Word: devil
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...ruling establishment that was sanctified by the church, a resentful peasantry followed the only image of rebellion they knew?Satan. The satanic messiah became especially appealing in times of despair, such as the era of the plague known as the Black Death. Real or imagined, the pact with the Devil may have been the last bad hope for safety in a world fallen out of joint. Thousands died in the persecution, many of them probably guilty
...malevolent connections, Satan remained a temptingly attractive figure. Milton made him such a hero that next to him Christ looked almost pallid. Faust's fiendish friend, Mephistopheles, is one of literature's great protagonists. It is no new thing for the Rolling Stones to conjure up Sympathy for the Devil. He had it long ago, even from so famous a church father as Origen, who speculated that Satan and his fallen angels would be saved at the end of time...
Even the Enlightenment did not do the Devil in. Just as ancient Romans flocked to mystery cults in the days of religious and political decay, so do more modern men seek out the occult in times of stress or excessive pragmatism. The Victorian period saw one such flowering, the 1920s another. Now an occult revival has come to the space...
...most famous of such groups, so far, is the Charles Manson "family," but now and again other grisly items in the news reveal the breed. In New York this spring, police were searching for possible Devil worshipers in a grave-robbery incident. In Miami last summer, a 22-year-old woman Satanist killed a 62-year-old friend, stabbing him 46 times. Convicted of manslaughter, she drew a seven-year sentence, thanked Satan for her light penalty, and said that she had "enjoyed" the killing. In April she escaped from prison, and has not been recaptured...
...inquirer to appropriate passages in the book, which then guide his actions. Tarot cards are another favorite. The standard tarot deck has 78 cards, 56 of the "minor arcana," similar to and forerunners of modern playing cards, and 22 "major arcana" cards depicting such mystical symbols as The Devil, The Fool, The Lovers and The Hanged Man, each of which has many interpretations. The tarots can be laid out in several ways to tell fortunes and interpret character; one method sets them in the form of a cross, another in an outline of a "tree of life...