it without being able to believe in it, and which sinks engulfed in the problem of it, like Empedocles in Etna. Non possum capere te, cape me, says the Aristotelian motto. Every diminutive of Beelzebub is an abyss, each demoniacal act is a gulf of darkness. Natural cruelty, inborn perfidy and falseness, even in animals, cast lurid gleams, as it were, into that fathomless pit of Satanic perversity which is ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... long call, or the shrill, demoniacal laugh coming out of the night tells of the sleepless activity of the loon. The whip-poor-will in the adjacent shrubbery seems companionable, and there is a friendly spirit in the short, shrill tremolo of the night-hawk from the invisible sky. Even the plaint ...
— The Ontario Readers: Fourth Book • Various
... what is narrated by many writers of the Shaman screaming and distorting of the features. Very few people know of what the human, voice is capable. It can not only be trained to divine song, but to such demoniacal howling as to deafen and appall even the guardians of a lunatic asylum. In Lapland, Central Asia, or on Nootka Sound the initiated are trained in remote solitudes to these utterances, to which no one can listen without ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... yokel who chanced to pass, hearing those weird, celestial voices, took to his heels and ran a mile straight off, and reported with ashy face and trembling lips that a ghost had appeared on the arch of the abbey as he passed, and called to him thrice, and had shrieked with demoniacal laughter as he hurried ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... sat cuddling the body to her; nor did Kerchak attempt to molest her. With the death of the babe his fit of demoniacal rage passed as suddenly as ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... I expected that little demoniacal curiosity to point to me with that never-resting hand of hers, and proclaim: "there in the new child's ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... part, and basing my opinion on my own experiences with other forms of the superphysical, with regard to the success of exorcism I am sceptical. I have been present when exorcism has been tried—tried on people supposed to be obsessed with demoniacal spirits, and tried on spontaneous psychic phenomena in haunted houses—and in both cases it has failed. Now, although, as I have said, I regard lycanthropy in the light of a property, and do not believe in the lycanthropist being possessed of a separate individual spirit, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... repeated the first. 'A filthy nation,' added the second. 'Ro—' exclaimed the third, meaning to say 'robbers'; but he was not allowed to finish the word: a tempest of soldi and half-lire descended upon their heads and shoulders, and leaped upon the table and the floor with a demoniacal noise. All three sprang up in a rage, looked up, and received another handful of ...
— Cuore (Heart) - An Italian Schoolboy's Journal • Edmondo De Amicis
... and the Great Schism, priests and kings and doubting philosophers and the Scripture. Paul III called him "the vagabond of the age." Calvin at first reckoned him among those who "had relished the gospel," but when he furiously retorted that he considered Calvin "a demoniacal imposter," the theologian of Geneva loosed against him a furious invective in his {195} Treatise on Offences. Rabelais was now called "a Lucian who by his diabolic fatuity had profaned the gospel, that holy and sacred pledge of life ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Tlascalan territory. Skirmishing was followed by a pitched battle between the Christians and the Tlascalans, in which the firearms and lances of the Spaniards wrought terrible havoc on their antagonists. Astounded at the sight of the horses—those extraordinary beings, whether of animal or demoniacal origin they knew not—and appalled by the thundering of the guns, which seemed to have some superhuman source, the Tlascalans at first fell back. But they overcame their fears, fell savagely upon the invaders, and were with difficulty ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... are confined to their sober hours. When indulging their insatiate thirst for spirit, they are boisterous and rude, and by their obstreperous laughter, their demoniacal shrieks and turbulent vociferations, produce an appalling discord, such as might well be expected to proceed from a company of infernal spirits at their fiendish revels; and exhibit a striking contrast to the low, monotonous tones used by ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... but the work of a few moments, yet it was not done any too soon, for the Indians had got within three hundred yards of us, and were still advancing, and uttering their demoniacal yells or war-whoops. There were forty of the red-skins and only three of us. We were each armed with a Mississippi yager and ...
— The Life of Hon. William F. Cody - Known as Buffalo Bill The Famous Hunter, Scout and Guide • William F. Cody
... de Montreux and the whole of their brood—sisters, brothers, two or three children, a priest, and several servants—a round dozen in all, have been condemned to death. The guillotine for them to-morrow at daybreak! Would it could have been to- night," added Marat, whilst a demoniacal leer contorted his face which already exuded lust for blood from every pore. "Would it could have been to-night. But the guillotine has been busy; over four hundred executions to-day...and the tumbrils are full—the seats bespoken in advance—and still they come.... ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... Within recent years psychology owes much of the advance made to a closer study of the physiology of the nervous system, and if genuine advance is to be made in our understanding of religious phenomena we must adopt the same plan of investigation. We do not, for example, understand the nature of demoniacal possession by a mere collation of cases. It is only when we put them side by side with similar cases that now come under the control of the physician, and associate them with certain peculiar nervous conditions, ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... mounted the pony, hitched up the legs of his leather trousers, folded back the brim of the big sombrero, and critically inspected the ponies before him. One of them, a demoniacal looking buckskin, appeared more vixenish than the others, and very promptly the youth made this selection; but to get in touch of the wily little beast was another matter. Every time the rancher made a move forward the herd found it ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... perceives this, although he does not commit himself in his Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture. "I am afraid," he says, in a letter to the Rev. J. W. Belcher, "that the objections to demoniacal possession involve in germ the rejection of all belief in the supernatural." This is wonderfully clear and straightforward for the Grand Old Man. Give up the belief that mad people may be tenanted by devils, and you should immediately join the National Secular Society. You ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote |
