Pact With The Devil Quotes

If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.

And so I make a pact with the devil, or in this case, my mommy.

When I say to the Moment flying; 'Linger a while -- thou art so fair!' Then bind me in thy bonds undying, And my final ruin I will bear!

These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.

That is another chamber of my heart that shows no electrical activity - the chamber that used to flicker into life when I saw a film that moved me, or read a book that inspired me, or listened to music that made me want to cry. I closed that chamber myself, for all the usual reasons. And now I seem to have made a pact with some philistine devil: if I don't attempt to re-open it, I will be allowed just enough energy and optimism to get through a working day without wanting to hang myself.

A book is a product of a pact with the Devil that inverts the Faustian contract, he'd told Allie. Dr Faustus sacrificed eternity in return for two dozen years of power; the writer agrees to the ruination of his life, and gains (but only if he's lucky) maybe not eternity, but posterity, at least. Either way (this was Jumpy's point) it's the Devil who wins.

The fine thing about pacts with the devil is that when you sign them you are well aware of their conditions. Otherwise, why would you be recompensed with hell?

Lucian was the kind of handsome that made women wonder if he’d made some pact with the devil. Dark hair. Dark, smoldery eyes. Dark suit. He gave off hints of power, wealth, and secrets like a cologne.

Los Angeles signed a pact with the devil and lost its soul a long time ago, you know? It flourishes, but it’s doomed.

Here, kitty, kitty, Chico says. The cover of his cage is still on, making his tiny clown voice slightly muffled. I feel bad for him under there, just waiting to start his evil little day...Freud walks toward Chico in his slinky fashion, sits under his cage and just stares. We have satanic pets...our pets seem to have made a pact with the devil.

Werd ich zum Augenblicke sagen: Verweile doch! du bist so schön! Dann magst du mich in Fesseln schlagen, Dann will ich gern zugrunde gehn!

We’ve made a devil’s pact, swapping convenience and efficiency for an ever-increasing tyranny of information and choice.

Some would say it was a pact with the devil, and therefore I am not bound by it. But after that day I was no longer certain that Tequamuck was Satan’s servant. To be sure, father and every other minister in my lifetime has warned that Satan is guileful and adept at concealing his true purpose. But since that day I have come to believe that it is not for us to know the subtle mind of God. It may be, as Caleb thought, that Satan is God’s angel still, and works in ways that are obscure to us, to do his will. Blasphemy? Heresy? Perhaps. And perhaps I am damned for it. I will know, soon enough.

Xas put his face close to Sobran's and said, soft and succinct, "Listen, and take this in. The terms of the pact are this: 'Xas shall go freely. God shall have his pains and Lucifer his pleasures.' So, if you please yourself and me the way you want, Sobran, you will be pleasing the devil. And I will not give you to him.

Who amongst us can claim true satisfaction from living a hedonistic lifestyle? Why I loathe myself with sufficient fury to dream of murdering myself is no great mystery. Making a pact with the devil’s henchmen, I callously plodded along tackling one superficial milepost after another, conquering thinly guised goals that reek of greediness and self-indulgence, all in a futile effort to stave off the inevitability of my doom. My professional work was devoted to promoting the private agenda of clients with ample cash to spare. I spent free time shopping for baubles. Similar to other Americans caught up in securing acquisitions and escaping through mindless recreational activities, shopping and pleasure seeking was my mantra.

To become a Satanist, it is unnecessary to sell your soul to the Devil, or make a pact with Satan. This threat was devised by Christianity to terrorize people so they would not stray from the fold.

nor did it go unnoticed by the latest litter of Archimboldians, recent graduates, boys and girls, their doctorates tucked still warm under their arms, who planned, by any means necessary, to impose their particular readings of Archimboldi, like missionaries ready to instill faith in God, even if to do so meant signing a pact with the devil, for most were what you might call rationalists, not in the philosophical sense but in the pejorative literal sense, denoting people less interested in literature than in literary criticism, the one field, according to them—some of them, anyway—where revolution was still possible, and in some way they behaved not like youths but like nouveaux youths, in the sense that there are the rich and the nouveaux riches, all of them generally rational thinkers, let us repeat, although often incapable of telling their asses from their elbows,

