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- [00:00]
Anthony Delaney
Hi, we're your hosts Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling. And if you would like After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal ad free and get early access, Sign up to.
- [00:10]
Maddy Pelling
History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week.
- [00:21]
Anthony Delaney
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:29]
Dr. Mickey Brock
Acast Powers the World's best Podcasts.
- [00:33]
Anthony Delaney
Here's the show that we recommend.
- [00:37]
Dr. Mickey Brock
Hello, welcome to We Signed an NDA, our podcast where we talk about the people who sign NDAs. Hollywood is the North Pole and the celebrities are Santa. This is a show all about the elves, so please don't sue us Santa. My name is Amanda Lifford. If my voice sounds at all familiar, it's probably from the Bio Files podcast. And my name is Ann Maddox. You may have seen me on Vanderpump Rules Getting fired on national television by Tom Sandoval. The Glasgow Willy Wonkin Experience One of the worst jobs in history. Kirsty, you're on the Right podcast. I was wearing snow pants lying under Stephen Colbert. Welcome. I've heard of Vanderpump Rules.
- [01:16]
Anthony Delaney
I don't know what it is, so.
- [01:17]
Dr. Mickey Brock
Listen to We Signed an NDA. Wherever you listen to podcasts, ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. Acast.
- [01:34]
Maddy Pelling
The diaries of godly Scots living in the 1600s, document a front line in a spiritual war wrought across a population perpetually wrestling with demonic temptation and doubt. Take young Mistress Rutherford, an orphan brought up by her grandfather in Edinburgh at the start of the 17th century. As an adult, she recalled in her youth how, aged just 11, she could not sleep. Fear of the Devil. When she did sleep, she would be terrorized by dreamlike visions of him so vivid and so disturbing that life quickly became exhausting, and even as a child, she soon desired to die. As she sat in the Kirk one day contemplating her troubles, she heard a great roaring wind outside and was overcome with a fear that it was the devil she heard come to take her away. Her mind flitted about in panic, for so she thought he had invaded it and would destroy her inside out. Mistress Rutherford was not alone in believing that she lived in a world where Satan was present. Ubiquitous even, no door, window, chimney, prayer, or spell powerful enough to keep him at bay. All across the city of Edinburgh, all across Scotland, all across Europe, people lived in full belief that the Antichrist did indeed walk the earth, raging and seeking any he might devour.
- [03:40]
Anthony Delaney
Hello and welcome back to After Dark. My name is Anthony.
- [03:45]
Maddy Pelling
My name's Maddie.
- [03:46]
Anthony Delaney
And today we are back with Dr. Mickey Brock for the second part of our exploration of the history of the devil. Now, we began last week exploring the origins of the devil and his rise to power and influence, I suppose. But today we're going to look at the decline and fall of Old Nick, as he's known. But is it an actual fall? But our guide, as I say, is Dr. Mickey Brock. And Mickey is a historian of religion and the supernatural in early modern Scot Scotland. She's the author of Satan and The Scots circa 1560-1700, the devil in Post Reformation Scotland, and is editing a forthcoming book called the Routledge History of the Devil in Western Tradition. So we couldn't be joined by someone who is more qualified to talk about this topic than Mickey. Episode one is just fantastic. If you haven't listened, go back and listen to it. And here we are in episode two. So we heard there, Mickey, in the introduction, that Maddie was reading about an account of somebody living with the devil in early 1600s. Just tell us a little bit more about Mistress Rutherford and that particular history.
