Fans of The Simpsons will remember Homer selling his soul to the devil to get doughnuts. Most of us would like more than that. For example, Dr. Faust, famously portrayed by Christopher Marlowe and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in his masterpiece play, got great power, wealth, and knowledge. But Ed Simon, in The Devil’s Pact: A History of the Faustian Bargain, argues that we all “sometimes betray our principles for personal gain” – that is, we “sign the dotted line of a devilish contract.” But whenever possible, he argues, we should all “try to reduce the suffering that is a by-product of appetite, consumption, and privilege.”
The standard devil’s bargain — the idea of giving up your soul for something you desperately desire — animates works as diverse as the musical Damn Yankees, Max Beerbohm’s fantasy Enoch Soames, John Collier’s humorous tale The Devil, George and Rosie, Mary MacLean’s searing confession Awaiting the Devil’s Coming, and James Hogg’s deeply unsettling Victorian novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The subject is so rich in literature that Simon, a cultural essayist and editor of the literary journal Belt Magazine, could write a book without ever addressing them. And yet he has more than enough material.
Following a preliminary chapter looking at the ancient magician Simon Magus and the Gnostic doctrine that the world was created by an evil creator, Simon discusses the three temptations of Jesus Christ in the desert, which culminate with Satan offering Jesus all the kingdoms of the earth if he will fall down and worship him. Jesus scorns this attempt to make what is, in effect, a Faustian bargain, but the very act of Satan’s temptation raises the question of whether the Christian Savior may have succumbed to his human side.
From there, Simon navigates us through a variety of stories and legends about humans’ interactions with demons and evil spirits, including the medieval tale of St. Theophilus, who was saved from the damnation of Hell after selling his soul through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, folk beliefs about succubi and incubi, persistent rumors of devil worship associated with the learned 10th-century Pope Sylvester II, and novels such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in which Ivan Karamazov imagines Christ suddenly appearing in Seville during the Spanish Inquisition and being burned at the stake.
Simon often begins chapters with shocking or eerie anecdotes. For example, he talks about the possible political assassination of Romanian dissident Ioan Petru Culianu, a leading authority on Renaissance occultism, in a University of Chicago bathroom in 1991. This leads Simon to consider figures in the history of astrology and alchemy, such as the Hermetic philosophers Roger Bacon, Agrippa, and Trithemius, before launching into a lengthy discussion of the historical Dr. Faustus and Marlowe’s play about him. Subsequent chapters move from the witch crazes of early modern Europe to the Salem witch trials of colonial America to Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in 1960s San Francisco. Another chapter presents an analysis of German Expressionist cinema, revealing that in 2015 unidentified individuals opened the grave of FW Murnau, the director of Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926), performed a type of séance, and then removed the film director’s head.
Simon’s coverage is clearly broad; one chapter focuses on musicians, particularly the violinists Tartini and Paganini and the blues guitarist Robert Johnson, who supposedly acquired their preternatural skills through immoral means. Johnson, Simon notes, supposedly made a pact with the Devil late at night at the intersection of U.S. Highways 61 and 41 in Mississippi, becoming the first in a lineage of pop-music superstars to later die at age 27.
By the time Simon analyzes Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, it is clear that the political dimension of the bargain is at the apex of his thinking. Mann’s masterpiece, which Simon calls the greatest German-language novel of the 20th century, is a semi-allegorical expression of German culture and the demonic allure of Hitlerism. Mikhail Bulgakov’s satirical The Master and Margarita offers a similar critique of Stalinist Russia. More generally, Simon argues that our modern belief in rationality and empirical science prevents us from grasping the insidious allure of irrationality and authoritarianism.
In fact, he says, Mephistopheles, the shape-shifting demon who carries out all of Faust’s wishes, should be seen as the supreme representative of “the animating spirit of modernity,” a ruthless utilitarian principle that “sees both nature and other people as tools for the furtherance of individual desires.” But our arrogant and greedy natures mean that we end up trading our souls (how you define souls is up to you) for a stew.
Simon takes the Faustian bargain from the personal to the global scale, pointing out the foolishness with which we “reduce the planet’s resources to mere convenience for us and unimaginable wealth for a corrupt few.” As the environment deteriorates, we “lose something of infinite value for a fleeting, illusory Mephistophelesian pleasure.” As a result, Simon calls our age the “Faustocene,” and we now see “an ever-increasing international movement toward authoritarianism and fascism, while biomes collapse.” Not just our souls, but the entire planet, have been exchanged for comfort and capital, making the deal you and I signed.
These highly charged and politicized discussions of the ills of late capitalism transform The Devil’s Pact from a work of cultural history into something closer to a polemic that may or may not be agreeable. Moreover, Simon’s style can sometimes be overemphatic (“His pact was a bargain, a bet, a wager, a contract”; in the next sentence, “a contract”) or indulge in purple extravagance. Of the Brothers Grimm, he writes, “Throughout the canon of folk tales the prints of the Devil’s hoofs have left a clear trail, and the blood of the pacts he signed can be found smeared on the various pages of their anthologies.” He also has an excessive fondness for certain words that are sometimes a little misused, such as “infamous,” “immaculate,” and “summon,” while occasionally using nouns and verbs that were highlighted as offensive in older dictionaries and that would still seem out of place in a popular academic paper, the very paper itself being puzzlingly absent. In discussing the “possessed” nuns of the 17th century Abbey of Loudun, Simon never mentions Aldous Huxley’s classic account, The Devils of Loudun, nor does he mention E. M. Butler’s related studies, The Story of Faust and The Magician Myth, or Montagu Summers’ many (admittedly somewhat dubious) works dealing with black magic and witchcraft.
Yet, these criticisms aside, The Devil’s Pact reminds us how often we trade things of inestimable value – our souls, our freedom, our honor, our beautiful earth – for what we ultimately mistakenly believe to be glittering trash. In Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, the poor husband lets Satan rape his wife in exchange for a successful acting career. Today, political demagogues try to fool us with golden visions and glittering promises. Don’t be fooled. Those golden visions are illusions, mere smoke and mirrors, and the promises are nothing more than self-serving lies and deceptive tricks. You can almost hear the smug laughter of hell behind their honeyed words.
Devil’s Pact
History of the Faustian Bargain
Melville House. 303 pages. $28.99