Norbert Wiener,” Tillingford said. “You recall his work in cybernetics. And, even more important, Enrico Destini’s work in the field of theophonics.” “What’s that?” Tillingford raised an eyebrow. “You are a specialist, my boy. Communication between man and God, of course. Using Wiener’s work, and using the invaluable material of Shannon and Weaver, Destini was able to set up the first really adequate system of communication between Earth and Heaven in 1946. Of course, he had the use of all that equipment from the War Against the Pagan Hordes, those damned Wotan-Worshiping, Oak-Tree-Praising Huns.” “You mean the—Nazis?” “I’m familiar with that term. That’s sociologist jargon, isn’t it? And that Denier of the Prophet, that Anti-Bab. They say he’s still alive down in Argentina. Found the elixir of eternal youth or something. He made that pact with the devil in 1939, you remember. Or was that before your time? But you know about it—it’s history.” “I

Those who felt no remorse after the slaughter were enlisted to be Miguel’s personal bodyguards or soldiers for the front line. They accepted that their lives would be brief and violent. It was a pact made with the devil for money and to feel, for once, what it was like to have power.

Martin Luther King Jr. was the greatest movement leader in American history. But, as Hillary Clinton once correctly pointed out, his efforts would have been futile without those of the machine politician Lyndon Johnson, a seasoned congressional deal maker willing to sign any pact with the devil to get the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act passed. And the work doesn’t stop once legislation is passed. One must keep winning elections to defend the gains that social movements have contributed to. If the steady advance of a radicalized Republican Party, over many years and in every branch and at every level of government, should teach liberals anything, it is the absolute priority of winning elections today. Given the Republicans’ rage for destruction, it is the only way to guarantee that newly won protections for African-Americans, other minorities, women, and gay Americans remain in place. Workshops and university seminars will not do it. Online mobilizing and flash mobs will not do it. Protesting, acting up, and acting out will not do it. The age of movement politics is over, at least for now. We need no more marchers. We need more mayors. And governors, and state legislators, and members of Congress . .

The adjective “Faustian” describes the insatiable striving for the unattainable, the impossible, for all knowledge and all power, for the infinite and perfect. The Faustian human will bow to no tyrant God. He will worship no God. He will never be a slave, servant or serf. He will have no lord and no master. Religious people regard Faust as having “sold his soul to the Devil”. In fact, Faust liberated his soul from the Devil (the Abrahamic God) so that he himself could become a God.

A good literary example of such a man is Faust at the beginning of the tragedy. The other components of his personality approach him in the shape of the poodle, and later as Mephistopheles. Although Mephistopheles, as is perfectly clear from many of his associations, also represents the sexual complex, it would in my view be a mistake to explain him as a split-off complex and declare that he is nothing but repressed sexuality. This explanation is too narrow, because Mephistopheles is far more than sexuality—he is also power; in fact, he is practically the whole life of Faust, barring that part of it which is taken up with thinking and research. The result of the pact with the devil makes this very evident. What undreamt-of possibilities of power unfold themselves before the rejuvenated Faust! The correct explanation, therefore, would seem to be that Faust identified with one function and got split off as Mephistopheles from his personality as a whole. Subsequently, Wagner the thinker also gets split off from Faust.

Scrooge has some interesting literary ancestors. Pact-makers with the Devil didn’t start out as misers, quite the reverse. Christopher Marlowe’s late-sixteenth-century Doctor Faustus sells his body and soul to Mephistopheles with a loan document signed in blood, collection due in twenty-four years, but he doesn’t do it cheaply. He has a magnificent wish list, which contains just about everything you can read about today in luxury magazines for gentlemen. Faust wants to travel; he wants to be very, very rich; he wants knowledge; he wants power; he wants to get back at his enemies; and he wants sex with a facsimile of Helen of Troy. Helen of Troy isn’t called that in the luxury men’s magazines, she has other names, but it’s the same sort of thing: a woman so beautiful she doesn’t exist, or, worse, may be a demon in disguise. Very hot though, as they say.

