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The title is a mouthful, I know. The Devil and Femininity might be the only two concepts that come across as clear. Ironically enough, that’s a problem. In this post, neither the Devil nor Femininity are what you think they are.

Though all this might sound overwhelming, the post is easy to follow. The reason? It’s based on an ongoing discussion I’m having with Igor da Silva Livramento, friend and fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. He’s also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.

And so, in this discussion of ours, we’ve been talking about how the Devil and Femininity, when examined outside the usual conceptual chains imposed by sociocultural norms, allow us to see a different reality. A reality where the Femininity of the Devil holds the key to a better, more inclusive understanding of the human experience.

The Devil and Femininity: What Having Sex with the Devil Feels Like?

Chris: I don’t know if you’ve seen The Ninth Gate, by Roman Polanski and starring Johnny Depp (if not, spoiler alert), but it’s basically a chase to find a very old book that is supposed to open the gates to Hell. It’s fairly cerebral, no Hollywood extravagances. One of the characters is a mysterious blonde woman who helps Depp’s character acquire the book.

Near the end, at night, outside an old provincial castle burning, they’re having sex on the ground. She’s riding him, and you can see it in her eyes: She is the Devil. And Depp’s character (and of course, vicariously, the viewer) doesn’t care about anything else in the whole world at that moment. The only thing that matters is that beautiful woman – possessing her and being possessed by her. It’s a great metaphor for sexual love.

Igor: This intrigues me in historical terms. Why is the woman the Devil? That seems to be an association that feminists would strongly criticize. At the same time, from a male point of view, it seems true. A mere glance, a subtle touch on the back of the neck, a caress in the hair, fingers hesitantly touching the fingers of others, everything seems an invitation to perdition. I can’t explain it, ultimately, it just moves me.

Chris: I’m also reminded of a short story by Alberto Moravia,”The Devil Can’t Save the World”, where the Devil wants to make a scientist offer his soul, and does so through sexual temptation, with one intriguing problem: the Devil (in the form of a very young Asian woman; virtually a minor) ends up becoming infatuated with the scientist. Getting his soul becomes secondary to having sex with him, being penetrated, being possessed. The whole story culminates in a thoroughly ambiguous scene, where it isn’t clear who seduces whom, who tries to trick whom, who was pretending all alone, and who gets the better deal in the end. It’s a delightful mixture of sexual desire, surrender, and repercussions.

The Devil and Femininity Beyond Experience

Igor: Still, it is dangerous to think of them as demons, as temptation, as danger. However much it corresponds to experience, one must go beyond mere experience, this we are taught both by philosophy and what I call thinking literature.

The Promethean Devil and Femininity as Hegelian Duality

Chris: Here I’d like to make an observation that will be very Hegelian: the Devil, through the masterful connection to Femininity that you made (and again, yes, here we refer to the “diabolical, inexplicable mystery of things lived”), is a symbol of the intersection between reason and emotion, between the sublime and the grotesque, between philosophy and art. The Devil is a liminal symbol of our very inability to resolve such pseudo-separations.

Ultimately, the Devil (and here is where Hegelian thought must inform the argument) becomes a symbol of the Real existing within this inability itself. In a sense, the Devil as Femininity becomes a supremely powerful symbol of humanity, more inclusive than any god. In a sense, through Femininity, the Devil becomes God – a humanist God, perhaps what Jesus on the cross would’ve been if history had taken a different recorded path.

The Figuration of the Triumph of Bourgeois Reason

Igor: When you say that the Devil is the symbol of thought and reason after confirming the association between diabolical and feminine, that intrigues me a lot. The feminine has historically been associated with unreason, delirium, hysteria (whose name is derived from the ancient Greek root for womb), emotion and feeling. Thus, the misogyny implicit in a devil who has an appearance of exceeding Faust’s reason, but who convinces the protagonist by his feelings and giving in to his feelings leads him to bankruptcy, becomes evident.

This is a figuration of the triumph of bourgeois reason, that which dictates where each thing should be, the unchanging social positions, a remnant of the rigid social hierarchy of aristocratic times. The remnants of the aristocracy still pulsating in the veins of the bourgeoisie, which does not believe itself to be born with blue blood in its veins, but thinks analogously: It is the socioeconomic class chosen by God (Calvinism, Protestantism).

The Devil and Femininity: “The Disobedience that Holds Us Together”

Chris: Ultimately, to me the Devil is the most apt symbol of humanity – indeed, of ideal humanity; what humanity “ought to be” (I’m being deliberately provocative and vague here). The Devil, through Femininity, not only becomes the sum of all the dialectical expressions of the human experience, but also – and perhaps this is more important – precisely underlines that such Hegelian syntheses are our connective tissue.

The Swedish rock band Ghost, with their song “He Is” have really struck gold with the lyrics “And He is the disobedience that holds us together”. I’m not familiar with the story behind the song, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it was written with other authorial intentions in mind. Nonetheless, studying the song’s lyrics it’s evident that there’s an attempt to offer an interpretation consistent with Luciferian ideas.

The Owl House and Rebellion

Such Luciferian ideas have penetrated art for a very long time. Obviously, the references are more apparent in our era, where you run a far smaller (but nonzero!) risk of being burned at the stake for glorifying the Devil.

Take the animated series The Owl House, for example, which I’ve mentioned in my post on Pink Gothic.

The idea of having a YA series with teens performing magic rituals, befriending demons, having LGBT relationships and – gasp! – defying authority and rules would’ve been unthinkable only a couple of decades ago. And it still is, to sadly many people.

The Owl House is a story of rebellion.
It’s the story of the misfit who didn’t belong, of the outsider at the margins.
It’s the story of how suffering beauty can be found in disobedience, and never in conformity.

I think the greatest single cultural contribution of the Devil in human thought is in informing our tendency and willingness to change and disrupt. There are many discourses we could have here but I’d like to focus on art (and here lies the immense symbolic power of conceiving the Devil in Feminine terms).

True art can only be a result of disruption and change. Otherwise, it’s only repetition, mere entertainment.