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

The Anticult Movement 7
before making good on a bargain he made with
Cyphre. The narrative unfolds in the gloomier
districts of 1950s Harlem and Louisiana marshes
in the quest for Favorite. The detective finally
discovers that he is Johnny Favorite, who had
previously failed to honor his contract when he
sold his soul to the Devil.
Angel of Death
The notion of an angel or demon who extracts the
soul from the body at death seems to have developed
from earlier notions of divinities of death.
Such figures are widespread in world culture. In
Hinduism, for example, Yama is the god of the
dead. In the earliest Vedic texts, Yama ruled an
afterlife realm not unlike the Norse Valhalla in
which the deceased enjoyed carnal pleasures. As
Hinduism was transformed in the post-Vedic
period, Yama became a rather grim demigod, who
snared the souls of the departed and conducted
them to the otherworld.
The notion of an angel of death was most fully
developed in rabbinical Judaism. Like Yama, the
Jewish idea of an angel of death developed across
time. The biblical emissaries of death were clearly
under the direct command of God, as, for
example, in 2 Samuel: “Then the angel stretched
out his arm toward Jerusalem to destroy it; but the
Lord repented of the evil and said to the angel who
was destroying the people, ‘Enough! Stay your
hand’” (2 Sam. 24:16).
None of the biblical references indicate that a
particular angel or group of angels have the
specialized task of meting out death.
Only in postbiblical literature does the idea of
an angel of death as such emerge. This “angel”
gradually develops into a demonic figure who
begins to act on his own initiative. By the time of
the Talmud, the angel of death was identified with
Satan, and the notion of an evil angel of death was
reflected in many folktales and in many folk practices
associated with death, burial, and mourning.
For instance, one commonly known bit of folklore
is that it is impossible to die in the midst of studying
Torah.
The many folktales associated with the angel of
death fall into roughly three categories. In the first
group, which we might call tales of horror and
magic, the stubborn and cruel angel of death is a
kind of antihero, somewhat like Dracula in many
vampire stories. In the second group, the angel of
death is defeated, especially by human deception.
In these tales he is portrayed as being rather
stupid. And in the final group, the angel of death
is moved by compassion to spare someone’s life or
otherwise to act benevolently. In many of these
narratives, the confrontation with the angel of
death occurs on a wedding night, during which
one of the two betrothed is fated to die.
See also Hinduism; Judaism; Satan
For Further Reading:
Encyclopaedia Judaica. Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan,
1971.
Sykes, Egerton. Who’s Who: Non-Classical
Mythology. New York: Oxford, 1993.
Wigoder, Geoffrey. The Encyclopedia of Judaism.
New York: Macmillan, 1989.
Angel on My Shoulder
This 1946 film was first made as a comedy then
remade for television in 1980. The central narrative
is built around the timeworn theme of making
a bargain with the Devil. The plot involves freeing
criminals to harass society. The remake was about
the resurrection of a convict. Other movies with
the Faust theme and comic foils are The Devil and
Max Devlin and Damn Yankees.
The Anticult Movement
One of the groups that weighed in on the Satanic
ritual abuse issue in its heyday was the so-called
anticult movement (ACM). When the ACM first
emerged as a coherent movement, its focus of
concern was minority religious movements. It was
only after ritual abuse became a popular topic that
it was incorporated into the ACM agenda. The
ACM also supplied the nascent ritual abuse movement
with the notion of “cultic mind control”
(more popularly referred to as “brainwashing”),
although the phenomenon supposedly explained
by Satanic mind control was actually quite different
from the phenomenon of commitment to socalled
“cults.”
The ACM arose in the early 1970s. In its earliest