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It’s been said that the Devil has all the best tunes. If this is true, he likes to keep a conspicuously low profile. While songs of praise for Jesus, God, Krishna, Buddha, the Virgin Mary, and a host of other deities, saints, and semi-deities abound, Satan is seldom properly hymned.

The post The Devil’s best tunes appeared first on OUPblog.

Anton Szandor LaVey was the most outspoken and most notorious apostle of Satan in the twentieth century. On his life before founding the Church of Satan in 1966, LaVey liked to spun wild tales, but he did actually work as a professional and semi-professional musician in the carnival circuit. The High Priest of Satan was fond of bombastic classic music in the Wagnerian mould and popular tunes from the thirties, forties, and fifties, the period in which he himself had been young.

The post Was Anton LaVey serenading Satan in his cover of “Answer Me”? appeared first on OUPblog.

Al Pacino is John Milton. Not John Milton the writer of Paradise Lost, although that is the obvious in-joke of the movie The Devil’s Advocate (1997). No, this John Milton is an attorney and — in what thus might be another obvious in-joke — he is also Satan, the Prince of Darkness. In the movie, he hires a fine young defense attorney, Kevin Lomax (Keanu Reeves), and offers him an escalating set of heinous — and high-profile — cases to try, a set of ever-growing temptations if you will. What will happen to Kevin in the trials to come?

The Devil is a terrifying foe in this film, which should not surprise us. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in the Duino Elegies that “Every angel is terrifying.” We sometimes forget that our devils were angels first. Tales of angels fallen from goodness particularly bother us, and Satan’s rebellion is supposed to have inspired the most terrible of conflicts. In The Prophecy (1995), Simon (Eric Stoltz) describes the conflict in Heaven and its consequences: “I remember the First War, the way the sky burned, the faces of angels destroyed. I saw a third of Heaven’s legion banished and the creation of Hell. I stood with my brothers and watched Lucifer Fall.”

The Doctor Who episode “The Satan Pit” (2006) also retells the story of this conflict. The Doctor (David Tennant) encounters The Beast (voiced by Gabriel Woolf) deep within a planet. The Beast tells The Doctor that he comes from a time “Before time and light and space and matter. Before the cataclysm. Before this universe was created.” In this time before Creation, The Beast was defeated in battle by Good and thrown into the pit, an origin that clearly matches that of the Satan whose legend he is said to have inspired: “The Disciples of the Light rose up against me and chained me in the pit for all eternity.”

A majority of Americans believe in Satan, a personified cosmic force of evil, but why? The Hebrew and Christian testaments say almost nothing about the Devil. As with Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, angels, and other topics related to the afterlife, most of what we know — or believe we know — about Satan comes from human imagination, not from holy scripture.

We have used stories, music, and art to flesh out the scant references to the Devil in the Bible. We find Satan personified in medieval mystery plays and William Langland’s Piers Plowman (ca. 1367), and described in horrifying—and heartbreaking—detail in Dante’s Inferno: “If he was fair as he is hideous now, / and raised his brow in scorn of his creator, / he is fit to be the source of every sorrow.” (Inferno 34.34-36)  We find the Devil represented in the art of Gustave Dore and William Blake, and in our own time, represented graphically in the comics The Sandman, Lucifer, and disguised as “The First of the Fallen” in Hellblazer. We watch Satan prowling the crowds for the entirety of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), and arriving for an earthly visit at the end of Constantine (2005).

And we are terrified. Like him or not, the Devil is the greatest villain of all time. Who else stands for every quality and condition that we claim to despise? Who else helps us to understand why the world contains evil — and why we are ourselves sometimes inclined toward it?