- [04:54]
Dr. Mickey Brock
Yeah, so I think what's so fascinating about Mistress Rutherford, and we don't know her first name, her first name is not actually Mistress, but that's what we have in her records. So we could imagine she's called Janet or something like that. Very common. But anyway, Mrs. Rutherford, we don't know more about her than that she was an orphan and that she had a sort of challenging childhood, raised by really strict Presbyterian grandparents. And she, I think, in some ways typifies the experience of a literate Scot trying to wrestle with the implications of the faith that they were a part of. I think I mentioned in the previous episode that one of the mandates of being a good Calvinist, right, and being a good member of the church in this period is to not only control your words and your actions, but also your thoughts and God. What a high bar for a teenager, for a young person to control your thoughts. And part of that was seen as, again, if you want it to be good, if you want it to be godly, if you want it to be one of the elect, then you should inherently be good in all of those ways. So she really represents the typical wrestling with one's faith and the role that Satan had in that journey to try and navigate this question that faced a lot of these Scotch witches, am I saved or am I damned? Because of course, according to Calvinist theology, nothing you do in life actually changes that path. But they believed that if you were one of the good and one of the godly, you would inherently act like it. So these Scots people, like Mistress Rutherford, spent a lot of time searching their souls for evidence of their demonic allegiances to see if they were in fact being swayed by Satan too much, or if they had enough godly impulses that might suggest they would go to heaven. So it's a real spiritual malaise, I think, is the way to think about this, and a real spiritual anxiety that's born of trying to be so good and be so godly. And this is certainly not unique to Calvinism. I probably don't need to tell people on this, on this podcast that sort of guilt and anxiety about one's religious identity is unique to many, many faiths. But certainly it's very pronounced in this sort of post Reformation Scottish context. And the ideas about the devil are a big part of that.
- [07:05]
Maddy Pelling
Micky, you've spent a huge amount of time working with 17th century archival materials and particularly thinking here about Rutherford's diary. Is it simply that fear of the devil grappling with these ideas are so much a part of daily life that they seep into these written records that people create for themselves? Or is the act of writing that out a way of exploring that? Is there. Is there a power to maybe come into contact with the devil, to imagine him on the page that allows ordinary folk to be part of these debates and these conversations?
- [07:43]
Dr. Mickey Brock
That is a really fantastic question. And the answer is sort of. It's both. You know, I've read lots of self writings, what I would call self writings, letters, spiritual diaries, these sort of conversion narratives, which is what is. And they are these sort of spiritual accountings, right? These sort of fearless moral inventories of their mental worlds and states. And, you know, for some of them, the devil just shows up like a little bit here and there because the devil was so ubiquitous. So they would have written about hearing about him in a sermon and then kind of thinking about things, or they might have felt that they had an evil thought and attributed it to the devil. So in some cases, the devil passingly shows up, a reflection of just how prominent Satan is. But others of these accounts, particularly these conversion narratives like Mistress Rutherford's, they're somewhat scripted, right? That is to say, it's not that they're not authentic, but they follow a very specific sort of story of struggle and redemption, struggle and redemption, wrestling with Satan, turning to God, wrestling with Satan, turning to God, and trying throughout to seek spiritual peace. And so they do borrow on these very biblical Tropes, right? Of trial and tribulation, right. Of a sort of pilgrim's progress us towards grace. So there's very little that's new under the sun in those to some extent. They almost in some ways resemble aspects of martyrologies which you probably have encountered before. And in that way, actually, I think what's interesting is the Devil can serve as a sign that maybe you are one of the righteous. Because who would the devil most want to go after, right? He most wants to get the good and the godly. So in some cases, and I don't think this is the case of Mistress Rutherford's account, but some of these ministers in particular really like to play this up like, Satan's coming after me, you know, and that why would he come after me? Because I am, you know, a servant of God. James vi, that was his whole thing, right? Like, who else would the devil want to attack but this great and godly king, right? He was a great self promoter, James.
- [09:39]
Anthony Delaney
So, yeah, listen, this is turning into a therapy session for me. I'm just like, oh, this is where all of this is coming from. But I want to move now. We talked about this kind of idea of the Fall, right? And what I want to start to hone in on a little bit in this episode is the rise of the skeptic and the rise of skepticism where the devil is concerned. Can you tell us when that starts to come about and how that manifests?
