The Teeming Brain

I’m making my weekly post a day late due to the Christmas holiday, which fell yesterday, on my usual day to update The Teeming Brain. I feel I can do no better by way of explanation than to quote the immortal words of Bob Cratchit to his employer to explain his late arrival at work one fateful December 26th: “I was making rather merry yesterday.”

This week I have a couple of nice bits of news to share for the post-holiday. Speaking of which, a belated Merry Christmas to one and all! Or if you don’t celebrate that particular holiday — which, let it be noted, can’t really be rejected as an exclusively Christian holiday, since it’s been almost completely secularized and commercialized by America in recent decades, and then there’s the fact that Christmas was created out of, and layered onto, ancient pagan traditions right from the start — but to regroup: if you don’t celebrate that particular holiday, well, here’s wishing you (belatedly) a nice December 25th. On the Gregorian calendar, of course, which not everybody subscribes to. So, in sum, to be safe, here’s wishing you a — well, just a day, I guess.

But to return to the subject of the above-mentioned news items: It has arisen that I’ll be appearing in a couple of forthcoming books, one of them a review journal and the other a horror anthology.

The review journal is titled Dead Reckonings and is being edited by Jack Haringa and S.T. Joshi. As Jack states at his blog (to which the title just linked will take you), the idea is to fill the void left by the death of the venerable Necrofile some years ago (whose online, non-print sister version, Necropsy, still exists). And oh, what the heck, I’ll quote Jack directly:

“Do you remember Necrofile? Do you miss its great, in-depth critical reviews of major releases in the horror and dark fantasy fields? I know I do, and I’ve lamented the loss of Necrofile, the absence of critical review venues in the genre, and the lack of much even half-decent genre reviewing in this journal more than once.

“Well, something’s being done about it. S.T. Joshi and I are co-editing a new review journal of horror and dark fantasy. Dead Reckonings will be issued semi-annually through Hippocampus Press and will contain approximately 35,000 words of essays and shorter reviews per perfect-bound issue.

“The first issue will focus on works released or to be released between September of 2006 and March of 2007, and it should be available by the end of this coming February. Reviewers and essayists scheduled for appearance in the first issue include Hank Wagner, Matt Cardin, Paula Guran, John Langan, Michael Marano, Richard Bleiler, June Pulliam, Mike Roden, Ramsey Campbell, and many more. “

So I feel I’m keeping great company here, and I was very pleased to be invited to contribute to this new publication.

As for the horror anthology, it’s none other than In Delirium II, a sequel to the original In Delirium, which was edited by Brian Keene and published earlier this year. As with the first volume, this second one is a tribute anthology to Delirium’s proprietor, Shane Staley, and is composed of stories written by authors who have been previously published by Delirium. The project was conceived and put together by John Everson, many of whose works populate Delirium’s publications catalog. John contacted me a few months ago to invite me on board, since my novella The God of Foulness had been published by Delirium in 2004 (and subsequently went on to receive a recommendation for the British Fantasy Award). I was happy to contribute. The whole thing was a secret; John assembled and edited the anthology, secured original cover art, and laid out and typeset the book without Shane’s knowledge. He then Fed Exed the finished product to Shane in a gift-wrapped box a little over a week ago.

Here’s the cover art, created by Mike Bohatch:

My story in there is “The Stars Shine Without Me,” whose only previous publication was in the fiction section at Horrorfind in 2002. Ellen Datlow liked it enough to give it an honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. A lot of people have asked me about it in the years since then, saying things like, “Don’t I remember reading a surreal story by you about some guy who works a desk job in a needle-shaped black tower?” The answer is yes, you do remember such a story, and this is it. I hope its appearance in In Delirium II, and then next year (I hope) in my second fiction collection, Dark Awakenings, will serve to satisfy the curious.

Incidentally, Shane Staley has posted a note at the “Delirium Insider” page of his website to express his surprise and gratitude at the gift. It’s a note that’s well worth reading, especially since it lists the anthology’s full table of contents. As with Dead Reckonings, so with In Delirium II I’m quite pleased to be featured in such a fantastic lineup of authors.

