The Devil might seem like kitsch and camp to modern sensibilities—more of a caricature of evil than anything else; like Dante’s devil, he is somewhat of a disappointment as a representative of pure evil. So why do we make a caricature of the devil? The answer has something to do with humour and absurdity. If we can laugh at something, it has less power over us. Real malevolence might be best approached indirectly—and represented as an evil clown.
This does not mean that the devil is purely a superstition of the past—nothing could be further from the truth. The devil has been updated and repackaged as a Nazi. Replace Satan with Hitler, and you have more or less the same monster. Hitler and his army of Nazi zombies fulfil all our psychological needs to personify evil and keep the mythological allure of the devil intact. The Nazi label is a short form for anybody we consider deplorable and will galvanise the mob on both sides of any conflict.
The truth is that the devil is alive and well, as is our tendency to mythologise evil. However, strip the mask from the evil dictator, and we discover that the devil is characterised by a lack, an absence. Hanna Arendt has shown us that the devil is the ordinary bureaucrat. In her essay Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt argued that the glamour of the Nazi war machine is a cover for the manager who is ‘just doing his job’. Furthermore, the Nazi monstrosity was not one man’s pathology but mass collective madness—ordinary men and women did the Nazi’s bidding gleefully and without much complaint. We might think we are virtuous ‘good citizens’, but take off the mask and discover that everyone is a potential monster. Society protects us from the inner devil but keeps him alive in the mythological imagination.
There is something comic about the devil. Hitler, with his goose step and moustache, is fundamentally a dark clown. He would have been laughed out of power if he had been televised, as Marshal McLuhan pointed out in his analysis of media effects. Hitler's demonic medium or media was the radio, and he was a master at mass hypnosis, tapping into the collective desire to project our sins onto a scapegoat jew. And, as Réne Girard has shown so well, the scapegoat mechanism is the hidden lie at the heart of the devil’s activity. It involves projecting our murderous desires onto an arbitrary victim. Scapegoats represent the painful truth of our shadow projected outwards, the devil we don’t want to see in ourselves.
So how do we demythologise the devil or neutralise his mythopoetic power? One way is to laugh at him, as Monty Python and Charlie Chaplin knew so well. Making fun of the devil neutralises his allure. We make a grave mistake by making the devil ‘sacred’. (Arguably, Donald Trump was elected because people took him far too seriously as a representation of pure evil—constantly comparing him to Hitler). The fact that we sacralise the devil indicates our perverse attraction to him and hides our own devilishness.
Alejandro Jodorowsky talks about the Tarot Devil as the artist. A creative person, in general, must deal with his inner darkness or plums the depths for creative energy. The artist knows there is no vitality without the shadow—which needs to be transformed, lest in control and dominate us.
Devils are often represented through the hybrid man/beast—however, hybridity is not devilish in itself—contrary to racist ideology, genetic variability is usually a sign of good health. Of course, in a monoculture, hybridity is threatening—but in the modern world, we must accept that race, identity, and sexuality as mixed to a certain extent. There is no pure race, pure sex, or pure ideology. The devil’s monstrosity is, therefore, paradoxically a purity obsession—the fact that dictators are notoriously obsessive about cleanliness and use the language of disgust speaks volumes.
The devil is usually depicted as a beast. But this is not because of his virile animality—this would be an insult to animals—but because of his cunning. Like the cult leader with his upside-down pentagram, he is a caricature of power, the ruler of the upside-down clown world; he enslaves or binds people to him. The devil is, therefore, not the body or its natural appetites as most ‘purity’ religions would suggest—but the mind’s machinations, hallucinations, and perverse projections.
The force of the devil is addiction: being bound to a monstrous passion which seems too large for us to tame—even if we are only addicted to chocolate. In the Devil card, the two ‘dwarfs' are codependent and are not purely victims but willing participants in the devil's fun and games. In the Rider Waits depiction, their chains are not tight, indicating they chose to be slaves. Like addicts, they waste their precious lives ’chasing the dragon’ or trying to recapture the bliss of the first heroin hit. A reciprocal narrowing of attention towards singular object desire binds them. This could just as easily be television, junk food, or pornography: there are so many poisons that the devil/pimp provides. And the greatest poison of all might be ideology. Capitalism, socialism, wokeism and all the other isms are the devil’s crack/cocaine.
Furthermore, the materialistic and scientistic Utopianism of the 20th Century has shown us that the devil is very rational. Rationality is clownish because it is such a nerdy denial of the facts of human existence. We are as irrational as ever. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and other psychoanalysts have shown us that all kinds of archetypal devils live in the unconscious; that the dream of a secular and rational utopia very quickly becomes a nightmare of totalitarian control.
Today, instead of projecting The Devil onto Hitler—or even Vladimir Putin (the present world devil)—it might be wiser to contemplate the devil in ourselves. When we stay chained to a bad relationship, when we cannot give up a bad habit or substance, when we betray ourselves and others, and when we subtly lie to ourselves, we become food for demonic possession. But when we recognise our inner devil, we are less likely to project it onto others. This is also related to humour; we must laugh at ourselves and our all-too-human natures.
The devil in us is very useful and can be transformed—albeit with a struggle. We must first acknowledge and bring our dark habitual patterns into the light. First awareness, then remorse, then action is how we deal with the devil or the shadowy parts of ourselves that we don’t want to see. The devil’s game is just one of smoke and mirrors—ultimately, there is a heretic or scapegoat outside our projections. The genius of Christianity has been to ask us to identify with the scapegoat (Christ) rather than the king—the suffering victim rather than the horned God. Revealing the scapegoat mechanism is how one reverses the dark magic of the devil.
To summarise: laugh at the devil. But at the same time, don’t forget that he exists in all of us and not only in our beloved figure of evil. If you get the devil card, ask yourself what unconscious and mechanical forces drive you and try to become conscious of them. And then try to transform the devil into a good servant. Sometimes we have to buy the devil a drink.
This article is part of a consideration of our study group on symbolism and Psychomagic. If you want to become a member and join one of our study groups, please write to me at andrewpgsweeny@gmail.com or check out the events calendar below for more details.
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