Ed Simon. Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology. Cernunnos, 2022.
Ed Simon. Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology. Cernunnos, 2023.
Ed Simon. Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain. Meville House, 2024.
HECTOR BERLIOZ’S 1830 Symphonie Fantastique is a tough listen and an even tougher piece to perform. To play the symphony risks horrific consequences. The devil is in the music.
In my day, we violas sat between the cello and second violin sections of the orchestra. We bumped against the woodwinds, meaning we heard outsized sound from the oboes, English horn, bassoons, clarinets, flutes, and French horns.
This seating pattern has everything to do with why Symphonie Fantastique gives me the creeps.
Berlioz composed his masterpiece in the throes of an unrequited obsession with Irish soprano Harriet Smithson. He wrote five movements—versus the usual four—during the heyday of classical “program music,” in which composers set their pieces to stories. (Consider Beethoven’s pathbreaking Sixth Symphony, the Pastoral, written in 1808 in five movements.)
In program notes, Berlioz said the primary melodic motif threading through Symphonie Fantastique was an “idée fixe.” Translation: obsession. The symphony tells the story of a gifted artist mad with unrequited love, who poisons himself with opium. The artist falls into a tortured stupor, dreams that he’s killed his beloved, and witnesses his own guillotining.
Even without program notes, it is obvious to both player and listener that Satan is afoot. The fourth movement, “Marche au supplice” (March to the scaffold), begins with timpani drums beating the pace of a man marching to his death. Joined by the French horns, the opening is as ominous as they come. In the fifth movement, “Songe d’une nuit du Sabbat” (Dream of a Sabbath night), the murdered beloved joins a witch’s sabbath, dancing diabolically in a Dies irae (Day of wrath or last judgment). We violas play col legno, tapping our bow sticks against the strings to summon rollicking skeletons.
But it’s the woodwinds who prove we’ve gone over to the dark side. Far from the lyrical woodwind choirs of Mozart or the percussive ones of Beethoven, the squealing clarinets and oversized bassoon section set up a raucous, deranged melody. Between the unrelenting rhythm and the woodwinds blowing out the idée fixe, we fall into the devil’s hands. That idée fixe blasts at top volume into the viola section’s right ear.
Composers aren’t the only ones with idées fixes. I know from personal experience that writers have them too. Over decades, as I transitioned from musician to writer, I became the kind of obsessive who pays close attention to other obsessives, especially when our fixations intersect.
You get a feel for Ed Simon’s capacious interests from the tagline on his website: “Religion. Literature. Culture. Politics.” He interrogates philosophy and religion, how religions evolve, historical antecedents to modern religious practice, and everything in between. Raised Catholic, he plumbs his Jewish background on his father’s side. Most of the details of that background are lost to the fluidity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, destroyed records, disappeared ancestors, and centuries of war. His keen awareness of his family history—including its lack of specifics—informs how he writes and thinks.
Perhaps we are birds of a feather. I am Jewish on both sides but was raised in a secular household with virtually no religious observance. My childhood home was fiercely intellectual, with endlessly curious parents who centered reading, writing, and education. They were ecumenical; my mother worked as a copy editor for a Lutheran publisher, Fortress Press. (In a delicious coincidence, this press has published some of Simon’s work.) With almost no formal Jewish education, I learned as much about Christianity as I did Judaism.
Since my early teens, I have yearned to understand my roots. I’ve endeavored to educate myself about Judaism from books, friends, family, and other elders, some of whom survived the Holocaust. Perhaps it is a function of my upbringing that I have a similar fixation with Christianity, particularly Catholicism, particularly what faith means in Catholicism.
It must be no surprise, then, that the two protagonists in my debut novel, Three Muses, are Jewish and Catholic respectively. The novel explores how the lone survivor of a family murdered by Nazis finds his way, what collective memory means in Judaism, and if and where religion fits. The other main character is a Catholic prima ballerina, enmeshed with an abusive choreographer, who rises to the pinnacle of her art. Through one another, the Holocaust survivor and dancer both find healing.