And finally, in case I don’t manage to upload another post by January 1st, here’s wishing you all a Happy New Year! (On the Gregorian calendar, of course…)

First, my standard proviso: If you haven’t already read the first installment in this series of posts, then please do so before reading this one, since the first one lays the groundwork for what I’m going on about.

But for now, to reiterate briefly: Since childhood I have been overcome from time to time by an experience of intense longing for something that I can neither name nor remember, but that seems bound up with beauty (both natural and artistic), transcendence, infinity, freedom, melancholy, joy, poignancy, nostalgia — a whole host of strangely interrelated moods and cognitions and emotions. It trembles just beyond the edge of attainment and seems to represent the fulfillment of everything I have ever desired, and of everything I have ever intuited about the deep meaning of life. C.S. Lewis experienced the same thing and built his life around it, borrowing the German term “sehnsucht” to refer to it. I sometimes call it the Autumn Longing since it seems bound up with that season — as indeed it was for Lewis, too, who once described the way he became intoxicated with longing at “the Idea of Autumn” upon reading Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin. H.P. Lovecraft was also subject to it, and wrote about it copiously. Most of the classical Romantics knew of it. And so have a great many other authors, as I have only begun to find in recent times.

For several years now I’ve set myself the task of keeping an eye out for writings where other people describe this longing. The very act of reading them fills me with a strange exhilaration and rekindles the longing itself. It’s addictive, let me tell you. I seem to be drawn to such things even when I don’t realize at first that they’re right before me.

Which brings us to Amadeus. As a teenager I discovered the movie version of this play, which had been written some years earlier by the great Peter Shaffer. It positively entranced me. I’ve always been extremely susceptible to the mesmerizing influence of certain films, but Amadeus was and is amongst a handful that head the list. Everything about the movie coheres for me. It seems a Perfect Thing.

And so it was that when I finally looked into the original stage version a few years ago, I was astonished to find that the great longing that has been so important to me features in Amadeus as well. I hadn’t watched the movie for some years, but when I read the script for the play and saw it depicting Salieri’s great longing for the beauty he heard embodied in Mozart’s music, I remembered instantly one of the most powerful scenes in the film, where Salieri looks through a portfolio of Mozart’s work and, recalling the incident decades later, says that he seemed to be “staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at an Absolute Beauty.” And of course when I reached that point in the play script, the same line was there, and it was equally wonderful.

So here, today, I’m reprinting the two scenes where this theme comes out most clearly in the play. The first is from the part of the play where Salieri has just spied upon a young Mozart as the latter flirts rather vilely(much more so in the play than in the movie) with his fiancée Constanze. Then music starts playing in the other room — the scene takes place at an aristocratic gathering at the home of a Baroness, where musicians are assembled to play some of Mozart’s music — and Salieri realizes this vile young man before him has composed music that seems to speak with the voice of God. And God is something Salieri knows about, because as a youth he prayed fervently for God to make him a composer, and promised that if God granted this wish, then he would devote his life to making music in God’s service. Salieri speaks to God frequently, referring to Him formally as “Signore” and thanking Him for the music that he sends to his humble servant. So naturally, when he finds that a vulgar, dirty-minded little man like Mozart (as Salieri sees it, and as Mozart is here portrayed) is the one who has received God’s greatest gift of musical expression, he turns against the deity and consciously works to block Him and destroy Mozart. (This is just another theme that renders the story endlessly absorbing to me.)

The second scene is the one mentioned above, where Salieri looks through a portfolio of Mozart’s music and recognizes the same awesome beauty and longing embodied in it.  The scene departs a bit from focusing on the longing proper in order to deliver an emotional punch based on the impression of awesome power of the absolute reality that shines through Mozart’s music.  As you’ll read, Salieri is overcome and, as it seems, nearly destroyed by the revelation of this power, which is made known via some impressive theatrical and musical flourishes.  Truly, this strikes me as one of the most purely and potently apocalyptic scenes, in the pristine root meaning of the word (the Greek apokalypsis meaning literally “the lifting of the veil”), to appear in modern drama, at least in my limited experience of the field.

This whole thing — the twin package of these two scenes from Amadeus – makes me want to dig further into Shaffer’s works to see whether he pursued such subjects elsewhere. In any case, I hope you enjoy reading all of this material, which as I’ve said is endlessly fascinating to me. It also elicits profound melancholy and, on some days, unbearable despair. And that’s just a natural part of it.

