The Devil's Best Trick E-Book

Randall Sullivan

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 625

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

How we explain the evils of the world - and the darkest parts of ourselves - has preoccupied humans throughout history. In The Devil's Best Trick, Randall Sullivan investigates historical, religious and cultural conceptions of evil, from Biblical times to European witch hunts to the devil-worshipping 'Black Mass' ceremony. He travels to Mexico to participate in the 'Hour of the Witches' - an annual ceremony in which hundreds of people congregate in the jungle south of Vera Cruz to negotiate terms with El Diablo. He takes us through the most famous exorcism in American history. And he delivers original reporting on the shocking story of a small town in Texas that, in 1988, unravelled into paranoia and panic after a seventeen-year-old boy was found hanging from a tree and rumours about Satanic worship and cults flourished. Nimble and expertly researched, The Devil's Best Trick brilliantly melds cultural and historical commentary with a suspenseful true-crime narrative. Randall Sullivan, whose reportage and narrative skill has been called 'extraordinary' and 'enthralling' by Rolling Stone, takes on a bold task in this book that is both biography of the Devil and a look at how evil manifests in the world.

Leseprobe

Also by Randall Sullivan

Dead Wrong

The Curse of Oak Island

Untouchable

The Miracle Detective

LAbyrinth

The Price of Experience

Graveyard of the Pacific

First published in the United Kingdom in 2024 by Grove Press UK,an imprint of Grove Atlantic

First published in the United States of America in 2024 by Atlantic Monthly Press,an imprint of Grove Atlantic

This paperback edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2025 by Grove Press UK

Copyright © Randall Sullivan, 2024

The moral right of Randall Sullivan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

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E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 077 7

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Preface

In the summer of 1995, I was living in a country at war. Where I kept my billet, in the westernmost province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the worst atrocities had been committed two years before my arrival. Nevertheless, it was amid the blast craters and bullet holes of Mostar, a demolished city that now lay under a psycho-terror siege of random mortar launches and sporadic sniper shots, that I began to recognize “the problem of evil” as an obstacle to religious faith.

The tales of horror I heard in Mostar were moral quicksand. I kept my head above the horror by floating the surface of it in a cracked shell of professionalism, refusing either to believe or disbelieve the story of those Catholic nuns who claimed to have been captured by a unit of so-called četniks, gang-raped until each was pregnant, then given a choice between abortion, suicide, and bearing a Serb bastard. For me, it was enough to dip my toes in the citywide seep of sadness that lingered after the very public deaths of a young Muslim mother and her two children, blown apart by a direct missile strike as they attempted to flee down the Neretva River in a rubber raft. I could deflect everything except the expressions of the orphans on street corners. Seven and eight years old, they stood smoking cigarettes and flipping off passersby with a stony insolence that you couldn’t have wiped off their faces with an assault rifle. Looking into their agate eyes, I knew it was too late for us all.

Picking a path through the gigantic pile of scorched rubble that had once been Mostar’s city center, a place where two years earlier Catholic and Muslim survivors of the Serbian bombardment had fought each other with artillery at close range, I asked myself, as so many had before me, “How can a God who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good abide such depravity?” And what about justice? Maybe God wasn’t who I thought he was. Maybe God wasn’t, period.

It didn’t help my sleep that the most impressive people I met that summer made a point of telling me that the Devil, at least, was real. The first to speak these words was Mirjana Soldo, a religious visionary in Medjugorje, the Bosnian Croat “peace center” twelve miles from Mostar. There, a rapturous cult of devotion had formed around apparitions of the Virgin Mary that were already the most controversial and closely observed purported supernatural phenomena to appear on earth in at least a half century. As Mirjana urged me to recognize the Devil as an actual being who was determined to steal my soul, her pale blue eyes seemed to darken, and her expression became a discomfiting combination of pity and reproach. My sense was that she felt obliged to give me a warning she knew I wouldn’t heed.

Rita Klaus was more successful in suspending my disbelief. A large, handsome, white-haired woman from Pittsburgh, Klaus was famous for her spontaneous healing from an advanced case of multiple sclerosis, the most celebrated and thoroughly documented of the many medical miracles associated with Medjugorje. Klaus had seemed to appear out of nowhere one afternoon in the village’s parish office. She sat down across from me, leaned over the table, laid a hand on mine, and introduced herself with these words: “Satan exists.” I felt as if I had been shot with some drug that causes a temporary paralysis. Klaus seemed to wait until the effect was complete before continuing: “The evil inside you comes from temptation. You have to make a decision, either for the good or for the bad. So the evil is inside us, as you believe, but it’s also out there, and believe me, it is very real and very pervasive.” Klaus then told me the story of a diabolic attack on her family that had begun when one of her daughters began to experiment with a Ouija board. The part that disturbed me most at the time, and that would haunt me later, involved a series of attacks on Klaus and her family by something that took the form of a large black dog with red eyes. “I don’t want to scare you, but I think you need to hear my story,” Klaus told me at one point. The emphasis she put on the word “need” troubled me.

The person I admired more than anyone I met in Medjugorje was a Franciscan priest named Slavko Barbarić, spiritual adviser to Mirjana and the other visionaries. Shortly after my meeting with Rita Klaus, Father Slavko attempted to breach my skepticism with a phenomenological report. Slavko was, among other things, an intellectual whose multiple PhDs included one in psychology. He lowered my guard by admitting straight out his own reluctance to believe in supernatural evil, then described the series of events that had changed his mind. One experience that made a deep impression involved his participation in the exorcism of a woman who was able to distinguish consecrated hosts from those that had not been consecrated. He and the other priests participating in the exorcism each had left the room on multiple occasions, Slavko recalled, only to return a few minutes later with either a wafer that had been consecrated or one that had not yet been blessed. The woman who lay on the bed never reacted once when they came into the room with an unconsecrated host, Slavko told me, but went into paroxysms of writhing and cursing whenever a consecrated host came near her. “What in her could possibly have known the difference?” Slavko asked. In reply, I simply shook my head.