an unrestrained infatuation with ecstasy and other extraordinary phenomena developed. These experiences were thought of as something to be obtained at all costs. Among some noted but deceptive visionaries of the time was the stigmatic, María de Santo Domingo (1486-1524), known as the Beata of Piedrahita. Her monastery became a center of spirituality and high prayer; she herself wrote a book on prayer and contemplation. But soon the Master General of the Dominicans had to isolate her because of certain aberrations and prophetic revelations. No one in the order, with the exception of her confessor, was allowed to converse with her or administer the sacraments to her; nor was anyone allowed to speak about her prophecies, ecstasies, and raptures, except to the provincial. Another visionary, Magdalena de la Cruz, a Poor Clare with a reputation for holiness, severe fasts, and long vigils, also bearing the stigmata, let it be known that she no longer required any food except the consecrated Host in daily Communion. In an investigation by the Inquisition she confessed to being a secret devil worshiper. Inspired by two incubuses with whom she had made a pact, she became very skillful at all sorts of legerdemain. Through her success in fooling both bishops and kings, she brought the fear of being deceived to all of Spain.

Is there not also the profoundest pleasure in bitterness? No satisfaction, no victory, will ever be the equivalent of the bitter plenitude of the sense of injustice. It revels in itself. It draws on the very roots of an inner revenge on existence. Who, in the light of that, could claim to give a definition of happiness? Complex as is this entanglement of good and evil, so too is it difficult to pass beyond good and evil when the very distinction between the two has disappeared. One may reject all this. The fact remains that the hypothesis of evil, of the lack of distinction between good and evil and our deep complicity with the worst, is always present, rendering all our actions impenetrable. But it is itself a principle of action and doubtless one of the most powerful. I am playing devil's advocate here. But if you reject this hypothesis you can always think in terms of a wager of the Pascalian type. What Pascal says, more or less, is this: you can always content yourself with a secular existence and its advantages, but it's much more fun with the hypothesis of God. With just a few sacrifices to make in exchange for eternal salvation, the advantages are much greater. Where we are concerned, this same wager becomes: you can always get by with the hypothesis of good and happiness, but it's much more fun with the hypothesis of evil. A variant of the same wager would be: you can always get by with the hypothesis of reality, but it's much more fun with the hypothesis of radical illusion.

That something is everywhere and always amiss is part of the very stuff of creation. It is as though each clay form had baked into it, fired into it, a blue streak of nonbeing, a shaded emptiness like a bubble that not only shapes its very structure but that also causes it to list and ultimately explode. We could have planned things more mercifully, perhaps, but our plan would never get off the drawing board until we agreed to the very compromising terms that are the only ones that being offers. The world has signed a pact with the devil; it had to. It is a covenant to which every thing, even every hydrogen atom, is bound. The terms are clear: if you want to live, you have to die; you cannot have mountains and creeks without space, and space is a beauty married to a blind man. The blind man is Freedom, or Time, and he does not go anywhere without his great dog Death. The world came into being with the signing of the contract. A poet says, “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower/drives my green age.

Excitement, then, is a defense against anxiety, a transformation of anxiety into something more bearable, a melodrama. And if one lives protected from the worst of the endless random true mysteries, risks, and traumas of the real world, there grows a hunger for excitement - hang gliders, cigarette smoking, pacts with the devil, gambling, hallucinatory drugs, bank robbery, art, books written without adequate data. Most people who can have it cannot long bear calm contentment.

