Introduction

The Devil, as a moral and theological concept, has not always existed in the form familiar to monotheistic religions. In Demonology and Devil-Lore (1879), Moncure Daniel Conway proposed that the Devil evolved from once-benign nature spirits and gods, gradually transformed into moral symbols of evil as religious and cultural paradigms shifted toward monotheism. This essay revisits Conway’s argument, situating it within modern comparative-religious studies by examining the transformation of nature spirits into embodiments of moral opposition. Scholars such as Mircea Eliade (1958), Jeffrey Burton Russell (1986), and David Gordon White (2020) have likewise addressed how religious systems moralize natural or mythological forces, offering a broader context to Conway’s nineteenth-century insight.

Nature Spirits and the Origins of the Demonic

Conway begins his inquiry by asserting that “primitive religion was based on the observation of natural phenomena, whose powers were personalized” (Conway, 1879/2012, p. 5). In early mythic consciousness, these beings, spirits of water, storm, fertility, and wilderness, were morally neutral, existing as reflections of human awe before the natural world. Conway (1879) writes that “the lights of heaven, animal and vegetable life, the elements and natural phenomena” were all “imbued with the sacredness of being” (p. v). Primitive peoples started to create their religious beliefs based on this opposition between the “anger of the gods” present in the elements of nature and its subsequent mythologizing of elements that at times were benign and at other times were evil.

In Conway’s view, evil emerged not from these spirits themselves but from later reinterpretations of them. The moment moral categories entered theology, “the deities of one faith became the demons of another” (Conway, 1879, vol. 2, p. 94). A classical example for those of us who were born in the Americas is that one when the Spanish conquistadores imposed their creed unto indigenous populations whose cosmology had been built centuries before their arrival. This pattern parallels the anthropological observation that moral dualism often arises from cultural competition rather than inherent metaphysical opposition (Eliade, 1958). Eliade describes this shift as a “sacralization and desanctification of nature,” a process where what was once revered becomes taboo or accursed when social order demands new symbols of power (p. 163).

From Nature Deities to Devils

     One of Conway’s most memorable claims is that “every religion is inclined to transform into Devils the Gods of the religion that it supplants” (Conway, 1879, vol. 2, p. 94). He illustrates this with examples from Semitic, Persian, and Greco-Roman traditions. The serpent, he notes, once “the symbol of Vishnu, the Hindu deity,” became the Persian symbol of evil under Ahriman because of sectarian conflict (Conway, 1879, vol. 2, p. 94). Similarly, Pan, once a pastoral deity of music and fertility, was demonized in Christian iconography, his horns and cloven feet adopted as physical attributes of Satan.

Jeffrey Burton Russell (1986) supports this view, noting that the Christian Devil “owes more to Pan, Pluto, and Loki than to any purely biblical source” (p. 34). For Russell, as for Conway, the Devil’s evolution reflects not theological inevitability but cultural borrowing: the transformation of local or rival deities into negative archetypes. David Gordon White (2020) extends this argument, suggesting that such reinterpretations reveal the human tendency to “demonize the Other—both religiously and ethnographically” (p. 211). Conway’s nineteenth-century intuition, therefore, aligns with current understandings of how evil operates as a social and psychological category.

The Devil as a Moral Symbol

Conway draws a critical distinction between “demons” and “devils.” The former are “creatures driven by fate to prey upon mankind for the satisfaction of their needs, but not of necessity malevolent” (Conway, 1879/2012, p. ix). Devils, on the other hand, emerge when moral value is projected onto these neutral spirits, when they are recast as embodiments of cosmic wrongdoing. In Conway’s schema, the Devil is a mirror of moral evolution: as human societies developed ethical codes, they externalized transgression into a single figure representing corruption, rebellion, and impurity.

Jungian interpretations of myth resonate with this perspective. Carl Jung (1959) argued that the devil archetype arises from the “shadow” aspect of the collective psyche, the projection of human fears, instincts, and repressed desires (p. 94). Conway’s “pure malignity” (1879, vol. 1, p. ix) is thus not a metaphysical force but a psychological necessity, the external image of inner contradiction.

Comparative Reflections: Ahriman, Loki, and Satan

By tracing the genealogy of the Devil, Conway identifies recurring mythic patterns across different peoples around the world. Ahriman of Persia, Set of Egypt, and Loki of Norse myth all serve as precursors or analogues of the Christian Satan we know of today. Each embodies chaos, rebellion, or destruction within a larger moral cosmology. As Karen Armstrong (2019) observes, these figures “personify the dangers of freedom — the necessary disobedience through which human consciousness matures” (p. 147).

Conway interprets such transformations historically: when one system of belief becomes dominant, it “moralizes” the cosmological opposition into a drama of good versus evil. What was once cyclical or complementary, light and dark, fertility and death, becomes polarized; something is good, and if not, it has to be bad because the domineering ones are right. The Devil thus becomes the moral residue of a fallen pantheon: a single scapegoat embodying the fears once distributed among many spirits.