I was to witness an exorcism myself only a few days later. I’ve attempted to deconstruct that experience many times in the years since, mainly in the hope that I would be able to put it out of my mind. Those I’ve spoken to about it always make reference to the “altered state” I was in at the time. I don’t deny this. That night and the days leading up to it were almost unbearable in their intensity. The Youth Festival Mass in which the exorcism occurred was the most fervid and enthralling religious service I’ve ever experienced. The thousand or so young adults who made their way to Medjugorje from all over the world had braved warnings from the United Nations and the European Union that the situation was especially unstable at the moment and that travel to the former Yugoslavia was “strongly discouraged.” The Croats were mobilizing for a final push against the Serbs, and the climax of the war was upon us. A sense that the armies of light were rallying against the forces of darkness imbued that evening’s mass from the moment it began. Father Slavko was as I’d never seen him before, ferocious in his ardor, swinging an enormous gilded monstrance and the consecrated host within like a holy weapon as he stormed through the crowd. Each time Slavko turned the monstrance in a new direction, repeating the words “Body of Christ,” I heard an eruption of bonechilling noises from out of the crowd, shrieks of agony and gasps of terror, animal howls and loud, throaty curses. There were several raspy barks of “Fuck you!” The choir on the stage behind Slavko only sang louder, faces aglow with the conviction of imminent victory. As Slavko approached, his expression frightened me; the gaunt priest’s reliably warm gaze was replaced by a piercing glare. He pointed the monstrance directly at me and in a booming voice shouted, “Jesus!” It was as close as I’ve ever come to keeling over in a dead faint. The roars of rage and cries of pain seemed to be swelling around me. A young woman standing perhaps twenty feet to my left began to produce a noise unlike any I’d ever heard, a cough so dry and deep that it sounded as if she was trying to bring up a lung. It went on and on, like an echo that did not fade but rather amplified. She bent over, then shuddered uncontrollably, a white foam issuing from her mouth in a copious stream. She dropped to the ground, kicking and writhing, and began to scream obscenities. I heard “Fuck you, Jesus,” in very clear English, but also curses—or what I assumed were curses—in a variety of languages I did not recognize. The girl’s voice became impossibly deep and guttural, and the white lather continued to pour from her mouth. A crowd of people gathered around, reciting the exorcism prayer of Pope Leo XIII. At one point, the girl on the ground seemed to go still and silent, but then her screams started up again, louder than ever, gruesomely desperate. At the moment of what I could sense as a climax, she arched her back into a position that not even a world-class gymnast could have held, impossibly extended, with her weight resting entirely on her heels and the crown of her head, and let forth a hoarse, croaking expulsion of breath that must have emptied her lungs utterly. It was the smell, though, that shocked me, a ghastly stench that was like the exponential product of rotted flesh. In that moment I became utterly convinced that something was leaving her, that what I had just witnessed was not emotional or psychological or imaginary but real, whatever that meant.

I remember very little of what happened next, just blurred images of the girl being helped to her feet and led away, of Slavko finishing the mass, of the shining faces of the choir as they sang. I have no idea how I made it back to the Pansion Maja, into my room, and out onto the tiny balcony where I awoke at dawn, sprawled on the concrete floor, shivering with cold and happy in a way that was completely unfamiliar.

Two days later I was in Rome, on my way home. It was mid-August, and to escape the suffocating heat I sought the cooling mists of the Fountain of the Four Rivers on the Piazza Navona. I was leaning against the back of a bench when I noticed an elegantly dressed man walking through a sea of tourists, T-shirt vendors, and street performers that seemed to part before him. He wore a beautifully cut blue blazer with cream linen trousers, a bright yellow cravat, and sharp-toed loafers polished to a high gloss. “Quite the gent,” I thought, then drew a quick breath when I saw the man’s face. His aquiline features were formed into the strangest expression I’d ever seen, a sort of malevolent drollery that did not entirely mask the suffocating rage beneath it. Though all by himself, the man began to speak in a loud voice as he drew near me, in a language that was not Italian. Heart pounding, I glanced at the tourists nearby, baffled by their lack of a reaction. Not one of them seemed to have noticed this jarring oddity moving among them. It was as if, somehow, the silver-haired man and I had been isolated from the scene surrounding us. Suddenly, he let loose with a mad cackle and turned his head slightly to fix me with one eye. In that moment, I felt absolutely certain he wasn’t human. I knew it. An unearthly calm came over me almost immediately. Why I can’t say, but I reached inside my shirt to grasp the scapular medal I had taken to wearing that summer, stared back at him, and whispered, “You can’t touch me.” He responded with an obscene leer. I understood exactly what he said then: “I’ll catch you later.”

After returning home, I spoke to no one about the . . . creature I had encountered on the Piazza Navona. In time, the indelibility of that summer began to fade. Within a couple of years, the only thing I understood better than before was how much of memory is conviction. And by then, the practical advantages all seemed to be on the side of doubt. To claim that I had encountered a diabolical entity on the Piazza Navona made me sound either crazy or foolish—even to myself. It wasn’t good for business.

I was aided immeasurably in my will to forget by the television broadcast of a “live exorcism” on a network news magazine. The contrived staging and cornball theatrics of this TV event served only to highlight the abject need for an audience that drove not only the show’s producers but also the grandiose exorcist and his dim-witted subject. There wasn’t enough self-awareness in the thing to raise it even to the level of farce. I thought, “What if my own state of mind is the main difference between what I witnessed in Bosnia and what I’m seeing now?” Even to allow this as a possibility undermined my recollection of that night in Medjugorje.