* * * * *

From Amadeus, Act One, Scene 5

[The Adagio from the Serenade for thirteen wind instruments (K. 361) begins to sound. Quietly and quite slowly, seated in the wing chair, SALIERI speaks over the music.]

SALIERI: It started simply enough: just a pulse in the lowest registers — bassoons and basset horns — like a rusty squeezebox. It would have been comic except for the slowness, which gave it instead a sort of serenity. And then suddenly, high above it, sounded a single note from the oboe.

[We hear it.]

It hung there unwavering, piercing me through, till breath could hold it no longer, and a clarinet withdrew it out of me, and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight it had me trembling. The light flickered in the room. My eyes clouded! [With ever-increasing emotion and vigor] The squeezebox groaned louder, and over it the higher instruments wailed and warbled, throwing lines of sound around me — long lines of pain around and through me. Ah, the pain! Pain as I had never known it. I called up to my sharp old God, “What is this? . . . What?!” But the squeezebox went on and on, and the pain cut deeper into my shaking head until suddenly I was running –

[He bolts out of the chair and runs across the stage in a fever, to a corner, down right. Behind him in the Light Box, the library fades into a street scene at night: small houses under a rent sky. The music continues, fainter underneath.]

dashing through the side door, stumbling downstairs into the street, into the cold night, gasping for life. [Calling up in agony] “What?! What is this? Tell me, Signore! What is this pain? What is this need in the sound? Forever unfulfillable, yet fulfilling him who hears it, utterly. Is it Your need? Can it be Yours? . . .”

* * * * *

From Amadeus, Act One, Scene 12

[He moves upstage in a fever -- reaches out to take the portfolio on the chair -- but as if fearful of what he mind find inside it, he withdraws his hand and sits instead. A pause. He contemplates the music lying there as if it were a great confection he is dying to eat, but dare not. Then suddenly he snatches at it -- tears the ribbon -- opens the case and stares greedily at the manuscripts within.
Music sounds instantly, faintly, in the theater, as his eye falls on the first page. It is the opening of the Twenty-ninth Symphony, in A major. Over the music, reading it.]

She had said that these were his original scores. First and only drafts of the music. Yet they looked like fair copies. They showed no corrections of any kind. It was puzzling — then suddenly alarming.

[He looks up from the manuscript to the audience: the music abruptly stops.]

What was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most music is never finished.

[He resumes looking at the music. Immediately the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola sounds.]

Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and the structure would fall.

[He looks up again: the music breaks off.]

Here again — only now in abundance — were the same sounds I’d heard in the library.

[He resumes reading, and the music also resumes: a ravishing phrase from the slow movement of the Concerto for Flute and Harp.]

The same crushed harmonies — glancing collisions — agonizing delights.

[He looks up again. The music stops.]

The truth was clear. That Serenade had been no accident.

[Very low, in the theater, a faint thundery sound is heard accumulating, like a distant sea.]

I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at — an Absolute Beauty!

[And out of the thundery roar writhes and rises the clear sound of a soprano, singing the Kyrie from the C Minor mass. The accretion of noise around her voice falls away -- it is suddenly clear and bright -- then clearer and brighter. The light grows bright: too bright: burning white, then scalding white! SALIERI rises in the downpour of it, and in the flood of the music, which is growing ever louder -- filling the theatre -- as the soprano yields to the full chorus, fortissimo, singing its massive counterpoint.

This is by far the loudest sound the audience has yet heard. SALIERI staggers toward us, holding the manuscripts in his hand, like a man caught in a tumbling and violent sea.

Finally the drums crash in below: SALIERI drops the portfolio of manuscripts -- and falls senseless to the ground. At the same second the music explodes into a long, echoing, distorted boom, signifying some dreadful annihilation.

The sound remains suspended over the prone figure in a menacing continuum -- no longer music at all. Then it dies away, and there is only silence.]

Recently I was involved in a group conversation about religion that ended up centering on the issue of the “pick and choose” approach, in which a person explicitly chooses which tenets, doctrines, etc., to adopt and which to reject among a given religion or group of them. A number of participants criticized this approach on the grounds that it represents human hubris, that it is “man’s attempt to play God” and all that, and advocated by contrast the approach of surrendering one’s autonomy to an authority higher than oneself, such as the Bible (conceived as inerrant and supernaturally authoritative), or Jesus, or God.

