[extracted from http://www.metroactive.com/features/satan.html ] MetroActive Features Satan Doll -- The devil is making a comeback on screen and stage -- but, really, he never left By Richard von Busack Satan is having an unusually busy time lately, turning up in one of the year's best movies, The Usual Suspects, in addition to cameos in Tales From the Hood and The Prophecy--and possibly Seven, depending on your theological bent. The devil has also satanically inspired one of the year's best records, Randy Newman's Faust, and religious historian Elaine Pagels has written a new scholarly biography of Old Scratch (The Origin of Satan; Random House). If Satan didn't have so much good taste, he'd be on the chat shows, demurely turning aside both the backhanded praise of Letterman and the fury of Oprah's choir. In the meantime, the devil is up to his usual tasks: haunting preschools, luring teenagers to sex and suicide, influencing the mass media, supporting abortion clinics, and involving himself in any number of churches that you, the reader, may not like. Pop culture, as always, delves into what people think as opposed to what they're supposed to think. Or, as Kierkegaard wrote, "An unconscious relationship is more powerful than a conscious one." The presence of the devil in the popular art of skeptics shows his power to evoke fright, or at least interest, even among the sophisticated. Carried away with his own rhetoric, Milton accidentally made him the hero of Paradise Lost--and popular art has followed suit. What was the poet thinking, writing something like "It is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven"? It's the motto of the romantic era. All of those elegant villains and heroes smelling of brimstone like Dracula and Heathcliff carry traces of Satan in them. So do bards like Byron and Baudelaire, titillated by deviltry even as they denied religion, admiring the devil who dares to ask questions, even of He who cannot be questioned. As an engaging figure in art, Satan is always a pleasure to watch and hear and laugh about--so thrilling, so dashing, so unfailing in his ability to scare away bores. In movies, he's such a sardonic wit that many of the screen's great villains have either played him or longed to do so. In operas or musical comedies, he dominates the action, like the peerless symbol of rebellion he is. The Intimate Enemy But there's another devil besides the great Satan of literature, stage, screen and hot-sauce bottle label: a mysterious spirit whose opposition begins in the service of the Lord, and who, even after rebellion, does God's bidding thoroughly. Whatever shudders Satan wrings out of the studio audience, he serves his master by punishing the evil and ushering the ungodly to the just desserts they somehow missed on earth. Satan, as Pagels (who also wrote Adam, Eve, and the Serpent) notes, began as "the intimate enemy," the devil you know. At the end of her The Origin of Satan, it's clear that Satan, who started as the embodiment of turncoats, was transformed into an exterior, foreign force who lures people to their doom. Pagels outlines how this spirit began as God's agent provocateur trying to persuade Job to give up his faith. But even in hazing Job, Satan is following God's directions explicitly. As Neil Forsyth put it in his 1987 study, The Old Enemy, the early Satan was "a shady and necessary member of the Politburo." While earlier accounts of Jehovah (such as the book of Isaiah) have God stating that he created both good and evil, the problem of God's responsibility for evil creates a need for a God of Evil, a need that Satan fulfills. Throughout the Old Testament, Satan takes the names of various gods to whom the Israelites were held in thrall at one time or another: Astaroth, or Astarte, is also known as Ishtar; Baal's name is the source for Beelzebub. The land of the Jews was invaded again and again, which is the reason for the lamentations and prayers for revenge in the Old Testament. Judea was part of the Roman Empire by the time of the birth of Jesus, and there were some among the hereditary Jewish rulers who had been lured by the cultural and political treasures Greco-Roman civilization offered. The Empire brought an armed peace in a part of the world where fighting has never been rare, and even some self-rule for the Jewish leaders. The elusive good side of the Roman reign was ending by the time Jesus reached adulthood. The Roman governor Pontius Pilate was notorious as what you could call a crucifying-judge. Meanwhile, in Rome, the maniac emperors Caligula and later Nero had decreed themselves gods, and intended to be worshipped in all parts of the Empire, including Judea, much to the horror of the Jews. Jesus was influenced enough by the revolutionary Essenes to be baptized by John, an Essene. The Essenes were monks who avoided contact with the Romans and other foreigners, held their goods in common and practiced celibacy. Much history of Satan, or the Prince of Darkness, was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, unearthed in the ruins of the Essene community of Qumran, Israel, in 1947. Even if there hadn't been a sketchy tradition of Satan and his