And because my numinous moments from the summer of 1995 were never repeated, it became easier and easier to tell myself that the extraordinary stresses and sympathies I experienced in Bosnia had induced bizarre perceptions of what were probably half-imagined shadows of a truth beyond my understanding. Or some such shit. While I didn’t really believe this new version of my story, I didn’t really believe the story I had come home with, either. It soon seemed both possible and preferable to shroud my memories in a haze of ambiguity.

My four-year-old son chased me out of that cloud. Gabriel got into bed next to me one morning, then whispered in my ear that something terrifying had happened to him during the night. A big black dog with red eyes, he said, came into his room and bit his baby blanket, the silk-banded square of blue flannel he had slept with since birth. My little boy was shaking as he spoke these words. When I hugged him close and tried to tell him that sometimes our dreams seem so real to us that we think they actually happened, he went quiet for a few moments, then told me plaintively that it wasn’t a dream, that he knew it wasn’t a dream, that it was real. When I tried again to talk about how affected a child can be by the things he imagines seeing in the night, Gabe became angry and demanded to know why I was trying to make him think he didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. “The dog was real, even if it wasn’t a real dog,” he told me. I let it go then, though the subject continued to come up from time to time, always when my son raised it. He seemed to have a need to talk about it. I tried several other times to suggest that what he had experienced was a very vivid, powerful dream, but this inevitably infuriated him. When he was five, he saw a psychologist who told him about the night terrors that younger children often experience, and how these take place in a zone between waking and sleeping. Gabe seemed to find some comfort in this notion, but within the year he again brought up the black dog that had bit his baby blanket when he was four and insisted once more that what had happened was real, not a dream or even a night terror. I was ready for him this time, and answered with the suggestion that I might have told his mom a story I heard from a woman I met in Bosnia about a black dog with red eyes that had terrorized her family. He might have overheard this story when he was very young, I went on, and later somehow half-dreamed and half-imagined a similar experience. “So now you think I’m crazy?” he asked. No, no, no, I assured him: all our heads are full not only of thoughts we know about, what we call the conscious mind, but also of thoughts we don’t know about, what we call the unconscious mind, and when those two mix, we can have experiences that seem completely real to us but not to anyone else. “So you’re saying that it wasn’t really real,” my son accused. I didn’t know what I was saying and shook my head in confused frustration. “It happened,” Gabe told me. “I know it happened.” He gave me a measuring look that I’d never seen from him before. I knew it was a big moment for us both. “You believe me, don’t you, Dad?” my son asked finally. I stared into his eyes for some time before answering, “I believe you.”

That was the last time we ever talked about it. It was also, for me I think, the beginning of this book.

PART ONE

The Author of Evil

CHAPTER ONE

i.

MIDNIGHT ON MARCH 6, 2015, was the Hour of the Witches in Catemaco, Mexico. The rollover into the first Friday of the month of March was the exact moment of each year, it had been explained to me, when a flood of demons poured into this remote town in the tropical jungle of Veracruz state.

I was standing just outside a circle perhaps forty feet in diameter. It had been drawn with a phosphorescent powder to intersect the points of a giant pentagram made of the same stuff, on a broad patch of packed dirt beneath a towering cliff where fires burned on the ridge. The perimeter of the circle was lit by dozens of candles that cast a dim, fluttery light on a man holding a large knife and wearing the skin and fur of an anteater as headgear. He swung around in a complete circle, displaying his blade to the entire assembly. The anteater’s bared teeth rested on the man’s forehead, its long tail trailing down his back. The animal’s skull dangled from a cord around his neck, like a grotesque talisman. Enrique Verdon bore the title gran brujo, or “great witch,” and was leading the Black Mass at which eight people inside the circle—iniciados, Verdon called them—were being bathed in the blood of sacrificed animals. One after another, the iniciados kneeled to pledge their souls to El Diablo, the Devil himself. As each promise to Satan was made, Verdon threw a handful of rue into the cauldron of glowing charcoal in the center of the circle, creating a whooshing flare of flame that made me cringe each time it rose up, even when I knew it was coming.

I looked across the circle at my friend Michelle Gomez, who had accompanied me to Catemaco as my translator, and could see her bugeyed and shivering. She had been badly shaken by the sacrifice of a goat moments earlier. For me as well, it had been a horrific experience. The animal seemed to realize its fate from the moment it was led inside the circle and was surrounded by the brujo’s assistants, six other witches who had traveled to Catemaco from all over Mexico. They were both men and women, all dressed in what looked to me like custom-made Halloween costumes, black in most cases. The brujo’s number one man, though, wore a red suit, as did the high priestess, a woman whose hair had been bleached platinum blond; she carried a carved wooden staff topped by a ram’s horn, festooned with assorted feathers and furs. The witch who created the most disturbing appearance called himself Joyi Ra and had used black, yellow, and red paint to turn his face into a kind of cubist mask of Nahualist symbols. Around his neck, Joyi Ra wore a necklace made of eight human finger bones.

The mustachioed witch in the red costume, which had a gold pentagram emblazoned on the back, was the first to seize the goat, but the others joined in quickly, lifting the animal by all four legs, then elevating its hindquarters. The animal’s bleating, which never stopped after it was raised from the ground, became all but unbearable within moments. Anthropomorphic as it may have been, I heard a creature pleading for its life up to the moment when the two witches at the back pulled the hind legs apart until they broke at the hip with a horrific cracking sound.

Not until Michelle translated it for me later did I know that Verdon had declared to all present that “the blood from a still-beating heart is the purest form of energy,” then proclaimed that the blood of the animals sacrificed during this ceremony “will be offered up to the dark powers.” Holding his knife aloft and turning it in the light from the iron cauldron, the brujo told the assembly, “We are calling upon Satan, the prince of the earth, to appear before us.” Before cutting the goat’s throat, he demanded that anyone who refused to accept this animal’s sacrifice should make himself known. “Randall, I wanted so badly to say something,” Michelle told me afterward, “but I knew you wouldn’t have wanted me to.”