Introduction

In English Language Teaching (ELT) professional development, digital learning has become indispensable. Online training modules, mobile platforms, and adaptive AI systems now mediate much of teachers’ continuous learning. Yet, institutions face a recurrent dilemma: whether to invest in custom eLearning designed for their specific teaching contexts or to adopt off-the-shelf courses readily available from educational providers. As Umare (2025) vividly analogizes, this decision resembles choosing between a fast-food meal and a home-cooked dinner; one prioritizing speed, the other personalization. For ELT professionals, this choice is not merely logistical but pedagogical, influencing engagement, reflection, and the sustainability of teacher growth.

Custom eLearning: Contextualized Learning for Reflective Practitioners

Custom eLearning aligns closely with the reflective teaching models advocated by Farrell (2019) and Schön (1983), as it allows for the design of learning experiences grounded in institutional realities, student demographics, and methodological beliefs. For instance, a custom-built module on Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) can incorporate authentic classroom recordings, local learner profiles, and school-specific feedback instruments. These contextual anchors transform generic content into reflective spaces for teacher identity formation and pedagogical renewal.

Furthermore, custom eLearning can integrate reflective journaling, peer-coaching simulations, and adaptive feedback loops, fostering the metacognitive engagement central to professional autonomy (Farrell, 2022). In this sense, custom design serves not merely as content delivery but as reflective pedagogy in action, aligning with Healey’s (2018) call for digital literacy in teacher education.

Off-the-Shelf Training: Scalability and Foundational Knowledge

Off-the-shelf courses, though often perceived as generic, play an essential role in providing accessible, rapid, and standardized professional knowledge. Consider specializations provided by FutureLearn or by Coursera; they’ve been put together to help teaching professionals to get basic and vital knowledge to better fit for their teaching. In ELT, such resources include global training packages on assessment literacy, digital tools, classroom management, and inclusion. These courses may ensure compliance with institutional standards and reduce the time required to onboard new teachers.

Their scalability supports large-scale teacher development programs, particularly in contexts such as national bilingual projects or institutional induction schemes. Off-the-shelf materials also facilitate equitable access to foundational concepts, functioning as a shared cognitive baseline from which teachers can later branch into customized, context-specific applications (Cutrim Schmid, 2017).

The Fallacy of Rational Supremacy: Lugones and the Crisis of Reason

In the short story Yzur, Leopoldo Lugones constructs a modern fable of scientific arrogance. The narrator’s obsession with teaching an ape to speak embodies the Cartesian legacy of mechanistic thought, a worldview that reduces living beings to automatons devoid of consciousness or soul. René Descartes famously asserted that “the animal-body is a machine” and held that animals are “without feeling or awareness of any kind” (Cottingham, 2009, p. 551) referencing the doctrine of the bête-machine. Descartes wrote in the Discourse on Method: “the animal body … as a machine which, having been made by the hand of God, is incomparably better ordered … than any of those … invented by human beings” (Descartes, 1637/1985, p. 56). Lugones’s narrator, trained in that positivist spirit, treats Yzur as both object and hypothesis. The ape’s body becomes a laboratory for the scientist’s metaphysical ambition, a test case for his belief that humanity’s essence lies in speech, and it looks like the narrative voice in the story wants to bestow humanity into Yzur. It is the narrator’s idea that, motivated by the idea that monkeys were once humans who, by giving up speech, descended on the evolutionary scale to their current state, he wants to bestow Yzur with humanity.

Yet the narrative progressively undermines this mechanistic worldview. Yzur’s gradual demonstration of intelligence, empathy, and emotional depth defies the notion of animal automatism. He responds to affection, displays loyalty, and even exhibits what the narrator interprets as conscience. In this reversal, Lugones anticipates Nietzsche’s assertion that “life itself is WILL TO POWER; self-preservation is only one of the indirect and most infrequent consequences thereof” (Nietzsche, 1886/1998, sec. 13). Moreover, Nietzsche also states: “The ‘will’ can naturally only operate on ‘will’ … in short, the hypothesis must be hazarded, whether will does not operate on will wherever ‘effects’ are recognized—and whether all mechanical action … is not just the power of will” (Nietzsche, 1886/1998, sec. 2). The scientist’s insistence on proving his theory reflects this Nietzschean critique of modern hubris: the belief that through intellect alone humanity can master life’s mysteries.