Which returns me to Ed Simon. I am gripped by his investigations of Christian thought and symbolism. He has an obsession with the devil, who stands in for rich complexities in Western thought but also poses serious questions about contemporary life and politics. Why has the devil had such a hold on the European intellect? What do the devil’s many iterations mean? What’s he doing in the culture and society of 2025? How do we understand the devil outside Catholicism?
Between 2022 and 2023, Simon produced two sumptuous art books titled Elysium: A Visual History of Angelology and Pandemonium: A Visual History of Demonology, as well as a third treatise, Binding the Ghost: Theology, and the Transcendence of Literature (this last book is terrific, but outside the scope of this essay).
In Elysium, Simon considers where to find transcendent experiences in today’s world. Unlike our ancient forebears, we don’t tend to see angels in the twenty-first century. Simon offers an interpretation for current times; angels are love “given a proper name, grace that is imagined with a face.” Angels remind us of “a wholly foreign and holy Other beautiful and irrational goodness.”
Both art books contain breathtaking paintings, prints, and drawings—angels and devils embodied—interspersed with enlightening text. Elysium considers angelology as a once legitimate field of serious study. Simon posits that angels are paradoxically both human and divine, vestiges of paganism that “connect us to an ineffable and indescribable deity.”
The history of angelology is aspirational, “a history of the world as it could be, as it should be.” All three Abrahamic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are text-based and take language seriously, and in that context Simon notes that angels are both message and messengers. In an exquisite formulation, Simon says that angels are the words. For a writer like me, intent on probing the meaning of love and memory, Simon’s interpretation of angels’ role in contemporary life both piques my imagination and provides spiritual balm.
Simon’s Pandemonium is illustrated with suffering, horror, misshapen people, monsters, overt sexuality, and other “demonic” temptations. Readers will either delight or cringe at depictions of artists’ worst imaginings. (Or likely both.)
Pandemonium is less about demons than about how humanity has considered demons throughout history. Simon reminds us that whether or not demons exist, “people’s experience of them absolutely exists.” A network of “metaphors, symbols, and images” defines the diabolical,
shifting and changing over centuries. Language, that is, “demonic poetics,” is an interpretive frame that sees “the literary and the magical as fundamentally the same thing.”
In contrast to angelology, whose history is hopeful but unfulfilled, a history of demonology is a history of the present culture. Although evil spirits and jealous, conniving, vengeful gods appear throughout all mythology, the Christian devil haunts Western thought with certain clear identifiers—redness, horns, fire, the form of a serpent. The devil is an external actor at odds with modern psychology’s presumption that each of us has the capacity to do both good and evil.
Simon’s most recent book, his twelfth, concerns one-on-one human contact with Satan, and as such is the most grounded in earthly life of these three. Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain takes readers through time, starting with Simon Magus, a first-century necromancer with whom Ed Simon is tickled to share a name. Simon considers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Salem witch trials, the Brothers Grimm, and beyond.
Although Christopher “Kit” Marlowe drew from earlier material, he is considered the godfather of the Faustian myth. Marlowe’s contemporaries in Renaissance London viewed him as “a wicked genius of ill repute” and, far worse, a playwright who could conjure demons on stage.
In Marlowe’s telling, the scholar Faustus bargains to abjure everything he’s learned in favor of the source of knowledge itself, which he believes can be obtained only through magic. Simon quotes this remarkable passage from the play:
These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, scenes, letters, and characters;
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
O, what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honor, of omnipotence,
Is promised to the studious artisan!…
A sound magician is a mighty god.
Simon muses that this description of the wizard’s powers also gives “shape to the vocation of the writer.” God creates man, but writers can also create gods.
In Marlowe’s play, no treasure can be gained without selling the soul. This Faustus does, signing in blood, and at the end, the audience witnesses him called to the devil. Simon believes Marlowe’s real idée fixe was religious heresy. He points out that Marlowe’s three most important plays, The Jew of Malta, Tamburlaine the Great, and Doctor Faustus deconstruct the three major Abrahamic religions. It’s more Marlowe than Faustus who captures Simon’s interest.