I winced because it was true. Michelle and I had agreed going in that we were strangers in a strange land, one where the culture was incomprehensible to us—though more to me than to her—and so needed to remain silent observers, no matter what happened. I repeated what I had heard from Antonio Zavaleta, a professor of anthropology in the University of Texas system and the closest thing to an authority on the subject of Mexican witchcraft as exists in American academia. Zavaleta, half Mexican and half Irish, told me that he had struggled for decades with what for him was still an unresolved dichotomy: “In the Mexican culture, things that would be seen by you and me as clearly defined evil aren’t seen that way at all. For instance, the use of a supernatural medium to accomplish someone’s death would clearly be considered evil by American standards. But here at the border [Zavaleta was living in Brownsville, Texas] it is part of everyday life. People don’t see it as evil, or in terms of right or wrong. They don’t understand it in those terms. It’s just part of their cultural reality. If you’re able to manipulate the spiritual or supernatural world, then you have a right to. This is a power you possess and you can use it if you want.”

Michelle, though, knew perfectly well that a good part of my motive for wanting her to keep silent during the Black Mass was that I had no idea what speaking up might bring down upon us. “It crossed my mind that if I said something it might be me instead of the goat,” she admitted. Whatever else might be said of her, Michelle was brave and resourceful, and as physically formidable as any human being four feet eleven inches tall could be. She had been described as “The World’s Best Bounty Hunter” on the cover of Wired magazine, an acclamation that was repeated in dozens of other media outlets. She was, in her own words, “one badass bitch.” Now, though, she looked like a frightened little girl lost in the dark.

When we talked later, Michelle would respond with what I took to be a slightly condescending “typical man” expression as I told her that, more than the animal sacrifices, I had been disturbed by the young girls used in the ceremonies. They were thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old, with that combination of soft, childlike facial features and a nubile brown body that seems to be the ultimate aphrodisiac for many Latin men. They were all dressed in matching black bras and panties, barefoot, and blatantly sexualized, but all virgins, as was required, according to the gran brujo. These girls had carried the chickens that were the first sacrificial offerings into the circle, marching in a rotation that created a sort of bizarre human conveyor belt, achieving an effect that was simultaneously salacious and robotic. The witch in the red suit had seized the chicken delivered by the girl first in line, swinging it by the neck as he used the bird to whack a kneeling iniciado all about the head, neck, and shoulders. The chicken’s wings flapped helplessly, feathers flying, and the middle-aged woman on her knees before the witch absorbed the blows with an expression of utter submission.

Like most of the other iniciados, the middle-aged woman declined to publicly declare what she had come to Catemaco to ask of El Diablo. The only two supplicants who revealed what had brought them here were a young couple from Monterrey who said they were trying to save a failing marriage. He had ruined everything with an affair, said the husband, Alejandro, and was here to “put my soul on the line to prove my commitment.” His young wife, Gloria, nodded her approval, and declared that by his willingness to risk eternal damnation Alejandro had shown he was serious about winning her back. I moved closer to examine Alejandro for signs that he was just playing along with what he knew to be a farce, but I saw the young man trembling, his expression a weird fusion of fright and rapture as the blood of a sacrificed animal was smeared on his face.

The bird that the witch in red had used to whip the middle-aged woman was somehow still alive when the brujo Verdon stepped forward to cut off its head, then tossed that aside and let the blood spurting from the chicken’s neck soak the kneeling woman’s head. The girl who had delivered the creature to the witches stood by with an expression that suggested mainly how much she was enjoying the attention of the men who gaped at her.

With Michelle’s assistance, I later asked a young man who had remained outside the circle, like me an observer, who these girls were, remarking that their parents must know what they were doing. “Their parents are here, watching,” he told me. The involvement of these girls was generacional, the young man explained. “Their parents are part of this, so were their grandparents before that.” “So their families literally give them to the brujo,” I said. The young man arched an eyebrow, as if to emphasize what my statement implied, and said, “Exactamente.”

I started to say that I had a teenage daughter of my own back home, but broke off in midsentence; I didn’t want her present in this place, even in a conversation.

Two other virgins had participated in the ceremony. One was a girl in a turquoise and red costume that included an elaborate feathered headdress. Her role, Verdon had explained, was to provide a human link to the Olmec culture from which the black magic traditions that were being observed this night had been drawn. Whether the Olmecs were in fact devil worshippers, or practiced human sacrifice, for that matter, is debatable, in the opinions of many anthropologists and archeologists, but Verdon wasn’t getting arguments from anyone present at his Black Mass.

The other virgin was a voluptuous young woman who looked to be a couple of years older than the girls in the black bras and panties. She wore a white gown and stood watching the sacrifices and other rituals with totemic aplomb. The virgin in white was shoulder to shoulder with the witches at the conclusion of the Black Mass, though, when they set fire to a fifteen-foot-tall pentagram and summoned El Diablo with chants I was glad I didn’t understand. She followed the witches too when they led the iniciados to the “Black Cave,” where a ten-foot-tall red devil version of Satan equipped with an enormous erect penis was waiting, surrounded by inverted crosses and assorted animal carcasses. The witches smeared the statue with the blood of the sacrificial animals, then, one by one, the iniciados knelt before it and whispered what they had promised to El Diablo. Verdon and all the other witches gathered around each of the iniciados and joined them in repeating a final blood oath warning that their souls would be forfeit if they failed to keep their end of the bargain. “If you don’t fulfill your promises to Satan, he will take everything away from you,” Joyi Ra told the young husband, Alejandro, as the witch wiped blood from the statue and smeared it across the iniciado’s forehead. “You are taking on a serious dark curse.”