We also work out these questions through characters who are not explicitly Satan, but who embody supernatural or preternatural evil. If writers and artists can be said to create “Christ figures,” then it makes sense that they might also create “Satan figures.” Professor Weston in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra space trilogy, Sauron in The Lord of the Rings trilogy of books and films, Darkseid (the ruler of the hellish planet Apokolips in DC Comics), Lord Voldemort (The Dark Lord of the Harry Potter mythos), and Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter all fit this profile. Such characters — dark, scheming, and because of their tremendous capacity for evil, all but all-powerful — may tell us as much about evil as our stories of Satan do. In fact, Mads Mikkelsen, who plays Lecter in the television series Hannibal, makes that comparison explicit:

“I believe that Hannibal Lecter is as close as you can come to the devil, to Satan. He’s the fallen angel. His motives are not banal reasons, like childhood abuse or junkie parents. It’s in his genes. He finds life is most beautiful on the threshold to death, and that is something that is much closer to the fallen angel than it is to a psychopath. He’s much more than a psychopath, and there is a fascination for us.”

In our consumption of narratives and images of the Devil, we are trying to work out what — if anything — the devil means. Even if we don’t believe in an actual fallen angel who rules this world and contends with God, most of us have come to accept that Satan is an emotionally-satisfying explanation for all that goes wrong in real life. The stories in which Satan chills us prove this beyond doubt. What could be more frightening than Al Pacino’s John Milton plotting the destruction of our hero in The Devil’s Advocate, his schemes only moments away from coming to fruition?

Evil is real, and has real power. We see that in the daily headlines and history books, in our own lives and even in ourselves. To find out where that evil comes from — to understand why human beings do things that are so clearly wrong — perhaps we do need to wrestle with the Devil, even if the only way we encounter him is as a character in a story.

The post Speak of the Devil: Satan in imaginative literature appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Awhile back I watched a great documentary about Dragons on the History Channel. It was different because it explored the scientific and historical findings that lead through civilizations. From Mesopotamia, Babylon, Egypt, Carthage, Scandinavia, China and Japan through the Middle Ages, across the ocean into Mexico with the Olmecs and Aztecs who performed human sacrifice to appease their dragon deity to Native North Americans and present day, the basic concept of the dragon has endured throughout millennia. The first evidence of dragons appeared in Mesopotamia 6000 years ago when the first written records were made. In this myth a good dragon, Marduk, slays the evil dragon, Tiamat, and uses the carcass to create all of the elements necessary for creation of the world. The question is why a dragon? Where did this concept originate? Why not a bear or wolf? Continue reading →

…And THIS came out. Hmmm… I’m not sure about posting this as it doesn’t fit into the over-all cutesy-ness of my posted work as of late, but c’est la vie. I was playing around with line and color and sort of just wanted to do a devil decorating a Christmas tree. Not so clever, I know.  I didn’t work at this all that much so it is what it is: a/the devil decorating a pine tree. But while working on it, this question was in my head as far as a cartoon idea, and I will ask you all: What would Christmas in hell look like? Got a clever cartoon idea for that anyone…? Feel free to share!

In the midst of working on something for The Awl, I returned to Twain’s brilliant riff — from Is Shakespeare Dead? — on his boyhood obsession with Satan. Here it is, for the uninitiated.

When I was a Sunday-school scholar something more than sixty years ago, I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I could about him. I began to ask questions, but my class-teacher, Mr. Barclay the stone-mason, was reluctant about answering them, it seemed to me. I was anxious to be praised for turning my thoughts to serious subjects when there wasn’t another boy in the village who could be hired to do such a thing. I was greatly interested in the incident of Eve and the serpent, and thought Eve’s calmness was perfectly noble. I asked Mr. Barclay if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber. He did not answer my question, but rebuked me for inquiring into matters above my age and comprehension. I will say for Mr. Barclay that he was willing to tell me the facts of Satan’s history, but he stopped there: he wouldn’t allow any discussion of them.

In the course of time we exhausted the facts. There were only five or six of them, you could set them all down on a visiting-card. I was disappointed. I had been meditating a biography, and was grieved to find that there were no materials. I said as much, with the tears running down. Mr. Barclay’s sympathy and compassion were aroused, for he was a most kind and gentle-spirited man, and he patted me on the head and cheered me up by saying there was a whole vast ocean of materials! I can still feel the happy thrill which these blessed words shot through me.