angels in the Old Testament and other Jewish writings, Pagels says, the Essenes would have invented one. In asking how God's servant becomes his adversary, she writes, the Essenes were really asking about those who wanted to cooperate with the occupying Gentiles: "How could one of us become one of them?" Since the early Christians essentially developed in an era of increasing persecutions by the Roman Empire, all of the New Testament has combat as its background. The references in the final chapter of the New Testament, the book of Revelations, to the Whore of Babylon and the Antichrist, all reflect the troubles of the occupied Jews, and of the Christians who came, at first, from their ranks. "Christianity would have had a much easier time without the book of Revelations, though it would be a much less colorful religion," writes Susan Turner in The History of Hell. Revelations, the source for much lore about the imminent end of the world, has long been either the most frightening or the most ludicrous part of the Bible, depending on the perspective of the reader. The tradition of a vengeful Satan dates from the persecutions of Christians by various Roman emperors, even by the enlightened Marcus Aurelius. These persecutions are one aspect of Christian lore that is not exaggerated, and the longing for vengeance is all over church lore like a coat of red paint. The early Christian theologian Tertullian (c. 160-230) is certain that the faithful will someday watch their tormentors burning in Hell. It will be as pretty a picture as fish jumping in a reservoir, he says. The fear of heresy also originates from these three centuries before the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity on Oct. 27, 312. A guerrilla church scattered in communities throughout the Roman Empire was basically creating its own systems of belief. It is for this reason that St. Paul's various epistles (some written by him, others forged in his name) counsel so frequently against false prophets and doctrines inspired by Satan. The possible directions that the Church might have taken if certain choices had been made in the 1st and 2nd century are worthwhile topics for discussion. The Egyptian theologian Origen has been excommunicated four times, thrice after his death, for his "apocastasis," the belief that after a time eventually Satan apologizes, and is forgiven, Hell is closed, and everyone concerned gets to go home. (It's such a seductive idea that Pope Leo XIII had to proclaim the eternity of Hell as recently as 1879.) And the Gnostic gospels, such as the Gospel of Philip, suggests that a person reborn in Christ becomes "holy, down to the very body," "no longer a Christian, but a Christ." In the Gospel of Philip, the seeker must learn his capacity for evil by looking inward and searching his own heart, an essential step toward purification. This knowledge, "gnosis" in Greek, is the key to the Gnostic heresy, a popular opponent to the early organized Christian church. Imagine, for a moment, Western civilization having these traditions to lead it--of eventual reconciliation, and of the inner light--instead of the traditions that prevailed: the double coronation of an authoritarian church and Satan as the Prince of Darkness. Ever since the era that produced the heated imagery of the book of Revelations, Satan has been an inspiration to folk art, giving us the scariness of the treble six (picked up straight from Jewish secret teachings of numerology, the kaballa), Bible comics, televangelism and movies such as The Omen series. Revelations also contains the only biblical reference to Satan being the serpent in the Garden of Eden, thus closing the circle by identifying Satan as "that old serpent," man's enemy from the beginning of time. Fearful Disclosures Panic is a word that describes the terror of seeing the Greek god Pan, the horned, goat-shanked god of fertility who is a forebear of the devil. The panic waxes and wanes depending on electronic broadcasting--Geraldo Rivera is the Cotton Mather of the cathode ray, giving his imprimatur to self-proclaimed experts on Satanism. While the movies delight in seductive charmers, the tabloids go for the jugular. Al Carlisle, of the Utah State Prison System (quoted in Jack Chick's comics and in the Rev. Jerry Johnston Edge of Evil: The Rose of Satanism in North America) claims that between 40,000 and 60,000 unfortunates are victims of ritual Satanic murderer each year. Now, that is a lot of dead bodies. Popular eschatology (or literature of the last days) provides some of the devil's most entertaining adventures. Stories of Satanic abductions still terrify Americans despite the suspicious lack of evidence. No one's turned up any more convincing signs of the devil's handiwork than spray-painted pentagrams, empty beer bottles and the graffitied names of Satanic heavy-metal bands that, in rock critic Nick Tosches' phrase, "wouldn't scare their beautician's poodle." (Even the rumors of knackered pets may be more prevalent than the real thing. A few years back, Anton LaVay, head of the Church of Satan in San Francisco, was giving a tour of his temple to a reporter; a cat ran out, and the reporter commented on