Books and Movies on Everyday Satanic Behavior

In another post, I mentioned that Warnke’s Satan Seller (1972) generated a lot of excitement back in the 1970s, during my years in the Jesus Movement. I recalled that, and C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters (1942), as rare attempts to visualize the practical, day-to-day operation of dark forces within our world.

It seemed that most other Christian accounts of satanic activity were vague, mysterious, full of fear and warning, but short on specifics. A person couldn’t tell whether Lucifer was supposed to be a towering majesty or a sniveling worm, a lone actor or the leader of a chaotic gang or the head of a massive bureaucracy in Hell. Not that these two books were exceptionally clear – but at least they provided some semi-realistic, contemporary Christian ideas as to how certain aspects of the dark side might work.

A question along these lines came back to mind, the other day, and I posted it on Christianity Stack Exchange. The gist of the question was, are there any other books like this? I phrased it as a question of genre, and several responses fairly construed that as a question of what to search for. As I dug into the suggestions offered in response to my question, I wasn’t sure it would be couth to editorialize on the subject at length within the Stack Exchange format, so I opted to expound here instead. As the following discussion proceeded, I developed more of a sense of what I was looking for.

Nonstarters

Before exploring the most helpful possibilities, let me eliminate the less promising leads. In the Stack Exchange question, I signaled a dearth of interest in theology. I didn’t believe that Satan existed. I just wanted to learn more about what a being of that nature could be like. In the best of circumstances, I would have to be uncertain how much weight to accord to Bible passages, and in any event I wanted contemporary, not antique, visualizations of satanic activity.

This meant that, to cite the classic, I was not interested in re-reading Dante’s Inferno (c. 1314/2009). Great literature, everyone says. In a recent article of interest, Scharl (2023) characterized Dante’s Satan as “bestial and gibbering,” a creature who “has lost not only his own reflected beauty but even his mind.” I didn’t see a lot of possibilities there. I thought maybe it would be more appealing to someone raised Catholic, which I wasn’t. I wasn’t really into it when I did read it – in my Literature Humanities course at Columbia, I think.

My Stack Exchange question also meant that I wasn’t interested in Bible-based commentaries. I was clear on this: I stated that I didn’t want to rehash that familiar material. I wanted imaginative extensions or departures from biblical texts. So I wasn’t interested in the suggestion that I read Sproul’s Unseen Realities: Heaven, Hell, Angels and Demons (2011) – even if I did appreciate the earnestness pervading the answer provided by the person (Lesley) who suggested that book. Later, when I got into book lists (below), similar thoughts excluded stories about Armageddon and the End Times (e.g., Left Behind), in which Satan could appear.

My lack of interest in conservative Bible studies grew out of personal exposure to that literature. I was not familiar with more liberal studies. The key difference seemed to be that conservatives strove to force-fit potentially divergent texts into a single coherent theology provided by God in an inerrant Bible. Scholars not driven by that agenda were free to interpret early Christian sources, from within the Bible and also from non-canonical works, according to their actual words, regardless of whether the results supported conservative dogma.

In that regard, I reviewed a number of sources, before concluding that Wikipedia actually provided a relatively thorough sketch of scholarly debate on the development of Satan’s persona and roles throughout ancient Jewish, early Christian, and more recent periods. For instance, Wikipedia observes that Satan does not seem to have been associated with the serpent in the Garden of Eden until the second century AD. For present purposes, the apparently diverse Satanologies of the New Testament (de Bruin, 2022) and of related literature seemed too thin, conflicted, and ethereal to deliver a functional concept of Satan in day-to-day terms.

Within today’s popular literature, I could have expanded my search to include works that presented psychopaths and other evil or horrific humans as exemplars of satanic vice. I declined to do this. I was not sure that, within Christian doctrine or otherwise, one could assume that all evil came from Satan, or that evil was his defining (much less his sole noteworthy) characteristic, or that he was always necessarily worse than all humans. Rather than assume such things, I was hoping that, among various characterizations of the devil, some would be especially convincing. I hoped to find a concept of Satan that would include arguably realistic ideas about his character, priorities, and behavior.

