Satanic Sympathies: On the Demon Depictions That Helped Jamie Quarto Write Two-Step Devil

When I was a kid I used to sneak out of bed at night to look at a painting in one of my mother’s art history books: St. Wolfgang and the Devil by Michael Pacher. I was growing up in a conservative Christian home; Satan was of great interest to me. What did he look like? Would I be able to recognize him, if he came after me?

I needn’t have worried. The Devil in the painting was an emaciated green lizard with curled fangs and sheep’s horns. He stood upright on delicate cloven-hooved feet. His spinal column was a clustered row of craggy oyster shells ending in a flipped-up tail; on either side of the tail, embedded into his butt cheeks, were lidless eyeballs. Beneath the tail was an open mouth with painted-red lips. One tiny, white tooth.

I couldn’t get enough of looking at that painting.

It was only a matter of time before the Devil would wend his way into my own work. My new novel, Two-Step Devil, features an enigmatic devil character who materializes inside a backwoods cabin to torment (and perhaps befriend) a man known as The Prophet. This devil wears cowboy boots and a bolo tie—and he’s got a giant theological bone to pick.

Here, then, is a not-even-close to exhaustive list of literary devils who were an influence as I drafted the novel. I’ve left out Dante’s Inferno, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s/Marlowe’s Faust narratives, and any biblical references—only because I’ve assumed these texts as givens.

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Mechthild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead

Little is known about the German mystic Mechthild, who experienced her first vision of the Holy Spirit at the age of twelve. In her 20s she joined a Beguine community at Magdeburg; she later went blind and became increasingly vocal in her criticism of the corruptions within the church. In her sixties, she moved to a protected Cistercian nunnery at Helfta, where she finished recording her visions, most of which are beatific.

But her Devil visions—hoo boy. As scatological and sexually raunchy as anything Dante would come up with more than half a century later*: “[Lucifer] grabs the proud one and thrusts him under his tail and says: I have not sunk so deep that I shall not lord it over you.”

“All the sodomites pass down his throat and live in his belly. Whenever he draws a breath, they slide into his belly. But when he coughs, they are expelled again.”

“Those who were unchaste together on earth have to lie bound in like manner before Lucifer; but if such a one comes there alone, the devil is his partner.”

Inherent in these visions is Dante’s notion of contrapasso, or eternal punishments suited to the sins themselves. That a woman—aging, blind, openly critical of the religious establishment—was a pioneering voice in imaginative Devil literature was an inspiration to me.

*Okay, I said I was going to leave out Dante, but can I just remind everyone that to get out of Hell, Dante and Virgil have to climb down Satan’s body until they reach his, er, private parts? And that, from there, they’re able pass from one hemisphere to the other? The Devil’s phallus—or maybe his anus, it’s unclear—as Earth’s gravitational center…let’s just say the image stuck with me, and reared its head (ha) as I was drafting Two-Step.

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I studied the British Romantics in graduate school, and Blake’s “Marriage” is the poem—philosophical rant? Visionary treatise?—I keep coming back to. For me there’s a particular delight in Blake’s inversion of familiar biblical texts, such as the “Proverbs of Hell,” in which pride and lust and wrath are the glory and bounty and wisdom of God. “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” is a Proverb that gets at the poem’s core: Desire is the ultimate good. “Energy is Eternal Delight.”

Blake’s “Voice of the Devil” argues against the Platonic separation of body and soul: “Man has no body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five senses.” My Two-Step likewise insists upon the unity of mind/soul and matter: “Consciousness, after all, is not separate from matter. Consciousness is matter.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown”

One night, the Puritan Goodman Brown leaves his young wife Faith at home and sets out alone to meet up with a gentleman “in grave and decent attire” who walks with staff shaped like a black snake. They head into the woods to attend a secret festival.

Brown suffers an attack of conscience and turns back; on the way home, he begins to see pious members of his community—including Faith!—heading in the opposite direction. Goodman and Faith end up bearing witness to an infernal worship service, where the gentleman, none other than the Devil himself, preaches from a pulpit situated between burning trees.

His sermon reveals the truth: everyone outwardly pious and god-fearing is, in fact, inwardly corrupt. “Now are ye undeceived,” the Devil says. “Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again, my children, to the communion of your race.”

Though the festival may only have been a dream, Brown becomes a misanthrope, shrinks from his wife, and for the rest of his life believes that everyone is a hypocrite. The idea that goodness and evil are linked—perhaps even depend upon one another—is part of Two-Step’s worldview.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is one of the best-known devil’s advocates in all of literature. But I have always been enchanted by the “Russian gentleman of a particular kind” who shows up later in the novel, when Ivan is suffering an attack of brain fever. This personage, a man around the age of fifty, appears presentable on first blush.