- [10:08]
Dr. Mickey Brock
So it's hard to pinpoint precisely when it comes about because to some degree, demonology has always presupposed doubt, which is to say, I think a lot of these people who are writing treatises about the devil, right, or about witchcraft, they always know that some of the things that they are claiming seem sort of bananas, right? Like people are doing what was Satan where, right? That kind of thing. So to some degree, there's always this. If you read works like the Malleus Maleficarum, right, which is the Hammer of Witches, this famous book by Heinrich Kramer in the late 1480s, it begins with saying, some of you will be skeptical, but here are six reasons why this is definitely for real. True, right? So I say that there's always this almost skepticism embedded in the way that people try to sort of prove the case of the devil's involvement. But you start to see the first clear articulations of some of the skepticism coming in the late 16th century. But those voices are very few and far between, and they start to multiply and become more common in the second half of the 17th century as the witch hunts decline and then by the early 18th century, skepticism about the devil is fairly common among intellectual elites. So I don't want to suggest that this is linear. I don't want to impose any sort of teleology. The devil remains really, really important to ordinary people and also to some elites throughout this whole sor move into the Enlightenment. But I would say we can identify some early modern sort of articulations of what will become a robust skeptical tradition by the end of the 17th century. A patient's recovery is only as good as their treatment plan. And for adult patients with bcg, unresponsive non muscle invasive bladder cancer, carcinoma in situ or nmibccis, Anktiva is an important treatment option to consider. This immunotherapy harnesses the body's natural immune response and works alongside bcg. It's a non surgical option that's been shown to produce durable complete responses up to four years for some patients, patients enabling them to avoid or postpone surgical removal of the bladder. Sounds like the doctor needs me. Ask your doctor if Anktiva is right for you. Patients treated with Anxiva BCG may still be at risk for more serious muscle invasive or metastatic bladder cancer which can be life threatening if bladder removal is delayed. If you don't respond to a second round of Anktiva with bcg, bladder removal surgery should be considered before starting Aniva. Tell your doctor if you're pregnant or planning to become pregnant as Anktiva may cause fetal harm. Common side effects include abnormal laboratory results, increased creatinine, painful urination, blood and urine, frequent urination, urgent need to urinate, urinary tract infections, high potassium, muscle pain, chills and fever. For more information visit anktiva.com or call 1-877-Anktiva 1-877-265-8482.
- [13:02]
Maddy Pelling
I'm so fascinated by this Mickey, because at the moment I'm writing a book about the 18th century and people getting involved in hoaxes and trying to tread that line of this idea of the Enlightenment, bringing all these new ideas and banishing these superstitions and this belief in, I suppose, old fashioned darkness as it is viewed in those binary terms. And of course that wasn't the case. Of course folklore and belief in the devil absolutely persisted. So I think this is fascinating. Let's start with one of the earliest skeptics though, when I ask you about Reginald Scott and his really influential titles that he publishes because he comes, as you say, at the end of the 16th century, this feels very early. Was it a risk for someone like Scott to set out a treatise that goes against the teachings of the church?
