Salon has a review this morning of Penn State professor Bill Ellis's book Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture. Two threads in the review strike me as particularly incisive:
The dorm-room séance and the midnight cemetery voyage in some dude's unmuffled Camaro, he argues, are debased fragments of an ancient and genuine folk-witchcraft tradition. ... As such, they reflect an eternal struggle between individuals and institutions over access to spiritual and supernatural realms, and the equally eternal struggle of teenagers to resist adult authority in general and the strictures of organized religion in particular.
The other argument that appeals to me is that experience-based religions (Pentecostalism, and the various flavors of born-again Christianity) provide their adherents with an actual experience of the Devil. Pentecostalism centers around an ecstatic state that I'd be more likely to characterize as dissociated, or even psychedelic. In such states, the possibility of "bad trips" always looms. If you are Christian, you draw on your mythic vocabulary to explain the bad trips, and voila, you have had a personal experience of Satan.
With such a large bloc of people who have deep personal convictions in the reality of Absolute Evil, there is a political force that's willing to put the face of Satan on its adversary of the day. "One group can become so convinced of its religious rectitude, and so convinced of the danger that the Other puts them into," says Ellis, "that they end up taking political and legal action against the Other."
The Bush administration has made masterly use of this belief in making the public project its fears first onto Osama, then onto Saddam. I used to wonder why dictators tended to have beards. Not so anymore: it's just easier to paint horns on their head that way.
Read the Salon review. It's by Andrew O'Hehir.