Appendix H, The Demonology of the Shakespearean play, Macbeth.

 

The Demonology of the Shakespearean play, Macbeth. 

"Where have you been sister? Killing swine."--Witches, Act. I

The first scene of Macbeth and the Three Witches.

The story of Macbeth begins on a fresh battlefield where vultures, and maybe crows, gather to pick tasty bits of flesh from the rotting bodies of dead soldiers--the spoils of war. What is implied is a demon enters one of the birds feeding on the corpses, and then appears as the first witch, the Prophesier. She lies on the ground like a resting crow when the film begins, and the other two witches de-sublimate within her mind, and she begins to speak with her two demonic sisters, "Where have you been sister?" And one of the sister answers, "Killing swine," meaning starting wars of greed and power all over the earth.

The possessed Prophesier tells her sister, "I want to show you something..." the demon sister immediately demands, "Show me! Show me!" and like a bird, the Prophesier lifts up her left foot proudly holding the amputated thumb of a sailor of fortune--a tasty battlefield carrion snack. 

*Within mythic thought everything, like pain or fear, are transferable substances based on symbolic substitution. The Prophesier is not pretending to be an allegorical crow, but is a crow.

The demons now hear a drum and sense the Thane (a royal official) from the city of Glamis, Macbeth, is coming. The Three Demons prepare their plan for Macbeth--to stimulate his greed and lust for power so that he destroys himself. Spiritual demons can only suggest, possessed humans have agency of action.

"Like a sieve as a sail (a sail that holds no wind), and like a rat without a tail (rats need a tail for balance to climb), I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do. I will drain him dry as hay! Sleep! Shall neither night nor day (from a restless conscience) hanging on his penthouse lid, he shall live a man-- FORBID!  Weary sev’n-nights nine times nine (counting her victim's sleepless nights)...Squawking, squawking...."

The Third Witch becomes a crow, howling, shaking, and flapping her wings! The demon crow Prophesier drapes herself in a robe: the required demonic ritual charms have been said. Rite comes before myth. These three sisters, imperfect speakers as they are, wait for Macbeth to tell him their strange intelligence, or mythical intuition. The demon possessed Witches of Macbeth always tell the truth, but greed blinds the hearer and they misinterpret reality. 

“It is a dreadful saying that the gods blind those whom they want to ruin…but who are these gods? They are the evil instincts that are in every nation with whose help the Nazis came to power…God opens the eyes of those whom he wants to save, however terrible this awakening may be.”-- “Against The Third Reich,” Paul Tillich’s Wartime Addresses to Nazi Germany 1942 to D-Day 1944 (pdf.) p.149, passim.

Shakespeare wrote his play "Macbeth" from reading the political scandals of his times that actually happened and the Christian King James I, praised him for the play in 1606 A.D. On the other hand, the Shakespearean actor Orson Welles did the same in his film "CitizenKane" (1941), but William Randolph Hearst and the U.S. government blacklisted him until his death.

Since American Christians hate Jesus so much and embrace Christian Nationalism instead, Macbeth is a good myth to re-tell in this time of Empire War Fever. 

The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021) by Joel Coen

*For more on mythic symbolic form see Ernest Cassirer’s “Philosophy of Symbolic Form, Mythical Thought Vol. 2” (1955)(pdf.).