When I returned home, I would be asked by various people if I had felt the Devil’s presence in Catemaco. The question was put to me with varying degrees of seriousness. Some posed it in a slightly mocking tone, others with earnest interest. My answer was always the same: “Yes, but not really at the Black Mass.” That midnight ceremony had been spooky and unsettling. I’d certainly felt the presence of something sinister, but it didn’t have a name. There was no sense of a single being behind it all, but rather an amalgamation of human and possibly inhuman wickedness, appetite, and vanity.

The Black Mass really couldn’t compare in intensity to what I’d experienced just an hour or so before arriving, in the living room of a tiny woman wrapped in a purple blanket. She was the daughter of Gonzalo Aguirre, the long-dead brujo to whom Enrique Verdon had dedicated his Black Mass at the beginning of the ceremonies, and the man who had “put Catemaco on the map,” as his granddaughter Chavela would tell Michelle and me the next day. Aguirre’s teacher was the more significant and frightful figure in the Catemaco story, but it was the apprentice, Don Gonzalo, who had become the most famous black magician in Mexico (where sorcerers and shamans hold a place of importance that is incomprehensible to most Americans), the one whose spells, curses, and hexes had drawn the first of what was now a very long line of politicians, movie stars, music idols, and athletes streaming in and out of Catemaco.

The hour I spent with Don Gonzalo’s daughter, Isabel Aguirre, immediately before heading to this dark ceremony had made a much deeper impression on me than the Black Mass would. By the time I left her home, I felt convinced of three truths. The first was that, as Doña Isabel had told me, there was a Devil. The second was that I did not want to know him. And the third was that I already did.

ii.

THE DEVIL’S APPEARANCE, like his disappearance, happened gradually.

He wasn’t around in antiquity because the ancients needed no devils. Their divinities did the dirty work. Even in the Mediterranean Basin, the cradle of monotheistic religion, the Mesopotamians, Sumerians, and Egyptians had worshipped gods who were at once good and bad, angry and kind, creative and destructive. They were not so much supernatural as supranatural, mysterious aspects of the visible world that could be influenced with sacrifices and offerings. Their origins and their development were fraught with lust, conflict, betrayal, and redemption. They were like us, only more so, forever rebuilding what they had destroyed, and destroying what they had rebuilt.

Some ancient gods were more menacing than others. The Babylonian king of the wind demons, Zu, was the father of disease, the bearer of storms, and the instigator of droughts. He ushered in famine during dry seasons, and locusts during rainy seasons. Zu was certainly fearsome, with his human body and lion head, taloned feet, scorpion tail, and serpentine penis, but the Babylonians wouldn’t have understood him as evil. Immorality didn’t enter into it—Zu was simply Zu.

The Greeks of this same period developed a belief in an Absolute they called moira, a remote and impersonal force that was the fount of creation, and which had assigned to each god and to each human his or her proper function. As in Egypt, and for that matter India, the Greek gods were paradoxical manifestations of the One. In both The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer (circa 1100–850 B.C.) draws little distinction between theos and daimon, and he portrays the characteristics of gods and demons as both good and bad. In his works, all men and all gods have destructive properties, and there is no single principle of evil, because it is part of the One.

The pre-Socratic philosophers generally placed responsibility for evil on us human beings, as much for the way we perceive things as for what we do. From the divine point of view, Heraclitus (535–475 B.C.) would explain, “all things are beautiful, good and right; men on the other hand deem some things wrong and some things right.”

Like the Hindus who were writing the Upanishads during this period, Socrates (469–399 B.C.) seems to have equated evil with ignorance, insisting that wickedness and perversity resulted from a lack of episteme, the practical knowledge of how to seek virtue and shun vice. It was his student Plato (427–347 B.C.), though, who put forth the idea that would most influence the development of religious thought on the subject. Evil had no real existence, Plato argued, no ontology; evil was merely the lack of good, a sort of moral emptiness that arose from the imperfection of the created world. Plato portrayed the creator less as a figure of worship than as an abstract principle, the essence of moira. Although he wanted to assert the goodness of this remote God, Plato labored mightily to explain how the primary principle of existence had produced such an imperfect world. He offered two possibilities, one monistic, the other dualistic: either the creator himself was possessed of an erratic, imperfect element (called chaos), or chaos could be a spirit separate from the creator that brings disorder and evil into the world. With that latter suggestion, Plato might have been the first person to suggest the existence of the Devil. In the end, though, after wavering between his monistic and dualistic notions, Plato seemed to abandon any hope of absolutes and resigned himself to the idea that the world was a meixis, a mixture.

Epicurus (341–270 B.C.) is the first person known to have formally posed the problem of evil, and he did so in a way that has compelled theologians ever since to wrestle with the “Epicurean paradox”: “Either God wants to abolish evil, and cannot; or he can, but does not want to. If he wants to, but cannot, he is impotent. If can, but does not want to, he is wicked.”

The Persian sage Zoroaster (sometime before 500 B.C.) insisted upon a God who was unblemished goodness. That commitment compelled him to found the first religion to teach pure dualism, through the revelation that evil is not a manifestation of the divine at all, but proceeds from a wholly separate principle. Put simply, Zoroaster subtracted some of God’s omnipotence in order to keep intact God’s absolute goodness. This he did by drawing on the ancient Hindu story of a battle between the ahuras (elder gods) and the younger daevas, who triumphed and became “the gods.” On the other side of the Indus, Zoroaster taught that the ahuras won that conflict and that one among them, Ahura Mazda, was elevated to the position of the One God, while the daevas became his enemies and their leader, Angra Mainyu, developed into the personification of all lies. Zoroaster, perhaps the first true theologian in the history of the human race, taught that two spiritual principles existed: Ahura Mazda, the One God, the lord of goodness and light, and Agra Mainyu, the lord of evil and darkness. These two were opposites but also twins, separate, independent principles of good and evil. Angra Mainyu, the first Devil, was to be seen as a totally alien force, never to be assimilated but only destroyed. Essentially, Zoroaster asked for what Carl Jung centuries later would argue is not humanly possible—that instead of recognizing the evil inside us and repressing it, we should deny its very existence, insist that it is outside us, and then strive for a perfection that will come only when we have separated ourselves from evil forever.

