The prints of darkness

Alan Wall

THE DEVIL: A MASK WITHOUT A FACE by Luther Link Reaktion Books, £17.95, pp. 208 Maddelena Stradivari, the most prominent priestess of the Italian Satanic Cult Spiriti Liberi, has this to say on the subject of diabolic iconography: The devil stands against God. I see it as a owhole entity which has a good and a bad part. I don't believe in a classical devil figure with horns and animal's paws; that's a figure created by Catholicism and the Bible.

She would find a lot to back her up in this book, though if she imagines that Protes- tantism is by its nature opposed to such iconography, she would be wrong. Luther and John Wesley did as much wrestling with the devil as St Anthony ever had to do. It was the variety of forms which the devil took with the Desert Father (not to mention the lascivious possibilities arising out of them) that inspired such diverse artists as Hieronymous Bosch and Flaubert.

It is a curious fact that while many are prepared to believe in a transcendental power of good, the same often baulk at the idea that there may be also such a power of evil. Sir Stephen Spender records how William Empson once remarked to him regarding T. S. Eliot: 'He has a mediaeval mind. He believes in hell and the devil and that sort of thing.' His mind was mediaeval, which is to say that it had not progressed. It had not in other words received the enlightenment of the Enlightenment. This is also what made Hugh Trevor-Roper so cross about the epidemic of witchcraft and witch-hunting across Europe: it was going on, not hundreds of years before, but actu- ally during the Enlightenment itself.

Father Ravignan said of the devils in the 19th century: 'Their masterpiece, Sirs, has been to get themselves denied by the age.' Theology that reforms itself via Enlighten- ment notions of progressivism often comes to grief when confronted with the gospel texts themselves. What, after all, was going on when Jesus confronted the Gadarene demoniac? I have had it put to me by a devout Roman Catholic that the demoniacs were probably epileptics and that Jesus only conceived of the struggle as one with evil forces because of the primitive state of medical understanding at the time. To which one can only respond that Jesus must then come out of it all as an effective (though muddle-headed) healer, but as a surely rather unconvincing Messiah. If he can't distinguish between the devil and the

Giotto, Judas Receiving Payment for the Betrayal of Christ, 1304-13, fresco in Padua

falling sickness, what use is he really likely to be as a redeemer? It all seems a little hard on the pigs too.

But Empson had a point — mediaeval may be right after all. Eliot would certainly have seen the point, for his own journey from the supremely Enlightenment-based Unitarian faith of his youth to the Anglo- Catholic faith of his maturity was prompted in large part by his terrible struggle with evil. By the time of his conversion he was convinced that there was a transcendental power of evil as surely as there was one of good, and that only a religion which could acknowledge the fact had any depth for him.

Luther Link sets about untangling the figures of Satan, Lucifer and the Devil, both through philology and iconography. He shows that the Satanic priestess from Italy is wrong in ascribing all the character- istics of that image of the devil to the Bible, for there's very little there about him in the way of visual description. Where there are scriptural sources they are usually apocryphal, with the major exception of the Book of Revelation — a book that very nearly stayed apocryphal in the western canon, and is still deemed to be so by the eastern churches.

Satan originates from the Hebrew and normally means adversary. This is the fig- ure in the Book of Job — an agent of God, one who tests faith on behalf of the Almighty. This became transmuted into the Greek diabolos (accuser or slanderer) and thence into the Latin diabolus. It went from there into English as devil, finding its right of passage in the Old English deofol. On top of this we have demon, transmuted from the word daimon which originally could be either good or bad, and was a spirit of intermediate realm. We have a curious retention of this, though freighted with the burden of subsequent demonolo- gy, in our usage 'He is driven by a demon'. On top of all this we have Lucifer, the light-bearer, probably based on a misread- ing of Isaiah, but becoming irrevocably entangled in the notion of Satan as the brightest and most beautiful of the angels before his fall. Hence Shakespeare: 'Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.'

Link's philological exposition is enter- taining and succinct, and he then goes on to set about the same task iconographically. This is also highly entertaining and very informative though at times tendentious. The burden of Link's argument is that evil cannot be convincingly portrayed except in human form, and that consequently any attempt to portray Satan as inhuman or bestial or superhuman, ultimately has a tendency to fail to make the figure terrify- ing enough to be convincing. The exemplar of this failure is Giotto, all of whose figures compel except for one — the devil.

Link could have found ramifications for this argument had he made use of some of the literature of exorcism. In Scott Peck's The People of the Lie, for example, the lengthiest and most harrowing exorcism gradually makes plain one fact: the preter- natural power can only exercise that power through people. Insofar as it is separated from people, its power ceases too.

In pursuing his thesis Link might• be thought to load the evidence a little. He does not for example mention an engraving by Urs Graf of 1512 entitled 'Crippled Devil', in which the demonic figure is part goat and part clawed monster. This is not a human shape, but it is most certainly a frightening one. It also seems inexplicable, given his theme, that no mention is made of Diirer's engraving which we now call `Knight, Death and Devil'. Link could bol- ster his argument from this source since the ravaged unicorn of that superb work seems pathetic rather than frightening, an exhausted parody of evil-doing, and not a threat at all. Panofsky argues convincingly that Darer probably made use of Erasmus's Enchiridion in which the spooks and phan- toms (terricula et phastamata) are to be set at nought. In other words, this work sits on the cusp where humanism decides to stare down the shadows.

This is a book worth arguing with, writ- ten with verve, wit and passion. It is also lavishly illustrated. I enjoyed every page of it and felt glad that at least one publisher (apart from one's own, it goes without say- ing) is committed to producing books of this quality at an available price. The full tendentiousness of Link's argument does, though, finally become apparent in the last chapter. Link's attitude to the devil is at the end similar to that of the psychiatrist in the Bob Dylan song who advises, 'Those old dreams are only in your head.' Well, maybe. The devil's realms are ambiguity and ambivalence.

It is striking that in this era of inclusive language nobody ever tries to make Satan female. The figure is always male, and often hugely and coldly priapic with it. But there's no Mrs, Miss or Ms Satan. We live in interesting times. Perhaps we'd better give the last word to the devil, or rather his female devotee. She explains the prefer- ence for anal sex in rituals of black magic:

When you make love you penetrate the vagina — that's a creative act which is not accepted for black magic. So we partake in anal sex which is accepted by the negative entity because it's not an act of creation . . . We did some evil things to people. We made some people feel physically ill and got them as far as having to be taken to hospital. They got epileptic fits, which were impossible cases to explain because they were people that had never had fits before. [Interview with Sven Harding].

God help the girl if Hugh Trevor-Roper ever gets her in his tutorial room. But then they would be talking to one another from different sides of the Enlightenment. Perhaps the path of progress hasn't turned out to be as straight as those smiling philosophes once imagined.