I ran searches for several other names whom Lesley suggested: James Perloff, Vernon Coleman, James Musker, and Bob Mitchell. Results of these searches reminded me that there could be a fair amount of fiction and fantasy in supposedly Bible-based sermons and writings. No doubt a person could assemble a highly inventive account of satanic activity by compiling and editing such sources. I just didn’t want to have to undertake that chore. I was looking for a book or other source in which someone else had already done that work, or something like it.

Those several searches also reminded me of some of the fringe right-wing periodicals that Dad used to receive occasionally. For instance, Wikipedia described the Illuminati – one of the most prominent targets of the conspiracy theories endlessly indulged in such periodicals – as a secret society founded in 1776 and dedicated to good causes, but allegedly devolving in later years into a shadowy cabal seeking to control governments and world affairs. For my purposes, the connection was tenuous: the Illuminati might or might not have been controlled or influenced by Satan. Again, I was looking for the book that said so, with supporting detail, and these searches didn’t give me that. Ditto for material on the Rothschilds, the Freemasons, and other targets of such publications.

Searches pertaining to Lesley’s suggested writers did lead to a few specific works. Perloff’s Truth Is a Lonely Warrior (2013) appeared to be an exposé of the alleged truth behind many disconcerting political events (regarding e.g., the sinking of the Maine), but satanic connections seemed to be secondary. Coleman evidently generated something called The Satanic Wars Have Started, but all I found on that was a funky 14-minute video that I watched only briefly, and an opportunity to enter the website of Godlike Productions, which claimed to be “based in the country of Jersey” (sic).

Suggestions by Lesley and others pointed toward QAnon, universally condemned by mainstream media.  Britannica (Holoyda, 2023) echoed the standard impression (e.g., Wikipedia) that the “QAnon conspiracy theory … adherents believed that U.S. Pres. Donald Trump was waging a secret war against a cabal of satanic cannibalistic pedophiles within Hollywood, the Democratic Party, and the so-called ‘deep state’ within the United States government.” I did not pursue this line of inquiry in detail. It appeared, however, that one of Lesley’s suggested writers (above) would fit here: see Musker’s New World Religion and The Beliefs of the Elite (2018). See also Enders et al. (2022), Jones (2023), and Miller (2023), as well as searches pertaining to demonic forces in politics, and QAnon articles at Vox, U.S. News, and Pew Research.

Deals with the Devil

We were closer to pay dirt with Lesley’s link to the Wikipedia page on “Deals with the Devil in popular culture.” But with a few exceptions that I will get to later, these still turned out to be not quite on target, for me, because – as the list’s name suggests – the usual concept was that someone made a deal with Satan or some other comparably evil figure, most commonly involving the sale of their eternal souls, but sometimes featuring some other sort of interaction (e.g., Rosemary’s Baby). The evil one would appear at the start and the end of the story, and maybe on a few occasions in between, implementing the trade and then seeking his part of the bargain. And that would be pretty much the extent of what we’d learn about him – which was to say, nothing new. For the most part, these weren’t stories about the devil; they were stories about people who were in some sense compromised by the devil.

That was what I expected from that Wikipedia list. But to make sure, I glanced at the linked Wikipedia pages, for the ones that had such links. In this process, I realized – to refine my Stack Exchange question – that I was particularly interested in material that could be at least imagined to be somewhat realistic. For instance, I didn’t think The Screwtape Letters described an actual situation, but at least (as I recalled) it broke down the larger satanic malice into plausible everyday tinkering. Another way to say it: I seemed to be looking for insights into the satanic personality, something more informative than just “He’s a bad guy who does bad things.” This orientation seemed to be going in more or less the opposite direction from grand fantasy dramas involving the Antichrist (e.g., The Omen) or war between angels (e.g., The Prophecy) or sci-fi stories of interplanetary aliens posing as Satan (e.g., Stargate SG-1).

With that refined understanding, I found it interesting that Baron Mordo imagined that Mordo (a Transylvanian nobleman) was “skilled at astral projection and hypnosis” as well as black magic and summoning demons, and that “Mordo’s use of these darker arts would sometimes backfire”; and I appreciated the apparent ability of Marvel Comics to build a whole fantasy world, complete with characters named Mephisto and Satannish. But it seemed Marvel (as well as DC Comics, the two accounting for many entries in Wikipedia’s list) was primarily interested in selling me that fantasy world, not in saying anything related to the biblical Satan. No doubt there were numerous stories featuring mystical bad players with imagined supernatural abilities cavorting in make-believe realms. But I wasn’t looking to become knowledgeable about make-believe realms.