the notion that Satan likes dead cats. An unamused LaVay picked up his kitty protectively and threatened the wrath of Satan on anyone who mistreats animals. If you really tremble before the awesome majesty of Satan, leave my cat alone!) Historic conspiracies all have one thing in common--inevitably, somebody has to blow it, as Jeffery S. Victor writes in his Satanic Panic: The Creation of a Contemporary Legend (Open Court Books, 1993). The Thuggee and the Mafia, cults in which it was worth your life to squeal, did, in the fullness of time, produce squealers. Where's the Carmen Valachi or the Jimmy "The Weasel" Fratiano of Satanism? Personal testimony from children and abductees is the only evidence, and the former is often coaxed from children by investigators. See the book Remembering Satan about a recent tragic witch hunt in Olympia, Wash., where police detectives bullyragged children into confessions of flying through the air and being forced to eat filth and molest dogs. Satan isn't remembered for the thrill of it; real-life traumas may produce fantastic visions, just as mental debilitation will, and there are always real-life copycat killers. As in voodoo, all you need is people convinced of the power for the power to work. The overbooked Satan of the 1990s is a symptom of economic hardship, of inequality and deprivation. If you believe his unholy hand turns the handle on the abortion mills, it's not an enormous logical step to imagine sacrifices of babies to him. In the pre-Civil War period, another time of upheaval and agitation, Satanic metaphors proved convenient slings to use against slavers and Catholics alike. The arrival of Irish and Italian Catholics in the 1840s, fleeing poverty in Europe, fueled the fury of those nativists who thought the devil had traveled with these immigrants. Victor points out that the classic of regressed-memory lore, Michelle Remembers, bears amazing parallels to 1836's The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, the bestselling secular book in American history until Uncle Tom's Cabin. The baby murderers, rapists and torturers in Maria's disclosures weren't a coven. They were priests and nuns in the Montreal convent where she had been a novice. The risen Satan is responsible, in some minds, for the effort to unite all nations and to condone birth control and sterilization, which brings down the native birthrate. A nativist politician talking about the American way under siege, the cultural war on, may not find the word "Christian" equivalent to "American," but he does know what the Essenes knew, in using combat metaphors that go back to Ezekiel: foreigners are the devil. Pagels cites anthropologist Robert Redfield that early human consciousness throughout the world frequently involves a pair of divisions: between man and animals, and between the tribe and outsiders. Satan, both beast and foreigner, is the symbol of the nether half of the two divisions. "The struggle within the Christian tradition," Pagels writes, "is between the profoundly human view that 'otherness' is evil and the words of Jesus that reconciliation is divine." True, Satan hasn't prevailed everywhere. In Europe and in the more prosperous parts of America, "Hell has become something of an embarrassment, and a bishop who resorts to threats of damnation is quickly roasted by the popular press," writes Turner. The Unitarian/Universalist doctrine calls Hell "the foulest imputation on the character of God that can be imagined," and this 100-year-old doctrine has had an influence on organized religion. The human love of God can be proved to have made the world, on the whole, richer, but fear of Satan can't be proved to have done any good. To paraphrase Proudhon's famous comment about the law, fear of Satan is a chain to the meek and a cobweb to the powerful. George Bernard Shaw described Satan fear as "a pathological symptom of that particular sort of conscience and nervous constitution which brings its victims under the tyranny of two delirious terrors, the terror of sin and the terror of death, which may be called also, the terror of sex and the terror of life." Add to that the terror of outsiders, whose relationship with God is not as sacred as our own. Still, Satan can be laid down by studying him in the light of day. Such study is our only slight hope of sharing the planet or saving it: of course, the two ideas are one and the same. _________________________________________________________________ From the Oct. 26-Nov. 2, 1995 issue of Metro The page from which this was extracted was designed and created by theBoulevards team. Copyright © 1995 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc. plus ----------------------------------------------------------------- plus [extracted from http://www.metroactive.com/features/satan2.html ] MetroActive Features Satan's Cinema Film Scratches: One critic's favorite onscreen devils, from Tim Curry to Buster Keaton By Richard von Busack Beautiful manners, menace--and all of the best dialogue; a guarantee of both the audience's complete attention and its constant sympathy. These are just some of the side benefits of playing Satan. The role of Satan attracts