western folklore 73.4

Fall 2014

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Editor: Tok ThompsonUniversity of Southern CaliforniaReviews Editor: Kimberly Ball

University of California, Los AngelesEditorial Assistant: Patrick Cleland

University of Southern CaliforniaBusiness Management: Ribbis Enterprises

Long Beach, CaliforniaEditorial Board

Jim Leary, University of Wisconsin-MadisonRobert Glenn Howard, University of Wisconsin-MadisonSabina Magliocco, California State University, Northridge

Carol Silverman, University of OregonDorothy Noyes, Ohio State University

Patricia Turner, University of California, DavisDaniel Wojcik, University of Oregon

Western Folklore (ISSN 0043-373X) is published quarterly in winter, spring, summer, and fall by the Western States Folklore Society.

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Herskovits, Melville. 1937. Life in a Haitian Valley. New York: Alfred Knopf.

Simons, Elizabeth Radin. 1986. The NASA Joke Cycle: The Astronauts and the Teacher. Western Folklore 45:261-277.

Lloyd, Timothy C. 1995. Folklore, Foodways, and the Supernatural. In Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the Supernatural, edited by Barbara Walker. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press.

Hall, Jonathon. 1984. The Dynamics of Oral Narratives. Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University.

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381THE DEVIL’S PACT

Volume 73 • Number 4

Fall 2014

Published by the Western States Folklore Society

©2014 by the Western States Folklore Society

ISSN 0043-373X

FolkloreWestern

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CONTENTS

ARTICLES

The Devil’s Pact: Diabolic Writing and Oral TraditionKimberly Ball 385

Tatar and English Children’s Folklore:Education in Folk Traditions

Liailia Mingazova and Rustem Sulteev 410

Memetics and Folkloristics: The TheoryElliott Oring 432

Memetics and Folkloristics: The ApplicationsElliott Oring 455

REVIEWS

Jennifer Reid, Finding Kluskap: A Journey Into Mi’kmaw Myth

Reviewed by Pauleena MacDougall 493

Elliott Oring, Just Folklore: Analysis, Interpretation, Critique

Reviewed by James P. Leary 496

Ann K. Ferrell, Burley: Kentucky Tobacco in a New Century

Reviewed by Amy Maxwell Howard 502


Pekka Hakamies and Anneli Honko, Theoretical Milestones: Selected Writings of Lauri Honko

Reviewed by Timothy R. Tangherlini 504

Frank de Caro, Stories of Our Lives: Memory, History, Narrative

Reviewed by William Schneider 508

Errata 510

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The Devil’s PactDiabolic Writing and Oral Tradition Kimberly Ball

A B S T R A C T

This essay examines the relationship between the Devil and writing in oral tradition, expanding on Thomas Sebeok’s observation that the repeated appearance of these two concepts together in folk narrative indicates that they are “related in meaning” in the thinking of informants. I suggest that this relationship reflects particular circumstances in the milieux of collection (nineteenth and early twentieth-century rural Europe), but also reflects essential qualities shared between the Devil and the written word. KEYWORDS: devil, writing, folk narrative, literacy, contract

If one idea or concept appears in consciousness, for whatever reason, other ideas or concepts related to it in meaning will also tend to appear. . . . With respect to communicative products—for example, a folktale—it should be possible to find out, by appropriate analysis of the greater-than-chance contingency of units in the products he emits, what ideas (in this case motifs or component parts of motifs) tend to go together in the thinking of the informant. By way of illustration, a much higher than chance association was revealed between the notion of writing and the devil in Cheremis [Mari] folktales—an insight which is as revealing as it was unexpected (Sebeok 1959:134).

Western Folklore 73.4 (Fall 2014): 385-409. Copyright © 2014. Western States Folklore Society

Kimberly Ball is a lecturer in the Department of Germanic Languages, Scandinavian Section at The University of California, Los Angeles

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In his content analysis of the folktales of Russia’s Mari people, Thomas Sebeok remarked a high degree of correlation between writing and the Devil, but offered no speculation as to how these two ideas might be “related in meaning,” as he suggested they are. This essay expands on Sebeok’s observation by exploring the meaningful relationship between the Devil and writing, and by noting that this relationship is not restricted to Mari folklore, but can be found in folk narrative collected across Europe and beyond.