Now, I myself am certainly no dogmatic supporter of the modern-day cafeteria-style approach to religion, although I have fiercely cherished my own personal freedom in this domain. There really is something vitally important in the recognition of a force or truth or principle or reality that transcends, dwarfs, and encompasses your personal, individual selfhood, however you may conceive that ultimate whatever-it-is.

And yet . . . and yet . . . I grew up with the evangelical Christian version of the “surrender your self and your autonomy” message being proclaimed all around me, and I still hear it being proclaimed today by a great many Christians of various stripes (and also by adherents of other faith traditions). And I can’t help taking serious exception to it, or at least to the version that’s almost always put forth.

Because in point of fact, nobody can actually achieve the epistemological-metaphysical feat advocated by the surrender-yourself camp. Nobody can really submit ultimately to a supposed ultimate authority, because the very recognition of such an authority is an a priori impossibility based on the brute fact of human self-consciousness and the human epistemological position.

This objection, not incidentally, goes much deeper than the positions expressed by the participants in the conversation that originally got me to thinking about all this. It goes deeper than the assertion that it’s right or wrong to pick and choose cafeteria-style between various religious texts, beliefs, doctrines, worldviews, etc.; deeper than the standard argument that develops when one side claims to choose from various possibilities and the other claims to forego this in favor of surrendering to an external authority.

The depth of what I’m talking about is expressed with exquisite clarity, and in terms that are universally applicable, by Richard Tarnas in his masterful intellectual history, The Passion of the Western Mind. In the section of his book devoted to explaining the post-modern viewpoint, Tarnas writes, “The fund of data available to the human mind is of such intrinsic complexity and diversity that it provides plausible support for many different conceptions of the ultimate nature of reality . . . . Evidence can be adduced and interpreted to corroborate a virtually limitless array of worldviews . . . . Because the human understanding is not unequivocally compelled by the evidence to adopt one metaphysical position over another, an irreducible element of human choice supervenes.”

An irreducible element of human choice. Aye, there’s the rub, and also the hub. Applying Tarnas’s statement — whose fundamental truth is self-evident — it’s obvious that the very decision to surrender one’s authority in matters of ultimate belief is actually an act of assertion and interpretation. Because to claim that you’re surrendering to a metaphysical or moral authority outside of yourself is merely to say that you are choosing, under your own sole sovereignty, to elevate that belief, doctrine, church, ideology, principle — whatever it may be — to the normative status of your highest ruling principle. The belief-doctrine-worldview-etc. doesn’t come with such authority pre-stamped, as it were, onto its invisible ideological visage, which you have somehow mystically managed to recognize, and which many millions of people who believe otherwise have somehow managed to miss.

In point of fact, the act of surrendering to religious authority — say, for example, by espousing a belief in the supernatural inspiration and absolute inerrancy of the Protestant Bible, or at least the original autograph manuscripts (which are conveniently lost to history [!]) — is just another case of the same ideological sleight-of-hand that has always been involved throughout history in the political arena in the “divine right of kings” shtick. It’s blatantly obvious to pretty much all of us that such a maneuver was and is a mere gimmick by which entire populations have invested certain people and social structures with authority over them, but have then chosen to believe that the authority is simply “natural” and “God-given.” But amazingly, the same principle at work in contemporary religion somehow slips under the radar of a great many moderns. Who knows, maybe an unconscious recognition of it accounts for the fact that a goodly part of the modern post-1970s evangelical explosion has been devoted to perpetuating outmoded monarchical images and stereotypes for describing the deity.

This is seen especially in contemporary evangelical music with its fetishizing of the kingly image of Jesus. Consider the titles of many popular praise choruses: “All Hail, King Jesus,” “Worship His Majesty,” “King of Kings and Lord of Lords,” and so on. I think this phenomenon is due to more than just the simple fact that such titles inarguably represent valid New Testament-type language (although it’s significant that in the four canonical gospels Jesus frequently and vociferously refuses kingly labels). It’s likely that the monarchical thrust of so much modern evangelicalism comes from the sense of dislocation and the loss of the “sacred canopy” (as sociologist Peter Berger famously called it) of shared cultural religious meaning that has so afflicted the modern world at least since the 19th century, when Nietzsche correctly pinpointed nihilism as the spiritual virus that would come to define the 20th century. Today’s evangelicals fight that sense of dislocation and meaninglessness by simply trying to assert divine authority, according to their own interpretation of the matter, back into existence. And you can witness this very thing at work not only in their music but in the mountains of theological and apologetic writing they have produced, and continue to produce, in defense of the indefensible.

(At this point I’m ineluctably led to quote Tom Ligotti, from his wonderful, brilliant short novel My Work Is Not Yet Done, from the portion where the narrator lays out the three-point view of reality and the “grand scheme of things” that has come to define his outlook:

A: There is no grand scheme of things.

B. If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact — the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity.

C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity.

It was this passage, with its arch-Ligottian twist on an idea that’s more familiar from post-modern philosophy, existentialism, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and elsewhere, that I turned to when I was searching for an appropriate title for my currently unpublished private journal, There Is No Grand Scheme. And for a detailed explication of my interpretation of the quote itself, you can check out a post I made to Thomas Ligotti Online early last year.)

(I suppose my attitude is also related to the classic statement about religious authority that is an oft-quoted part of the Buddhist scriptures, and that is supposed to have come from the mouth of the historical Siddhartha Gautama [i.e., the Buddha] himself:

“Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense . . . . Believe nothing on the faith of traditions, even though they have been held in honor for many generations and in many places. Do not believe a thing because many people speak of it. Do not believe on the faith of the sages of the past. Do not believe what you yourself have imagined, persuading yourself that a God inspires you. Believe nothing on the sole authority of your masters and priests. After examination, believe what you yourself have tested and found to be reasonable, and conform your conduct thereto.”

This has always resonated strongly with me, which probably explains, or at least illuminates, my antagonistic feelings toward the more authoritarian religious traditions.)

So that, in a very large nutshell, is my problem with the surrender-yourself attitude. But as I said at the beginning of this screed, I also accept that the recognition of a transcendent reality that encompasses and supersedes one’s individual selfhood is quite valuable. So how do I reconcile these attitudes?

In part, or maybe in whole, I do so in quasi-Zen terms, in the language and from the viewpoint of nondualism as articulated, for example, by Douglas Harding in his philosophy of headlessness, which seeks to awaken people to the paradox of their simultaneous first-person and third-person modes of existence, the former of which is the center and essence of conscious personal identity (and from which viewpoint one manifestly, in actual present experience, does not exist, but is instead a spacious absence). This recognition and/or approach runs all through the mystical literature of the world, finding exquisite expression in the West in, for example, the many writings of Meister Eckhart and Plotinus, and more recently in the writings of Eckhart Tolle, Ken Wilber, and others. It’s how I’m literally forced to understand things now, based on my own personal experiences, insights, and understandings. But of course that’s the type of statement that would lead a surrender-yourself evangelical or fundamentalist to criticize me for relying on my own judgment. As if I have any other choice.

In a related but distinct vein, I also reconcile these aspects of my understanding by making recourse to the daimonic theory of personal selfhood and ultimate identity. But that opens up another can of daimons altogether.

Apologies for my failure yesterday to make my regular Monday blog post. I really have no excuse, especially since I was off work yesterday due to last week’s winter storm that has resulted in several days of school cancellations. Today we’re in our fourth day of this unexpected vacation, with a return to work tomorrow looking mighty doubtful given the dreadful ice-packed conditions of all the rural back road around here. I devoted yesterday to working on some writing and musical projects, so at least I was productive after a fashion. But alas, I let the blog slide.

Today I realized that I’ve let something else slide here at The Teeming Brain: I never announced the winner of the fourth Daemonyx contest! I announced the contest way back on October 23rd, almost a month and a half ago, as part of my ongoing attempt to spread the word about Daemonyx (my musical project whose first album will be released next year). My apologies go out to Cody, who won by correctly identifying the source of the sound clip that appears multiple times in my/Daemonyx’s songs “The Gates of Deep Darkness” and “Daimonica.” For his prize Cody chose a hardcover copy of the horror anthology The HWA Presents: Museum of Horrors. I’m sure he’ll enjoy it, since there are some fine stories by some fine authors in there. Congratulations, Cody!