In that sense, the compiler(s) of Wikipedia’s list seemed to be going well beyond the classic concept of deals with the devil. I surmised that the same might be true of manga and other material based in Asia or other non-Christian lands (e.g., Vathek): unless I happened to notice something in a Wikipedia page to the contrary, I had to doubt that their concept of the dark side would be informative with respect to the Christian concept of Satan – though Belladonna of Sadness looked like an interesting exception. It was also unclear what some entries (e.g., Team Fortress 2) were doing in Wikipedia’s list, given that their writeups made no mention of Satan, the devil, or demons. I excluded others that were more in the nature of vampire or over-the-top horror stories because, again, these did not seem to have any potential relevance to reality, and in some cases also had no explicit link to Satan.

Further, I found that I wasn’t interested in witchcraft tales that resembled the stories of selling one’s soul: a little unexplained and very unlikely black magic and presto! all kinds of crazy things happen. I could maybe be interested in a Devil’s Cookbook that would feature a recipe followed by an anecdote about the effects of the recipe upon some unsuspecting target, maybe with a matter-of-fact explanation of how the result would have changed if you’d used eye of newt instead of maple sap extracted under a February blue moon – though the inclusion of outlandish ingredients could easily trigger problems of credibility. For me, probably the better Devil’s Cookbook would be written by a pharmacist or psychiatrist and based in psychoactive medications prescribed at 2 PM on a Tuesday, not in a kettle bubbling and boiling on Halloween. It seemed that this sort of book could veer toward either left- or right-hand magic – that is, toward either the malicious or the beneficial.

I hadn’t seen many films or read many stories in which Satan was a steady presence throughout. I guessed that I would find this sort of thing most persuasive if he was a calm and timeless presence, along the lines of The Man from Earth; see also Wandering Jew. Efforts to position him in some mundane bad guy role (e.g., The Devil’s Advocate) left me cold.

Those exclusions left me with a short list of entries, on Wikipedia’s list, that seemed most likely to convey a relatively imaginative or informative sense of who the devil is and/or what he does. Faust, surely the most famous entry on the list, also seemed to feature an above-average amount of interaction with the bad guy (i.e., the demon Mephistopheles). I supposed that Faust and its many spinoffs (e.g., Mephisto) could at least generate some ideas. It seemed that Young Goodman Brown could at least contribute a sense that interaction with evil forces could leave a person cynical and bitter. The Master and Margarita evidently did feature a Satan who filled much of the book with various criticisms of Soviet citizens’ behavior.

Other Portrayals in Popular Culture

Along with the preceding section’s list focused on deals with the devil, Wikipedia offered a larger list of instances of appearances by the Devil in the arts and popular culture. That list was quite long; fortunately, it included a brief synopsis of each entry. Thanks to the guidelines worked out in the preceding section (above), this time I had a better sense of what I was looking for. Here are a few examples of works that were respectable, in some sense of the word, but that I could dismiss quickly:

• Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger: based on the brief Wikipedia writeup; didn’t seem particularly insightful.
• The Exorcist: I didn’t believe in demonic possession or exorcism. It wasn’t clear to me what a demon would gain by occupying the body of a girl, much less abusing that body instead of using it for some practical purpose. There seemed to be a lot of counterintuitive rules, such as the one that evidently prevented such a creature from immediately leaping to the body of a more powerful adult. In short, it did not appear to me that the author had worked out a credible theory of what a demon or Satan could be like, or might want to do.
• God, the Devil and Bob: funny, but not remotely plausible.
• Fallen: fantasy TV comparable (for present purposes) to the Marvel fantasy universes (above). Similarly Legend.

After eliminating works like those, that were more obviously incompatible with the interests described above, I took another pass through that Wikipedia list and eliminated some of the remaining entries that were noteworthy, for one reason or another, but not really on target.

• Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: I had appreciated other McCarthy works, and it sounded like I would find this engrossing. But for present purposes it seemed to convey only a vague sense of the Devil, as a supernatural being who contributed to a good (anti-)Western story, but who didn’t seem to translate very well into the larger world. In a similar vein, Stephen King’s Needful Things.
• Good Omens: another one that seemed interesting, and could maybe contribute to an imaginary background story.
• To Reign in Hell: Wikipedia’s remark – “The novel appears to be heavily influenced by John Milton’s Paradise Lost” – persuaded me to prioritize the latter, which I had not yet read.
• Memnoch the Devil: potentially useful if – after finishing Paradise Lost – I still wanted a cosmology presenting a devil’s-eye view of how God and everything fit together.
• Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell: sitcom portrayal of something like the hellish bureaucracy of Screwtape Letters – but by this point I had encountered enough other interesting material to find that vision less intriguing.

Along with those works of fiction, Wikipedia offered a list of historical figures who had supposedly made deals or otherwise been involved with the devil, ranging from Pope Sylvester II (946-1003) to certain present-day figures.

By this point, I had accumulated a number of potentially interesting items deserving a closer look. Before turning to those works, however, I wanted to complete my review of the sources suggested in response to my Stack Exchange question.

Satanism

Lesley, one of the Stack Exchange respondents (above), inspired me to suppose that Satanists might be a good source of information or speculation about Satan.

If that seems obvious, maybe it shouldn’t. Satanists ain’t what they used to be, according to the BBC (Geohegan, 2019). That article, a review of Hail Satan?, described the Satanic Temple (founded in 2013) as a “religion” with a primarily sociopolitical purpose. (See also Columbia Magazine, 2022.) According to one spokesperson, “We want people to evaluate the United States being a Christian nation …. It’s not.” Geohegan said,

[A]lthough there is a certain theatrical, horror movie side to their Black Mass rituals in which they do invoke Satan, they freely admit none of them actually believe in Satan as an actual spiritual entity, leaning instead on the accurate translation of the Hebrew word Satan, which means “adversary”.

One of their concerns, Geohegan indicated, was with the “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s and 1990s. Again quoting the Satanic Temple spokesperson:

It was this 10 to 15-year period, where there was a basic idea that there was a kind of organised, underground, secret conspiracy of Satanists that were … doing evil things like murder and torturing animals and raping children and doing it in the name of Satan. … Many people had their lives ruined and in the most extreme example, went to prison for a very long time. … [T]here’s been no attempt publicly, to come to terms with that period. … [T]he Satanic Temple really does want people to remember and to know more about what happened ….

It was certainly interesting to see the view of the U.S. Department of Justice (Daniels, 1989): “A “self-styled satanist” is a sociopath, psychopath, or drug addict who justifies criminal acts through a belief system centered in Satan.” A search for “Christian demonic fiction,” recommended in response to my Stack Exchange question, led to lists and discussions highlighting works from that (1980ish) period (e.g., Reddit). One name stands out: Frank Peretti, labeled by Publishers Weekly (2013) as “the father of Christian fiction.” Vox (Romano et al., 2022) said that he earned that status – and would be revived again, more recently, in the QAnon era – for his viral This Present Darkness (1986) and Piercing the Darkness (1989) duology, both of which imagined “Angels and demons engaged in very real, literal battles for humanity, often just out of sight of their impassioned human charges.”

The 1980s’ Satanic Panic wasn’t the first such episode. Time (Rothman, 2015) told of a Satan scare in the early 1970s. Earlier still, Dyrendal (2018) described

the (probably) most infamous hoax of the late nineteenth century: the string of publications by Léo Taxil (Gabriel Jougand-Paget) and his collaborators alleging a Masonic-Satanist world conspiracy. Unfolding over a period of many years, the story is well known; like “Romantic Satanism,” it has been studied multiple times before. … [I]t is a fantastic story …. [I]t was one of Taxil’s purposes to make people laugh at the credulity of believers.

Dyrendal was reviewing a book by Luijk (2016), whose first chapter’s abstract read, in part, as follows:

While the concept of people worshipping Satan was actually an invention of Christianity to demonize its internal and external competitors, this dark stereotype created by the Church eventually came to be embraced as a positive (anti)religious identity by some in the modern West. … The emergence of new attitudes to Satan proves to be intimately linked to … the ideological struggle for emancipation that transformed the West and is epitomized by the American and French Revolutions.

