by May, Rollo
The myth is an unseen guide, a silent leader, a way of deciding what is acceptable and not acceptable; and it brooks no more questioning than did Satan in Marlowe’s Faust when the clock struck twelve. As Marlowe’s Faust says in a moment of insight, “The god thou servest is thine own appetite.”
FIFTEEN
The Devil and Creativity
God allowed evil to exist, woven into the texture of the world, in order to increase man’s freedom and his will to prove his moral strength in overcoming it.
The Philosophy of Gnosticism
THE RELATION OF MODERN PEOPLE to the myth of the devil is startling indeed. In Chapter 1 we cited the study made in the 1970s of beliefs in the devil and in God, in which it was discovered that the belief in God was decreasing while the belief in the devil was increasing.
The alarm this phenomenon calls forth is that it indicates that great numbers of contemporary people are expressing their disillusionment with life, their suspicion of their fellows, and their frightening uncertainty about their future. The study implies that people have shifted from faith to fatalism.*
Most sophisticated and educated people in the West in our century had cast out the term “devil” as mere superstition. But strange things have been happening in the world during recent decades. By 1950 we had seen so much cruelty in the sheer destruction in Hitlerism and we had observed the use of concentration camps as an accepted technique of government. America had dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and the nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, reducing these two whole cities to groaning rubble in two hours. These things understandably led many thoughtful people seriously to wonder whether the term “devil” should not be brought back into our vocabulary, certainly not as a person but as a powerfully active myth.
We also recall the case referred to in Chapter 2, when Charles’ critical point in his therapy was his identification with Satan. For Satan existed as a myth of Charles’ identity. The devil empowered his soul. These were more than mere words for Charles; he emphasized that his belief was not a form of Manicheanism since Satan really believed in Cod. By means of the myth of the devil this man could accept his negativity—for it had suddenly changed into a positive term. “I am Satan,” he kept repeating. “Satan was a rebel for God.” At last he had found an outlet for his rebellion merged with his considerable talents. In Jungian terms he was freed to create something of real value by his acceptance of his shadow, Satan.
When we note the number of books written about Satan by recognized scholars in our day, the data become almost overwhelming. Some of these titles are Lucifer, The Devil in the Middle Ages, Sanctions for Evil, Light at the Core of Darkness.
An excellent study of the devil has been made by psychologist Henry Murray of Harvard in his essay, “The Personality and Career of Satan.”* Murray first refers to Isaiah in the Bible for his description of Satan:
How art thou fallen from heaven, O day star, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst lay low the nations! And thou saidst in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God; and I will sit upon the mount of congregation, in the uttermost parts of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like unto the Most High.
Murray then speaks of Origen. This Church Father
convinced his fellow theologians that these words could refer, not to any earthly king, but to Satan only; and henceforth the Devil became the prince of pride on whose brow was to be read. I will be like unto the Most High. This puts Satan in a class which includes the giants who tried to scale Olympus and replace Zeus, as well as a host of other defeated defiant ascensionists, frustrated dictators, would-be deicides, regicides, and parricides.*
Our task here is to look at the reality of the myth of the devil without reifying the concept, that is, without seeing the devil in time and space. When Luther, as a student in the seminary, threw his inkwell at the devil, he was reifying the concept. In the twentieth century it gives us a strange feeling to hear someone talking of the devil as an actual person in the flesh. An elderly black woman who was the cook for some neighbors told us that a younger friend of hers had been waiting for the bus in a small crowd when “the devil spoke to her right there!” Her young friend ran fast around the block to escape the devil. I don’t recall the rest of the story, but being a psychoanalyst I assumed the young friend may have seen someone in the crowd who cued off some reverie of sexual or other prohibited contents and the devil was the best creature upon whom to project it.
There is another strange contradiction in the treatment of Satan, or the devil, which is the paradox in all three versions of Faust. The devil, or Mephistopheles, the representative of Satan, tries to persuade Faust not to sell his soul to Lucifer. The devils had already done so, and they had afterward greatly regretted their decisions. In answer to Faust’s question in Marlowe’s version, for example, Mephistopheles answers,
O Faustus, leave these frivolous demands
Which strike a terror to my fainting soul!
And he states how much he regrets his own loss of the chance to see the “face of God and taste the eternal joys of heaven.”*
This surely says that an inner conflict goes on even in hell. The group around their leader, Lucifer, already has a number of famous names. The forms that this myth may take are infinite; the myths of the devil each of us brings to therapy are unique. But the individual myths are variations on a central theme of the classical myths, in this case Satan, which refer to the existential crises in every person’s life.
The devil’s land of hell has been kept as part of our classical vocabulary. In the myth of purgatory, we have seen Dante exploring hell in company with Virgil. Hell is also that part of the underworld which Odysseus had to visit to get directions from his deceased father as to how to sail back to Ithaca in his journey home. It is clear in these classics that one can learn things of great value by visiting the underworld, the habitat of the devil.