If the notion of art—in this case theater—as Satanic temptation seems out of date, consider the zeal with which books are banned from schools in today’s America. If books didn’t present devilish dangers, parents would have nothing to fear. But as Simon makes clear, the nature of what we see as diabolical is always mutating.
Simon finds the Faustian bargain alive and well in American politics. In a July 2024 guest essay in the New York Times, “J.D. Vance Keeps Selling His Soul. He’s Got Plenty of Buyers,” he wrote,
There is a lesson for Mr. Vance from the Faust story…. Beyond mere self-interest, what the legend warns against is the embrace of irrational forces and powers, especially when there is the delusion that the person trading their soul can wrangle the Devil.… The politics of authoritarianism is often embraced as a tool by those who believe that they can contain such forces and use them for political gain.
That is perhaps what’s most Faustian about Mr. Vance—and by proxy Mr. Trump. Their belief that a movement built on aggrievement and rage can be easily controlled, that there is some way in which you can trick the Devil while holding on to what he’s given you. Mephistopheles certainly understood that the house always wins….
Ambrose Bierce, an American with Puritan roots, was born in 1842 in a log cabin in Ohio. In a delicious wordplay, Bierce left home at age fifteen to become a printer’s devil, an assistant in a print shop who does jobs like mixing ink and carrying trays of type. He became a writer and humorist, penning The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), an alphabetical listing of words defined with diabolical interpretations. Fashion is “A despot whom the wise ridicule and obey.” Take is a verb that means “To acquire, frequently by force but preferably by stealth.” Bierce’s definitions point a damning finger at the American way.
At the end of Elysium, Simon mentions Harold Bloom’s description of the American religion. Simon quotes Bloom:
Most Americans who think they are Christians are something else, intensely religious but devout in the American Religion, a faith that is old among us, and that comes in many guises and disguises and that overdetermines our national life.
As with angels and devils, the shape-shifting American religion tends to work in bina-ries. It seems incapable of wrestling with complexity in anything surpassing a sound bite. Our two-party governing system both reflects and exacerbates these tendencies. We seem unable to grasp nuance and contradiction. We must be for or against.
Judaism comes from a different place. Judaism trucks not in binaries but in doubt and questioning, unanswered puzzles and multiple, changing interpretations. Words are central, students are encouraged to present arguments that overtake their teachers’, and humans argue directly with G-d. The heroes of the Old Testament are not solely good or solely evil but flawed bundles of contradictions. Brothers murder brothers and steal birthrights. Husbands prefer one wife to another. A king sends a husband to his death in order to seduce his widow. The greatest judge becomes corrupted by allowing his wives to worship gods from their home countries. And so on.
There’s an old saw, “two Jews, three opinions.” I can’t begin to do justice to the complex scholarship around Judaism and the devil. While researching this article, however, I listened to a revealing sermon delivered by an ultra-Orthodox congregational rabbi in Orlando, Florida. According to Rabbi Sholom Ber Dubov, the devil does not exist unless someone is in a position to make a choice. Satan appears in the Torah as a concept that delivers a person to the opportunity to choose between good and bad.
Jewish mythology also offers a figure called a dybbuk, a figure returned from the dead, not so different from an African American haint. Saul Ansky’s play The Dybbuk, which premiered in Warsaw in 1920 (written in Russian and translated by Ansky into Yiddish), is a Jewish classic. Dybbuks had been written about at least since the sixteenth century, but Ansky’s play brought them into the literary mainstream. Recently dead souls who maliciously inhabit the bodies of the living because they have unfinished business, dybbuks leave once their business is accomplished, they are exorcised, or, in Ansky’s play, both.
The drama in The Dybbuk concerns Leah, who becomes possessed on her wedding day by the soul of a dead man betrothed to her at birth by her father. A messenger, eerily conversant in kabbalah, delivers ominous wisdom. In the end, two rabbis and a rabbinic court are necessary to perform an exorcism and mete out justice. There are no “just rewards” or condemnations to hell. Instead, the resolution is a tangle of mercy, justice, grief, and death. It is a short work, resolving in ambiguity and complexity, which is to say, it doesn’t really resolve.