CHAPTER TWO

i.

MICHELLE GOMEZ WAS WITH ME in Catemaco because of a conversation that had taken place between us twenty months earlier, during June 2013, in a New Orleans hotel suite. Michelle was in Louisiana to track down a criminal who was using a half dozen “ghost selves” created on the internet to manipulate and avoid capture by the various law enforcement agencies pursuing him. She had gained control of one of her quarry’s associates with a plausible threat of criminal charges. From him, she knew that the criminal she was after was living aboard a stolen Hatteras yacht hidden on one of Louisiana’s bayous. We were waiting together at my hotel for the call that would tell us which bayou that might be. At one point during our hours of conversation, Michelle asserted her belief in the power and presence of supernatural evil in the world. Then she began to describe what she had experienced back in August 1988, when a young woman named Mary Reyna had showed up in Lockhart, Texas, Michelle’s hometown, about twenty miles south of Austin.

I knew Michelle had won some beauty pageants as a young woman, but this was before that, she explained, back in the days when she was still a solid tomboy. Yes, she did begin competing in pageants a couple of years later, Michelle conceded, but only because she was pressured by her mother and her older sister, who were concerned that she might never grow up into the proper young woman they saw in her. During the summer of 1988, though, she still disdained anything remotely “ladylike” (a favorite term of her mom’s). “I was seventeen but really young for my age,” she told me. “I went everywhere on my bike, wore jeans or cutoffs and a white T-shirt with Converse tennis shoes like a uniform, always had my hair in a braided ponytail.”

She had spent the first two months of summer in the daily company of a group of seven or eight other kids who were younger teens, “all boys except for me,” Michelle said. They spent their days riding bikes and skateboards around town, or at the park, playing baseball and swinging on grape vines. Her large Mexican American clan was among the most prominent families in Lockhart, and they were very protective of her, Michelle explained. Her brother Mario, fourteen then, was as powerfully built as she was petite and went with her everywhere, “so no one ever messed with me.”

One of the friends she hung out with that summer was Eddie Reyna, who lived in a big white house on Trinity Street that was directly behind her family’s own home on Brazos. The bunch of them, and she especially, were enjoying a glorious summer, as Michelle recalled it. For her, it was a final but golden passage out of childhood. Until Eddie’s cousin Mary came to town.

Eddie’s mom called to invite her over to meet the family’s new houseguest about halfway through August, Michelle remembered. As Mrs. Reyna described it, Mary had been sent south by her family from Childress, a town in that northern part of West Texas known as the Panhandle. The purpose was to get her away from some unspecified “troubles.” Mary didn’t know anyone in Lockhart, and since they were the same age, Eddie’s mom hoped Michelle might show her around town and introduce her to people.

She was startled when she stepped into the Reynas’ family room the next day and met Mary, Michelle remembered: “There had never been anyone who looked like her in Lockhart. She was dressed in all black clothing—even her socks and shoes were black—with long black hair that didn’t look like she had brushed it in weeks and a very pale face. She wasn’t an ugly person, though, far from it. She had freckles and she didn’t wear any makeup, because she didn’t need it; she had very nice skin and really long eyelashes. But she also had this totally blank expression. I remember she never smiled once. She didn’t talk much, either.”

When Mrs. Reyna called her over after a few days and asked what the two girls had talked about, “I said, ‘Nothing,’ ” Michelle remembered. “ ‘She’s a weirdo and my mom said I can’t hang out with people that only wear black clothes.’ ” Mrs. Reyna chuckled and said, “Try to be her friend, please, Michelle. Help her change. All she needs is one friend.”

Michelle said okay, but she kept trying to avoid Mary. “But then one day the whole group of us went over to Eddie’s and Mary noticed our friend Erik. She got me alone and started asking questions about him. I remember I told her, ‘He’s Catholic and goes to church every Sunday.’ I could see she didn’t like that. But she was still interested in Erik. So she started trying to join our group. Basically, she bought her way in. Somehow she always had money and she would invite us to Pizza Hut to eat and play video games. Mario and the other boys weren’t going to turn that down.”

Gradually, and it was difficult to say why, Michelle told me, she became intrigued by the girl in black. Although they were the same age, Mary seemed much older, and Michelle, as her senior year in high school approached, was beginning to feel embarrassed about still being such a little girl. Perhaps that was because Mary took every opportunity to suggest that she should be embarrassed by it.

Michelle remembered that Mary had really seemed to join their group on Halloween night.

We all got together at the field on our street and talked about scary stuff. Mary was the one with the most spooky stories and we all went home really frightened.

For some reason, after that, she started to tell me things, about where she came from and what went on there. I remember she asked me once if I had ever done anything I had to feel real guilty about. I felt like she was going to confess something, but she changed the subject. She started to talk about Childress. She said it was “a weird town that had some weird people in it.”

Just days later, Mary began to talk about dreams she was having, dreams that were making it hard for her to sleep, Michelle remembered:

They were about this group she called “the Merchants of Death.” It was really creepy but it was also really fascinating. She told me about how in her dreams this group was meeting in a place they called “the Haunted House” in a town near Childress and that they kept a red bulb in the porch light that they turned on when they were meeting, on the twenty-fourth of each month, and that they always performed a “sacrifice.” She said it was usually an animal, but she sort of made it sound like there were people being sacrificed, too. One time she told me the reason she had left Childress was because two boys and two girls had already been killed and she was afraid she would be killed, too. I know how crazy this sounds, but Mary had this way—she would jump from reality talk to these “dreams” and it was hard to tell the difference. It was like a series of dreams that were all connected, and she would move from one to the next, like you do when you’re really dreaming. But sometimes she was talking about things that I thought maybe had really happened.