THE SOURCES OF CREATIVITY
The devil, in some strange form, turns out to be essential to creativity. In Dostoevsky’s novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan has a discussion with the devil. The devil speaks, “No, you are not someone apart, you are myself. You are I and nothing more.”
Ivan replies, “You are the incarnation of myself, but only one side of me … of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them. You are myself—with a different face. You just say what I am thinking, you are incapable of saying anything new!”
This brings out one aspect of the devil—the fact that true originality, creating something which is unique, is denied him, though creativity cannot occur without him. He is the negating aspect of experience. The devil’s reality lies in his opposing the laws of Cod, and this sets the dynamic necessary for all human experience. The devil exists by virtue of the fact that he opposes God. Out of this comes the dynamic of human creativity. Rilke was right when he said after his one and only session of psychotherapy, “If my devils are taken away, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.” This tension between the angels and the devils is essential for the creative process. Without the devil there would be stagnation instead of creative production. This is what William Blake had in mind when he stated that Milton in his Paradise Lost was “of Satan’s party and didn’t know it.”
One way to avoid awareness of the struggle against the devil in our world is simply to deny it out of hand. This is the method of the cults. Rejuvenated by their new acquaintanceship with the religions from India and Asia Minor, the followers of cult leaders wipe out all those fears of what might happen and then concentrate in meditation on only the beliefs of the cult leader. Cult members close their ears and eyes to the clamoring of evil pounding at the door. We cannot wipe from our memories the gruesome logic in the mass suicide in Guyana in the summer of 1980, when 980 of the people belonging to this cult, all those present in the camp, who had come from America, committed suicide because Jim Jones, the
ir leader, ordered them to do so. That is the logical climax of the activity of all cults which deny the conflict between good and evil.
It is possible to worship evil, which also makes the same mistake in reverse. There have been many “cults of the devil” during the last two decades, though they are not called that, just as there were cults of the devil at the time of the witch burnings in Salem.
We recall that Thomas Mann pictures the devil in his long dialogue with Dr. Faustus; the devil spoke mainly about art. It is the tension between the devil and the inspiration of the harmonious in the painter or musician or other creative person which leads to the creative act. In Beethoven’s composing a symphony or Cezanne’s painting Mount Sainte-Victoire that the struggle for originality—to sing the music or to paint the picture as they hear it or see it—is so intense. And if the artist succeeds, he or she has achieved the creative work by virtue of the struggle between negation and creation. Creation has won, defeating negation.
As the statement from Gnosticism at the head of this chapter tells us: the problems of freedom, moral strength, and creativity are intimately connected with evil. “O alas, how now do men accuse the gods,” cries Homer in the Odyssey, “For they say evils come from us. But they themselves, by reason of their sins, have sufferings beyond those destined for them.” Perhaps our greatest sin is our refusal to look evil and the devil straight in the face.
POE’S “RAVEN”
The conflict between the devil and God has been experienced by poets ever since human beings learned to communicate and is closer to us than we think. The American poet Edgar Allan Poe illustrates this in his well-known poem, “The Raven.” He writes about the devil or demon in our terms:
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—
by these angels he hath sent thee….
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“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet
still, if bird or devil!
Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest
tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate, yet all undaunted, on this desert
land enchanted—
On this home by horror haunted—tell me
truly, I implore:
Is there—is there balm in Gilead?—tell me
—tell me I implore!”
Quoth the raven, “Nevermore.”
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And the raven, never flitting, still is
sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of pallas just above my
chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a
demon’s that is dreaming;
And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws
the shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies
floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!*
Thus Poe described the struggle within himself against what he calls the demon and prophet. Poe’s heart is “by horror haunted,” his soul is doomed to lie in this condition. Except—and this throws clear light on the whole creative process—Poe turns his agony into a poem.
The creative process is characterized by joy one hour and agony the next. But if one wishes to experience the sense of joy, one must be willing to endure the agony of the journey into hell, more commonly called the dullness of hour after hour when inspiration is conspicuous by its absence.
John Steinbeck describes how “the despair came on me” when he was writing his great novel, The Grapes of Wrath. He was choking with trepidation about the work as he was writing it. “It’s just a run of the mill book,” he wrote in his diary. “And the awful thing is that it is absolutely the best I can do....I’ve always had these travails … never get used to them.”†
The Grapes of Wrath turned out to be a book for the ages. The specific topic of the Joads was universalized by Steinbeck in his struggles in describing these impoverished people; in our day it would be the homeless and the street people. He received a Nobel Prize particularly for this work, but he had to fight his devils every step of the way, his devils being expressed by fatigue, discouragement, and most of all despair about his ability as a writer.