- [13:49]
Dr. Mickey Brock
Yeah. So Reginald Scott, you know, his big work, Discovery of witchcraft, is in 1584. And interestingly, I know you've had an episode on James VI, and he wrote his demonology in 1597 as a response to Scott's skeptical treatise, Discovery of Witchcraft. He really wanted to prove Scott wrong, because in this treatise, Scott says essentially that belief that the devil is doing things to allow witches to exercise magical powers, that's just a delusion, right? The devil is not able to imbue these ordinary women with the ability to make husbands impotent and to cause storms and all of these things. He says, listen, that's a load of rubbish. People are kind of delusional here. The devil's really powerful, and also witchcraft is a thing, but by allowing the devil to become this figure who can have all these servants, it's giving him too much power and it's challenging the sovereignty of God. That's Scott's main argument, right? That we've given the devil too much through our obsession with witches. And some of these things have other explanations. And was it risky? Yeah, it was risky, right. You could piss off the king, which it certainly, although he was a king of Scotland at the time, and Scotch is writing from England, so he has a little bit of COVID But it could be. It could be risky. There are a number of figures who, once we get into the 17th century, are labeled atheists for saying this. Thomas Hobbes, people always think about him as, you know, the author of Leviathan, this sort of commentary on the regicide and on the preferredness of absolute rule. But in Leviathan, Hobbes also talks about the devil, and he also talks about demons and kind of dismisses some of those ideas and says, no, everything in the world is corporeal, actually, even God, which is a very heterodox belief. And people say you're an atheist because the concern is it's a slippery slope, right? If you start to chip away at belief in witches, soon you'll start to chip away a belief in the devil. And when you start to chip away a belief in the devil, soon you'll start to chip away at belief in God and the whole house of cards comes crumbling down. Right? So Scott, he's not skeptical about the devil per se, but he's skeptical about the way the devil's power on earth has been construed. But even that can be seen as a little seed kernel of something that could turn into a threat to the sort of structures of power. So yeah, I mean people are taking risks to do this. It's interesting on the main Protestant are more like, there are certainly Catholic skeptics, but there's a little bit more space for Protestants to write about this because there's a little bit more decentralized control not in Scotland, but in England because of, you know, the Church of England has always been an interesting, an interesting beast in various ways. But it allows a little bit more space for certain types of heterodox thinking in, in the context of someone like Scott, for example. And he's lucky that he's writing during the reign of a monarch who's like kind of chill about some of this. In Elizabeth I, he would have had potentially different responses had he written it under someone else.
- [16:45]
Anthony Delaney
I love this reminder of the house of cards that you referenced there, Mickey, about, you know, you don't believe in the devil, you can start to chip away belief in God. And of course this is what happens slightly in the 17th century when they. The regicide takes place and Charles I loses his head because that's almost an attack on God. This is the divine right of kings. He has been directly appointed by God, or so previous belief systems would have said. And so therefore even God is destructible by the time we get to the 17th century. So it's so powerful to think about the way that these minds, this mindset shifts during this kind of 50, 60 year period.
- [17:33]
Dr. Mickey Brock
Yeah. And I actually think it has a connection to that Mistress Rutherford story we started with. And that particularly for Reformed Protestants, which is basically a synonym of Calvinism. Right. Basically for these Calvinist types that are so invested in the sovereignty of God to such a degree, of course, that they believe in election, that God is sort of totalizing, determining of everything. Because of that, the devil has a very different role for Protestants. For those sorts of Protestants. Right. The devil is God's hangman. The devil's an instrument of God's wrath. The devil is testing your elect status or not. And that leads to a much more internalized devil. For a lot of these Protestants, they see the devil as infiltrating their mind like Mistress Rutherford was thinking about when she's sitting in church and trying to concentrate. What that does is I think makes the devil a little bit less corporeal, a little bit less external and more related to human sin and human evil. And I think that's part of what eventually becomes the project of moving this idea of evil from the realm of the cosmic from the realm of the devil, to be something that humans themselves can manifest. And that's a very slow process, it's not straightforward. But there is kind of an interesting development that kind of gets us from thinking about the horrific evil of the devil in that Last Judgment painting we talked about last episode, to thinking about the very human evil of a figure like Jack the Ripper right there, there's an arc there. And I think Protestantism is sort of in the middle of that and helping shepherd the idea of evil to being something that's us, right? And there's a skeptic, you know, Spinoza, Baruch Spinoza, who's writing also in the second half of the 17th century, who essentially says, listen, like, if God created everything and God's good and the things that he does are beautiful, then anything that's evil in the world is us. We don't need the devil for it. And so I think that's really powerful. But I do think in some ways it's connected to this sort of, of strict Protestantism in a way.