And how grave and dangerous it is to search curiously into the things passing our understanding, to put faith in what is new without consulting the opinion of the Church and its prelates; and even to invent new and unaccustomed things, for devils are wont to insinuate themselves into this kind of oddity, either by occult instigation or by visible apparitions in which they transform themselves into angels of light, and beneath an appearance of piety or some other good they lead one on to pernicious pacts, plunge one into error, as is permitted by God to punish the presumption of those who allow themselves to be carried away by such things. Therefore he admonished her to renounce these vain imaginations, to cease propagating such falsehoods, and to return to the way of truth.

broad sense, let me say, however, that the similarities far outweigh the differences. In both, our Doctor Faustus summons the demon Mephistopheles from the underworld and strikes a pact to have twenty-four years on Earth with Mephistopheles as his personal servant. In exchange he gives his soul over to Lucifer as payment and damns himself to an eternity in Hell. At the end of these twenty-four rather excellent and sinful years, though filled with fear and remorse, there’s nothing Faustus can do to alter his fate. He’s torn limb from limb and his soul is carried off to Hell.

José Daniel, who physically resembles Richard, was by common consent exceptionally bright and, depending on how you look at it, incredibly lucky or unlucky. Shot fourteen times during an ambush, he survived and hobbled out of the hospital, one-eyed, and hunted down his assailants. “One at a time,” said Richard, awed. Caught and jailed, in prison he was stabbed thirteen times and again survived, fueling rumors he made a pact with the devil for immortality. Belief in Santeria, a voodoo-tinged African-Caribbean import, was widespread, especially among gangsters who prayed to santos malandros, holy thugs, for success and survival. Who else, after all, could they turn to? Many of El Cementerio’s mothers dealt drugs, as did the head of the neighborhood association, who had a sideline renting pistols. The state was largely absent save for police, and they were brutal and corrupt, selling bullets, extorting store owners, moonlighting as kidnappers, auctioning prisoners for execution. Police killed between five hundred and a thousand people per year, mostly young men in slums, and were very seldom charged. Officers accidentally shot dead the Nuñez boys’ grandmother while chasing a suspect through their home. Which returns

There are times when it becomes necessary to make a pact with the devil. But it can be especially delicious if one devil is used to bedevil another, don't you think?

Yesterday, I felt pretty humiliated and disgraced, Devil pact.

The opposite of a criminal is an Oedipal mother, which is its own type of criminal. The Oedipal mother (and fathers can play this role too, but it’s comparatively rare) says to her child, “I only live for you.” She does everything for her children. She ties their shoes, and cuts up their food, and lets them crawl into bed with her and her partner far too often. That’s a good and conflict-avoidant method for avoiding unwanted sexual attention, as well. The Oedipal mother makes a pact with herself, her children, and the devil himself. The deal is this: “Above all, never leave me. In return, I will do everything for you. As you age without maturing, you will become worthless and bitter, but you will never have to take any responsibility, and everything you do that’s wrong will always be someone else’s fault.” The children can accept or reject this—and they have some choice in the matter. The Oedipal mother is the witch in the story of Hansel and Gretel. The two children in that fairy tale have a new step-mother. She orders her husband to abandon his children in the forest, as there is a famine and she thinks they eat too much. He obeys his wife, takes his children deep into the woods and leaves them to their fate. Wandering, starving and lonely, they come across a miracle. A house. And not just any house. A candy house. A gingerbread house. A person who had not been rendered too caring, empathic, sympathetic and cooperative might be skeptical, and ask, “Is this too good to be true?” But the children are too young, and too desperate.

These days it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil's pact... it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere. (...) And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie... and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

Biographers who admire Marx and seek to cover for him will want to ignore his poetry among his corpus of writings. They should nonetheless bristle at what they see in Marx’s poetry. They will encounter what Paul Johnson discerned: “Savagery is a characteristic note of his verse, together with the intense pessimism of the human condition, hatred, a fascination with corruption and violence, suicide pacts and pacts with the devil.”82

