Posts Tagged ‘Satan’
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”*…
Today is, of course, All Hallows Eve. Let us pause to consider the patron “saint” of the occasion. From Ross MacFarlane…
“While the idea of God has received much attention from philosophers and progressive theologians, its counterpart, the dark figure of the Evil One, has been much neglected”. So begins The History of the Devil, wherein this perceived wrong is to be righted by Paul Carus [see here], a self-described “theologian of science”.
Although an unfamiliar name now, at the end the nineteenth century Carus was hailed for his attempts to “conciliate science and religion”. He also played a key role in the introduction of Buddhist thought to the United States, to which he emigrated from his native Germany in the mid-1880s. A prolific author — The History of the Devil was one of the seventy-five books he published in his lifetime — Carus also edited two philosophical journals (The Open Court and The Monist), through which he published some of the most notable thinkers of his day.
His work reflected the intellectual climate of the times. Educated at Strasburg and then Tübingen, he used rigorous historical techniques such as textual analysis in his comparative studies of religion and mythology. Carus was also conceptually influenced, like many other writers of the period, by the ideas of Edward Tylor, an English anthropologist, who applied Darwinian principles to the evolution of the social world. Carus’ view that “the belief in magic is a natural phase in the evolution of mankind” closely aligned with Tylor’s theory that societies evolve from savagery to barbarism and finally to civilisation.
The History of Devil, then, brings the same sensibility to bear on the Evil One. The approach is broad, sweeping, and comparative. “The Gnostic Christian view of Doomsday and Hell”, Carus tells us, “embodies many ancient traditions of Egyptian, Indian, and Persian mythology and foreshadows at the same time the later Roman Catholic view as represented in mediaeval art, finding its poetical consummation in Dante’s Divina Comedia”. It is also inherently Tylorean: “Demonolatry, or Devil-worship, is the first stage in the evolution of religion, for we fear the bad, not the good”, he declares.
Carus pays particular attention to the era of European witch trials, arguing that beliefs in witchcraft and the selling of souls marked “a new period in the evolution of mankind”. So too was their later decline, which “ceased naturally with the ascendancy of science”, a development that Carus sees as interlinked with the rise of Protestantism. Indeed, in his interpretation, the Reformation played a major role in how the Devil was understood, with the notion of evil changing from a real-life personification to a more abstract notion or principle. By the nineteenth century, the Devil’s powers had declined from their medieval peak, with “his main office . . . that of a general mischief-worker in the universe”; a figure of fun rather than of fear, he had now become a laughable character in folktales, easily outwitted by old women and children.
For Carus, the changing status of the Devil was intimately linked to a similar transformation in perceptions of the Christian God — less of a regular interventionist and more the background orchestrator of a harmonious universe…
… In this changing conception of Christianity, Carus sees civilised society as one where science alters but does not replace religion, “passing out of the old stage of magic into the higher stage of a direct comprehension of facts . . . as astrology changed into astronomy, so the religion of miracles will give way to the religion of science”. In other words, “faith in the objective authority of truth is the next step in the religious evolution of mankind.”
Although The History of the Devil is easy to critique from the standpoint of the twenty-first century — how to explain the witch hunts that took place in Protestant lands during and after the Reformation? — its attempts to show the complex nature of the development of religious beliefs still hold relevance to our contemporary world. The book also anticipates later, better-known ideas: Carus’ schema for the growth of a sceptical worldview — where excessive religious faith is beaten back by the rationality of science — prefigures in part Max Weber’s thesis on the “Disenchantment of the World”. If nothing else, The History of the Devil deserves attention as a work of comparative scholarship as such. Carus builds his argument in a chronological fashion with the help of over three hundred illustrations. Highlighting similarities and differences between gods and goddesses across different belief systems, he ranges across history, philosophy and theology, providing a more ambitious work of comparative mythology than the volume’s title suggests.
