Word: devil
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Enthusiastically interested in the black arts, Jasper Symmes '52 last month convinced Jasper McKee '51 to aid him in an extensive survey of metaphysics. The first real experiment, scheduled for this week, was to be an attempt to make contact with the devil. Symmes explained that the ritual involved drinking the blood of a white dove at midnight on a windswept field...
...Devil's Disciple. Butler invaded science and theology with the same contumacious temerity. He denied both the Crucifixion and Resurrection; nonetheless, he believed in "God"-a Butler-made vital spirit of whom he Shavianly said: "God is not so white as he is painted, and he gets on better with the Devil than people think." Like Carl Jung, he believed in a collective unconscious-an inborn "memory" of human habit and behavior handed down through the generations. The art of living, he held, was to keep a tricky but common-sensical balance between this vital inheritance and the equally...
Nearby "Brimstone Corner," so called because brimstone was stored in the basement of the Park Street Church in 1812, is the windiest spot in the City. It seems one day the Devil and the Wind were making merry on Tremont Street, blowing dresses and parasols, when suddenly the Devil saw the open church door. "They need me in there," quoth he; "wait here." So the Devil went inside the church and never came out again. And that is why to this day the Wind, faithful to its evil friend, still blusters around Brimstone Corner and Old Granary...
...President peered into the next room, explained cheerily: "I just wanted to see that everybody is comfortable. Are you all fixed up? If not, I'll give them the devil." Someone wisecracked: "Give 'em hell." Said Harry Truman: "I'm through giving them hell. Now we'll work together...
Poulenc (he pronounces it heavily almost as Poolonka) likes to describe himself, with a fast, toothy grin, as "both a saint and a devil." Last year, his frothy, obstetrical opera Les Mamelles de Tirésias -in which one character changes sex on stage and another litters the footboards with a good share of his 40,000 babies-created the noisiest scandal in Paris since the premiere of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Like the Rite, however, it is still going strong...