Simon makes frequent reference to the Jewish kabbalah, which, to grossly oversimplify, includes a mishmash of concepts about the devil. The kabbalah influenced medieval Christian thought and vice versa. It exists outside the Bible. Comprising multiple texts, it took on written form primarily between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, relatively recently in the history of Judaism. It is a form of mysticism that interrogates the nature of G-d with symbols and theories that branch into magic, cosmology, and ancient philosophy. There was a time when rabbis considered the kabbalah so potent that it should not be studied before age forty, and even then only under the tutelage of a rabbi.
In Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008), Margaret Atwood elevates the Faustian bargain from individual to global terms, reading it as a metaphor for climate crisis. Her book is an allegorical takedown of life in the Western world and the destruction it wreaks. In her view, our culture’s pact with the devil is the borrowing of time, a buy now, pay later scheme. For hell, she substitutes debt, another kind of “placeless place.”
Atwood goes back to medieval Europe, when Jews were almost universally prohibited from owning land and many were forced into moneylending, the profits of which kings eagerly taxed. “This mix of money, kings, nobles, and Jews was volatile,” she writes. She credits the thirteenth-century Philip IV of France with inventing the game of “kill the creditors,” when he discovered that he could erase his debts to the Knights Templar “as if by magic” by accusing them of heretical activities. Thanks to the anti-Semitic blood libel, the ploy could easily be modified to “kill the Jewish creditors.” Centuries of pogroms followed, from one end of Europe to the other. “I got through this point without mentioning the Nazis,” Atwood writes. “The point being that I didn’t have to.”
Maybe instead of taking on such Faustian costs and binding ourselves to the placeless place of debt, we should “calculate the real costs of how we’ve been living, and of the natural resources we’ve been taking out of the biosphere,” she concludes.
Simon also finds ways to bring Mephistopheles into contemporary life. Toward the end of Devil’s Contract, he spends a chapter on Mephistopheles in Hollywood. “To make a film is to court the Faustian bargain, to claim for oneself a power which only rightfully belongs to 
God,” he writes. The great directors—among them Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick—“all have a reputation for being maximalists, for obsessive control and often cruelty against their stars,” evidence of the diabolical price of their creative achievements. Theodor Adorno, the celebrated German philosopher who became a Holocaust refugee in Hollywood, spoke of the dangers of American pop culture in Faustian terms. In Simon’s words, Hollywood produces “work dedicated to obscuring the contradictions of capitalism and of making inequities and injustices appear pleasing, just as a demon can come disguised as a great beauty.”
Simon takes readers through an analysis of the evils of totalitarianism in the Faustian twentieth century, using literature as his guide. Thomas Mann witnessed how an entire nation could become “demonically possessed.” His Doctor Faustus was written as a mea culpa for the horror of his beloved Germany descending “into pure Satanic madness.”
Simon also considers the Russian classic The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, a satiric and, for its author, dangerous critique of the Stalinist regime. Satan is actively afoot in this surrealistic allegorical novel, and the pleasure and ultimate chaos and pain he wreaks is intended to reflect the impact of Stalin’s merciless, godless rule.
Simon ends on a grim if realistic note. He calls our age the Faustocene, whose “patrimony is death, and its child the apocalypse.” Given the current state of things, it’s hard to argue. We have surrendered our privacy and autonomy to Silicon Vally oligarchs. We ignore climate change while embracing mass consumption and cheap fuel, regardless of the consequences. The dangers of ignorance and rage are upon us, as multiple countries sit atop arsenals with the capacity to destroy the world many times over.
On the other hand.
Let us hope that, as Rabbi Dubov suggests, the nearness of the devil indicates that we do have choices, and that we will exercise them in favor of a thriving future.
A postscript. Berlioz the man experienced a better outcome than Berlioz the dreamer. He persisted, and years later married soprano Harriet Smithson.
Martha Anne Toll is a novelist and cultural critic. Her debut novel, Three Muses (Regal House), won the Petrichor Prize for Finely Crafted Fiction and was shortlisted for the Gotham Book Prize. Her second novel, Duet for One (Regal House), will appear this May. She serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and holds a BA from Yale and a JD from Boston University. She comes to writing professionally after a career dedicated to social justice.
Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash
