“The Catholic clergy and some of the lay champions of the Roman Church fight still more for the existence of Satan and his imps. If Des Mousseaux maintains the objective reality of spiritual phenomena with such an unrelenting ardor, it is because, in his opinion, the latter are the most direct evidence of the Devil at work. The Chevalier is more than the Pope; and his logic and deductions from never -to-be and non-established premises are unique and prove once more that the creed offered by us is the one which expresses the Catholic belief most eloquently.
“If magic and spiritualism”, he says, “were both but chimeras, we would have to bid an eternal farewell to all the rebellious angels, now troubling the world; for thus, we would have no more demons down here… And if we lost our demons, we would LOSE OUR SAVIOUR likewise. For, from whom did that Saviour come to save us? And then, there would be no more Redeemer; for from whom or what could that Redeemer redeem us? Hence, there would be no more Christianity!!” Oh Holy Father of Evil; Sainted Satan! We pray thee do not abandon such pious Christians as the Chevalier des Mousseaux and some Baptist clergymen!! For our part, we would rather remember the wise words of J. C. Colquhoun, who says that “those persons who, in modern times, adopt the doctrine of the Devil in its strictly literal and personal application, do not appear to be aware that they are in reality polytheists, heathens, idolaters.”
Seeking supremacy in everything over the ancient creeds, the Christians claim the discovery of the Devil officially recognized by the Church. Jesus was the first to use the word “legion” when speaking of them; and it is on this ground that M. des Mousseaux thus defends his position in one of his demonological works”. Later he says, “when the synagogue expired, depositing its inheritance in the hands of Christ, were born into the world and shone, the Fathers of the Church, who have been accused by certain persons of a rare and precious ignorance, of having borrowed their ideas as to the spirits of darkness from the theurgists.”
Three deliberate, palpable, and easily refuted errors, not to use a harsher word, occur in these few lines. In the first place, the synagogue, far from having expired, is flourishing at the present day in nearly every town of Europe, America, and Asia; and of all churches in Christian cities, it is the most firmly established, as well as the best behaved. Further, while no one will deny that many Christian Fathers were born into the world, (always, of course, excepting the twelve fictitious Bishops of Rome, who were never born at all), every person who will take the trouble to read the works of the Platonists of the old Academy, who were theurgists before Iamblichus, will recognize therein the origin of Christian Demonology as well as the Angelology, the allegorical meaning of which was completely distorted by the Fathers. Then it could hardly be admitted that the said Fathers ever shone, except, perhaps, in the refulgence of their extreme ignorance.
The Reverend Dr. Shuckford, who passed the better part of his life trying to reconcile their contradictions and absurdities, was finally driven to abandon the whole thing in despair. The ignorance of the champions of Plato must indeed appear rare and precious by comparison, with the fathomless profundity of Augustine, the “giant of learning and erudition”, who scouted the sphericity of the earth, for, if true, it would prevent the antipodes from seeing the Lord Christ when he descended from heaven at the second advent; or of Lactantius, who rejects with pious horror Pliny’s identical theory on the remarkable ground that it would make the trees at the other side of the earth grow and the men walk with their heads downward; or again, of Cosmas-Indicopleustes, whose orthodox system of geography is embalmed in his “Christian topography”; or finally, of Bede, who assured the world that the heaven “is tempered with glacial waters, lest it should be set on fire”, a benign dispensation of Providence, most likely to prevent the radiance of their learning from setting the sky ablaze!
Be this as it may, these resplendent Fathers certainly did borrow their notions of the “spirits of darkness” from the Jewish kabalists and Pagan theurgist, with the difference, however, that they disfigured and outdid in absurdity all that the wildest fancy of the Hindu, Greek, and Roman rabble had ever created. There is not a dev in the Persian Pandaimonion half so preposterous, as a conception, as des Mousseaux’s Incubus revamped from Augustine. Typhon, symbolized as an ass, appears a philosopher in comparison with the devil caught by the Normandy peasant in a keyhole; and it is certainly not Ahriman or the Hindu Vritra who would run away in rage and dismay, when addressed as St. Satan, by a native Luther.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 