Finally, the book reveals the mind and character of a humane and thoughtful individual. Carus is nothing if not an optimist in his belief that science and religion can exist in harmony, and he often exhibits wry humour about evil and the human condition. He thus concludes The History of the Devil with a suggestion that a little devilish mischief may go a long way in achieving a happy life:
If we took away from life its satire, jokes, and other “devilries,” it would lose part of its most fragrant zest, and if constructing a man consisting of virtues only, would not that fellow be the most unbearable bore in the world, wearisome beyond description? For it is a sprinkling of petty vices that makes even a great man human. A mere ethical machine would neither be attractive nor arouse our sympathies.
“Paul Carus’ The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (1899),” from @publicdomainrev.bsky.social.
* Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2
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As we deal with the devil, we might recall that on this date– Halloween– in 2005, Gary Estrada, met his goal visiting and taking the ride at Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom Haunted Mansion 999 times. Estrada had begun riding in January of that year and finished on Halloween in just ten months. Why 999 times? Because that is how many “happy haunts” are said to live there.
“Not in utter loneliness to live / Myself at last did to the Devil give!”*…
With an excerpt from his new book, Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain, Ed Simon on “the most important story ever told”– the story of Humanity’s transactional relationship with evil…
The legend of the Devil’s contract is the most alluring, the most provocative, the most insightful, the most important story ever told. It concerns a humanity strung between Heaven and Hell, the saintly and the satanic; how a man could trade his soul for powers omnipotent, signing a covenant with the Devil so that he could briefly live as a god before being pulled down to Hell. Frequently associated with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, that Elizabethan play wasn’t the origin of that myth, but his is certainly a sterling example of that eternal script. Yet long before that Renaissance play and long afterwards, we can find the inky traces of Faust’s damned signature in a multitude of works both high and low, canonical and popular. More disturbing than that is the way that the Devil’s hoof-prints can be found across the wide swatch of history, in our willingness to embrace power and engage in exploitation, to summon self-interestedness and to conjure cruelty…
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… Tamburlaine the Great’s iconoclasm and The Jew of Malta’s irreverence aside, no work of sacred heresy in Marlowe’s oeuvre is as profound as Doctor Faustus. His quisling scholar selling his birthright for the pottage of trickery and illusion may be modernity’s operative metaphor, but Marlowe was hardly the originator of the myth. As you’ll read in the chapters ahead, Marlowe adapted the historical Johann Faust from German folkloric tradition, though the myth of a contract with Satan existed centuries before that unfortunate alchemist first crossed potassium nitrate with sulfur. Nor of course was Marlowe’s rendition the final word, as thousands of permutations of the basic story have been produced over the half-millennium, from Goethe to the musical Damn Yankees, Thomas Mann to the Dixie-fried pablum of the execrable Charlie Daniels Band number “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” High culture like Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8; pop culture from the comic book Ghost Rider to the Jack Black flick Tenacious D in the Pick of Destiny.
“The figure of Faust is—after Christ, Mary, and the Devil—the single most popular character in the history of Western Christian culture,” writes Jeffrey Burton Russell in his classic Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World. And of those characters, Faust is the most fully human to us, in his arrogance and his failure, his negotiations and his capitulations, in the whole litany of abuse which the cankered soul is capable of inflicting upon itself. Russell’s contention is far from hyperbole, and amending the word “character” to “narrative,” I’d say that there are few archetypal scripts in our culture as essential as the legend of a man selling his soul to the Devil. Thousands of works of literature and film, music and art, grapple with the bargain whereby somebody trades what’s most human for power or wealth, influence or knowledge. Only the myth of Adam and Eve being cast out of Eden competes with Faust in terms of influence, and that story is arguably an early variation on the Devil’s contract…
… though it is ostensibly a history, and this narrative moves onward rather chronologically, I prefer to think of the story it tells as being about a character who is outside of time, who lives parallel to past, present, and future. An eternal story. Because what this book is concerned with are the implications— culturally, politically, theologically—of these highly symbolically charged narratives concerning the abjuration of a soul, of the ceding of what’s intrinsic to us, of the capitulations and negotiations which make up any failed life, which is to say every life. More than a history, then, Devil’s Contract is an account of what it means to be human in all of our failings.
