How Satan is propping up Bush's war on terror

An obsession with the devil, born out of personal experience, explains why so many fundamentalist Christians believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were working together.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Jan 17, 2004 | Bill Ellis goes to some lengths to convince you that he's a normal American. The biographical blurb in the back of his new book, "Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture," assures readers that he's an "active member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America" -- perhaps the most mainstream and least controversial religious affiliation one can imagine.

When I first contacted Ellis about an interview, he replied by e-mail that a reporter from another publication had recently insisted on visiting him at home in Hazleton, Pa., to watch him celebrate Halloween and then attend church the following Sunday. "I'm not sure what he expected," Ellis wrote, "but we did not sacrifice any goats on the former date and didn't have anyone slain in the spirit or exorcised of demons on the latter."

Indeed, when I finally reach Ellis by telephone one recent morning, he does not come off like the goat-sacrificing, demon-exorcising type. He's a soft-spoken man with a mild demeanor, careful to avoid overstatements and generalizations, and his sense of humor is so dry as to be almost imperceptible. He has to take a moment near the beginning of our conversation to help his arthritic dog in the door and up the steps to her food bowl. At one point, he describes himself as a "solitary," a word used by Wiccans to denote a person who is interested in witchcraft but belongs to no coven. There is no folklore department at the Hazleton branch campus of Penn State, where Ellis teaches English, and almost all his contact with colleagues is via the Internet.

Yet one could make a case that this unglamorous professor is a curious kind of cultural hero. At the very least, Ellis has demonstrated courage and fortitude for little tangible reward. His research field -- Satanism and the occult, especially as perpetuated in the folklore and rituals of teenage culture -- is not seen as respectable either by the society at large or the academic world. He has sporadically been attacked by fundamentalist Christians for spreading the evil gospel of the Horned One. "If you think that Satan is not alive and an ever present threat to Christians," wrote one Penn State alumnus, "then you are either (A) not a Christian or (B) a dupe of Satan himself." The writer went on to say he would pray for Ellis' removal from the classroom -- a prayer the university administration, to its credit, has declined to answer.

When I ask whether people in Hazleton judge him harshly because of his scholarly interest in Satan, Ellis chuckles quietly. "I would say they would judge me harshly on my commitment to literacy," he says. "We're in an area where intellectualism is not especially liked."

But the more you read about Ellis' research into the history of Ouija boards, chain letters, lucky rabbit's feet and adolescent "legend-tripping" (i.e., late-night visits to haunted graveyards and other spooky locations), the more you understand that behind these obscurities lie key questions in contemporary culture. Among other things, Ellis says he understands exactly why so many Americans believe that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were working together, despite the lack of any factual evidence to support that claim.

In both "Lucifer Ascending" and his 2000 book "Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media," Ellis builds a sober and persuasive argument that the recent hysteria over the influence of Satan in America, much of it emanating from the Christian right, reflects a misunderstanding of a cyclical or dialectical process that has repeated itself for centuries. The dorm-room séance and the midnight cemetery voyage in some dude's unmuffled Camaro, he argues, are debased fragments of an ancient and genuine folk-witchcraft tradition. (More so, perhaps, than the New Age feminist happy-talk of contemporary Wiccans and neo-pagans, although Ellis speaks respectfully of such boutique beliefs.) As such, they reflect an eternal struggle between individuals and institutions over access to spiritual and supernatural realms, and the equally eternal struggle of teenagers to resist adult authority in general and the strictures of organized religion in particular.

Most significantly, Ellis argues that occultism and evangelical Christianity are more closely related than the devotees of either are likely to admit. The two phenomena have shaped each other, with the Spiritualism craze of the 19th century (which produced the Ouija board, among other phenomena) leading to the explosion of Pentecostalism, with its emphasis on individual experience with demonic possession and the Holy Spirit, early in the 20th. Today, after an interlude in the middle of the last century when American Christianity was dominated by mainstream Protestant and Catholic theologies -- religion based on "intellectual ethics," in Ellis' words -- the charismatic, holy-roller, born-again faiths are back with a vengeance. And so is Satan.

For many evangelical Christians, Ellis explains, the Man-Goat and his legions of demons are not metaphorical or intellectual constructs. "The trend in Christianity toward Pentecostal, charismatic modes of worship really has revived the experience of Satan, rather than the concept of Satan," he says.

As difficult as this can be for atheists, agnostics and even mainstream religious types to accept, Ellis insists that the ecstatic transformations seen at a Pentecostal revival -- speaking in tongues, being slain in the spirit, the exorcism of demons, etc. -- reflect something genuine and powerful. (No one who has ever witnessed such a service, regardless of his or her personal beliefs, is likely to doubt this.) Whether you believe the experience is spirit possession or a dissociated psychological state is, of course, an irreducible question of faith. But all religions that rely on such incandescent moments -- from snake-handling Pentecostalism to Christian Science to Wicca to the animist faiths of sub-Saharan Africa -- must confront what it means when the spiritual experience turns sour.

Next Page: Believers "don't have to be convinced to believe in the devil. They've felt the devil"

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