In oral tradition, the Devil is frequently found in connection with books, lists, letters, inscriptions, and indelible marks left on the environment from which stories can be “read”—but the most notorious of diabolic documents is the Devil’s pact. This motif may be traced to the Bible, in which the idea of a covenant with God, central to the Old and New Testaments, suggests the possibility of a corresponding pact with God’s opponent, just as the blood sacrifice, of animals or of Christ, could be understood as inspiration for the blood signature (Roos 1972:43-4; Allen 1985:19). The earliest recorded account of a human being entering into a written pact with the Devil is the story of Saint Theophilus of Adana, first written in Greek between 650 and 850 CE and translated into Latin at the end of the ninth century (Palmer and More 1936:58-9; Allen 1985:18-9).1 According to the story, sixth-century cleric Theophilus signs a pact with the Devil in his own blood in order to gain a bishopric, but ultimately repents and is rescued by the Virgin Mary, who retrieves the damning document from hell (Palmer and More 1936:60-77). This story, and others involving written Devil pacts, became a staple of medieval exempla collections from which priests throughout Europe drew sermon material (Allen 1985:18-9). Medieval church art served as a visual form of exempla, and here, too, the conclusion of a written pact with the Devil was frequently portrayed (Camille 1986; Pócs 1991-2:347; Stone 2002:2). The Devil’s pact has a long history and, like other traditional narratives and motifs that associate the Devil with the written word, is of widespread international distribution, but this essay will concentrate on narratives recorded during the great period of folklore collection in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and on German-language materials, representing the vernacular of Martin Luther, a key figure in


the history of European literacy, and of Faust, perhaps the most infamous of all the Devil’s pactors.

Georgius Faustus of Helmstadt, thought to be the historical Faust, would have studied occult sciences as part of his education at the University of Heidelberg, where he received a Masters degree in Philosophy in 1487 (Baron 1978:11-6). In the late fifteenth century, the focus of European scholarship was shifting from theology to more worldly knowledge, and Heidelberg was a German center of studia humanitatis, or Renaissance Humanism, which included the study of “natural magic”; Faustus reputedly made his post-graduate living as a wandering scholar practicing astrology and necromancy (Baron 1978:19-20, 84-6). After his death, Faustus’ memory lived on and was embellished in oral tradition and popular literature, where the story of the learned man selling his soul to the Devil in exchange for knowledge was already widespread (Roos 1972:48; Pócs 1991-2:347-8), but Faust scholar Frank Baron identifies Martin Luther, who frequently expressed in his writings the belief that all magicians were in league with Satan, as “the first most influential proponent of the connection between Faustus and the devil” (Baron 1978:79-81; 1992:134-5). Apparently, Luther knew whereof he wrote, for by his own admission (and according to popular tradition) Luther himself was tempted by the Evil One, but, unlike Faust, managed to resist his lures. Here is the Grimms’ rendering of Luther’s best-known diabolic encounter:

Dr. Luther was sitting in Castle Wartburg, translating the Bible. The Devil was not happy about that, and would have liked to disrupt the holy work; but when he tried to tempt him, Luther grabbed the inkwell out of which he was writing and threw it at the Evil One’s head. To this day one may be shown the room and the chair where Luther sat, and also the flecks on the wall, where the ink flew (Grimm 1993:525).2

Luther’s translation of the New Testament into German is a landmark moment in the history of European literacy and, according to tradition, the Devil is there. Luther drives the Devil away with his inkwell and goes on to complete his translation—

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writing triumphs over the Evil One—and yet it is an act of writing that attracts the Devil in the first place. In this story, it is explicitly the sacred nature of the writing to which the Devil is drawn; he characteristically likes the challenge of converting the most hardened of holy men (see motif G303.9.4.4, “Devil tempts cleric (hermit)”). But in early modern Europe, the very pursuit of scholarship, connected as it was with “natural magic,” was regarded with suspicion by many as potentially heretical, even demonic (Roos 1972:48; Baron 1992:134-5).

I begin with Faust and Luther to acknowledge that the link between the Devil and writing in later folk narrative echoes these earlier associations. The focus here, however, will be on narratives recorded during Europe’s folklore collection boom period, and on the ways in which the Devil’s connection with writing found in these narratives is at the same time more specific to the milieux of collection—reflecting particular circumstances in nineteenth and early twentieth-century rural Europe—and more fundamental—having to do with essential qualities shared between the Devil and the written word.