Yet closer inspection reveals that his style is a tad outdated. His scarf-like necktie is the kind “worn by people who aim at being stylish”; his checked trousers are “of excellent cut, but too light in color and too tight for present fashion.” In brief, Dostoyevsky writes, “there was every appearance of gentility on straitened means.”

The gentleman-devil, who punctuates his speech with French, presents his case: he has been much maligned. He loves humans. He wishes to become one of them, perhaps in the form of “some merchant’s wife weighing two hundred fifty pounds….My ideal is to go to church and offer a candle in simple-hearted faith….”

Alas, he is consigned to negation, he is the indispensable minus—without his adversarial presence, humanity would be one long boring church service, “holy but tedious.” Ivan first denies his existence (“It is I myself speaking, not you”) and then grows impatient with him (“fib more intelligently or I won’t listen”). He finally hurls a cup of tea at him—as Luther flung his inkwell, and as my Prophet flings his guitar.

Mikael Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

This one comes close to the top of my list of strangest novels of all time. One hot day in May, the Devil—called Woland—materializes in Moscow. He’s dressed in a grey suit and carries a stick “with a black knob shaped like a poodle’s head” (an allusion to Goethe’s Faust, in which Mephistopheles first appears as a black poodle). In his wake are a naked woman/vampire with red hair named Hella; a giant cat named Behemoth; and two disfigured henchmen.

Woland registers himself as an “artiste” and seeks out Margarita so he can help her find her beloved master, a writer who has gone mad after failing to publish his novel. In Bulgakov’s rendering, everything is inverted: Jesus isn’t the savior, but a man called Yeshua; Woland himself is truthteller and hero, echoing Blake and Dostoyevsky in his argument that “the prince of this world” is the reason its opposite can exist.

Bulgakov wrote the novel in the 1930s, at the height of Stalin’s ruthless regime. The book is, in many ways, the devil’s gospel—”the writer tells lies in order to say something true,” Boris Fishman writes. Because of Soviet censorship, it wasn’t published until twenty-seven years after Bulgakov’s death.

C.S. Lewis, Perelandra 

The Screwtape Letters is one of Lewis’s most widely-read works, and had an obvious influence on Two-Step. The devil-figure in Perelandra, the central book in Lewis’s Space Trilogy, is less well known.

Cambridge philologist Ransom travels via space capsule to an unfallen planet, Perelandra (Venus); his nemesis, the scientist Weston, follows. Weston becomes possessed by the devil, or the Un-Man—and the smile on his face after he tortures and kills an innocent animal is one of the most terrifying descriptions of pure evil I’ve ever read:

[His smile] was not furtive, nor ashamed, it had nothing of the conspirator in it. It did not defy goodness, it ignored it to the point of annihilation. Ransom perceived that he had never before seen anything but half-hearted and uneasy attempts at evil. This creature was whole-hearted. The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.

Joyce Carol Oates, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”

Fifteen-year-old Connie—as vain and selfish as any spoiled adolescent—is home alone. It’s Sunday afternoon and her family has gone to a picnic. A car with the name ARNOLD FRIEND painted on its side pulls up to the house. Arnold Friend (“An old friend,” our high school teacher was quick to point out) walks up to the locked screen door. He wears tall boots that don’t fit quite right; his steps appear unsteady, as if his feet don’t reach the bottoms of the boots.

Arnold Friend somehow knows everything about Connie. He begins to seduce her, telling her that he’s her lover, that he’ll be gentle with her the first time. “I’ll hold you so tight you won’t think you have to try to get away or pretend anything because you’ll know you can’t. And I’ll come inside you where it’s all secret and you’ll give in to me and you’ll love me.”

Connie is horrified—and mesmerized.  Eventually she does give in, stepping through the screen door and out into the land that “she had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.”

“Didn’t you see me put my sign in the air when you walked by?” Arnold Friend asks her at one point, drawing an X in the air to demonstrate. My Prophet imagines defeating Satan by carving a giant X in the air; later in the novel, Two-Step (who also wears boots) is forced to make the sign, though for a very different reason.

Rabih Alameddine, The Angel of History

Over the course of a night, in the waiting room of a psychiatric hospital, Yemeni-born Jacob is visited by Satan and Death. Jacob, a poet, is aptly named for the biblical character who wrestles with an angel. In Alameddine’s novel, Satan is on the side of life and energy (like Blake’s voice of the Devil). He urges Jacob to remember the events of his life.

Death takes an oppositional stand, urging Jacob to give in to the bliss of forgetting. Like the gentleman visitor in Ivan’s nightmare, Alameddine’s Satan makes a case for his own essential role in human history: “and Satan said… I am no creature of mere light, I am of fire born, fire of fire, the blood in the veins of the world is lit up by my flame, I am life’s primal force, you are the child at the end of the diving board afraid to jump.”

What about you? Who are your favorite devils in literature, film, painting, sculpture, theater, opera, dance?

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Two-Step Devil by Jamie Quatro is available via Grove Press.