In addition, Bergson’s philosophy of intuition contrasts the mechanical intellect’s rigidity with élan vital, the creative force of life. He argues that “intellect is always a ready-made instrument … it cannot grasp what is new; whereas intuition can embrace the flow of life in its continuity” (Bergson, 1907/1944, p. 89). The narrator’s experiment, driven by method and calculation, fails because it denies this intuitive vitality. In his attempt to force Yzur into the mold of rational speech, he kills the very life he sought to elevate. The ape’s muteness becomes not a sign of inferiority but of resistance, the voice of what Bergson might call “life’s inexpressible continuity.” By the story’s end, Lugones’s narrative dismantles the Cartesian paradigm and exposes the moral bankruptcy of reason detached from compassion. In Yzur’s death, rational progress culminates in ethical regression; knowledge triumphs only by destroying what it sought to understand.

The Psychoanalytic Double: Desire, Repression, and the Mirror of Language

From a psychoanalytic perspective, Yzur dramatizes the tension between desire and repression through the narrator’s relationship with his subject. It can be stated that Yzur becomes a mirror of the narrator’s unconscious, his need to affirm humanity through the reflection of an “other.” In Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, “the Mirror Stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification” (Lacan, 1949/2006). Lacan writes: “This form [the Ideal-I of the mirror stage] situates the agency of the ego … in a fictional direction” (Lacan, 1949/2006). The scientist’s (or narrator’s) fascination with Yzur mirrors this process: he sees in the ape both his evolutionary past and his desired reflection, a creature that can confirm humanity’s uniqueness by reproducing it.

However, this identification quickly becomes pathological. The narrator’s sense of self depends on Yzur’s progress; his failure to elicit speech from the ape threatens his symbolic identity as a rational subject. In Lacanian terms, Yzur becomes the objet petit a, the unattainable object of desire that structures the narrator’s pursuit of knowledge. The ape’s silence functions as repression, the unspoken remainder of the narrator’s own unconscious guilt and lack of tenderness.

Lacan’s concept of the Symbolic order, the realm of language, law, and social identity, illuminates the tragedy at the story’s core. Entry into language entails separation from instinct and immediacy; language means being “humanized”, something the scientist is looking for. The narrator’s experiment thus represents humanity’s endless compulsion to reassert its entry into the Symbolic, to reaffirm that the Word distinguishes man from beast (or from ape, in this very case). Yet ironically, this obsession exposes the emptiness behind the signifier. Yzur’s inability to articulate words does not mean he lacks humanity; rather, it reveals that human speech itself may be a defense against the inexpressible truths of emotion and empathy.

In the end, Yzur’s death can be read as the ultimate return of the repressed. The creature’s silence transforms into a final act of communication: a gesture of sacrifice that says more than language ever could. The scientist’s tears and guilt confirm the psychoanalytic reversal; he has projected his own unconscious fragmentation onto the creature, and through Yzur’s destruction, he has come to recognize the abyss within himself. The mirror shatters into a million pieces, leaving behind only a broken reflection of reason’s self-inflicted wound.

Promethean Ambition and the Allegory of the Fall

On a mythic plane, Lugones’s scientist inherits the Promethean archetype, the overreacher who dares to rival divine creation. Prometheus’s theft of fire symbolizes humanity’s quest for knowledge and autonomy, but also the curse of perpetual suffering. As Viscoli (1974) explains, “The core of the archetype – that man must pay a price for fire – suggests that, although greater awareness is available, man must suffer for it.” Lugones re-imagines that myth within the modern laboratory: the “fire” here is speech, the sacred medium of consciousness and creativity. To give speech to an ape is to replay the act of divine rebellion, to attempt to recreate humanity in one’s own image.

Yet the experimenter’s aspiration carries within it the seeds of damnation, quite like what happens to Dr. Frankenstein with his creature. Yzur’s suffering, culminating in self-destruction, mirrors Prometheus’s torment on the rock. Knowledge becomes punishment for Yzur; enlightenment, a form of enslavement. The scientist’s ambition to bestow language on the voiceless turns into a metaphysical transgression, a violation of the natural and moral order. Lugones’s narrative thus transforms the laboratory into a modern Olympus, where humanity plays god and confronts the tragic consequences of its pride.

This mythic dimension deepens when the story is read through the Edenic and Babelian motifs. In the biblical account of Babel, language becomes fragmented and humanity’s attempt at unity through speech is punished. Nietzsche himself criticized “positivism, which stops before phenomena saying ‘there are only facts,’ I would say: no, facts are precisely what there are not, only interpretations” (Nietzsche, 1886/1998). Lugones’s narrator, in attempting to teach Yzur to speak, seeks to recover that lost Edenic language, to heal the separation between human and animal, nature and culture. Yet, as in the biblical narrative, the attempt ends in failure and exile. Yzur’s silence echoes humanity’s expulsion from paradise: the impossibility of absolute communication.