Then he began to bail out that ocean’s riches for my encouragement and joy. Like this: it was “conjectured” — though not established — that Satan was originally an angel in heaven; that he fell; that he rebelled, and brought on a war; that he was defeated, and banished to perdition. Also, “we have reason to believe” that later he did so-and-so; that “we are warranted in supposing” that at a subsequent time he travelled extensively, seeking whom he might devour; that a couple of centuries afterward, “as tradition instructs us,” he took up the cruel trade of tempting people to their ruin, with vast and fearful results; that by-and-by, “as the probabilities seem to indicate,” he may have done certain things, he might have done certain other things, he must have done still other things.

And so on and so on. We set down the five known facts by themselves, on a piece of paper, and numbered it “page 1″; then on fifteen hundred other pieces of paper we set down the “conjectures,” and “suppositions,” and “maybes,” and “perhapses,” and “doubtlesses,” and “rumors,” and “guesses,” and “probabilities,” and “likelihoods,” and “we are permitted to thinks,” and “we are warranted in believings,” and “might have beens,” and “could have beens,” and “must have beens,” and “unquestionablys,” and “without a shadow of doubts” — and behold!

MATERIALS? Why, we had enough to build a biography of Shakespeare!

by Natalie BabbittFSG 1974 Ten little short story gems concerning the Devil himself and his inability to corrupt good souls or fully control bad ones.I stumbled onto this (as with many older titles these days) in an sales alcove at my local library. Discarded, withdrawn, and donated books are in constant rotation, and with prices between twenty-five cents and a dollar it's impossible to resist.

If you weren't around last year you might have missed the fact that the MotherReader blog enjoys hosting a yearly 48-Hour Book Challenge. Here are the details as she states them.

So the chosen weekend is June 8–10, 2007.

Here are the basic guidelines to start. I am open to suggestions if you’ve got them, or ask me questions so I can establish a related rule. Here goes:

1. The weekend is June 8–10, 2007. Read and blog for any 48-hour period within the Friday-to-Monday-morning window. Start no sooner than 7:00 a.m. on Friday the eighth and end no later than 7:00 a.m. Monday. So, go from 7:00 p.m. Friday to 7:00 p.m. on Sunday... or maybe 7:00 a.m. Saturday to 7:00 a.m. Monday works better for you. But the 48 hours do need to be in a row.

2. The books should be about fifth-grade level and up. Adult books are fine, especially if any adult book bloggers want to play. If you are generally a picture book blogger, consider this a good time to get caught up on all those wonderful books you’ve been hearing about. No graphic novels. I’m not trying to discriminate, I’m just trying to make sure that the number of books and page counts mean the same thing to everyone.

3. It’s your call as to how much you want to put into it. If you want to skip sleep and showers to do this, go for it (but don’t stand next to me). If you want to be a bit more laid back, fine. But you have to put something into it or it’s not a challenge.

4. The length of the reviews are not an issue. You can write a sentence, paragraph, or a full-length review.

5. For promotion/solidarity purposes, let your readers know when you are starting the challenge with a specific entry on that day. When you write your final summary on Monday, let that be the last thing you write that day, so for one day, we’ll all be on the same page, so to speak.

6. Your final summary needs to clearly include the number of books read, the approximate hours you spent reading/reviewing, and any other comments you want to make on the experience. It needs to be posted no later than noon on Monday, June 11.

7. Sign up in today’s comments. You’re welcome to post the challenge on your site to catch the bloggers that come your way but don’t come mine. Point them to today’s post to sign up. On Friday, June 8, I’ll have a starting-line post where you can sign in to say you’re officially starting the challenge.

I’ll work on some prizes for most books read, most hours spent, and most pages read (if it isn’t the same winner as most books read). Last year I allowed an alternate, personal goal challenge, but this year the logistics of that might kill me. If you want to play along, but not really do the Challenge, that’s fine, but no prizes. I’ll have a 48 Hour Book Challenge Solidarity Post to list your personal weekend book challenges.