- [19:26]
Maddy Pelling
I'm very interested, Mickey, in what you're saying about the progress, or the opposite of that, I suppose, the decline really of the devil as this corporeal presence in the world in a linear form. And actually there are lots of pushbacks against that. And if one were to plot it on a graph, it would not simply be a simple decline downwards. And I want to move us on to our next story now because I think this represents one of those moments where that shift in belief starts to become tested and people's deeply generationally ingrained beliefs do bubble to the surface in amongst these more so called modern discussions. By the end of the 1700s, Edinburgh had become known as the Athens of the North. A seat of rational thinking and so called enlightenment that amazed all of Europe and drew in many of the best and brightest minds. But at the start of the century, things were slightly less illuminated. In fact, they were for some, shrouded in darkness. For hundreds of years, the city's state ordered hangings took place in Grassmarket, the long wide open space lined with high tenement, all in the shadow of the Castle Rock. On hanging days, a huge black gallows would appear towards its eastern end. Sir Walter Scott would later describe how a double ladder was placed against it for the ascent of the unhappy criminal and the executioner. He recorded that as this apparatus was always arranged before dawn, it seemed as if the gallows themselves had grown out of the earth in the course of one night. And on the night after the execution, the gallows again disappeared, he says, into silence and darkness. Of all the victims of that horrid contraption, none were more famous in her day than half Hangit Maggy. Though it was what happened to her after she was taken down from the noose that would make her name. Margaret Dixon was executed in 1724 for the alleged crime of infanticide. Her story had been spread in broadside and ballads, and on the day appointed for her death, a huge crowd came to watch this unnatural woman receive her justice. When it was done, her lifeless body was put into a cart to be taken away from the crowd and back back to her hometown of Musselburgh, about six miles out of the city. But as her body was transported cold and jolting with the motion of the cart onto which she'd been loaded, the driver heard a strange noise. To his astonishment, when he opened the lid of her rudimentary wooden coffin, he found Margaret very much alive. He turned and fled, escaping from what he presumed must be a vengeful ghost. Margaret, far from dead, clambered out to freedom because, according to Scots law, no one could be hanged twice. News spread of her rising from blackness, seeping into Edinburgh's coffee houses and taverns, its broadsides and its drawing rooms. It was whispered in alleyways and pronounced with fear in the pews. A narrative began to emerge now in its retelling, and with it, a new character. Old Nick. For who else could have brought Margaret back from the dead but the devil himself?
- [23:36]
Anthony Delaney
Well, before we get into this, I just want to say I want you to come back, Mickey, if you will, do us the. The very kind honor and do us a whole episode on Maggie Dixon, because I think she deserves our attention. But. But in this specific instance, when we're talking about the devil, we're talking about his trajectory, do we assume. Is there an assumption that there is some kind of satanic involvement in her resurrection? Because there are many different versions of her resurrection. Right. It's confusing because it's almost incomprehensible to these people that this may have happened. Of course, likelihood is she just hadn't died at all, obviously. But how does he weave into this story? And what are the multiple resurrection stories?