MOBY DICK AND THE MYTH OF CAPTAIN AHAB
Moby Dick is a tale of the myth of the devil on a whaling ship, with Captain Ahab as skipper. This Pequod set forth for two years on a voyage to the far southern seas in search of the Great White Whale. Surely a classic, Melville’s story is considered by many readers to be the greatest American novel. Melville gives us a picture of Satan in the person of Captain Ahab, an embodiment of that fallen angel or demi-god who in Christendom was variously called Adversary, Lucifer, Satan, Devil.
It is a marvelous story of the hunt for the white whale in distant oceans, and it grips us with the passion that fits its subject, the attraction of the devil in the person of Captain Ahab.* The Biblical name “Ahab” is taken from a king of ancient Judah who gave Jewish prophets much trouble; and he was especially attacked by Elijah.
The young man who relates the tale introduces himself simply with the phrase, “Call me Ishmael.” This also fits a Biblical myth—it is the name of the little boy of four or five who is driven with his mother out into the unforgiving desert and sure starvation by Sarah, the first wife of Abraham.
At the beginning of Moby Dick, there occurs a Sunday worship service led by the pastor of the whaling church in New Bedford. The pastor climbs up to his pulpit by his rope ladder, which is the prow of a whaling ship, and there he delivers a sermon to his seafaring and God-fearing congregation on the story of Jonah, who was swallowed by the whale while he was trying to escape God’s command. Divine commandment is a law at sea, and hence Jonah is brought back in the belly of the whale.
Though the Pequod sails from New Bedford on its voyage to the South Seas on Christmas day, the sailors do not see Captain Ahab for several months. They only hear the sound of his pacing—tap-tap-tap—all night long on the deck of the ship. His peg leg was a result of his previous encounter with the great white whale. But Captain Ahab’s hatred, burning red hot till it carried everything before it, is deeper than a lost leg. He is filled with the devil’s hatred of this great beast. He is to engage in a battle like the wars of the gods on Mt. Olympus which caused the whole world to go into convulsions and explosions which the ancient Greeks could only endure with bated breath.
At Easter Captain Ahab appears and calls his sailors together on deck. He there conducts a Black Mass, welding together the spirit of the crew to engage in a life-and-death battle with Moby Dick. This is clinched by the shouting crew as they all drink grog from a horn, joining their captain in his war of hatred against the arch-enemy, Moby Dick. All the sailors’ ears and eyes and strength are devoted to this volcanic struggle; everything is subordinated to finding and killing the Great White Whale. Henry Murray states, like almost every other reviewer, that the White Whale is a myth of God.
Ahab is so filled with fierce hatred, so absorbed with the life-and-death hunt, that he refuses to join another ship, Rachel, in the search for the son of the Rachel’s captain, who had become lost in the wilderness of the unending sea. The captain of the Rachel could only shout back in response, “May God forgive you!”
From the very soul of Melville, the experience of the heart of this quiet New England author, has come a character who represents the spirit of evil on this voyage of hatred and revenge. Captain Ahab embodies the spirit of Lucifer or Mephistopheles or the devil all in one in this peon to the anti-god. “Melville had learned on his own pulses what it was to be Narcissus, Orestes, Oedipus, Ishmael, Apollo, Lucifer. In this story he condenses from his own creative imagination the nature of Satan.”*
The only one who was not convinced by the shared hatred of Moby Dick was the chief mate, Starbuck, a devout Quaker who believed he should shoot Ahab according to the laws of the sea but does not have the c
ourage to do so. Ultimately Starbuck comes to love his fierce captain, committed to destruction though Ahab is. The devil has in this, as in any other conflicts, the strange power of evil. In Ahab we see the devil incarnate.
After a year and a half they sight the Great White Whale. For three days the battle ensues. The sailors, imbued with the spirit of their captain, absorb the powers of hell as they harpoon the great creature again and again. In the fight Ahab’s peg leg is broken, another is quickly made, and this also is broken in the struggle against the Great White Whale.
After the second day, Starbuck, the mate, tries to persuade Ahab to call off the fight:
“Great God! but for one single instant show thyself,” cried Star-buck; “never, never wilt thou capture him, old man—In Jesus’ name no more of this, that’s worse than devil’s madness. Two days chased; twice stove to splinters; thy very leg once more snatched from under thee; thy evil shadow gone—good angels mobbing thee with warnings:—what more wouldst thou have?—Shall we keep chasing this murderous fish till he swamps the last man? Shall we be dragged by him to the bottom of the sea? Shall we be towed by him to the infernal world? Oh, oh,—Impiety and blasphemy to hunt him more!”
But Ahab answers,
“Starbuck, of late I’ve felt strangely moved to thee; ever since that hour we both saw—thou know’st what, in one another’s eyes.
“Ahab is for ever Ahab, man. This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.”
Yes, he does act under orders like Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, who also acted under orders from Lucifer. Later Ahab cries,
“Oh! my God! what is this that shoots through me, and leaves me so deadly calm, yet expectant,—fixed at the top of a shudder! Future things swim before me, as in empty outlines and skeletons; all the past is somehow grown dim.”*