The Devil's Details: The Evolution of the Devil through Art and Literature

Letter Ten skips Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob entirely and goes straight for the Old Testament body count. Satan’s thesis: the old testament shows us the Deity before he got religion, the new one shows him afterward. The first time he came down to earth he brought life and death. The second time, he brought hell.Death, Satan argues, was a mistake — not because it was cruel but because it was insufficient. It inflicted misery beautifully on the survivors, but it let the dead escape into the blessed refuge of the grave. A way had to be found to pursue them beyond the tomb. The Deity worked on this for four thousand years without success, then came down, became a Christian, and his mind cleared. Everyone believes he was harsh in heaven and became gentle as Jesus Christ — whereas it was as Jesus Christ that he invented hell.Then Satan starts quoting Numbers, and the rest of the episode is us reading the Midianite massacre out loud and reacting in real time. Kill every male among the little ones. Keep the rest for yourselves. Seventy-two thousand beeves. The biblical law says thou shalt not kill; the law of God written in the heart of man says thou shalt kill; and if God himself wrote the commandment, then plainly he can’t keep it.And then there’s the wall. Satan speculates the Midianites must have done something trivial to earn extermination — maybe someone had been pissing against the wall. A person could piss against a tree, piss on his mother, piss on his own breeches and get off, but he must not piss against the wall. We assumed Twain invented this. He did not. It’s First Kings 14:10, word for word. We also work out what it actually means, which reframes the massacre passages completely.

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Letter Nine is the shortest letter yet, and it wraps up Noah in about two pages. The Ark continues its voyage, compassless and uncontrolled, the sport of random winds and swirling currents, and the rain keeps falling at a hundred and twenty inches a day — ten feet — for forty days and forty nights, until every hill four hundred feet high is submerged and the heavens and even the angels go dry. No more water was to be had. As a universal flood, Satan says, it was a disappointment. But there had been heaps of universal floods before, as witnessed by all the Bibles of all the nations, and this was as good as the best one.The ConversationWe dig into the two arguments Twain packs into this tiny letter. The first is that every culture on earth has a flood story, and Twain's Satan treats them all as equally valid and equally unimpressive — Gilgamesh's flood was fine, this one was fine, nobody's flood was special. We work through why that might be: whether it's the same event remembered differently, whether early civilizations were simply codifying their stories during a period when flooding was the thing most likely to kill them, or whether every creation myth eventually writes itself into a corner and needs a mechanism to explain why there are no giants or unicorns anymore. Mommy, daddy, where did they all go? The flood. Don't look back any further than the flood.The second argument is the one that stings. The Ark lands on Ararat, seventeen thousand feet up, the living freight disembarks, and in a single sentence Noah plants a vineyard, drinks the wine, and is overcome. This person, Satan notes, had been selected from all the populations because he was the best sample there was. He was to start the human race on a new basis. This was the new basis. The promise was bad. Now was the time to do with these people what had been so judiciously done with the others — drown them. Anybody but the Creator would have seen this. And if it's true that God foresaw everything from the beginning of time, then he foresaw Adam and Eve eating the apple, foresaw that their posterity would have to be drowned, foresaw that Noah's posterity would be just as unendurable, and foresaw that he'd eventually have to come down and be crucified to save the same tiresome human race again. Granting all that, the pulpit is granting that in the matter of intellect the Deity is the head pauper of the universe.We also sit with the Noah's-drunkenness problem, which neither of us has ever found a satisfying explanation for. If Noah wasn't a real person, then the story isn't a neutral record of a real man's flaws — it's a deliberate choice, which means it has to be teaching something. And whatever that lesson was, the culture that held it has been separated from us by enough centuries that we can't see it anymore.We Also Discuss