tragedians and light comedians alike, from Mickey Rooney in The Private Lives of Adam and Eve to Sammy Davis Jr. in Poor Devil. Satan is most effective when fleetingly glimpsed, like the demon peeping through the smoke in The Exorcist or the scaly back in Rosemary's Baby. More recently, Lucifer has been played big and greasy. Strangely, Robert De Niro's grubby Mephisto, peeling his deviled egg with unclean fingernails, seems to have frightened a lot of movie fans. Jack Nicholson's horny devil in The Witches of Eastwick topped De Niro with a monstrous transformation scene, turning into a sort of giant, living crookneck squash in the finale. Most recently, a heavy-metal Satan (Viggo Mortensen) turned up in The Prophecy, although he is upstaged by Christopher Walken's Angel of Death. But enough of these long-haired, unwashed Satans! Give me the urbane tuxedo-wearing devils any day: Laird Cregar in the 1943 Heaven Can Wait, Fred Astaire in a television play called Mr. Lucifer; Ray Milland in Alias Nick Beal, and Vincent Price in The Story of Mankind. But cinematic diabolism has as many styles as the Prince of Darkness has names. My nine favorite screen devils are below: Tim Curry in Legend (1985). Tom Cruise as Good tries to upstage Tim Curry as Darkness, and has as much luck as good ever does against evil in this wicked world. Ridley (Blade Runner) Scott's dippiest movie, it had unicorns in it, like a schoolgirl's calendar, but what a handsome devil Curry was with that rolling baritone voice, those grand ebony horns and skin the color of chicken tandoori. Walter Huston in The Devil and Daniel Webster (a.k.a. All That Money Can Buy) (1941). Satan cruises New Hampshire for souls, like a politician preparing for the primary. Walter Huston plays him as a raspy little sinner, with a nasty chuckling voice, an insinuating squint and a goatee. One of the devil's best onscreen moments: a delightful final scene in which a down-but-not-out Scratch sizes up the theater audience for sales prospects. Peter Cook in Bedazzled (1967). He calls himself Spiggot, a swinging London devil, and he's summoned by the diabolical name of Julie Andrews to help (at the usual price) a Faust who works at a burger stand. In one great scene, Spiggot wordlessly provides his charge (Dudley Moore) with a long wooden spoon when they have lunch--recalling the proverb "If you sup with the devil, use a long spoon." Rex Ingram in Cabin in the Sky (1943). In a segregated heaven and hell, Rex Ingram presides over colored hell as "Lucifer Jr." Ingram, who starred in Green Pastures, was thus perhaps the only actor besides George Burns to play both God and Satan. Still, Burns never had in his infernal court Louis Armstrong as an imp or Lena Horne as a Marguerite. Ralph Richardson in Tales From the Crypt (1972). Should the devil be British, with a public-school accent foretelling an eternity of cold showers, compulsory chapel and canings? I was 14 when I saw Tales From the Crypt, and I can remember Richardson, wearing a brown monk's robe and sitting in a stone alcove shushing the questions of a newcomer to hell with a "It ... can ... wait." I had been an ex-Catholic only about a year, and I think I prayed that night. Benjamin Christensen in Haxan or Witchcraft Throughout the Ages (1922). Scandinavia has changed so essentially little since the Middle Ages that some movies from that corner of the world have a medieval spirit. Deep Lutheran theology provided the agony into Bergman's films, and the Dane Carl Dreyer's films have faces out of Cranach. This exposé of the witch trials shows the horrors of the Church militant, while recreating the medieval visions of the bedeviled. Director Christensen was an imposing figure with obscene frilled ears like a salamander's and a tongue almost as long as Gene Simmons of Kiss. Frank Silva as Bob on Twin Peaks. Silva died in September 1995, so call this a sentimental choice. He was a set dresser whom David Lynch spotted and suspected might be good as the epitome of evil. "Bob smile, everybody run." Captain de Zita in Glen or Glenda (1953). A booking agent for strippers, "he did everything from running the girls down to their dates, to picking them up at two or three of the morning, and shaving them," said producer George Weiss, remembering this extremely unsavory-looking character. De Zita, whose first name is lost to us, plays the devil in Ed Wood's Glen or Glenda, as ratty, as squalid, a monster as Max Schreck's Nosferatu. Buster Keaton in Go West (1925). Buster Keaton appears in a devil suit with rubbery horns and a tail that stretches like an elastic band. Keaton was more often the subject of diabolical forces than anyone in the history of movies. Unfortunately, he doesn't get a close-up wearing the devil suit. More's the pity, because it would have been a profound theological lesson to see Keaton's face as the devil, standing forlorn, exposed like a folk tale under a microscope. _________________________________________________________________ From the Oct. 26-Nov. 2, 1995 issue of Metro The page from which this was extracted was designed and created by theBoulevards team. Copyright © 1995 Metro Publishing and Virtual Valley, Inc. EOF