That hunting by fire was still practiced by the natives on a large scale, and it had been his lot to stumble on six baby elephants, victims of a fire from which only fully grown animals had managed to escape thanks to their size and speed? That whole herds of elephants sometimes escaped from the blazing savanna with bums up to their bellies, and that they suffered for weeks? Many a night he had lain awake in the bush listening to their cries of agony. That the contraband traffic in ivory was still practiced on a large scale by Arab and Asiatic merchants, who drove the tribes to poaching? Thirty thousand elephants a year— was it possible to think for a moment of what that meant, without shame? Did she know that a man like Haas, who was the favorite supplier of the big zc^s, saw half the young elephants he captured die under his eyes? The natives, at least, had an excuse: they needed proteins. For them, elephants were only meat. To stop them, they only had to raise the standard of living in Africa: this was the first step in any serious campaign for the protection of nature. But the whites? The so-called “civilized” people? They had no excuse. They hunted for what they called “trophies,” for the excitement of it, for pleasure, in fact. The flame that attracted him so irresistibly burned him in the end. He was the first to recognize the enemy and to cry tally-ho, and he had gone on the attack with all the passion of a man who feels himself challenged by everything that makes too-noble demands upon human nature, as if humanity began somewhere around. thirty thousand feet above the surface of the earth, thirty thousand feet above Orsini. He was determined to defend his own height, his own scale, his own smallness. "Listen to me,” he said. "All right, you're a priest A missionary. As such, you've always had your nose right in it I mean, you have all the sores, all the ugliness before your eyes all day long. All right. All sorts of open wounds— naked human wretchedness. And then, when you’ve well and truly wiped the bottom of mankind, don’t you long to climb a hill and take a good look at something different, and big, and strong, and free?”“When I feel like taking a good look at something different and big and strong and free,” roared Father Fargue, giving the table a tremendous bang with his fist, “it isn't elephants I turn to, it's God I” The man smiled. He licked his cigarette and stuck it in his mouth. “Well, it isn't a pact with the Devil I'm asking you to sign. It's only a petition to stop people from killing elephants. Thirty thousand of them are killed each year. Thirty thousand, and that's a .small e.stimate. You can’t deny it . . . And remember—'* there was a spark of gaiety in his eyes— “and remember. Father, remember: they haven’t sinned.” He was stabbing me in the back, aiming straight at my faith. Original sin, and the whole thing— you know all that better than I do. You know me. I’m a man of action: give me a good case of galloping syphilis and I'm all right. But theory . . . this is between ourselves. Faith, God— I've got all that in my heart, in my guts, but not in my brain. I’m not one of the brainy ones. So I tried offering him a drink, but he refused.” The Jesuit’s face lit up for a moment, and its wrinkles seemed to disappear in the youthfulness of a smile. Fargue suddenly remembered that he was rather frowned upon in his Order; he had several times been forbidden to publish his scientific papers; it was even whispered that his stay in Africa was not entirely voluntary He had heard tell that Father Tassin, in his writings, represented salvation as a mere biological mutation, and humanity, in the form in which we still know it, as an archaic species doomed to join other vanished species in the obscurity of a prehistoric past. His face clouded over: that smacked of heresy.

Aye, that was him in a nutshell, veiled in secrets and stories, dark smuts that would either stick or be cleaned away. In the semidarkness, he was more shadow than person, more darkness than light. The devil was incarnate, sitting opposite, making secret pacts with her, asking her to sign over her soul.

If I’m the twitching devil, you’re his crazy henchman.