The chapter thus appeared to contend that the medieval church used the concept of Satan, typically a fallen angel and thus immortal, as an enduring and deplorable focus of loyalty that could be ascribed to anyone who didn’t behave or believe as the church demanded. Linking someone to Satan (or, in recent decades, to Hitler – see Godwin’s Law) was an arguably more refined way of echoing a little kid’s inarticulate accusation of “Bad”: those people are bad, and that’s enough to condemn them, seeking details only to seal the indictment and/or for entertainment. But (the chapter evidently said) that game lasts only so long. At a certain point, some alleged deplorables might start to take pride in departing from the official ideology – and then you could have a movement.

Seen that way, a modern Satanist’s concept of Satan could be less about doing bad things and more about deliberately not being counted among the self-congratulating “good” hypocrites. As a derivative movement, Satanism of this nature might have an appeal no stronger than that of the church itself. One visualizes a future era in which, just as Taco Bell and Kentucky Fried Chicken have now merged in such a way as to sell both previously competing fast foods from a single outlet, the marketing wizards of Christian and Satanic churches will someday work together in an increasingly desperate attempt to persuade an ever more thoroughly secular society to pay attention to either of them.

It did appear that Satan tended to be defined as primarily an antithesis to various Christian virtues and priorities. Even the Order of Nine Angles (sic) – which Britannica (White, 2023) characterized as the “best-known example” of a more radical Satanism – traced its origins (according to Wikipedia) to “a secretive pre-Christian sect” that had survived for centuries in Wales. Note that its origins were distinguished by being pre-Christian – that is, as an alternative to Christianity.

And yet, as just suggested, the most effective antithesis to the message of Christ has been, not a dramatic Satanism, but rather our indifferent secularism. What has gained mass traction – what wields enormous power in our world – is most certainly not the Nine Angles calls for human sacrifice or for the breakdown of society, not to mention the worship of bizarre gods. Such antics have been completely overwhelmed by an aspiritual materialistic consumerism. What won, in the last half-century at least, was Nietzsche‘s recognition that God is dead, especially in the sense that modern society has rendered him irrelevant for most purposes in most lives.

Among the small minority of people who have nonetheless gravitated toward Satanism, Wikipedia cites Dyrendal (above) and others for an identification of Theistic Satanism as a subset whose primary belief is that “Satan is an actual deity or force to revere or worship.” Nontheistic alternatives seem to tend, instead, toward a “self religion” (i.e., emphasizing improvement of the self) with transgressive, nonconformist, elitist, self-reliant, and otherwise individualist values.

Evidently such scholars also distinguish reactive from rationalist forms of Satanism. The former apparently presents itself (and presumably Satan, to the extent it is theistic) as an opposition to Christianity and/or to Christian-based society, while the rationalist variety concerns itself more with its concept of the good life (e.g., hedonism), regardless of how Christians might react.

In seeking an understanding of Satan as an existing or at least hypothetical personality, these remarks seemed to suggest that I would be looking for perspectives from theistic Satanism. Within that sphere, I was already familiar with the reactive interpretation common to Christians – with, that is, the belief that Satan was simply an antichristian sort of character, one who spent his time finding gratification in being deliberately contrary.

To me, that sort of character seemed tedious and weak if not childish. If that’s all it was about, my work was largely done: there was little more to understand. Just figure out whatever God is about, and you can find Satan clowning around with it, trying to mess it up, basically just killing time until his eventual assignment to the lake of fire. That seemed to be a sort of straw man character, the kind of stupid Satan that a Christian would invent, in order to make the godly path seem so obviously superior.