DEVIL’S PACT NARRATIVES: LETTER AND SPIRIT

In many narratives involving pacts with the Devil, whether the pact is written or oral, an issue of central importance is the difference between the letter and the spirit of language. Often, the Devil understands the language of the pact and any subsequent agreements according to what might be called its spirit—that is according to a more common-sense, less literal, construal of meaning. The human pactor, on the other hand, seeks to subvert the spirit of the agreement by understanding the terms of the pact according to the letter. Ultimately, the Devil accedes to this more literal interpretation, and the human pactor is saved. Consider the following story about a smith who signs his soul over to the Devil. When the time comes for the Devil to collect, the smith gives him one last task to complete:

He demanded of the Devil that he build a dam through the middle of the lake in one night; he must carry the necessary sand there in a sack on his back, and when the rooster crowed,


the dam must be finished, otherwise the Devil would lose the right to the smith’s soul. The smith, however, had earlier given his helper the assignment to disturb the rooster during the night. And so she did, and before the Devil had completed the structure, the rooster let his voice ring out. Full of rage and spewing fire, the Devil flew into the air, and the smith was saved. When it has not rained for several weeks, one can still travel in one place through the middle of the lake (Knoop 1893:92-3).3

This narrative features motif G303.16.19.4, “Devil flees when cock is made to crow.” The commonsense understanding of “when the rooster crows” would be dawn, the event usually thus heralded, and the period for the dam’s completion is initially understood as “one night”—this is the spirit of the agreement. The smith, however, holds the Devil to a literal interpretation of “when the rooster crows” and manipulates the event. Ultimately, the Devil abides by the letter of the pact rather than insisting on its spirit, and the smith is saved.

A similar divergence between letter and spirit with respect to a period of time is found in ATU 1187, “Meleager.” In this version, the wife of a man who had previously signed a pact begs a reprieve when the Devil comes to collect:

Now she happened to have a small burning candle in her hand, and she asked the Devil to let her husband live until the candle burned down. When the Devil gave his consent, she quickly blew out the flame. Then the Devil realized that he had been swindled, and departed from there with a fearful roaring. The little candle, however, was carefully looked after and never lit again (Van der Kooi 1994:107-8).4

In Devil’s pact stories featuring motif K552.9, “Let me live as long as this candle lasts,” the Devil clearly assumes that the respite will be brief, as the candle in question is typically both small and burning. The commonsense understanding of this agreement, its spirit, is that the pactor should gain only a short reprieve. The literal understanding, however, grants the pactor life as long as the extinguished candle is kept safe from further burning, and another

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pactor is saved from hell by language understood literally. A similar tactic is used by pactors who ask the Devil to wait until they have tied a shoe, buttoned a coat, or made some other minor adjustment to their clothing. The Devil agrees, but the pactor never performs the action, thus becoming known for unusual dress habits, and subverting the spirit of the agreement.

In the preceding narrative, there is a written pact with the Devil, but the divergence between letter and spirit pertains to a subsequent oral agreement. The following concerns only an oral agreement, but the disjunction between letter and spirit turns on the written word. A pastor annoyed with an impassable morass in his parish makes this pledge: “Devil, if you build a road and dam through the mud in three days, then you shall take my soul where you find it, as long as I no longer stand on this, my territory” (Jahn 1999:198)5. The Devil agrees, builds the road, and is overjoyed when he eventually finds the pastor outside his parish. When the Devil attempts to seize the pastor, however, he gets a surprise:

…He pulled his arms back, as if he had sunk his claws in ice, and the pastor laughed out ringingly with great pleasure, replying: “Oh, you dumb Devil! Did you think to catch me so easily? Where I walk and stand, there I find myself on my territory; for when I concluded the pact with you, I had laid under the soles of my feet pages from the book of the holy gospel, which lie there to this day and will also not come out as long as I live. Do you now see why you got a fright and a shudder when you wanted to grab me?” Then the Devil knew that he was no match for the cleverness of the priest, and full of wrath and shame, he cleared off hastily and did not let himself be seen again in the lifetime of the Pastor of Starkow (Jahn 1999:198).6

Instead of time, here interpretations diverge over space, or rather, “territory” (Gebiet). The pastor’s understanding of “territory” to refer to the Bible pages tucked into his shoes, or perhaps metaphorically to the Bible as his rightful sphere of knowledge, takes precedence over the Devil’s more common sense under-standing of “territory” to mean parish. This story turns upon the


pastor’s freedom to interpret “territory” as he chooses, as long as his interpretation is within the bounds of the letter. This story emphasizes the human pactor’s power to interpret, and the Devil’s bondage to the pactor’s interpretation.

