BY EDGAR ALLAN POE[Story]
This writer, to whom the inner world was more of a reality than the external world, had many visions, especially of the devil. The two seem to have been on a familiar footing. The devil, we must admit, filled Poe’s imagination even if we will not go so far as to agree with his critics that he had Satan substituted for soul. His contemporaries, as is well known, would say of him: “He hath a demon, yea, seven devils are entered into him.” His detractors actually regarded this unhappy poet as an incarnation of the ruler of Hades (cf. North American Review, 1856; Edinburgh Review, 1858; Dublin University Magazine, 1875). It was but recently that a writer in the New York Times declared Poe to have been “grub-staked by demons.”
The story “Bon-Bon” offers a specimen of Poe’s grimly grotesque humour. It first appeared in the Broadway Journal of August, 1835.
The devil of this most un-American of all American authors is not the child of New World fancy, but part of European imagination. The scenery of the story is aptly laid in the land of Robert le Diable.
Poe’s description of the devil is, on the whole, fully in accord with the universally accredited conception of his ordinary appearance. His brutal hoofs and savage horns and beastly tail are all there, only discreetly hid under a dress which any gentleman might wear. The devil is very proud of this epithet given him by William Shakespeare; and from that time on, it has been his greatest ambition to be a gentleman, in outer appearance at least; and to his credit it must be said that he has so well succeeded in his efforts to resemble a gentleman that it is now very hard to tell the two apart. The devil is accredited in popular imagination with long ears, a long (sometimes upturned) nose, a wide mouth, and teeth of a lion. It is on account of his fangs that Satan has been called a lion by the biblical writers. But although the prince of darkness can assume any form in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, and in the waters under the earth, he has never appeared as a lion. This, I believe, is out of deference to Judah, whom his father also called a lion. Hairiness is a pretty general characteristic of the devil. His hairy skin he probably inherited from the ancient fauns and satyrs. Esau is believed to have been a hairy demon. “Old Harry” is a corruption of “Old Hairy.” As a rule, Old Nick is not pictured as bald, but has a head covered with locks like serpents. These snaky tresses, which already “Monk” Lewis wound around the devil’s head, are borrowed, according to Sir Walter Scott, from the shield of Minerva. His face, however, is usually hairless. A beard has rarely been accorded to Satan. His red beard on the mediaeval stage probably came from Donar, whom, as Jacob Grimm says, the modern notions of the devil so often have in the background. Long bearded devils are nowhere normal except in the representations of the Eastern Church of the monarch of hell as counterpart of the monarch of heaven. The eyeless devil is original with our writer. His disciple Baudelaire in his story Les Tentations ou Eros, Plutus et la Gloire presents the second of these three Tempters as an eyeless monster. The mediaeval devil had saucer eyes. According to a Russian legend, the all-seeing spirit of evil is all covered with eyes. The cadaverous aspect of the devil is traditional. With but one remarkable exception (the Egyptian Typhon), demons are always represented lean. “A devil,” said Caesarius of Heisterbach of the thirteenth century, “is usually so thin as to cast no shadow” (Dialogus Miraculorum, iii). This characteristic is a heritage of the ancient hunger-demon, who, himself a shadow, casts no shadow. In the course of the centuries, however, the devil has gained flesh. His faded suit of black cloth recalls the mediaeval devil who appeared “in his fethers all ragged and rent.”
It is not altogether improbable that the ecclesiastical appearance of the devil in this story was not wholly unintentional, as the author believes. While Satan cannot be said to be “one of those who take to the ministry mostly,” he often likes to slip into priestly robes. In the “Temptation of Jesus” by Lucas van Leyden the devil is habited as a monk with a pointed cowl.
In the comparison of a soul with a shadow there is a reminiscence of Adalbert von Chamisso, whose Peter Schlemihl (1814) sells his shadow to the devil. In his story The Fisherman and His Soul Oscar Wilde considers the shadow of the body as the body of the soul.
That the devils in hell eat the damned consigned there for punishment is also in accord with mediaeval tradition. This idea probably is of Oriental origin. The seven Assyrian evil spirits have a predilection for human flesh and blood. Ghouls and vampires belong to this class of demons.
The devil’s pitchfork is not the forked sceptre of Pluto supplemented by another tine, as is commonly assumed. It is the ancient sign of fertility, which is still used as a fertility charm by the Hindus in India and the Zuñi and Aztec Indians of North America and Mexico. A related symbol is the trident of Poseidon or Neptune. This symbol was recently carried in a children’s May Day parade through Central Park in New York.