If the consumer society no longer produces myth, this is because it is itself its own myth. The Devil, who brought Gold and Wealth (the price of which was our soul), has been supplanted by Affluence pure and simple. And the pact with the Devil has been supplanted by the contract of Affluence. Moreover, just as the most diabolical aspect of the Devil has never been his existing, but his making us believe that he exists, so Affluence does not exist, but it only has to make us believe it exists to be an effective myth. Consumption is a myth. That is to say, it is a statement of contemporary society about itself, the way our society speaks itself. And, in a sense, the only objective reality of consumption is the idea of consumption; it is this reflexive, discursive configuration, endlessly repeated in everyday speech and intellectual discourse, which has acquired the force of common sense. Our society thinks itself and speaks itself as a consumer society. As much as it consumes anything, it consumes itself as consumer society, as idea. Advertising is the triumphal paean to that idea. This is not a supplementary dimension; it is a fundamental one, for it is the dimension of myth. If we did nothing but consume (getting, devouring, digesting), consumption would not be a myth, which is to say that it would not be a full, self-fulfilling discourse of society about itself, a general system of interpretation, a mirror in which it takes supreme delight in itself, a utopia in which it is reflected in advance. In this sense, affluence and consumption – again, we mean not the consumption of material goods, products and services, but the consumed image of consumption – do, indeed, constitute our new tribal mythology – the morality of modernity. Without that anticipation and reflexive potentialization of enjoyment in the ‘collective consciousness’, consumption would merely be what it is and would not be such a force for social integration. It would merely be a richer, more lavish, more differentiated mode of subsistence than before, but it would no more have a name than ever it did before, when nothing designated as collective value, as reference myth what was merely a mode of survival (eating, drinking, housing and clothing oneself) or the sumptuary expenditure (finery, great houses, jewels) of the privileged classes. Neither eating roots nor throwing feasts was given the name ‘consuming’. Our age is the first in which current expenditure on food and ‘prestige’ expenditure have both been termed consumption by everyone concerned, there being a total consensus on the matter. The historic emergence of the myth of consumption in the twentieth century is radically different from the emergence of the technical concept in economic thinking or science, where it was employed much earlier. That terminological systematization for everyday use changes history itself: it is the sign of a new social reality. Strictly speaking, there has been consumption only since the term has ‘passed into general usage’. Though it is mystifying and analytically useless – a veritable ‘anti-concept’ indeed – it signifies, nonetheless, that an ideological restructuring of values has occurred. The fact that this society experiences itself as a consumer society must be the starting point for an objective analysis

John Lennon, for example, is reported to have made a pact with the devil before he and the Beatles became famous.  The pact involved a period of twenty years.  Almost twenty years to the day of the pact, John Lennon was shot.[198]  This form of diabolical influence is usually the hardest to break.  There are many factors which make these pacts so strong.  As Fr. Fortea says, “The great destructive power of a pact is that the person may think he is condemned no matter what he does.”[199]  If the person can be reached with the hope of grace, it would then, of course, be possible to overcome the contract and the diabolical effects it has brought.

From the moment their pact is made, that devil’s contract that will make neither of them happy, there’s no stopping them. At the epicenter of the American earthquake that is VTO lies this very Oriental disorientation. Abstinence: it becomes their rocket fuel, and flies them to the stars.

Wolff was also privy to another Sunrise dirty secret: the extent to which the separate peace pact was a cold betrayal of the United States’ and Britain’s wartime Soviet allies.

Even after everything I’ve told her, everything I’ve done, she’s offering to sign another deal with the devil in blood. This time, there will be no breaking the ungodly pact. This time, if she can earn it, she’s mine for eternity.

Don't Let The Devil Hear You Weeping by Stewart Stafford Don't let the Devil hear you weeping, Or darkness comes as your friend, Saying God sent it to save you, And be with you until the end. Tail wrapped around you snugly, Gripped firmly in meaty claws, Only then get its beastly odour, Against which there should be laws. Dancing the inferno's fiery rim, Spitting bile in your begging bowl, Paper cut, a blood pact union, To steal away your purest soul. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.

The concept of a pact, particularly one with the Devil is a relative latecomer to witchcraft mythology.[23] Early examples of magical grimoires such as the Greek Magical Papyri and even the Key of Solomon both present the occultist as ‘master of spirits’, just as the tribal shaman is in traditional cultures. In fact the Greek Magical Papyri actually shows the mage extracting an oath of allegiance from the daimon, rather than the other way around! It seems to be a uniquely post-Christian idea that the witch obtained his or her power from a pact with the devil or other powerful familiar