- [24:18]
Dr. Mickey Brock
Yeah, so, I mean, it's such a fascinating story. It is shameless. Plug the subject of the book that I'm currently writing. You know, I think this question of what does the devil have to do with this? I mean, the reason her case is such a fitting story for this podcast and for this subject is because it does take place in 1724, in this sort of really interesting moment of transition for Edinburgh, for Scotland, for Europe. She was hanged according to this very draconian 1690 infanticide law, which was driven by the underlying idea that women who conceived their children illegitimately would be driven to murder their babies. This was sort of the most devilish, unnatural thing a woman could do. And really, in some ways, this law in 1690 borrows on certain tropes about what women did that came out of the witch trials. They were easily led by Satan to do dastardly things. They harmed children. They subverted the norms of their gender. In the 1690 law, really, it captured a lot of women in his grasp. Most of the women who were convicted according to this were domestic servants. A lot of them had their children through unconsensual cases. That certainly was the case with Maggie Dixon. She was raped. Her child was almost certainly stillborn. But according to the rules of this law, if you had concealed your pregnancy and not called out for help during birth, you would be considered a handmaiden of Satan. Right? Someone who. And that was the language they used. Someone who did the worst sort of thing a woman could do. There are lots of pamphlets written about them. And these pamphlets present women who become murdering mothers as being tempted by Satan, susceptible to the Devil, driven to slay their own seed by Satan's lures. Right. People describe it in this way, but if you go into a courtroom among learned men at the time, these attorneys and Lord advocates, people presiding over the criminal courts, they don't tend to talk about the devil in the 18th century. So I think that again, shows this moment of tension where for clerics who are usually writing these infanticide pamphlets and who were also very involved in the witch trials, the Devil's still really active and women are his particularly vulnerable. Women are his easy targets. Right. And they're carrying that into the 18th century, even at a moment when the devil and his role in the world are being debated in the coffee houses, in the courtrooms, and among other intellectual groups. So it's this real moment of tension. So her story needs to be seen in sort of that context of the 17th century law that's playing out in the early 18th century, as you have a society that's having skeptical ideas not just about the church or about God, but also new ways of thinking about science, about medicine. So when this question of the resurrection comes into play to your question, Anthony, about how the hell did she live? I mean, what's going on? This is bizarre. There are a range of explanations that people put forward. Some say, well, because she was a lusty woman who had had a child out of wedlock, she must have had an affair with the executioner and convinced him in her sort of femme fatale way to loosen the noose. Right. There are these sorts of very stereotypical stories that get at play. Others say, though, there's a pamphlet that's published immediately after her execution called Warning to the Wicked. And it's really saying she was driven by the. To do her initial crime and that it must have been old Nick who kind of helped her get out of the noose. And that represents a very, I think, sort of early modern idea that driving people to commit evil was. Was Satan, right? But then you have other people who think, well, maybe actually, you know, she lived, maybe that's God's favor. So it turns into this real crisis of authority that people are debating her survival. And I think it really is representative of this moment of real concern about what was the role of the Church, what was the role of the state, and what was the role of the devil in all of this.
- [28:20]
Maddy Pelling
I really want to know more about her story, but I'm aware that we have a time limit, so you must come back, Micky. But very quickly, what happens to Margaret?
- [28:28]
Dr. Mickey Brock
In the end, she lives as, you know, she becomes this total cause celeb. Everybody wants to see her because they do think she's a revenant. Right? She's been resurrected. Is she, you know, roaming the earth like a servant of the devil? Or is she God's chosen? She survived this. I mean, people are really shocked about how she did it. So people start to pay money to try to come see her. She sort of cashes in on her newfound celebrity. She reunites with her husband, who she had been separated from at the time. She falls pregnant, and she goes on to live in Edinburgh for another few decades. She has more children. So it's a really fascinating story. But what's really interesting to me is she. She becomes, you know, she's featured in Sir Walter Scott's novel Heart of Midlothian. She inspires a bunch of poetry. And what I think is fascinating about her story as it's retold and retold again is how much of the initial sort of religious interpretation and also the role of that infanticide law, how much those things get lost. She also, I should say, people variously speculate, oh, is she a witch? Right? Because that's a, you know, it's a very witchy thing to do to Survive your hanging. And I think we really have to understand that, that for women in this period, they're either a Madonna who rejects the devil who has a godly path, or they're an Eve, they're a whore, they're someone who follows the wiles of Satan. There's not a lot of space for women to operate in between those things. And I think the various competing interpretations of Maggie and what happened to her after her survival are read through that very black and white lens of role for women.
- [30:00]
Anthony Delaney
I'm going to skip forward now, Nikki, because we're coming to the end of this two parter and I want to end by reflecting on our own time, I think, you know, and we've done a bit of a hop, skip and a jump over the 19th and 20th century where the Devil, I guess, raises his head every now and again in film or in kind of cultural moments. But I would love to hear your thoughts on whether or not the devil has died in the West. Are we free of him?