Increasingly an account of humanity right now. For all the legend’s archaicism, the muttered Latin and the alchemical conjuration, Faust’s story has always been estimably modern, perhaps the first modern story. Unlike Adam and Eve, with their inscrutable Bronze Age story composed in an idiom so ancient and foreign that centuries of theologians have disagreed on what the implications of each facet of the tale might mean, the details in the Faust legend are inescapably of our time. This is, after all, the story of a contract. The dénouement of most versions of the Faust story involves the signing of a legally binding document, an experience foreign to the authors of Genesis but replete in our own lives, whether interacting with human resources or clicking on an agreement with our phone company. Faust’s tale may deal in the numinous and the transcendent, but it’s also about bureaucracy and paperwork, our contemporary hell and its sacrament, respectively. We recognize Faust in a manner that no character in the Bible can ever be our contemporary…
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… Marlowe staged his play at the very beginning of what is increasingly being called the Anthropocene, the geological epoch in which humanity was finally able to impose its will (in an almost occult manner) upon the earth. There are costs to any such contract, as the wisdom of the legend has it, so that it’s worth considering after five centuries of human domination of the planet that we might now be facing our own collective appointment at Deptford. We seem to finally be facing the final act, the apocalyptic tenor of our times, from climate change to nuclear brinkmanship making the continued survival of humanity an open question, our sad predicament the result of hubris, and greed, and vainglory. It may be appropriate to rechristen this age the Faustocene. Because whether or not the Devil is real, his effects in the world are. When it comes to “truth” and “facts,” the two words are not synonymous, and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if I could make out the smoke of some devilish chimera beyond the neon-line of the Rose Theater, deep within a darkness so all-encompassing that not a squib of light is capable of escaping…
“A Deal With the Devil: What the Age-Old Faustian Bargain Reveals About the Modern World” in @lithub.
See also: “You Are Equal To The Spirit You Understand,” Nathan Gardels‘ consideration of the lessons in Goethe’s Faust, in @NoemaMag.
* Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
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As we reconsider our contracts, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that slavery was abolished in the British Empire, as the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 came into force (though it remained legal in the possessions of the East India Company until the passage of the Indian Slavery Act, 1843).
“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization”*…
The phrase confuses me. I was born in California. My mom was born in New York. “Go back where you came from.” Um, okay. I mean, I was headed home anyways. My house is just a few blocks away.
I grew up in a mostly non-Asian city, so I used to hear the phrase sometimes. Kids like to pick on the one who looks a little different. But these days, when I hear an adult say it to another adult, it catches me off guard. It doesn’t make sense.
You traverse an American’s family tree, and eventually you find an immigrant. And most of the time, you don’t have to go back that far.
So … what if everyone went back where they came from?
Find at at Nathan Yau‘s “If We All Left to ‘Go Back Where We Came From’.”
* Gandhi (who also observed, “No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.”)
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As we stir the melting pot, we might recall that today is the Feast Day of Lucifer– more properly, of St. Lucifer of Caligari. At least, it’s his feast day in Sardinia, where he’s venerated. Lucifer, who was a 4th century bishop fierce in his opposition to Arianism, is considered by some elsewhere to have been a stalwart (if minor) defender of the orthodoxy; but by more to have been an obnoxious fanatic.
“Lucifer” was in use at the time as a translation of the the Hebrew word, transliterated Hêlêl or Heylel (pron. as HAY-lale), which means “shining one, light-bearer.” It had been rendered in Greek as ἑωσφόρος (heōsphoros), a name, literally “bringer of dawn,” for the morning star. The name “Lucifer” was introduced in St. Jerome’s Latin translation of the Bible, the Vulgate, roughly contemporaneously with St. Lucifer. But the positive spin of Lucifer of Caligari’s name was, even in it’s day, in tension with the received idea of “Lucifer”; the conflation of “Lucifer” with an altogether evil “Satan” had begun centuries earlier.
Indeed, Satan had undergone a pretty profound transition: “Satan” is from a Hebrew word, “Saithan,” meaning adversary or enemy; in original Jewish usage (see the book of Job); but Satan is the adversary, not of God, but of mankind; i.e., the angel charged by God with the task of proving mankind an unworthy creation. Thus Satan was originally not in opposition to God, but doing His will.