• Three's Company, and the realization that neither of us could correctly remember the premise of a show we both grew up with
• Whether there's a haunted apartment discount, a gay discount, and critically, a gay ghost discount
• Kynan's house, where a previous owner may have died, which produced no reduction in price whatsoever, and whose walk-in closet is reportedly larger than Lester's bedroom
• Corporeal form dysmorphia, and whether the afterlife adds ten pounds or six feet
• Why Las Vegas has no basements, and what hardpan does during a flash flood
• The Egyptians building snakes into their afterlife because snakes were the thing most likely to kill them, and English folklore building wolves into everything for the same reason
• Twain's line that only Roman Catholics with a priest handy to sandpaper their souls at the last gasp stand any real chance, and here and there a Presbyterian — a word Kynan still refuses to look up because the syllables are funnier unexamined

Links

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• Connect with Kynan on Instagram or Letterboxd
• Connect with Lester on Facebook, Instagram, or X

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Letter Eight opens with Satan's flattest verdict yet: man is, without any doubt, the most interesting fool there is, also the most eccentric. He hasn't a single written law in his Bible or out of it which has any purpose but to limit or defeat the law of God. And to prove it, Satan reaches for two animals.Temperament, he says, is the law of God written in the heart of every creature, and it must be obeyed. Lust is the dominant feature of the goat's, and the goat obeys the whole day long in the rutting season without stopping to eat or drink. If the Bible commanded the goat not to fornicate, even sap-headed man would see how foolish that is — yet he puts all men under the identical prohibition, when by temperament many men are goats and others are tortoises. And Twain's tortoise is the funniest thing in the letter: that cold, calm Puritan, who takes a treat only once in two years, falls asleep in the middle of it, and doesn't wake up for sixty days. The goat earns punishment. The tortoise earns praise, for doing nothing.The commandment gets the same treatment. It makes no distinction between children at birth and men of a hundred, so it lands hardest on the people most capable of breaking it and not at all on the ones who couldn't if they tried — and those are the ones who get congratulated, which is nonsense, because even the Bible knows that if the oldest veteran there got his lost heyday back for an hour he'd throw that commandment to the winds.Then the letter goes somewhere we truly did not expect, and we spend the back half of the episode working through Twain's argument that human sexual law is precisely backwards — and that the person with everything at stake in the matter should be the one writing it, rather than the immeasurable hog who has nothing at stake worth considering and makes it himself anyway. Twain closes by proposing two editions of these letters: one unedited for Bible readers and their children, the other expurgated for persons of refinement.

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Letter Seven finds Noah's family aboard and saved — if that could be called an advantage, Satan says, since no intelligent person over sixty would consent to live his life again. They were saved, but they were not comfortable, for they were full of microbes. Full to the eyebrows, obese with them, distended like balloons. Enough had to be preserved to supply future races with desolating diseases, and there were only eight people aboard to serve as hotels.Typhoid, cholera, lockjaw, consumption, black plague, and hundreds of other aristocrats — golden bearers of God's love to man — all sumptuously housed in the lungs, the heart, the brain, and particularly the guts, where the great intestine was the favorite resort. They gathered by countless billions and sang hymns of praise, and at night when it was quiet you could hear the soft murmur of it. Their principal hymn: Constipation, constipation, the joyful sound proclaim, till man's remotest entrail shall praise its Maker's name.Then it turns. Many poor people go barefoot because they can't afford shoes, and the Creator saw his opportunity. He always has his eye on the poor — nine-tenths of his disease inventions were meant for them. You can tell because one of the pulpit's favorite names for him is the Friend of the Poor, and the pulpit never pays him a compliment with a vestige of truth in it. When science exterminates a disease that's been working for God, God gets the credit. He is the slowest mover in the universe, and in all history never thought of a noble deed first — he always arrives just after somebody else did it, and annexes the dividend. The hookworm cure was going to cost a million dollars, and God was just reaching for his wallet when Mr. Rockefeller pushed in ahead of him.The letter closes with a convert who asks his priest how to be worthy of his new faith and is told to imitate his Father in Heaven. He studies his Bible thoroughly and does exactly that. The results are catastrophic. When he reports back, the priest changes the subject and asks what kind of weather he's having up his way.