The story’s allegorical undertones also evoke the fallen angel motif. Like Lucifer, the narrator aspires to divine knowledge, only to be cast down by his own arrogance. Yzur’s death functions as both punishment and revelation: the recognition that divine creation cannot be replicated without moral ruin. Lugones, steeped in Symbolist aesthetics and metaphysical speculation, crafts in Yzur a fable of ontological exile, the eternal distance between the Word and the world, between intellect and life. Based on Silva-Rojas, Armijo, and Nuñez (2015), “Exile has been something permanent throughout the history of mankind. In ancient times, it may be found the idea that this world dwelled by human beings is not our own home, which has been a mythic vision widespread in various cultural traditions (1). Exile has been viewed as a paradigm in which the notion of human life, at least in western culture, is interpreted as being exiled (2).” The experimenter in Lugones’s story is in search of breaking the paradigm and share his “exile” with Yzur, a part of being human, exiled.

The Violence of Cultural Assimilation: Yzur as the Colonized Other

Beyond its philosophical and psychological layers, Yzur can be read as a profound commentary on colonial power and cultural violence. The narrator’s attempt to teach Yzur a human language parallels the historical imposition of European culture and reason upon colonized peoples in Latin America. Just as the scientist demands that Yzur abandon his natural form of communication, colonial systems demanded that indigenous peoples renounce their languages, rituals, and ways of knowing in favor of Western rationality.

This act of “civilizing” the ape mirrors what postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak (1988) terms epistemic violence: the silencing of subaltern voices through the imposition of dominant discourse. Yzur’s muteness, therefore, becomes both literal and symbolic, the enforced silence of the colonized other whose humanity is recognized only when it imitates the colonizer. The scientist, despite his affection for Yzur, embodies the paternalistic logic of empire: benevolent in intention, destructive in outcome, punitive when being, let’s say, disobeyed.

Yzur’s suffering and final death dramatize the price of assimilation. Forced into a linguistic system that negates his essence, he ultimately destroys himself rather than betrays his nature. This act can be interpreted as a silent rebellion, a refusal to submit to the oppressive structure of imposed civilization. The narrator’s remorse at the end reveals his own complicity in this moral tragedy. In destroying Yzur, he has reenacted the violence that modernity inflicts upon all forms of otherness: the animal, the indigenous, the emotional, and the intuitive.

Through this lens, Lugones anticipates later critiques of anthropocentrism and colonial modernity. His story exposes the dark underside of the “civilizing mission”, whether scientific or imperial. By giving the ape the role of the colonized subject, Lugones destabilizes the very categories of “human” and “animal”. The supposed elevation of Yzur to humanity becomes instead a descent of humanity into brutality, revealing that civilization itself can be a form of barbarism when built on domination and erasure.

Conclusion

Leopoldo Lugones’s Yzur stands as a prophetic allegory of modernity’s paradoxes, a tale that intertwines philosophy, psychology, mythology, and history to question what it truly means to be human. Through the interplay of Cartesian mechanism and Nietzschean skepticism, the story dismantles the illusion of rational supremacy; through Lacanian psychoanalysis, it exposes the unconscious desire and repression underlying humanity’s quest for mastery; through Promethean and Biblical allegory, it reveals the tragic cycle of transgression and fall; and through postcolonial interpretation, it denounces the cultural violence implicit in the drive to civilize and dominate.

In Yzur’s death, Lugones crystallizes a universal irony: the more humanity seeks to affirm its superiority through reason and speech, the more it betrays the compassion and humility that define true consciousness. The ape’s silence reverberates as a moral indictment of modern civilization, a silence that speaks of pain, loss and the enduring need to reconcile intellect with empathy. Ultimately, Yzur becomes a mirror in which readers confront the abyss of their own rational pride, reminding us that knowledge without love leads not to enlightenment but to exile.

📚 References

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Descartes, R. (1985). Discourse on the method (J. Cottingham, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1637) https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1637.pdf

Lacan, J. (2006). “The mirror stage as formative of the I function as revealed in psychoanalytic experience.” In É. Roudinesco (Ed.), Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans., pp. 75–81). W. W. Norton. (Original work delivered 1949) https://www.academia.edu/1539509/Summary_of_Lacan_s_The_Mirror_Stage_as_Formative_of_the_Function_of_the_I_as_Revealed_in_Psychoanalytic_Experience_

Lugones, L. (1906). Yzur. In Las fuerzas extrañas. Buenos Aires: Félix Lajouane.

Nietzsche, F. (1998). Beyond good and evil (Helen Zimmern, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1886) https://ia803401.us.archive.org/23/items/beyond-good-and-evil_202105/Beyond%20good%20and%20evil.pdf

Silva Rojas, M., Armijo, J., and Nuñez, G. (2015). Philosophical and Psychological Perspective of Exile: On Time and Space Experiences. DOI:10.3389/fpsyt.2015.00078

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press. https://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Can-the-subaltern-speak-by-Gayatri-Spivak.pdf

Viscoli, L. (1974). The Promethean Archetype. UNM Digital Repository. https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/engl_etds/406/