User:Mavarin/Echthroi

Echthroi (Εχθροί) is a Greek word meaning "The Enemy" (literally "enemies"). The singular form of the word, Echthros, is used in many versions and translations of the Bible for enemy. Where the word echthroi (enemies) is used in of Romans 5 10 it is passive and means the object of God's enmity. Historically used primarily in connection with biblical and classical subjects, the term has more recently been used to refer to a mythical and biblical group of creatures who want nothing more than to destroy all of creation, most notably in Madeline L'Engle's "Time Quartet". A personification of the forces of impersonalization and nihilism,, they are a form of evil that exists in both the macrocosmic and microcosmic level, in a universe whether everything is interdependent. L'Engle counters this evil primarily with what she calls "Naming", the process of lovingly helping individuals to know and become their true, particular selves. These concepts appear in one form or another in a number of L'Engle's books, as part of her recurring themes of good versus evil, interdependency, and the role of the individual in the cosmic scheme of things.

Appearances
L'Engle's Echthroi first appear in A Wind in the Door, as the supernatural antagonists behind a number of strange and terrible events in the lives of Meg Murry and her family. Meg first becomes aware of their existence in Chapter Two of the book, when a doppleganger of Mr. Jenkins suddenly flies "screaming across the sky," becoming "a slash of nothingness". The "singular cherubim" Proginoskes later identifies what Meg encountered as one of the Echthroi, and takes her to "yesterday" to see the Echthroi tear a rip in the galaxy, annihilating stars in the process. Meg's father, an astrophysicist, has already been called away to investigate such seemingly impossible phenomena. Meg's mother, a microbiologist, is simultaneously investigating an illness in her brother Charles Wallace Murry's mitochondria. The two problems, one in macrocosm the other in microcosm in terms of size, are both caused by the Echthroi. Later the Echtroi again impersonate Mr. Jenkins, and convince the microscopic "farandolae" to act against the interests of their host mitochondrion, nearly killing Charles Wallace in the process. Meg learns that the only way to fight the Echthroi in their attempts to "extinguish" creation is to "Name" whatever is being attacked, filling the void with love and an understanding of the particular entity in its uniqueness.

Charles Wallace again runs afoul of the Echthroi in A Swiftly Tilting Planet. In that book, the Echthroi try to "blow" Charles Wallace off course as he travels in time on the back of a unicorn named Gaudior, landing him in a "projection" of a time in which the Echthroi have won. Again an Echthros impersonates another character, this time Gaudior.

Although the malevolent force in A Wrinkle in Time is referred to as the Black Thing rather than the Echthroi, it is an earlier form of the same basic concept. In that book, which immediately precedes A Wind in the Door in the Time Quartet series, Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin O'Keefe are shown a star giving up its own existence as a star to combat a patch of cosmic darkness, essentially the reverse of what Meg sees with Proginoskes. Evil in that book, directed by the giant brain known as IT, takes the form of anonymity and conformity, similar to the concept of "Un-Naming."

Characteristics
Echthroi are depicted as the forces of "Un-Naming", bent on annihilating not just matter, but knowledge and understanding of the individual, "making people not know who they are". Impersonal and unnamed themselves, they try to convinces Sporos and others that nothing and no one matters but the pleasure of the moment. As Donald R. Hettinga explains, the Echthroi are "fallen angels" and "a kind of personified nihilism, an active evil that is attacking the universe by convincing creatures to deny their importance in a symbiotic creation." Author Calvin Miller refers to the Echthroi as "demonic spirits" that "are always stalking good, making the whole sick, the entire partial, the holy eroded by the contaminated."

As Liam Duncan describes them: "Echthroi desire nothing. They desire Nothing. That is to say, if they got their way, everything would be broken apart, and the pieces be broken apart, and corrupted, and reduced to nothing, until nothing exists. Nothing. Nothing at all. Not even a vacuum, because even a vacuum is Something, if you use your imagination. Nothing at all.  Every victory we win, no matter how insignificant it seems, puts them farther from that goal. And every victory they gain, no matter how tiny, brings them closer."

The suggestion made is that Echthroi are nothing more than personified Oblivion, whose aim is to twist Nature in order to create more of themselves. It is possible that they constitute a metaphor for the potential destructive tendencies in the human mind.

Other Uses
Outside the L'Engle corpus, the words Echthros and Echthroi occur mainly in connection with biblical studies and in classical literature. Aristotle and others classified people that characters in tragedy encounter into philoi (friends and loved ones), echthroi (enemies) and medetoeroi (neithers), with the characters seeking a positive outcome for the first group and the downfall of the second.

The term also appears in the Canto XII of the little-known epic The Purple Island by nineteenth century poet and rector Phineas Fletcher, apparently in the general meaning of enemies.