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On this BONUS episode, we look at Ridley Scott's 1985 fantasy epic Legend, where Tim Curry delivers one of cinema's most memorable portrayals of evil incarnate as the "Lord of Darkness" – a towering, crimson-skinned monster with the horns of a minotaur and ...well...the voice of Tim Curry!
Curry's theatrical background shines through his commanding physical presence and deliciously hammy delivery, creating a devil that's equal parts terrifying and charismatic. From his unmistakable laugh to his appropriately devilish "We are all animals, Lady," Curry transforms what could have been a generic fantasy villain into a genuinely unsettling embodiment of temptation and corruption.
We explore how Legend fits into the broader tradition of cinematic devils, examining Curry's performance alongside the film's fairy tale aesthetics and its deeper themes about the eternal struggle between good and evil. Whether you love it or.....REALLY love it, there's no denying that Curry's Darkness left an indelible mark on horror and fantasy cinema.
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A while back we covered Ridley Scott's Legend over on our bonus feed — Tim Curry as the Lord of Darkness, twelve feet of horns and somehow still the most charming thing in the movie. We've moved that episode over to the regular feed, free for everybody.He was everywhere, and he was part of all our lives. Hexxus to Pennywise. Rooster to Richelieu. Frank N. Furter to Forte, the evil talking pipe organ. He was Long John Silver and Captain James Hook, two of fiction's greatest pirates. In The Worst Witch, which is where Lester first saw him, he showed us that anything can happen on Halloween. His voice and his presence were unmistakable, and his Lord of Darkness is the perfect fantasy devil — equal parts scary and sexy, as only Tim Curry can do.So go watch Legend if you haven't, or rewatch it if it's been a while. There are a lot of different versions out there, because Ridley Scott. But the best version will always be the one with the most Tim Curry. Thank you, Mr. Curry, for filling our lives with joy, and for making us laugh, cry, and shiver with anticipation.

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Letter Six opens with the funniest sentence in the book: "On the third day, about noon, it was found that a fly had been left behind." The Ark turns around. Sixteen days of searching follow, and the fly is recovered and welcomed aboard with hymns of praise, the family standing uncovered out of reverence for its divine origin. It had not lacked for food — the multitudinous corpses had furnished it in rank and rotten richness.Satan insists this was no accident. Without that one housefly, the repopulated world would have gone without typhoid fever — a disease he admires because it can wreck a patient without killing him, restoring him to his feet with a long life ahead and yet deaf, dumb, blind, crippled, and idiotic. Billions of sickbeds stocked, billions of cemeteries recruited, all from one fly, foreordained from the dawn of creation.Then Satan hands over the key to the whole Bible God: jealousy. Among humans it ranks as a weakness, a trademark of small minds, a thing the smallest mind will lyingly deny. And here is God announcing it outright — I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God — which Satan says is only another way of saying: I am a small God, and fretful about small things.The letter ends with the harshest passage in the book so far. Every mechanism of the human body has an enemy planned for it by the Creator. Not one has been overlooked. They are an organized army, a besieging army, moving by squad and company and regiment. It is the Creator's Grand Army, and he is the commander in chief. And man's chiefest pet name for his ferocious commander in chief is Our Father in Heaven.We also get into whether we should eradicate mosquitoes now that we can, the Euthyphro problem explained via a turkey sandwich, and why this letter reads less like blasphemy and more like an old man's grief.

