for Jim R. Lewis, my advisor — in memoriam
A friend of the Devil is a friend of mine… You’ve got to know who he actually is, first.
Western folk tradition says that the Devil is Satan, who was once an angel named Lucifer, who got pissy taking orders from Yahweh and Saint Michael and then revolted. This got him cast down from Heaven to Hell, and then he went from being angelic middle management to the King of Evil, the Dark Lord, and the Devil.
A backasswards promotion, really. But it’s also a folk story so powerful in its telling through generations that our culture accepts it with no idea what its origin actually is. Frankly, it’s a pretty universal good versus evil mythic trope, but certainly not Biblical or canonical.
Satan is not the Devil. Different character. You can turn the Bible up and down all kinds of ways, there is no Devil in there. (The Devil is also not the entity at the Crossroads, but that’s another entry.) Satan shows up as an angel in the Book of Job. That’s his name. He’s not fallen, he’s busy doing prosecutorial work for God, and he’s the one that bets God that his devotees only love him because he showers them with benefits, and they’d all lose faith if he started making their lives a living hell. So God– not Satan– picks poor Job as a test case… A Jewish friend of mine says the angel Satan is like God’s prosecuting attorney. He’s got a job to do to keep people — and God– in line. He’s the CPS agent who tells the codependent parent who is overfeeding their child to morbid obesity out of misguided love that they need to stop, or they’ll kill their kid.
Christians, who have appropriated this story from the Jews, wrestle with this; they are raised to never disobey God. Not so in Jewish culture; there is a long history of prophets and others in the Bible arguing with God and getting him to rethink his actions in the scriptures; it’s to explain that being engaged with the Divine means that you question constantly as you walk the path — and you aren’t just accepting the loudest voice in the room as the truth just because that’s easier.
The Devil is a trickster, troublemaker, crazy wisdom teacher, destroyer of illusions, king of bad-shit-happens-to-all-people. He is an archetype and a mythic character in nearly all world traditions. Christian colonization of Pagan gods formed him into the horned, cloven footed rascal that appears on lye cans and Run Devil Run oil bottles. He’s feared because people who don’t want to face reality, or their own base and instinctual nature, are confronted with those things when confronted with him. Accept him, surrender to him? “The Devil made me do it.” Well, he’s about agency, too — so that’s why none of us are fooled by that line. The Devil also forces you to face your pain and the lies you tell yourself about who you think you are.
Some people accept the lessons. Some sit and stew in their own juices and never recover because the lies they tell themselves are too comforting, seductive, or heavy. It’s one of the reasons there are two figures chained at the feet of the Devil tarot card…
A short foray into Jewish magical learning taught me about demons in that culture’s folklore. Demons aren’t enormous terrifying monsters that rise from a crack in the earth to chase you down. Demons instead are tiny and invisible, and swarm around us constantly, getting stuck in our hair and noses and ears like walking through a patch of damn gnats at your campsite. If we could see them we would all go insane. This is why Jewish tradition developed so many purification rituals, especially among physicians, in ancient times. Yeah, gentiles thought that was all weird and foreign… but people didn’t die nearly as frequently in the care of the Jewish physicians as they did with the others. (It appears cleaning off demons also by default cleaned off what was later found to be the actual problem: microbiological infection.)
Want to check for demons in your home by Jewish tradition? Put a dish filled with ashes next to your bed before going to sleep. In the morning you will see eety beety bird feet prints all in the particulate… We inhale demons constantly. We consume them. They consume us. Make them your allies rather than your enemies. They become part of you.
A warped or unformed anima in men is often referred to as the mother-lover; a man who is still a psychological boy projects his unfulfilled needs for his mother onto every woman in his life. It’s why there are so many man-children in the world — so many Peter Pans and so too many women willing to be their Wendys.
A warped or unformed animus in women is called the demon lover. Her need for a protector, sensuous life, sexual desire and pleasure is given to any man who initially invigorates her, but then exhausts her energy — because by giving in to what he presents himself to be, she is actually letting him feed on her.
If the alternative is an unfelt, pleasureless, passionless life… is that really so horrible?…
Mary McLane, an early Canadian feminist author, wrote her first book at the age of 19, I Await the Devil’s Coming. I learned of it when a scholar at the UMAAR conference a few years ago did a presentation on teaching it in a course on religious feminism. MacLane writes in a vivid and radical way about how she believes the Devil would make an excellent husband; passionate, unafraid, and lusty. And she luridly describes her own desires and refusal to be tied to the social norms forced on women, and the boring men and man-children of her time. It was shocking in its day to read that the Devil would arrive to be her lover and her liberator.
I think it would be a kick in the pants for doing a book group on this old classic. I’m looking forward to breaking past the discussions of what was shocking in 1901 and instead get into the gristle of what the urge for the Devil means. I’ll bet there is much truth to be gleaned about author and for the reader, and how, yet again, women’s passion and desire has to be articulated as wicked, evil, or demonic…
The Devil card in the tarot is a puzzle to unpack.
If you are doing a reading or a ritual involving the archangels in the tarot, you lay out Judgment (Gabriel), Temperance (Raphael) the Lovers (Uriel) and the Devil: he’s the archangel Cassiel. He is winged like the other angels, and while rendered in the manner of Eliphas Levi’s Baphomet, he has the symbol of Saturn in his raised right hand. Cassiel is the Saturnine archangel. He is the archangel of loneliness and tears; his ability to intercede on behalf of mankind is restricted. This is why he observes and cries for the world. A lot.
The Devil card fools people. Querents are so preoccupied with focusing on the oogly boogly Baphomet figure in the center that they don’t look at the subjects at his feet… which is who the card is really about.
Sure, they are chained at the feet of the Devil and it appears that they are suffering… but look closer…
The chains are loose enough around their necks that they can slip them off and walk away anytime. They stay because they don’t see that they are able to do so. They believe that they are trapped when they actually aren’t; their imprisonment and enslavement are illusory. They are in a monkey trap that they can escape when they let go of what they think comforts them and protects them and defines them, when all of that is what actually shackles them…
I miss my demon lover. So much.
My heart and head ache knowing he is in pain and unable to see the way out of it yet. I miss the fiery touch, the ecstasy, the surrender… and I’d happily burn up part of myself to hold him again and smell the brimstone in his hair. That is not a deal with the Devil. That is a beautiful absorbing of truth, humanity and a life burning with desire. It’s to feel alive.
But he’s submerged by pain and suffering right now, staring at the Devil card — the card of the trickster-teacher, the angelic questioner, the force of passion, the weeping archangel, who can’t reach over and loose the binding — and he’s not really seeing it.
Those chains you are wearing are yours, love… not the Devil’s. You are not being punished, you are not trapped. See them for what they are, feel them, know them… and then you will lift them off and you will walk away free…
And then you can say the Devil made you do it.
Rose in the Retort 