Mary spoke of one “dream” she had that the parents who owned the Haunted House had run a boy down with their car because they were afraid he was going to talk to the police about what they were involved in. “She described the whole thing in such vivid detail,” Michelle recalled. “She always did. It was like I could see it happening as she talked. Listening to her was almost like going to see a really scary movie.”

She never told her parents any of the things she was hearing from Mary, Michelle said. “I remember once I said something about asking for God’s help, and Mary told me, ‘I don’t believe in God. I believe in the Devil.’ I was shocked and asked why. Mary’s answer was, ‘Because the Devil makes things happen.’ If I’d told my mom about that, I’d have never seen Mary again.”

One thing she regretted, Michelle told me, was that she’d gone along when Mary convinced all the boys to join her in a Ouija board session in the attic of the Reynas’ house. “The rest of us were sort of treating it like a game, but Mary was very serious,” Michelle recalled. “She had talked before about someone she called ‘the Thane,’ who she said was the leader of this group back in Childress. And then that day when we were all together, she told us that ‘the Thane’ and the Devil spoke to her through the Ouija board. Some of the others were giggling, but they were all creeped out, too, I think. And then at one point Mary took her hands off that little pointer thing and I swear to you, Randall, it kept moving on its own. We were so terrified that we all ran out of the room. Everybody was screaming. These two Black kids that were part of our group, Mack and Ernie, they swore they would never go near Mary again, and they didn’t. But I kept seeing her, because by then I was really curious what it was all about.”

Some time that winter, right after the calendar had rolled over into 1989, she invited Mary over to her house for a sleepover, Michelle recalled. Mrs. Gomez, though, told her daughter Mary wasn’t welcome unless she wore something besides black. “I actually had to loan her clothes, because she said she didn’t have anything that wasn’t black,” Michelle said. When they got ready for bed that night, Mary said she wanted to sleep on the floor, then made up a place for herself with quilts and pillows. Moments after she lay down, though, Mary began to complain about the night-light in the hallway. “My mom had this Virgin of Guadalupe night-light,” Michelle explained, “that she said warded off darkness—spiritual darkness, she meant—and Mary really didn’t like it. She demanded that I turn it off, but I wouldn’t, and we had a nasty fight about it. I actually told her to go home, but she wouldn’t leave. And then she started talking about this one dream that she’d told me about several times before.”

The scene Mary described involved the group of people who met at the house with the red porch light. Only in this “dream” they were gathered around a fire in a pasture with trees and tree stumps all around them. She could see their faces and knew who they were, Mary said, but for some reason couldn’t manage to remember their names. On the sleepover, however, Mary transitioned from the description of the scene in the pasture to a story about how she was supposed to go out there to join the group. Someone was supposed to pick her up at the Hardee’s restaurant at midnight to drive her out there, but never showed up, Mary said. Eventually, though, another person from the group arrived to pick her up, and told her, “Tate’s dead.” She knew a Tate, Mary explained, a really cute guy her age who lived in Childress. The person who picked her up said Tate had been talking about committing suicide and so “we helped him do it.”

“This is still your dream, right?” Michelle asked. Mary didn’t answer.

A few nights later, Mary came back to that same “dream,” only this time she described seeing Tate hanging from a rope and watching as the rope broke. “They” got a stronger rope and hung him again, said Mary, who added, “We sacrificed him.”

“Her description was so vivid that I felt like I could see the whole thing,” Michelle recalled.

The last time she and Mary were alone was at her house, Michelle recalled. Her family were all gone. The two girls were in the kitchen and while she was looking for sodas in the cupboard, Michelle remembered, Mary said, “I’ve told you so much, too much, but you’re too stupid to figure out what I’m telling you. Maybe I should just kill you before you put it all together.” When she turned around, Michelle said, Mary was holding a knife, raised above her shoulder. “I grabbed the lid off the trash can that was right next to me, like a shield,” Michelle recalled, “and I swung it at her. We danced around and I really thought she was trying to stab me. But then all of a sudden she laughed and said it was just a joke and put the knife down. But I told her to get out of my house.”

She saw Mary one time after that, Michelle said, on the street in March 1989. “She told me that the Thane and the Devil had spoken to her through the Ouija board and commanded her to go back to Childress. Honestly, by then I thought, ‘Good riddance.’ And then Eddie told me a couple of days later that Mary was gone. I don’t know why it took me until then, except that I had started to be really afraid of Mary, but I began to put things together. I started thinking that she might really have killed someone, or been part of the group that had killed someone.”

Michelle, who considered herself an accomplished artist, decided to make pen-and-ink drawings of the scenes Mary had described in her “dreams”: The house with the red porch light; the boy being run over with a car; the other boy hanging from the biggest tree in a windbreak planted along the border of two cotton farms. Then she took the drawings to the Lockhart Police Department.

Michelle told me she rode her bike to the police station, and she may have, but in his report dated March 23, 1989, investigator Gerald Clough wrote that the girl had arrived for her interview accompanied by her father, Rudy Gomez. Clough described Michelle in the first paragraph of his two-page report as “an intelligent, very normal eighteen-year-old girl,” then noted that Michelle was “very concerned that Mary Reyna will find out she has talked to the police.” He had assured the girl, Clough wrote, that “we will keep her information as confidential as possible.”

Michelle told Clough the story of her association with Mary Reyna, from start to finish, then handed him the drawings she had made. What Clough saw in them he didn’t say in his report, but the investigator was apparently impressed enough to send them on to the police in Childress.