Considerable problems arose when one had to identify the physical process of intercourse with demons. This is clearly a most difficult point (as difficult as that of identifying the physical nature of flying saucers!), and Sinistrari gives a remarkable discussion of it. Pointing out that the main object of the discussion is to determine the degree of punishment these sins deserve, he tries to list all the different ways in which the sin of demoniality can be committed. First he remarks: There are quite a few people, over-inflated with their little knowledge, who dare deny what the wisest authors have written, and what everyday experience demonstrates: namely, that the demon, either incubus or succubus, has carnal union not only with men and women but also with animals. Sinistrari does not deny that some young women often have visions and imagine that they have attended a sabbat. Similarly, ordinary erotic dreams have been classified by the church quite separately from the question we are studying. Sinistrari does not mean such psychological phenomena when he speaks of demoniality; he refers to actual physical intercourse, such as the basic texts on witchcraft discuss. Thus in the Compendium Maleficarum, Gnaccius gives eighteen case histories of witches who have had carnal contact with demons. All cases are vouched for by scholars whose testimony is above question. Besides, St. Augustine himself says in no uncertain terms: It is a widespread opinion, confirmed by direct or indirect testimony of trustworthy persons, that the Sylvans and Fauns, commonly called Incubi, have often tormented women, solicited and obtained intercourse with them. There are even Demons, which are called Duses [i.e., lutins] by the Gauls, who are quite frequently using such impure practices: this is vouched for by so numerous and so high authorities that it would be impudent to deny it. Now the devil makes use of two ways in these carnal contacts. One he uses with sorcerers and witches, the other with men and women perfectly foreign to witchcraft. What Sinistrari is saying here is that two kinds of people may come in contact with the beings he calls demons: those who have made a formal pact with them – and he gives the details of the process for making this pact – and those who simply happen to be contacted by them. The implications of this fundamental statement of occultism for the interpretation of the fairy-faith and of modern UFO stories should be obvious. The devil does not have a body. Then how does he manage to have intercourse with men and women? How can women have children from such unions? The theologians answer that the devil borrows the corpse of a human being, either male or female, or else he forms with other materials a new body for this purpose.

Pacts with the devil have been made many times. There is no other way to explain the popularity of the book Fifty Shades of Grey.

True immortality is the immortality of childhood and adolescence, where you never think you will have to die one day. The phantasm of immortality is merely the price paid for the certainty of dying. And it is ready to pay any price, including that of annihilating itself to achieve immortality. In the past, some were prepared to lose their souls (their hope of eternal life) in a pact with the Devil to enjoy the privileges of mortal existence. Today we are ready to sacrifice any idea of a future immortality for a present corporeal immortality, a perpetual renewal in cloning. Immortality is no longer a metaphor. We want a real immortality, we want a technical incarnation of it here and now. This is the new pact with the Devil, sealed and signed in blood by the human race, which prefers to be cryogenized alive rather than await some hypothetical resurrection of bodies.

Written in blood: In olden times in the West people used to say “I put my hand and seal” on a document when signing it. In the East this was literal in some cases. The emperor of Japan in ancient days “signed” important documents by dipping his hand in blood and putting a full bloody handprint on the page. In the history of pacts with the Devil, people were supposed to sign their names in blood. I have seen a couple of alleged pacts from earlier centuries and neither, as far as I can tell, was signed in blood, though they do bear signatures of people. Blood undoubtedly stressed the seriousness of the signing. You were giving away your soul. “The Blood Is the Life.

God always sends an angelto soften the sting of the devil.

These days, it feels to me like you make a devil’s pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started…. but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers – who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained. Who would want to stay? But you have made a devil’s pact…. it drags you in and suddenly you are unsuitable to return, your children are unrecognizable, you belong nowhere.’ 'Oh, that’s not true, surely.’ 'And then you begin to give up the very idea of belonging. Suddenly this thing, this belonging, it seems like some long, dirty lie…. and I begin to believe that birthplaces are accidents, that everything is an accident. But if you believe that, where do you go? What do you do? What does anything matter?

You are driving me into such a state of despair that no hour of the day passes when I do not desire your death and wish that you were hanged. What aggravates me most of all is that we shall both go to the devil and then I shall have the torment of seeing you even there. I swear by what I loathe above all – that is yourself – that I shall make a pact with the devil to enrage you and to escape your madness. Enough is enough. I shall engage in any extravagance I so wish in order to bring you unhappiness. If you think you can get me to come back to you, this will never happen, and if I did come back to you, beware! Because you would never die but by my hand.