Divergences in interpretation also arise with respect to what it is the Devil will receive for his services, as in the following example of ATU 1191, “The Dog on the Bridge”:

The Devil promised to finish the construction; for that, the soul of the first to cross the bridge should belong to him. In a short time construction was complete. Then the Devil’s clients sent a dog over first. At that, the Devil became furious, with great rage seized the dog, and threw it through the bridge. The hole that resulted from that can never be repaired (Schell 1897:413).7

As is the case in many other narratives incorporating motif K219.6, “Devil gets an animal in place of a human being,” the Devil demands “the soul of the first to cross the bridge” in obvious expectation that he will receive for his troubles a human soul. No doubt when he stipulates “the first to cross the bridge,” his intention is “the first human to cross the bridge”—this is the spirit of the agreement, the commonsense understanding, because the brothers know just as well as the Devil himself that the Devil is only interested in human souls. The Devil is, however, bound by the letter of the pact, which the brothers interpret to their advantage.

Stories incorporating motif H1021.7, “Stick from the body,” also hinge on competing interpretations of what the Devil’s stipulated payment should be. In the following, a man whose coach is hopelessly stuck in a mire agrees to give the Devil “a piece of his body” in exchange for help:

When he was afterwards supposed to give the agreed payment to his helper in time of need, the coachman handed him a piece of one of his overgrown fingernails. The outwitted Satan immediately changed his shape and, in the form of a hideous monster like a fiery salamander, shot off from there hissing wildly amidst thunder and lightning, so that the mountains resounded. A crucifix and various holy plaques hang in memory

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to this day on the rock face and serve to comfort Christians and exhort them to prayer (Wünsche 1905:100).8

When the Devil demands “a piece of his body” from the coachman, he presumably expects something less extraneous than a fingernail, and one could argue that a commonsense understanding would support the Devil in his desire. The spirit of the agreement is that the coachman should pay a higher price than would be agreeable to him, yet the coachman is allowed to hold the Devil to the letter of the pact and escape with the loss of a mere fingernail. The letter of the agreement, however, could be made to serve the interests of either coachman or Devil; it is unclear when the agreement is initially made who will decide which body part will serve. In that the decision falls to the coachman, this story provides further evidence of the power of human beings to interpret language to serve their own ends, and the Devil’s subjection to the letter of the pact and its interpretation by a human pactor.

Consider also in this regard ML 3000, “Escape from the Black School at Wittenberg,” about a school where black magic is taught. At the end of the term of study, the students run for the door because the last student to leave must forfeit his soul, the Devil taking the hindmost. Suggestively, the Black School is frequently located in the city of Wittenberg, where Luther first nailed his theses to the church door, and which subsequently became a center of Lutheran learning. ML 3000 often ends with the ultimate student successfully arguing his way out of damnation by convincing the Devil to accept his shadow instead, for it, after all, was truly last to leave (motif F1038.2, “Devil gets shadow instead of man”). Here again, the Devil submits to any human interpretation that accords with the letter of the agreement, however much it may violate the spirit.

Occasionally, the Devil turns the tables and, by insisting on a literal interpretation, subverts the spirit of the pact, thus trying to get the better of the human pactor, who has a more commonsense understanding of the pact’s conditions. In one narrative, a farmgirl agrees to give the Devil “the first bundle she would make the following day” in exchange for help in spreading manure on the fields:


The maid agreed to that, and in ten minutes all the manure lay on the field and she could go to the dance. But the farmer felt uneasy about the thing, so he held the maid back from the dance and went with her to the minister, where she had to explain the matter. The minister made a serious face and counseled her, if she would not be lost, not to tie her petticoat early the next morning, but rather to go into the barn wearing her best shift, and there to tie up a bundle of straw and throw it out the door. The maid followed the advice of the minister. Hardly had she thrown the bundle out the door, when the Devil seized it and shredded it into a thousand pieces (Wünsche 1905:103-4).9

The more commonsense meaning of “bundle” (Bund10) to someone who works on a farm would be a bundle of grain or hay, rather than a bundle made of oneself tied into a petticoat. The serving maid is bound to the letter of the pact and would have suffered grievously had she tied her petticoat first thing in the morning, but unlike the other narratives so far considered, this story shows the party with the power to interpret, in this case the Devil, being outwitted. With the help of the minister, the girl is able to give the Devil only what she intended, but she must play by the Devil’s rules to do so; she must understand “first bundle” to mean “first thing tied up in the morning” and act accordingly. The Devil is allowed to dictate the interpretation of the pact, while the human pactor is bound to the pact’s letter, that is whatever the Devil’s interpretation of the letter may be. The Devil’s attempt to interpret the pact to serve his own purposes in this story is, however, unsuccessful.