- [30:28]
Dr. Mickey Brock
Yeah. So no is the answer. It's the very short answer, but let me give you sort of the longer answer. I mean, the devil really never goes away. It's just ideas about the demonic become channeled into other avenues. So for example, right, if you take sort of the Whitechapel murders at the end of the 19th century, right, there is Jack the Ripper and that whole story, all the evil that's part of that, he becomes sort of a devil figure. And then also people think about the evil of the slums and the situation of people living in poverty in the East End, right? So you see this sort of way in which ideas about evil find different avenues and humans can become kind of the stand in for these devil figures. But it's not as if the core of those ideas goes away. And it's not that people's profound desire for explanation for what happens to them in the world that doesn't go away. People always want to understand why are there plagues, why are there fires, why are there mass murderers, why are there deaths, why are this their genocide? Why are these things here? And if you believe in God, and if you believe God is all good, and if you believe God is all powerful, you have to have an answer to that or otherwise again, this sort of whole edifice starts to crumble. So the reason I sort of paint that out is to say there remains a need for Satan to a certain degree, especially for believers, not for everybody, for people who don't believe they can conceptualize of evil as being about Things we create for ourselves, the conditions of poverty, the conditions of genocide. But for those who do believe the Devil helps absolve God of any responsibility for bad things that are continuing to happen in the world. And that impulse is still very much there even in the West. So, you know, by the time you get into, I mean, I'll give you actually a really specific example from my side of the Atlantic. 9 11, right? Very beginning of the 21st century. Increasingly, I assume everyone knows about this, but Now I teach 18 year olds who are like, what happened? And I'm like, oh my God. You know, the thing about being a professor is like, you keep getting older and yet your students say the same age. But there was a lot of rhetoric after 911 about this being the product of an axis of evil. There were a lot of Christian circles that saw the devil as sort of driving the terrorists who were part of that attack. And of course, this led to profound levels of Islamophobia and the demonization of Muslims writ large. And I think that use of the devil as an explanation for these geopolitical problems, I mean, I think that's still really apparent in some pretty profound ways. And of course, there were echoes of this before the Satanic panics of the 1980s. And since 2016, I would argue the devil's had a bit of a renaissance, I'm kind of sorry to say, especially on my side of the Atlantic, in that the devil has become real fodder for people on the religious right, the political right, to talk about their enemies, be it in the halls of Congress, be it at universities, be it among LGBTQ communities, be it among immigrant groups, whatever. The devil is still a really useful sorting mechanism for people on sort of that side of thinking about things. And you, we have seen a really profound rise of demonic rhetoric and American political discourse. So you are a leftist, you are a Marxist, you're a communist. Those things have become, for some people, a byword for saying you're also a servant of Satan. And this is part of this Pizzagate conspiracy belief. It's part of QAnon thinking. Right? There's been a real, you know, bringing back up of that role for the devil. And I think it's part of it post 2016, obviously there were lots of big things that happened on both side of the Atlantic that upended certain norms and structures. Certainly the COVID 19 pandemic didn't make that any better. So I think the Devil is really, really having a heyday. And what's fascinating to me about this, and I know, I'm going on. But when you think about these satanic panics throughout history, you think about antisemitism. People are really worried about blood libel and harm to children. The Herod. This is a panic about heretics. In the 11th, 12th century, people worried about heretical cults indoctrinating children and doing rituals with them. During the witch trial, there was a fundamental belief, right, that witches, at the behest of Satan were harming children. Then, you know, the satanic panics of the 1980s also featured harm to children. And now you have all these really sort of horrific things being levied at trans. People worrying about, what about the children? What about the children? And they're being demonized through that lens. So I think it's really fascinating to think about why satanic panics and these practices of demonization so often revolve around this perception of potential harm to children, because that's a real through line in all of this.