I would expect a real spiritual opponent to God to have a much greater sense of himself. This would not be the unimaginative politician who tries to define him/herself as merely the opposite of his/her opponent. This would be, to the contrary, a real leader, someone with a vision of what needs to happen, leaving it to Christians to get up to speed on his message if they were able. This Satan would present good reasons to question the Christian God’s preferences, to set forth on his own path. He would advocate individualistic, rationalistic (e.g., hedonistic), or otherwise self-gratifying and/or self-improving priorities for mankind, possibly knowing that this was a dead end, but more likely believing that this was really the best path. That seemed to be the sort of Satan I was looking for, the one I would find most competent and convincing as a serious answer to – indeed, conceivably even an apparent refutation of – the Christian God. That was the whole idea, right? – that he would be capable of luring away vast numbers of people, for real.

Within my limited searching, it did not appear that Satanic churches, cults, or groups had written any really compelling books about Satan. LaVey’s Satanic Bible drew mixed reviews on Goodreads and Wikipedia but strong positive reviews on Amazon; it looked like a possible exception. Even so, it seemed that I would probably get a more compelling, possibly even exciting, sense of a proposed satanic personality by concentrating on the best literature about Satan.

Another Round of Eliminations

The preceding section refined my sense of what I might be looking for. Within the realm of literature especially, I had identified a number of works tentatively worth considering, but now it seemed I could reduce that list. For the time being, at least, I discarded the following:

• Lewis, The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast. Although The Screwtape Letters was one of the examples that I cited at the start of this post, I now saw it as clearly dependent upon a “tempter” persona, implying that Satan and his minions were merely reactive. For those interested in more material along these lines, Wikipedia provided lists of sequels and adaptations.
• Hill, Horns. An interesting take on the powers that a man might have if he were magically transformed into something of a demonic figure. But it wasn’t a Satan’s-eye view; it still depended somewhat on the tempter mentality; and magic just generally had no credibility for me.
• Pullman, His Dark Materials. Popular, and apparently well done, but reactive against (rather than independent of) Christianity; featuring daemons rather than Satan; and apparently a retelling and rearrangement of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which (again) it seemed I should prioritize.
• Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan. Contended that Satan, above all others, “most truly believes in the Gospel – and yet he is forbidden ever to partake of it.” It sounded implausible, on both sides, but it might be a worthwhile read for those who favor a reactive rather than independent Satan.
• Madach, The Tragedy of Man. Another tempter story, but apparently a good one.
• Gibson (director), The Passion of the Christ. Blockbuster film, but highly biblical and thus not much of a source of potential new ideas about Satan.
• Lucifer (TV series). Tom Ellis got some strong reviews for his role as the Satan who became proprietor of a nightclub in L.A. But the idea was wrong. Wikipedia said he was “[b]ored and unhappy with his life in Hell,” and therefore chose to find action among humans. For those who conceived of Satan as a proud deity, leader of millions, this would be like saying that a bored human decided to look for adventure by hanging out with cats, using his/her powers to play little tricks on them. It might be entertaining for a while, but eventually it could seem pathetic.

This left me with a still-considerable list of possibilities to examine more closely. For the moment, I had to merely list most of them. Time permitting, I hoped to return to this page with an update. The materials yet to be read or at least reviewed more closely included these:

• Peretti, This Present Darkness (1986). Although this volume seemed to be more about forces of darkness generally than about Satan specifically, as noted above, its reputation as a page-turner and its revival in recent years (with Vox (2022) characterizing it as virtually a script for the QAnon movement) suggested that it could serve as something of an update to The Screwtape Letters on the question of what a powerful, arrogant Satan could be imagined to be trying to accomplish these days. Throughout my life, evangelicals had surreptitiously loved the story of Satan in these End Times because they knew, thanks to their interpretation of biblical prophecy, that he was going to lose in the end. Possibly Peretti would color that contest as more of a real battle, mounted by a Satan who knew what he was doing.
• Mitchell, Satan’s Seed (2022).
• Milton, Paradise Lost (1667). This still appeared to be pretty much the mother lode.
• Heinlein, Job: A Comedy of Justice (1984).
• Duncan, I, Lucifer (2002).
• Hancock, Arena (2002).
• Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack (2006).
• Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).
• Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793).
• Eberstadt, The Loser Letters: A Comic Tale of Life, Death and Atheism (2010).
• Kazantkakis, The Last Temptation of Christ (1955; movie 1988). I had enjoyed both, but it had been a while. It seemed I could review both for ideas.
• Generally, searches for demonic forces within contemporary literature and Christian demonology.