Another example in which the Devil claims the right to interpret the terms of the pact but nonetheless fails in the end is the “Robber Madej” story, also known as “The Devil’s Contract” (ATU 756B). German versions frequently begin with motif S240, “Children unwittingly promised,” according to which a human pactor promises to give the Devil what he does not know he has at home, and this turns out to be the human pactor’s unborn child. The beginning of one collected version of this story reduces this initial circumstance to a concise, even cryptic, summary:

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While in his mother’s womb, a priest was promised by his father to the Devil, as that of which he knew nothing at home… (Schönewerth 1859:35).11

Without further elaboration on this significant event, the narrative continues with the priest going to hell to retrieve the documentation of his father’s promise as a necessary step before reading his first mass. The priest succeeds in getting back the damning papers, seemingly through force of personality, and so frees himself from the Devil’s clutches without any reference to the precise wording of the agreement or any recourse to creative interpretation. The point in this story where the difference between letter and spirit is important is the beginning, when the priest’s father promises the Devil “that of which he knew nothing at home”. The priest’s father may well think he is agreeing to give the Devil nothing, supposing the category of “that of which he knew nothing at home” to be an empty one; he knows nothing about it, after all. In spirit, the father agrees to give nothing, yet according to the letter of the agreement he must relinquish his unborn son. As in the previous “bundle” narrative, here too the Devil is ultimately unsuccessful in his attempt to interpret the letter of the pact to serve his own ends, and the pactor escapes.

An important exception to this generalization—the Devil’s inability to profit by a more literal interpretation—is a class of narratives that do not deal with pacts per se. These are stories, like the following, in which the Devil takes literally words spoken in jest or momentary anger:

When one calls the Devil, he comes. A woman in Obermiem-ingen, who more often spoke of the Devil than of God, found that out. One night as her child screamed incessantly, she said: “Stop—If you aren’t quiet, may the Black One fetch you,” took the child and held it out the window. Then it was ripped from her grasp; one heard it screaming for a long time ever farther into the distance. The Devil had taken the child. Then the woman’s eyes were opened, and she called the Black One no more (Petzoldt 1978:284).12


The woman’s words are not a pact. She means them, probably, as a threat to stop her child’s crying, but according to the letter they constitute an offer to the Devil—one that he does not need to hear twice. Like a pact, the woman’s words take an “if…then…” form; they are a sort of promise to which the Devil holds her, though clearly this is not the spirit of her words, not what she intends to accomplish by speaking them. Something similar occurs in the following version of ML 3070, “The Demon Dancer” (motif G303.10.4.1 “Devil dances with a maid until she dies”):

At a great wedding at the noble Hoyerswort estate in Eiderstadt (built by Kaspar Hoyer), there was among the guests a girl who was the nimblest dancer for far and wide, and who could not resist dancing. Her mother warned her, but she cheekily said: “And if the Devil himself should ask me to dance, I would not turn him down!” That moment a stranger came in and asked her to dance. This was, however, the Devil. He spun her around in dance until blood came from her mouth and she fell down dead. The trail of blood in the hall is indelible… (Van der Kooi 1994:100).13

Here too, the Devil holds the hasty speaker to the letter of her word, ignoring what her true feelings about dancing with the Devil probably are, and the spirit of jest and bravado in which she most likely made her utterance. In this type of legend, where the Devil takes advantage of unguarded speech (exemplifying ATU 813 and motif C12, “A Careless Word Summons the Devil”) the Devil assumes the right to interpret the letter, a right he takes away from the human characters in the story. These stories contrast with the Devil’s pact narratives so far considered in that the Devil profits from an act of literal interpretation. But whether human or Devil profits in the end, the connecting thread in all of these stories is a preoccupation with the difference between the letter and the spirit of language, with letter trumping spirit each time.14

Luther himself regarded the letter as more important than the spirit of Devil’s pacts. In the Tischreden, Luther describes how a young student who had made an oral agreement with the Devil came to him seeking help out of this situation, whereupon Luther

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