The sound clip, incidentally, consists of a man’s voice asking, “Is there someone inside you?” Cody correct identified it as coming from the film version of The Exorcist, where it is spoken by the psychiatrist (played by Arthur Storch) who hypnotizes Regan in an attempt to get at the source of her bizarre behavior. She answers “Yes” to his question, after which the psychiatrist announces that he is now speaking to the person inside of her. As we all remember, frightful chaos ensues.

My fascination with the theme of possession, inner presences, and that kind of thing won’t be new to readers of The Teeming Brain. The idea of a demonic, or rather a daemonic, or rather a daimonic influence evidencing itself in a person’s psyche has become a kind of philosophical/psychological/artistic/spiritual/religious lodestone to me over the past several years. It gets at the foundations of everything that has always fascinated me about the questions and issues surrounding art, creativity, inspiration, religious authority, God, the Devil, good, evil, spiritual transcendence, human subjectivity, psychosis, dreams, nightmares, mythology, and more. As I’ve mentioned in the past (e.g. in my post titled “Daemonyx: What’s in a name?“), the same idea stands at the center of my musical and literary pursuits.

At one or two points in the history of this blog, I’ve offered excerpts from my essay “The Angel and the Demon,” which will appear in Icons of Horror and the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of Our Worst Nightmares, a two-volume reference work from Greenwood Publishing Group that’s scheduled for publication on the 30th of this month. I thought it quite fortuitous, given my intense personal fascination with the subject, that this specific topic fell to me when the essays were being assigned. A couple of posts ago I talked about the upsurge of religious-themed horror that I see taking shape in contemporary popular culture. As all culturally informed readers know, this is hardly the first time such a thing has happened. It famously happened once before, in the 1970s, when The Exorcist became a phenomenon, first as a book and then a movie, that swept across the American and Western cultural landscape. We should remember, especially in present circumstances, that Blatty’s famous novel was one of the key elements in the birth of “horror” as a modern publishing category. Right from the start, then, religion was central to this whole enterprise.

Surely you guessed a paragraph ago (didn’t you?) that I was going to quote once again from my Angel and Demon essay. Here’s a goodly chunk of its introduction, excerpted from the extended or complete version, which will only appear in a scaled-down fashion in the Greenwood book. The introduction discusses America’s cultural fascination with the iconic Angel and Demon, both of whom are aspects of the “someone inside you” that inhabits us all. As frequently happens when I really throw myself into nonfiction projects, I found all of my research playing right into the topics that fascinate me most as a human being.

FROM “THE ANGEL AND THE DEMON”

by Matt Cardin

I. Introduction: the prevalence of the Angel and the Demon

Even a cursory survey of the supernatural horror genre reveals the important role that the angel and the demon have played in it. From texts such as Dante’s Divine Comedy (written 1308-1321) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which straddle the boundary between religious devotional literature and outright fiction, to fictional works such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796) and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist (1971), the demon has provided ongoing fodder for creators of supernatural horror. As for the angel, while it has most often served as a mere foil for the demon, and has often been left entirely unmentioned in favor of focusing exclusively on demonic horrors, it has still made its presence known. Paradise Lost, for example, begins with a dramatic narration of the fall of Lucifer and his fellow angels from heaven and their subsequent transformation or transition into demons. More recently, the Prophecy series of horror movies from the 1990s and early 2000s has flouted modern Western conventions by abandoning the cute, cozy angels of Victorian art and the greeting card industry, and returning to a more ancient and traditional portrayal of angels as powerful, terrifying beings.

Nor are these figures influential merely within the confines of the supernatural horror as such. In 1973 the cinematic adaptation of The Exorcist became a sensation among audiences and was subsequently recognized as the first true “blockbuster,” predating the likes of Jaws and Star Wars. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won two of them. Its earnings made it one of the top grossing films at the U.S. box office that year, and in the decades since, it has steadily remained in and around the top ten highest grossing films of all time both domestically and internationally. Upon its first release it ignited a national conversation about theological matters within the United States, just as its author (Blatty, who penned the screenplay from his own novel) had hoped it would do, and spurred many fear-based conversions and reconversions to Christianity.

