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

Mesoamerica 173
Richardson, James, Joel Best, and David G. Bromley.
The Satanism Scare. New York: Aldine de
Gruyter, 1991.
Victor, Jeffrey. Satanic Panic: The Creation of a
Contemporary Legend. Chicago: Open Court,
1993.
Wakefield, Hollida, and Ralph Underwager. Return
of the Furies. Chicago: Open Court, 1994.
Mephistopheles
The legend of Faustus, who signed a pact with the
devil by selling his soul to Mephistopheles, became
popular with Goethe’s Faust. The basic narrative
is, however, much older, originating as a mythical
story during the medieval period.
Dr. Faust’s story drew upon the life of a
philosopher who decided to make a living by
casting horoscopes and predicting the future. In
subsequent decades, Faust’s life was transformed
into the legend of a philosopher who decided to
abandon philosophy and devote himself to magic
practices and spells. Once, while practicing magic
invocations, Mephistopheles appears to the doctor
with a proposal: Mephistopheles will teach the
doctor the Devil’s knowledge and powers in
exchange for Faust’s soul after twenty-five years.
Mephistopheles’s name etymologically means “he
who loves not the light,” in contrast with Lucifer
(“light bearer”). The name originated in the
Renaissance period as a combination of Greek,
Latin, and possibly Hebrew elements, which
explain the existence of variants of the name, such
as Mephisto, Mephistophilus (in Shakespeare’s
Merry Wives of Windsor), Mephist, and Mephisto.
The Faustus legend has animated popular
culture since the Middle Ages. With the creation of
Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
(1564–1593), however, it became a topic of artistic
inspiration in poetry and music throughout the
following centuries, culminating with Faust: Eine
Tragödie by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749–1832). Although Goethe’s work is regarded
as the apex of the development of this story, the
legend continued to inspire nineteenth-century
literature on the Devil.
Following twenty-five years of devilish practice,
Goethe’s Faust repents having sold his soul to
the Devil and is saved. In Marlowe’s work, by
contrast, Faustus is lost. The Devil, however, was
no longer the enemy of the medieval dueling
contest with Christ or with a saint or a virgin. The
contest of the Devil in the eighteenth century was
within people who left their individual struggles
and sinned for the sake of gaining personal power.
Last but not least, the “new” Devil was to a certain
extent sympathetic to the human condition, and
introspective. The Devil’s introspection and
humanization began in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and was reflected even in some of
the human characters of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
Goethe’s Devil no longer embodies an exclusively
a Christian meaning. He is, rather, a more
complex, multifaceted, and ambiguous character,
representing not only evil against good, but also
the oppositions of matter-spirit and chaos-order,
as well as the stimulus to creativity. Although in
the late nineteenth century new operas depicted
Mephistopheles’s and Dr. Faust’s story, Goethe’s
Mephistopheles remained the masterpiece of the
Mephistopheleses represented in literature.
See also Faust; Pact with the Devil
For Further Reading:
Davidson, Gustav. A Dictionary of Angels Including
the Fallen Angels. New York: Free Press, 1967.
Rudwin, Maximilian. The Devil in Legend and
Literature. Chicago: Open Court, 1931.
Mesoamerica
The aboriginal societies of the Americas represent
a wide variety of different cultures, a variety that is
missed under the generic rubric “Indian” through
which Native Americans are usually regarded. Far
from being a single monolithic culture, aboriginal
Americans had created a series of significant civilizations—cultures
that often bore little resemblance
to one another. Despite this diversity, it is
possible to assert that, like most societies outside
the influence of the Zoroastrian-Judeo-Christian-
Islamic complex, all of these traditions postulated
the existence of demonic forces, but none
possessed a full-blown Satan figure.
Prior to the intrusion of Europeans, the Native
peoples of central and south America had created
societies rivaling the civilizations of ancient Egypt,
Mesopotamia, India, and China. These are the so-