Devil in the Detail
3rd October 2025
When I was offered the chance to review two new books about the Devil, I thought, “what fun!” I wouldn’t describe myself as a particularly diabolical person, but as someone whose deep love of Paradise Lost has made me, as good old William Blake didn’t quite put it, “of the devil’s party while very much knowing it,” I rubbed my hands together in glee at the prospect of getting down and dirty with Old Nick.
Not, you understand, that my purely literary interest can begin to compare to the “Satanic Panic” outbreak that gripped the imaginations of middle America in the late 1980s and 1990s. “Satanic cults! Every hour, every day, their ranks are growing!” So began one typically understated NBC special that boasted macabre stories of animal sacrifice, cannibalism, ritualistic child abuse and grisly ceremonial murders, all described with a mixture of apparent shock and prurient relish. People genuinely feared that agents of the Devil walked among them. Not least because the media whipped them up into a frenzy.
It is easy to look back at Satanic Panic and chuckle at its absurdity. For a brief moment, we might pity the teenage goths and emos who were suspected of unspeakable crimes because they liked the color black. We can do this because, of course, in our enlightened age, nobody really believes in the Devil anymore. Even the camp but hardly blood-curdling flamboyance of the Satanic Temple is somewhat restrained today; its adherents now spend their time rather quaintly fighting for “representation in schools.”
What I find interesting is that humans, uniquely among the animal world, have developed social institutions to constrain or even suppress natural instinctive behaviors. No other animal species has anything resembling a police force. Whence comes the notion that certain proclivities (that we all have) are somehow not-good?