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Letter Five is Noah's collecting problem, worked out with actual receipts. Satan sets up the comparison first: a Roman named Symmachus once sent men across Asia and Africa to gather wild animals for the arena, and it took three years and four and a half million dollars — for under five thousand animals, all of them quadrupeds and alligators, no birds or snakes or insects. Noah's contract was a hundred and forty-six thousand kinds of creatures plus upwards of two million species of insects. Satan's conclusion: Noah gave up. He gathered what he had room for and stopped. If he'd known the requirements at the start he'd have known he needed a fleet of arks, but he didn't know how many kinds of creatures existed, and neither did his Chief.Which is why there's no kangaroo, no possum, no gila monster, and no ornithorhyncus. They only escaped drowning by accident — there wasn't water enough to go around, only enough to flood one small corner of the globe, the rest of the world being unknown and therefore presumed not to exist.The centerpiece is the stranger who shows up with news: six hundred miles off he watched a billowy black sea of strange animal life coming up a valley. Sloths as big as elephants. Frogs as big as a cow. A megatherium and his harem. Saurians and saurians and saurians, a hundred feet long and twice as quarrelsome. They'd heard about the Ark and they were coming — all of them, hungry, and they wouldn't care a rap for the regulations. This is what finally decides Noah to stop and let the rest go extinct.He'd have sailed at once, but the decorators of the housefly's drawing room still had finishing touches to put on. Another day went to loading sixty-eight billion flies, the Deity still afraid there might not be enough. Another to stowing forty tons of selected filth for their sustenance. Then he sailed, and the Ark was just sinking out of sight when the monsters arrived and added their lamentations to those of the frightened children clinging to the rocks in the rain, praying to an all-pitying being who had never answered a prayer in his life.

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Letter Four picks up right after the expulsion from Eden and runs straight through to Noah's Ark. Adam and Eve leave under a permanent curse, having lost every pleasure they had before the Fall — but they gained one worth all the rest, which Satan calls the Supreme Art. They practice it diligently. Results follow, by the name of Cain and Abel. And these had some sisters, and knew what to do with them. Twain is poking directly at the thing everyone quietly skips in Sunday school: if you take the text literally, this is the only way the math works.Then the Flood, and Satan's central argument. God was dissatisfied with humanity's morals, which — in some respects — were not any better than his own. Indeed, they were an unflatteringly close imitation of his own. He created those people and was solely responsible for their conduct, so not one of them deserved death. But if you're extinguishing them as policy, there can be no justice in favoritism: all should be drowned, or none. Instead he saved a sample and drowned the rest, because man was his pet.Twain, a former riverboat pilot, then takes the Ark apart with real professional relish. Neither Noah nor God had ever built an ark before or knew anything about arks, so something out of the common was to be expected. It happened. No rudder, no sails, no compass, no pumps, no charts, no anchors, no ventilation. Eleven months at sea and fresh water enough to fill two arks of its size, and the additional ark was not provided.The letter's best joke closes it out: when Adam ate the apple and learned how to multiply and replenish, the other animals learned the art too, by watching him. It was cunning of them. It was neat. They got everything worth having out of that apple without tasting it, and without afflicting themselves with the Moral Sense, the parent of all immoralities.

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Letter Three opens with Satan's flattest and funniest line yet — "You have noticed that the human being is a curiosity" — and then works methodically through the Christian Bible, which he describes as a two-million-word book containing some noble poetry, some clever fables, some blood-drenched history, a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies. It's built mainly out of the fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin, so it can't help being unoriginal. The only two genuinely new things in it are heaven and hell, both of which he's already established are ridiculous.Then the cosmology. God spent five days on Earth and made twenty million suns on the sixth, apparently as night lighting. Arcturus — mentioned in Job as evidence of God's greatness — is fifty thousand times the size of our sun, and has been classified as one of Earth's night lamps. Sunday school still teaches this, and children go on believing it long after they've learned better, keeping the creation myth and the astronomy in separate drawers of their brains.Then Eden, where God threatens Adam and Eve with death when they have never seen death and have no sample of it. They eat, and gain not useful knowledge but only the knowledge that good and evil exist and how to commit evil — the Moral Sense, back again from The Chronicle of Young Satan, which Satan argues should place man below the beast rather than above it. Like prizing a watch that has to run wrong over one that can't.The letter's real payload is the parenting argument: humanity's own best minds agree a father owes his child tenderness, protection, and never a hand raised except in kindness. God's treatment of his earthly children is the precise opposite of every one of those things — and the same minds justify it, excuse it, and call him the all-merciful and the all-loving. These sarcasms, Satan says, are uttered daily all over the world. They are meant seriously and delivered without a smile.

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