Some time passed before law enforcement in Lockhart heard back that the drawings they had sent north were startlingly precise matches of locations and events that had actually taken place in and around Childress. There really had been an abandoned home in the nearby town of Kirkland that had a red porch light and was known as “the Haunted House”; it had burned to the ground only recently under circumstances that were considered “mysterious” and may have involved arson. And there had been a fifteen-year-old boy who worked as a dishwasher at a local restaurant who had been killed by a car in a hit-and-run while walking home from work one night, only a couple of blocks from the Haunted House at an intersection that was nearly identical to the one Michelle had drawn; no one had been arrested for the crime. But what had really impressed the police in Childress was the eerie exactitude of Michelle’s drawing of a scene out north of town, on the steep curve in a dirt road that was known to local youth as “Boxer’s Corner,” the place where the corpse of seventeen-year-old Tate Rowland had been found hanging from the branch of a horse apple tree on the evening of July 26, 1988, only a couple of weeks before Mary Reyna showed up in Lockhart.

ii.

IT WAS THE JEWS who created a narrative in which both God and the Devil grew into their roles. The Yahweh of the pre-exilic Hebrew religion was not much different, really, from the ambivalent deities of the ancient monists—a blend of light and dark elements, alternately merciful and cruel. When Joshua captured the city of Hazor, the Israelites “spared nothing that drew breath, destroyed the city by fire, plundered the goods, took the cattle,” then attributed all of this to the will of their God. Again and again in the early books of the Old Testament, actions and motives that in Christianity would be attributed to the Devil are ascribed to Yahweh’s “shadow side” (to use Carl Jung’s phrase). The notion that the Lord of Hosts was what Jung called an “antimony of opposites” is expressed most succinctly in Isaiah, where God tells the prophet, “I form the light and create darkness; I create peace and make evil; I the Lord do all these things.”

Only after the moral instruction of the prophets developed into a central part of the Jewish faith did the Hebrews become uncomfortable with the idea that their God would permit—sometimes even encourage—people to sin and suffer. Their response was to extract the destructive aspect of God and give it to a malignant spirit who eventually became the Devil. But this trends toward dualism, a blasphemy for Jews. Only by denying that the Devil was evil in origin could the Hebrews allow him to exist, as an angelic being created good who fell from grace by his own free choice.

Of course, it can be reasonably argued—and is by most Christians—that the Devil was in the Bible from the beginning, in the guise of the serpent (“more subtle than any other wild creature that the Lord God had made”) that leads Adam and Eve to their own fall. The serpent is a seducer and a sophist who encourages Adam and Eve to eat forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, claiming that the consequence will not be nearly so severe as God has threatened, all the while knowing it will cost the couple their immortality. What’s difficult to understand about the creation story, of course, is why God placed the tree of knowledge of good and evil in the Garden of Eden if he really wanted Adam and Eve to remain innocent. One also wonders why God made the serpent so subtle and malevolent. Who really, we are forced to ask, was the tempter?

We get no clear answer to this question from the Pentateuch, because God’s identity seems to fluctuate in those first five books of the Old Testament. God several times refers to himself in the first-person plural in those oldest passages of the Bible, as “we,” and is called the Lord of Hosts, surrounded by a heavenly council called the bene ha-elohim, “sons of the Lord.” These “sons” at times seem more like demigods than angels. The fall of God’s “sons” is chronicled in what has become perhaps the least-discussed chapter of the Book of Genesis, where the bene ha-elohim are first described as angels. In Genesis, and in the more detailed account from the banned Book of Enoch, the “Watcher” angels plunge from heaven because they lust after the daughters of men. The Watchers are led by one called Samyaza, who encourages them to alight on Mt. Hermon, take human wives, and teach these women the arts of magic and agriculture. Another Watcher, Azazel, teaches men to manufacture weapons and ornaments, tempting them to violence and vanity. The offspring of the Watchers’ intercourse with human wives are a race of giants called nephilim, who turn upon mankind, destroying property and devouring human flesh. God ultimately answers the prayers of men by sending four archangels, Uriel, Raphael, Gabriel, and Michael, to slay the giants, and then to attack the Watchers themselves, casting them into “the deep valleys of the earth,” where they are to remain until the Day of Judgment. A survivor of this conflict becomes (gradually) the Devil, a malignant creature alternately known as Belial, Mastema, Azzael, Satanail, and Samael, but finally as Satan.

The Old Testament has forty-six books, and angels are mentioned in thirty-one. They appear first in Genesis, when Adam and Eve are cast out of Eden and God uses cherubim and a flaming sword to bar their readmission. Most of the angels of the Old Testament appear in the guise of splendid young men who minister to human beings with adoration and rebukes, comfort and chastisement. They pray for some people but punish others. One of these angels also seems to serve at first as God’s spy, then as his prosecutor, and finally as his debating partner. That angel is Satan.

Satan’s first biblical appearance is in the Book of Numbers, and the scene poses a real problem for those who insist both on scriptural literalism and that the Devil fell from grace before man was created. In Numbers, when Balaam decides to go where God has warned him never to venture, he saddles his ass and sets off. “But God’s anger was kindled because he went,” Numbers tells us, “and the angel of the Lord took his stand in the road as his satan.” By blocking Balaam, this lowercase-s satan, or “obstructor,” is actually serving both the will of God and the interests of man. In the Book of Zechariah, Satan (uppercase now) is the angel who sits among God’s heavenly counselors, playing the role of prosecuting attorney in the Lord’s court. The high priest Joshua rises to his feet in the dock “before the angel of Lord, with Satan standing at his right hand to accuse him.” It is in Zechariah that Satan is for the first time described as “the adversary” of mankind. Yet he still seems to be in God’s service.

“Of course he’s working for God. Certainly,” Dr. Martin S. Jaffee, the Stroum Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle and an academic authority on the Jewish concept of the Devil, told me when I put the question to him. Dr. Jaffee seemed both irritated and amused when I pressed him to explain how the Jews could accept the idea of God—and the Devil—evolving