- [35:13]
Maddy Pelling
It's so interesting to hear you say all of this, Mickey. I could listen to hours more, but we should end soon. I do have one final question, though. It strikes me that you spend a significant amount of your time thinking about the Devil in a removed, intellectually rigorous way, but nonetheless spending a lot of time with him, thinking about the effect the belief in him has had in the past and indeed today. And I just wonder if you have any personal antidote to the devil. And I don't mean that you believe in him and therefore need to repel him, but that it's a very heavy topic. It's a topic that takes you to some of the darkest human behavior. And I wonder if as a researcher, as a historian, you seek out ways to step back from that sometimes and to bring a little bit of light into your research and your life.
- [36:09]
Dr. Mickey Brock
That's a great question. And let me just say from the outset, when I started doing this work, when I was doing my PhD was doing my research in Scotland. And I really remember this actually, because it was, you know, in the winter time when I got to Scotland, and I was there for six months, you know, from like October through February. And I'm coming from Texas. It's the darkest it's ever been in my life. I go into the archives to read about Satan when it's dark. And I come out of the archives to, you know, I've been reading about Satan all day and it's still dark. And, you know, my family, some of whom are quite. Are quite religious, extended family, and also just the community I grew up in was quite evangelically Protestant. People sort of really were worried about what I was doing. Like, aren't you concerned about reading about all of this? And, you know, I would sort of say I'm studying this historically. I'm not interested in the question of reality. As a historian, that's not really relevant because the devil matters because people believed he was real. Right. So, but my, my. I definitely heard from people in my life concern about the nature of the material and about the sort of, you know, heaviness of what it might bring. Not because they were worried about, like, my mental state. They were worried about my soul. Right. It was very different. Different thing. And so it's always been interesting to sort of think about. About those dynamics. You know, for me, this story of demonization and it's, you know, a belief in the devil and the ways that it's really harmed some of the most vulnerable people historically. I mean, that is. That this is hard stuff. Stuff. But I think the study of history is also a story of overcoming. I mean, no one could have imagined. Well, not no one, but most people could not have imagined in, say, 1650, 51, at this moment, when Janet Sawyer is going to her death for the crime of witchcraft, that the Scottish Witchcraft act would be repealed. Right. In the 1730s. People could not have imagined in the 1730s that by, you know, year 2000, believing in God's a choice, believing in the devil's a choice, we have that latitude. So I really do think that history, even the dark parts of it, are still stories of overcoming, are still stories of moving towards hope, of moving towards light. And to me, keeping in mind the arc of things and the agency that we have within these hard moments to reject lazy demonization, to reject lazy categorizing of the other and. And instead to choose tolerance, to choose joy, to choose welcoming, that choice is something that I also see people making historically and today. And that gives me a lot of hope, even in the midst of some of these darker episodes that I spend a lot of time with.
- [38:44]
Anthony Delaney
I don't think there's anything more fitting to end two episodes on the history of Satan, the history of the Devil, with than that message. I think that's what we can take forward from this, and that's what really can resonate with us as we leave these two episodes. I cannot say thank you enough. Off to Dr. Mickey Brock, who has guided us so expertly through these last two episodes. They truly have become two of my favorite already. Sometimes you just get an episode. Maddie, I know we talk about this all the time. There's episodes and guests that you just really remember and there's really stand out and those are the ones we're always like. Please come back, please come back, please come back. So I hope you guys listening feel exactly the same and Mickey, I hope you will join us again on After Dark at another time. Thank you so much for joining us us and thank you for listening as ever. Please do leave us a five star review. Wherever you get your podcasts it helps other people to discover the show and if you have enjoyed this please go back and look at our back catalogue of so many other episodes. There are other witchcraft episodes in there. There are all kinds of demonic possession episodes in there. So you will, you will find something to to fit your taste. Until next time, happy listening.
- [39:56]
Dr. Mickey Brock
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- [40:00]
Anthony Delaney
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- [40:03]
Dr. Mickey Brock
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