The “occult world,” or occulture, is a term that has developed a very wide meaning in modern academic discourse. The full panoply of occult thinking is enormous. While always mindful of the broader definition of the subject, this essay is largely limited to what the author believes would be an acceptable vernacular definition of the occult as essentially referring to black magic, and most especially to the satanic. This has been a subject with enormous resonance for American history and culture. The argument in this chapter is that Satan has played, and continues to play, a central – and on occasion a decisive – role in American cultural and political life. He is a figure deeply in the American grain, a vivid and personal presence in the lives of many millions of Americans, given powerful and recurring embodiment in American popular culture, in particular. But he is also a presence centrally informing some of the classic works of American literature.

The contribution of the New Testament to Christian anti-Judaism is a broad and complex question that has generated a vast amount of scholarship, especially in the post-Holocaust era. This essay focuses on the three most important and potent issues: supersessionism, the deicide charge, and the association of Jews with Satan. It concludes with reflections on the question of whether the New Testament and Christian theology are inherently anti-Jewish.

The only surviving Byzantine image of the horseman inhabits an ominous and foreboding landscape. The unique image appears in an illustrated version of the Book of Job. The horseman presides over a darkly emotional and philosophically rich scene (Vat. Gr. 751, fol. 26r). The artist who created this image transported the horseman back in time to have it preside over the darkest moment in the trials of virtuous Job caught up in a contest between forces far greater than himself. Given that the motif of fall permeates the Book of Job, our image metaphorically envisions a bitter estrangement from the Queen of Cities. In this unique image of Job, Justinian’s column is multivalent. It is both triumphal and tragic. If it were not juxtaposed with Job’s suffering it would seem celebratory. However, the juxtaposition is central. The horseman is poised to witness how the righteous suffer as a result of a cosmic battle between good and evil. Either the manuscript’s creator was very prescient in forecasting Job-like tribulations for Constantinople or he was operating with hindsight at some point after the Crusader capture of Constantinople in 1204.

Witch hunts raged for almost 300 years across Europe and its colonies, claiming the lives of some 50,000 women, men, and children. At their height, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, magistrates and inquisitors tortured those suspected of witchcraft in desperate attempts to uncover their confederates and prove their fealty to the Devil himself. Many people believed that their friends and neighbors had made wicked pacts with Satan and practiced harmful magic that destroyed crops, sickened livestock, and murdered the innocent. Lurid tales of secret gatherings, where witches worshipped the Devil and ate the flesh of unbaptized infants, combined with widespread economic hardship, famine, and war to produce unprecedented levels of paranoia and anxiety that lasted for generations. Theologians and philosophers accused witches of engaging in sexual intercourse with demons, the ruling classes led brutal purges of rebels and heretics, and practitioners of folk magic — healers, midwives, soothsayers — went from respected members of their communities to suspected witches.

Like other second-century authors, the author of EpAp combines Johannine incarnational theology with the Lukan miraculous conception account and views the miraculous conception as the means by which the incarnation took place. Unlike the canonical evangelists, this author also provides an account of the pre-existent Jesus’ descent from heaven, adopting angelic disguise. Thus the angel Gabriel in the Lukan annunciation story is here the Son of God in angelic form, who brings about his own incarnation in Mary’s womb without assistance from the Holy Spirit. EpAp thus narrates the entire process of incarnation, following the precedent of the angelic transformation schema depicted in the Ascension of Isaiah. In that text, the event of incarnation appears to take place not at conception but at the birth itself – a point of agreement with an otherwise quite different ‘narrative of incarnation’ in the Protevangelium of James. So-called ‘adoptionist’ christologies may better be understood as attempts to narrate the incarnation, now identified with the descent of the Spirit/Christ at Jesus’ baptism.

Rembrandt Duits focuses on the Western aspect of Italo-Byzantine cultural and artistic interaction and thus expands the geographical setting of the Cretan representations of Hell. His chapter presents a new perspective on the origins of certain elements in the Cretan images of Hell, which he points out have parallels in Western – particularly Italian - art. He draws on a representative sample of 25 per cent of all the Cretan wall paintings showing Hell that appear to deviate from pre-established Byzantine traditions. The geographical dispersion and chronological range of the sample mean that this iconographic divergence cannot be explained as the impact of a single Cretan master or a local ‘school’. Duits draws our attention to iconographic elements that suggest an interaction of Cretan and Italian artists, such as devils pulling souls by ropes or chains, frontally rendered processions of sinners, the double-headed Dragon of the Depths, the structure of Hell, and inscriptions that identify certain sinners. He argues that while there are no clear formal derivations of Western art in Cretan Hell scenes, there is nonetheless a strong suggestion that Cretan painters were aware of certain trends in the Italian rendition of Hell.

Rembrandt Duits focuses on the Western aspect of Italo-Byzantine cultural and artistic interaction and thus expands the geographical setting of the Cretan representations of Hell. His chapter presents a new perspective on the origins of certain elements in the Cretan images of Hell, which he points out have parallels in Western – particularly Italian - art. He draws on a representative sample of 25 per cent of all the Cretan wall paintings showing Hell that appear to deviate from pre-established Byzantine traditions. The geographical dispersion and chronological range of the sample mean that this iconographic divergence cannot be explained as the impact of a single Cretan master or a local ‘school’. Duits draws our attention to iconographic elements that suggest an interaction of Cretan and Italian artists, such as devils pulling souls by ropes or chains, frontally rendered processions of sinners, the double-headed Dragon of the Depths, the structure of Hell, and inscriptions that identify certain sinners. He argues that while there are no clear formal derivations of Western art in Cretan Hell scenes, there is nonetheless a strong suggestion that Cretan painters were aware of certain trends in the Italian rendition of Hell.

Chapter 4 explores Gregory’s re-telling of the fall against the backdrop of the ‘garments of glory’ tradition. After being persuaded by the devil to eat the fruit in paradise, the image of God is banished and clothed in garments of ‘thick, dull flesh’, which equates to being shrouded in sin. This renders the human person at greater risk from the devil. Here, we examine the way in which Gregory discusses the devil, arguing that Gregory attributes to the devil a diminishing existence. The battles with the spiritual powers of darkness form a primary strand in Gregory’s narrative of the image of God’s existence, in which the devil hovers behind conversations of sin, the flesh, the world and the passions.