Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

152 Lisa and the Devil, a.k.a. The House of Exorcism
Virgil, for example, placed souls who had not been
properly buried in a limbo realm where they had
to wait a hundred years before being admitted to
the Land of the Dead.
The notion of the dead as stuck in a neither
here nor there realm is ancient. In most of the
world’s religious traditions, the journey from this
world to the abode of the dead is not thought of as
a step that one takes immediately upon death.
Instead, following death, spirits must find their
way to the otherworld. In many cases souls are
unable or unwilling to undertake the journey to
the realm of the dead, and continue to hang out
around their living relatives, often bothering the
living in some way. As spirits who are no longer a
part of the realm of the living, and yet who cannot
or who will not find their way to the realm of the
dead, these “haunting” spirits exist in a kind of
borderland—a limbo—between life and death.
Thus at least a rudimentary notion of an afterlife
limbo is widespread in world cultures.
In religious traditions that postulate a heaven
and a hell as the final abode of the soul, serious
thinkers have grappled with the fate of those
who, while not ethical exemplars, have been
more or less good, and not guilty of truly evil
actions. This has led to the development of ideas
of intermediate afterlife abodes in which souls
were purified and made fit for paradise. The
most famous of such intermediate realms is
Catholic purgatory. Prior to the elaboration of
the notion of purgatory, the early Christian
community had accepted a less developed idea of
limbo. Limbo provided a realm to which unbaptized
babies could go without having to be
condemned to hell.
Another question limbo answered for the
early Church concerned the fate of righteous
people who had passed away in the eras before the
good news of Christianity. In other words,
Christians of the first few centuries of the
Common Era imagined that only Christian souls
could go to heaven. But where does that leave
such righteous and deserving individuals as the
Old Testament patriarchs (e.g., Abraham, Moses,
etc.) Placing them in a limbo realm, from which
Christ later rescued them and conducted them to
heaven, solved this problem.
See also Purgatory
For Further Reading:
Eliade, Mircea, ed. Encyclopedia of Religion. New
York: Macmillan, 1987.
Eliade, Mircea. Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of
Ecstasy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1964.
McDannell, Colleen, and Bernhard Lang. Heaven: A
History. 1988. New York: Vintage, 1990.
Turner, Alice K. The History of Hell. New York:
Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993.
Lisa and the Devil, a.k.a. The House of Exorcism
A 1975 film, in which a tourist, while visiting an
Italian village, meets a man who looks exactly like
a devil she sees in a medieval fresco. She is
persuaded to come to his old mansion, where she
encounters horror. After filming, the movie was
reedited before its release for the purpose of riding
the wave of popular interest that arose in the wake
of the Exorcist. The original has been restored in
some video versions.
Little Nicky
Little Nicky, played by Adam Sandler, is the third
son of Satan in this 2000 film. When dad decides
to extend his rule in hell for another 10,000 years,
the two oldest sons leave hell so that they can have
their own realm to rule—earth. Unfortunately,
this upsets the balance of the cosmos, and Nicky
has the task of going to earth and bringing his
brothers back. This is the setting for an otherwise
typical slapstick Sandler comedy.
Little Witches
A transparent takeoff on The Craft. This 1996 film
tries to outdo its predecessor by increasing the
number of Catholic schoolgirl coven members
from four to sixteen, and making them sexier and
more sinister.
Lost Souls
Satan is on the verge of manifesting on earth in
this 2000 film. For some reason, he needs to take
over a human body to do so. In this case, the body
will be a 33-year-old male (the same age as Jesus