The borderless economy in which money, technology, industry and goods move without hindrance throughout the world promises a future in which every home, in the words of Alvin Toffler, will become an ‘electronic cottage’. But globalization also has its losers, its economic have-nots, destined to be tranquillized by digitized trivial entertainment or to nourish hatreds that threaten to break out in violence.

While the experience of the Second World War has to a large extent shaped the political makeup and destinies of all European societies in the second half of the twentieth century, Poland has been singularly affected. It was over the territory of the pre-1939 Polish state that Hitler and Stalin first joined in a common effort (their pact of nonaggression signed in August 1939 included a secret clause dividing the country in half) and then fought a bitter war until one of them was eventually destroyed. As a result, Poland suffered a demographic catastrophe without precedent; close to 20 percent of its population died of war-related causes. It lost its minorities - Jews in the Holocaust, and Ukrainians and Germans following border shifts and population movements after the war. Poland's elites in all walks of life were decimated. Over a third of its urban residents were missing at the conclusion of the war. Fifty-five percent of the country's lawyers were no more, along with 40 percent of its medical doctors and one-third of its university professors and Roman Catholic clergy. Poland was dubbed 'God's playground' by a sympathetic British historian, but during that time it must have felt more like a stomping ground of the devil.

Environmental historian Valeria Fogleman wrote that perhaps the early Christian colonists saw themselves figuratively as the wolves’ prey based on the New Testament’s anecdote of Jesus sending his followers out as sheep among wolves. Their antipathy and fear toward wolves was a physical manifestation of their spiritual protectiveness, she wrote, for “wolves were considered capable of murdering a person’s soul.” Wolves were also viewed through a religious and cultural lens as animals that made pacts with the devil, thereby garnering them the stigma of being full of trickery and evil. Livestock damages may have been the rational argument for clearing wolves from the woods around settlements, but wolves likely also symbolized a potent religious threat in the minds of some early colonists. The Native Americans did not view wolves so negatively, and some even tattooed images of wolves - along with moose, deer, bears, and birds - on their cheeks and arms, according to William Wood, writing about New England in 1634, described the “ravenous howling Wolfe: Whose meagre paunch suckes like a swallowing gulfe” in a passage that imparts the belief that wolves consumed more prey than was necessary. Wood wished that all the wolves of the country could be replaced by bears, but only on the condition that the wolves were banished completely, because he believed wolves hunted and ate black bears. He also lamented that “common devourer,” the wolf, preying upon moose and deer. No doubt, the colonists wanted the bears, moose, and deer for their own meat and hide supplies. Yet Wood also observed the wolves of New England to be different from wolves in other countries. He wrote that they were not known to attack people, and that they did not attack horses or cows but went after pigs, goats, and red calves. The colonists seemed to believe the wolves mistook calves that were more coppery colored for deer, so much so that a red-colored calf sold for much less than a black one.

the obsession to oppose communism at any cost led six U.S. Army officials to make a pact with the devil—Klaus Barbie.” America, it seemed, was finally starting to come to terms with its own past as a safe haven for the Nazis.

The Oedipal mother makes a pact with herself, her children, and the devil himself. The deal is this: “Above all, never leave me.

The girls expressed in fits what they could not communicate in words, or what no one seemed to hear when they entrusted it to words.* Mather and Sewall were mistaken about lightning and its preference for parsonages.† But Parris was correct in noting that the devil targeted the most pious. Hysteria prefers decorous, sober households, where tensions puddle more deeply; it made sense that the Salem minister wound up with more witchcraft victims under his roof than anyone else. (The surprise was that he did not wind up with more. Two Parris children soldiered on, forgotten by history.) Instructed not to fidget, well-mannered, well-behaved Betty and Abigail writhed. They could not unburden themselves as did those loudmouthed, plot-propelling bad girls Abigail Hobbs and Mary Lacey Jr., who may actually have believed they had signed pacts with the devil and sound as if they would have if they could. It would have been easier at the parsonage to have a vision than an