Portraying the Devil

It suddenly hit me that the Devil in Sympathy for the Devil isn't particularly scary or fearsome. He's partaken in wars and been key in the assassinations of some famous people (Jesus, Anastasia and family and the two Kennedy's), but a truly fearful Devil would perhaps claim responsibility for some more gruesome events, like the Holocaust, the Nanking Massacre, and generally mass torture and genocides. But of course, that would probably make the song very tasteless, and indeed I suppose some of it's popularity comes from the fact that the Devil is indeed sort of sympathetic and not particularly dangerous.

It's no easy task to portray the Devil in fiction I'm sure. It's a thin line between ridiculous and fearsome, and it really puts the writer (director etc.) in a tough spot, because he has to match the Devil in ingenuity - the Devil is never more clever than the creator makes him, so it's quite a task to make him supernaturally cunning.

One author who does an amazing job portraying the Devil/Satan was the Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov in the book The Master and Margaritta, first published in 1966-67. The novel also served as the inspiration for some of the lyrics in Sympathy for the Devil.


Satan, in the novel, comes in the guise of Woland, a foreign professor and magician, who comes to Moscow to perform a black magic show. His very colourful retinue includes Behemoth, a giant black cat, who talks and walks around on two legs and has a weak spot for pistols and vodka.

The novel, which took Bulgakov many years to write, portrays satan as a well-spoken, albeit somewhat rambling, personage, which uses his supernatural skills to wreack havoc and punish and reward persons he finds deserving.