The World of Religions, March-April 2005 —
It doesn't matter whether the devil exists or not. What is undeniable is that he is coming back. In France and around the world. Not in a spectacular and sensational way, but in a diffuse and multifaceted way. We can point to a host of clues for this surprising comeback. Cemetery desecrations, more often of a satanic than racist nature, have multiplied throughout the world over the past decade. In France, more than 3,000 Jewish, Christian, or Muslim graves have been desecrated over the past five years, double the number in the previous decade. While only 18% of French people believe in the existence of the devil, those under 24 are the most numerous (27%) to share this belief. And 34% believe that an individual can be possessed by the devil (1). Belief in hell has even doubled among those under 28 over the past two decades (2). Our research shows that significant parts of teen culture—Gothism, metal music—are steeped in references to Satan, the quintessentially rebellious figure who opposed the Father. Should we read this morbid and sometimes violent universe as simply the normal manifestation of a need for rebellion and provocation? Or should we simply explain it by the proliferation of films, comics, and video games featuring the devil and his acolytes? In the 1960s and 1970s, teens—and I was one of them—were more interested in expressing their difference and their rebellion by rejecting consumer society. Indian gurus and the soaring music of Pink Floyd fascinated us more than Beelzebub and hyper-violent heavy metal. Shouldn't we read this fascination with evil as a reflection of the violence and fears of our time, marked by a breakdown of traditional social connections and reference points and by a profound anxiety about the future? As Jean Delumeau reminds us, history shows that it is in times of great fear that the devil returns to the stage. Isn't this also the reason for Satan's return to politics? Reintroduced by Ayatollah Khomeini when he castigated the Great American Satan, the reference to the devil and the explicit demonization of the political adversary was taken up by Ronald Reagan, Bin Laden, and George Bush. The latter is simply inspired by the considerable resurgence in popularity enjoyed by Satan among American Evangelicals, who are increasing the practice of exorcism and denouncing a world subject to the powers of Evil. Since Paul VI, who spoke of the "smokes of Satan" to speak of the growing secularization of Western countries, the Catholic Church, which had long since distanced itself from the devil, has not been left behind and, as a sign of the times, the Vatican has just created an exorcism seminary within the prestigious Pontifical University Regina Apostolorum.
All these clues merited not only a real investigative file on the return of the devil, but also on his identity and his role. Who is the devil? How did he appear in religions? What do the Bible and the Koran say about him? Why do monotheisms have more need of this figure who embodies absolute evil than shamanic, polytheistic, or Asian religions? How can psychoanalysis also enlighten us on this character, on his psychic function, and allow a stimulating symbolic rereading of the biblical devil? For if, according to its etymology, the "symbol" - sumbolon - is "that which unites," the "devil" - diabolon - is "that which divides." One thing seems certain to me: it is only by identifying our fears and our "divisions" both individual and collective, by bringing them to light through a demanding work of awareness and symbolization, by integrating our dark side - as Juliette Binoche reminds us in the luminous interview she granted us - that we will overcome the devil and this archaic need, as old as humanity, to project onto the other, onto the different, onto the stranger, our own untamed impulses and our anxieties of fragmentation. (
1) According to a Sofres/Pèlerin magazine survey of December 2002.
(2) The values of Europeans, Futuribles, July-August 2002)