The idea of the archfiend’s standard agreement — relinquishing your soul for something you desperately desire — energizes works as various as the musical “Damn Yankees,” Max Beerbohm’s fantasy “Enoch Soames,” John Collier’s humorous story “The Devil, George and Rosie,” Mary MacLane’s fiery confession “I Await the Devil’s Coming” and James Hogg’s deeply unsettling Victorian-era novel “The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.” So rich is this theme in literature that Simon, a cultural essayist and editor of the literary journal Belt Magazine, is able to write an entire book without discussing any of these. Still, he has more than enough to work with.
Following a preliminary chapter reflecting on the ancient magician Simon Magus and the doctrines of Gnosticism, which posits that this world was created by an evil demiurge, Simon turns to Jesus Christ’s three temptations in the desert. These culminate in Satan offering Jesus all of Earth’s kingdoms if he will just bow down and worship him. Jesus disdains this effort to enact what is, in effect, a Faustian bargain. Yet Satan’s very attempt raises the question of whether the Christian messiah, in his human aspect, might have succumbed.
From there, Simon meanders among a wide variety of stories and legends about human interaction with devils or demons. These include the medieval tale of St. Theophilus, who was saved from damnation after selling his soul by the intercession of the Virgin Mary; the folk belief in succubi and incubi; persistent rumors of diabolism associated with the learned 10th-century Pope Sylvester II; and novels such as Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” in which Ivan Karamazov imagines Christ’s sudden appearance in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition and sentencing to be burned at the stake.
Simon frequently opens his chapters with some striking or macabre anecdote. For instance, he recounts the likely political assassination in 1991 of dissident Rumanian scholar Ioan Petru Culianu, a leading authority on Renaissance occultism, in a University of Chicago restroom. This leads Simon to consider several figures in the history of astrology and alchemy, such as the hermetic philosophers Roger Bacon, Agrippa and Trithemius, before proceeding to an extended discussion of the historical Dr. Faustus and Marlowe’s play about him. Later chapters segue from the European witch craze in early modern Europe to the Salem witch trials in colonial America to Anton LaVey’s satanic church in 1960s San Francisco. In another chapter, he introduces an analysis of certain German expressionist films by revealing that unknown individuals in 2015 pried opened the tomb of F.W. Murnau, director of “Nosferatu” (1922) and “Faust” (1926), performed some kind of necromantic ceremony and then carried off the filmmaker’s head.
Simon obviously casts a wide net. One chapter focuses entirely on musicians, particularly the violinists Tartini and Paganini and the blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who supposedly acquired their preternatural virtuosity by unholy means. He notes that Johnson reputedly cut his deal with the Devil late one night at the crossroads of U.S. Highways 61 and 41 in Mississippi, and was later the first in that line of pop-music superstars who died at age 27.
By the time Simon comes to analyze Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus,” the political dimension of the bargain is clearly uppermost in his thought. Mann’s masterpiece — Simon calls it the greatest German-language novel of the 20th century — semi-allegorizes German Kultur and the diabolical appeal of Hitlerism. Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical “The Master and Margarita” provides an analogous critique of Stalinist Russia. More generally, Simon proposes that our modern belief in rationality and empirical science hampers us from grasping the insidious appeal of the irrational and authoritarian.
In fact, he says, Mephistopheles — the shape-shifting demon who executes all Faust’s wishes — should be regarded as “the animating spirit of modernity,” the supreme exponent of that heartless utilitarian principle that “sees both nature and other people as tools in the furthering of the individual’s own desires.” Yet because of our arrogant rapaciousness, we ultimately end up trading our souls — however you define souls — for a mess of pottage.
Further extrapolating the Faustian bargain from the personal to the global, Simon points to our foolhardy “reduction of the earth’s resources to something that provides mere convenience for us and unimaginable wealth for a corrupt few.” As our environment deteriorates, we are losing “something of infinite value for the transient and illusory pleasures offered by Mephistopheles.” Simon consequently labels our own era the “Faustocene,” now increasingly “manifested in the growing international movement toward authoritarianism and fascism just as the biome collapses. Not just our souls, but indeed our entire planet traded for comfort and capital, a contract signed by you and me.”
These highly charged and politicized arguments about the evils of late capitalism transform “Devil’s Contract” from a work of cultural history into something close to a polemic, one with which you may or may not agree. Simon’s style, moreover, can sometimes veer into the over-emphatic — “His was a bargain, a wager, a bet, a contract,” and in the next sentence a “covenant” — or indulge in purple extravagance: Speaking of the Brothers Grimm, he writes: “Across the canon of folktales the Devil’s hoofprints make a clear path, and blood from the contracts he signed can be found smeared on the sundry pages of their anthologies.” He’s also overly fond of certain words, sometimes slightly misused, such as “infamous,” “immaculate” and “conjuration,” while occasionally resorting to nouns and verbs that older dictionaries would highlight as offensive and that still seem out of place in a work of popular scholarship. That scholarship itself displays some puzzling lacunae: In discussing the “possessed” nuns of the 17th-century convent at Loudun, Simon never mentions Aldous Huxley’s classic account, “The Devils of Loudun.” Neither does he refer to E.M. Butler’s relevant studies, “The Fortunes of Faust” and “The Myth of the Magus,” or to the many (admittedly somewhat dubious) works of Montague Summers that deal with black magic and witchcraft.
Still, these cavils aside, “Devil’s Contract” reminds us of how often we deludedly exchange something of inestimable value — our souls, our freedom, our honor, our beautiful Earth — for what is ultimately glittery trash. In Ira Levin’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” the pathetic husband allows Satan to rape his wife in return for success … as an actor. Today, political demagogues try to dupe us with golden visions and glowing promises. Don’t be misled. Those golden visions are illusions, mere smoke and mirrors, and the promises nothing but self-serving lies and deceitful trickery. Behind all their honeyed words, you can almost hear the smug and infernal laughter.
Devil’s Contract
The History of the Faustian Bargain
Melville House. 303 pp. $28.99
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