Conclusion

Summary

Whether or not Peter Berger is correct to suggest that those who believe in demons and angels make up the “cognitive minority” in today’s secular societies, it is certainly the case that angelology and demonology have been marginalized from the settings that have most shaped modern Western scholarship. Partly as a result, even historians of religion tend to assume that any “real” interest in demons must have been popular or sectarian, rather than elite or mainstream, and that any literary claim to commerce with angels must signal a work’s allegorical, esoteric, or mystical character. When confronted with premodern references to angels and demons by learned elites, it is common to presume that they must be symbols or ciphers for something else.