Demons in the Study House — BT Kiddushin 29b — #11

Abaye heard that [Rav Acha bar Yaakov] was coming [to study in his study house]. There was a certain demon in the Abaye’s study house and when two people arrived together—even in the daytime—they were tormented [by the demon]. [Abaye] said to [his students]: Do not invite [Rav Acha] to be a guest [in your home]. Perhaps a miracle will occur. [Rav Acha] went and slept in the study house. A seven-headed dragon-serpent appeared to him. With every bow he made [in prayer], one of its heads fell off. The following day [Rav Acha] said to [Abaye]: Had not a miracle occurred, you would have endangered me!

INTRODUCTION
Our bizarre story is preceded by a baraita (Mishnaic era teaching) that tells us that if a man has insufficient financial resources to educate both himself and his son, he takes precedent over the son. R. Yehudah, however, expresses the opinion that if the son is quicker and more intelligent, the son’s education should take priority. Gemara cites, as an example, Rav Acha bar Yaakov, who sent his son, R. Yaakov, to study in Abaye’s house of study but upon learning that his son did not excel in his studies, Rav Acha told him to stay home and went in his stead to study with Abaye.

COMMENTARY
For those still in the Halloween spirit, you’ll enjoy knowing that Abaye’s study house is haunted by a demon. Babylonian culture was rife with demons and spirits, and the Babylonian Talmud reflects the belief that largely invisible demons and spirits present a ubiquitous and continual threat to decent people: they inhabit the air, water, trees, roofs, and even privies. One is most vulnerable to malicious demons at nighttime and when alone. This is precisely Rav Acha’s situation in Abaye’s study house. The demon who haunts Abaye’s study house is particularly virulent: he threatens the students even when accompanied by a friend, and even in daytime.

Abaye instructs his students not to offer Rav Acha home hospitality, although tradition and courtesy require that they should. Abaye knows that without lodging for the night, Rav Acha will stay in the study house, where he will root out the demon by virtue of his famous and outstanding piety. As predicted, Rav Acha spends the night alone in the study house where he is confronted by a seven-headed dragon-serpent. Rav Acha’s piety to the rescue! He spends the night in prayer; each time he falls to his knees, one of the seven heads falls off. His genuflections are spiritual fencing lunges against the demon and his words are decapitating swords. Rav Acha vanquishes the demon—just as Abaye hoped. Recognizing a setup, Rav Acha is understandably annoyed with Abaye for knowingly placing him in a dangerous situation. He attributes his success to a miracle, that is, to God’s intervention.

Ancient cultures are not alone in their fascination with malicious spirits, be they demons, dybbuks, or dragons. Carl Jung wrote about the Shadow archetype of the unconscious mind, a mosaic of basic animal instincts and repressed ideas and desires that includes the best and the worst within us. He suggested that the Shadow appears in dreams and visions (primarily nighttime phenomena), often taking the form of a demon, dragon, snake, or some dark and frightening figure, a projection of what we suppress or dislike in our animal nature. We cannot eject evil from our psyches and our lives, so we project it outward onto imagined external monsters. If we view the story of Rav Acha through a Jungian lens, a fascinating image appears.

On one level, when Rav Acha finds himself alone in the dark, his human compulsions and inclinations arise and manifest in the form of a seven-headed dragon-serpent, threatening to destroy his intention to study Torah. He disempowers (kills) his Shadow dragon, his dark animal instincts, by immersing himself in prayer. But what about Abaye? There is something inherently contradictory here. Abaye wants Rav Acha to rid the study house of the demon that haunts Abaye and his students—by teaching them to repress their animal instincts through prayer?—yet in telling his students to deny hospitality to Rav Acha, Abaye gives in to the demon by failing to do what is right (extend home hospitality) and by placing him in a dangerous situation.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER AND DISCUSS

1. Jung wrote about the connection between the Shadow and artistic creativity: at times an artist can see “…the figures that people the night-world—spirits, demons, and gods; he feels the secret quickening of human fate by a superhuman design…he catches a glimpse of the psychic world that terrifies the primitive and is at the same time his greatest hope.”(1) If the demon is a projection of what Abaye and his students dislike about themselves, how might they—and we—come to terms with our “demons” and put them to constructive, and even artistic, use?
2. Concerning the connection Jung makes between evil and artistic creativity, Rollo May writes: “…evil can’t be put out of human life, as Jung noted that one could not erase the Shadow. And if one tries to put it out, then the rage is put out with it and the capacities to create are thrown aside with the so-called evil.”(2) May then quotes Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust: “I am that which always does evil which turns into good” (Part I, Lines 1335-37). We might be inclined to quote a story from the Talmud which tells of a time that the people were able to immobilize the Evil Inclination and, as a result, all generativity came to a grinding halt, threatening the future of life on earth (BT Yoma 69b). Do you think Rav Acha’s decapitating the dragon is meant to connote “erasing” the demon, or seizing control of him and using his powers for creativity and good (note what he says to Abaye)?

 (1)  Jung quoted by Christian Gaillard in “The Arts” in The Handbook of Jungian Psychology, ed. Renos K. Papadopoulos, p.360.
(2)  “Creativity and Evil,” in Facing Evil: Confronting the Dreadful Power Behind Genocide, Terrorism, and Cruelty, ed. Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, pp. 73-4.