Angels have shared a similar widespread influence. Director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which begins and ends with angels, received only a middling response from audiences and critics when it was first released in 1946 (although it was nominated for five Academy Awards). Then in 1974 a copyright lapse due to a clerical error placed the film in the public domain. When television stations around the country began to take advantage of the opportunity to run the film free of royalty charges, a new generation of viewers rediscovered and fell in love with it, thus transforming it into a widely beloved “holiday classic,” and thus rendering the supporting character of Clarence the most famous cinematic angel of them all.

Over the course of subsequent decades, angels became the subject of a bona fide national obsession in the U.S. A slew of television programs (Highway to Heaven, Touched by an Angel), movies (Angels in the Outfield, City of Angels), and best-selling books (A Book of Angels, Ask Your Angels, Where Angels Walk) arose to cater to a rising fascination with the idea of winged heavenly guardians and messengers. In 1994 the NBC television network aired a two-hour primetime special titled Angels: The Mysterious Messengers, and PBS ran a well-received documentary titled In Search of Angels. A 1993 Time magazine cover story about the angel craze included a survey indicating that 69 percent of Americans claimed to believe in angels, while nearly half believed they were attended by a personal guardian angel. Newsweek, which ran its own angel-themed cover story the very same week the Time issue appeared, reported that the angel craze appeared to be rooted in a very real spiritual craving: “It may be kitsch, but there’s more to the current angel obsession than the Hallmarking of America. Like the search for extraterrestrials, the belief in angels implies that we are not alone in the universe—that someone up there likes me” (quoted in Nickell, 152-3).

Not incidentally, this sentiment closely echoed Blatty’s expressed motivation for writing The Exorcist. As he has explained in numerous interviews and also in his 2001 memoir If There Were Demons, Then Perhaps There Were Angels: William Peter Blatty’s Story of the Exorcist, when he was a junior at the Jesuitical Georgetown University in 1949 he encountered a Washington Post story about a fourteen-year-old boy in Mount Rainier, Maryland who had undergone an exorcism under the official sanction of the church. Blatty had long been concerned about the spiritual direction of modern Western society—The Exorcist, let it be noted, was published in the immediate wake of the 1960s’ “death of God” movement—and in the account of this boy and his apparent demonic affliction, Blatty thought he could discern “tangible evidence of transcendence.” Two decades later he fictionalized the story in his famous novel. But it was a fiction with a serious existential purpose; as he later explained, in his view the reality of demons served as a kind of apologetic proof for the existence of God: “If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting” (quoted in Whitehead). In 1999, at a time when movies such as The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echoes, The Blair Witch Project, and Stigmata were flooding movie theatres and video rental stores, he invoked a version of the same idea to account for the resurgent popularity of supernatural thrillers: “One of the prime allures of the supernatural thriller is that there is a world of spirit and that death doesn’t mean our final destiny is oblivion” (Bonin).

In the early 1970s it seemed that the Roman Catholic Church, or at least the Pope, agreed with at least the first half of Blatty’s demon-angel apologetic. In November of 1972, Pope Paul VI delivered an address to a General Audience in which he expressed his concern over what he viewed as demonic influences at work in the world: “Evil is not merely an absence of something but an active force, a living, spiritual being that is perverted and that perverts others. It is a terrible reality, mysterious and frightening. . . . Many passages in the Gospel show us that we are dealing not just with one Devil, but with many” (Pope Paul VI). These statements ignited a debate both inside and outside the church and embarrassed many priests whose outlook was more in tune with the secularistic, demythologized tenor of the time than with what they viewed as the mythological belief system of pre-Enlightenment Christianity. But the international phenomenon that was The Exorcist demonstrated that the Roman pontiff obviously spoke not only for himself but also for an enormous public that either believed as he did or, at the very least, suspected or wanted to believe in the existence of a transcendent spiritual reality. The fact that the pope’s remarks were bookended, temporally speaking, by the 1971 publication of Blatty’s novel and the 1973 release of the movie makes it difficult to avoid speculating that all three statements—the novel, the movie, and Paul VI’s speech—were expressions of a burgeoning cultural phenomenon.