The Occult Revival: A Substitute Faith

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is man's feeble attempt to become godlike, to master the world around him. It is, in short, magic, the earliest of man's religious responses. The world's oldest art works, the primitive animal paintings in the cave at Lascaux in southwestern France, for example, were Stone Age man's magical invocation of success in the hunt. The astrology so many millions follow today is a direct legacy from the astronomer priests of Babylonia. Even when Christianity spread through Europe, many in the countryside kept their rustic rites along with the new religion. ("Pagan" stems from the Latin paganus meaning "country dweller" and "heathen" from "dweller on the heath.") For centuries, magical arts and Christianity lived in uneasy coexistence, as they still do in Latin American countries. But then, out of ancient lore and the minds of medieval churchmen, came the Devil.

Winged Creature. He was not a Christian invention. One of his most persistent forms in the popular imagination—the horned, winged creature with claws—dates at least as far back as ancient Mesopotamia, where it was the image of Pazuzu, the malaria-bearing demon of the southwest wind, the "king of the evil spirits of the air." In the Old Testament the Devil was satan, the Hebrew word for adversary, as in the Book of Job. Throughout the Old Testament, he remains clearly subject to the wrath and will of Yahweh. But the New Testament began to give the Devil stature, especially with Jesus' temptation in the desert, when the Devil offered him all the kingdoms of the world (Matthew 4: 8-9).

By the time the early church fathers were compiling a theology of the Devil, the mystery religion of Gnosticism was on the scene, proclaiming that the world and all material things in it were irredeemably evil. Taking up the Gnostics' bias, the fathers often wrote as if Satan really were the ruler of the world, or at least its viceroy.

Meantime, an entire mythology of the origin of devils arose. One story, based largely on a nonbiblical narrative known as the Book of Enoch (and brief mentions in Genesis and the epistles of Jude and II Peter), told of an angelic race of "Watchers," who were tempted to have intercourse with terrestrial women, and sired a race of giants. The giants died in internecine battle, but their bodies gave forth demonic spirits that prowled the world doing evil.

It took centuries more for the church to condemn witchcraft and magic as exclusive tools of the Devil; persecution did not begin in earnest until the 13th century. By then much of the residual paganism had died out, and at least some of the witchcraft and magic had turned more sinister. The spirits now invoked for aid were demons; the pact was with the Devil. So at least the Dominican inquisitors saw it, and so many suspects admitted.

Corrupt Priest. Some of the confessions must have been sheer defiance: faced with a ruling establishment that was sanctified by the church, a resentful peasantry followed the only image of rebellion they knew—Satan. The satanic messiah became especially appealing in times of despair, such as the era of the plague known as the Black Death. Real or imagined, the pact with the Devil may have been the last bad hope for safety in a world fallen out of joint. Thousands died in the persecution, many of them probably guilty