Later– during the Second Temple Period, when Jews were living in the Achaemenid Empire, and Judaism was heavily influenced by Zoroastrianism— the concept of an evil power ruling an underground domain of punishment for the wicked became fixed in doctrine (mirroring Angra Mainyu, the Zoroastrian god of evil, darkness, and ignorance). Over time, elements of the Graeco-Roman god Pluto/Vulcan/Hephaestus, the Underworld, & various aspects of Nordic/Teutonic mythology also made their way into the Jewish, then Christian, understandings of Satan and his realm.
St. Lucifer of Calgari
Satan doing God’s work: The Examination of Job (c. 1821) by William Blake
“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever”*…
In A System of Elocution, with Special Reference to Gesture, to the Treatment of Stammering, and Defective Articulation (1846), Andrew Comstock set out to illustrate the proper gestures to adopt when public speaking. Comstock emloyed a figure “acting out” a section from Milton’s Paradise Lost, in which Satan, expelled from Heaven and finding himself in Hell, delivers a speech to awaken his legions…
A physician and professor of elocution at the Vocal and Polyglot Gymnasium in Philadelphia, Comstock was hugely influential in the burgeoning science of elocution in mid-nineteenth-century America. Among other questionable creations, he invented his own phonetic alphabet to improve the speech of his pupils, an alphabet which was also used to transcribe documents, including the New Testament.
More at “Speech of Satan to his Legions… (with Gestures).”
* Winston Churchill
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As we e-nun-ci-ate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1921 that Jane Heap And Margaret Anderson were sentenced by a federal court. Heap and Anderson were publishers of The Little Review. In 1918, they received a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses from their mutual friend Ezra Pound, and undertook to serialize it in their magazine. Ulysses ran in the periodical– which also published Pound, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, William Butler Yeats, Sherwood Anderson, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Malcolm Cowley, Marcel Duchamp, Ford Madox Ford, Emma Goldman, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, Francis Picabia, Carl Sandburg, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Arthur Waley, and William Carlos Williams– until 1920, when the U.S. Post Office seized and burned four issues of the magazine and charged Anderson and Heap with obscenity. At the conclusion of the trial, in 1921, the women were fined $100 and and forced to discontinue the serialization.
I may not know art, but…
The good folks at Metaphilm (“enjoying the late-night conversation about—you know—what the movie ‘really’ means”) invoke the spirit of their patron saint Robert Bresson to serve up an on-going series of essays that decode (“we don’t review, we interpret”).
Your correspondent has enjoyed entries ranging from…
Sympathy for the Devil
Dorothy Sayers and the American Faust Film
How a British Detective Novelist Can Help Us Understand an American Film Obsession
to…
Knight and Day vs. Inception
More Than This
Knight and Day delivers all the profundity that Inception only promises
But perhaps no one entry has been as impactful as Galvin P. Chow’s (in)famous reinterpretation of David Fincher’s martial masterpiece…
Fight Club
The Return of Hobbes
Hobbes is reborn as Tyler to save “Jack” (a grown-up Calvin) from the slough of un-comic despair
And lest readers think that criticism is an empty exercise, with no meaningful influence on the field that it surveys, consider GorillaMask’s illustration of Chow’s thesis: I am Jack’s Calvin and Hobbes…
(Special Calvin and Hobbes bonus: Michael “Bing” Yingling’s Calvin and Hobbes, the Search Engine… tres cool!)
As we renew our subscriptions to Cahiers du Cinéma, we might recall that it was on this date in 1536 that monk, physician, humanist scholar, and writer Francois Rabelais was absolved by Pope Paul III of apostasy and allowed to get on with his work, both medical and literary. Rabelais’ influential (and oft-imitated) satiric masterpiece, Gargantua and Pantagruel (five books, 1532-52) is a mock-quest… with the emphasis decidedly on the “mock”: the “prize” sought being at times the ideal toilet paper, at times the wisdom of the Holy Bottle.
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