We only make a deal with the devil because the terms look good

Photo by Liana Mikah on Unsplash

If you grew up on the old stories, and by the old stories, I mean the strange and sometimes scary ones that we were told as children.

Well, if you grew up on the old stories, and you know the ones, the ones that only got away with being so vicious and candid because they were for children, had pictures and were described as ‘fairy’ stories, so the adults could lie and say they were all made up.

You know, the kind of stories that bring you up when there’s no one else around to do the job properly, for whatever reason. 

Well, if you are a child who was mothered and fathered by the old stories, then you probably will have noticed something curious. 

That at one point or another in these tales, there is always a crisis.

This might look like a full stop.  An insurmountable block from which there appears no way forward. 

Or it might show up as a question mark. At the end of an unanswerable question.

Our characters appear to have no way out of their desperate situation but staying put doesn’t seem like an option either. What can be done?

And this is where in stories, as in life actually, although it often doesn’t feel like that when it’s our life, things begin to get interesting. 

Because often - not always - but often -  there appears at that crossroads, an interesting character with an interesting offer. 

And you’ll know, if you read enough of the old stories, that this interesting character often has some interesting character traits.

A habit of appearing out of nowhere and disappearing into nowhere.

A suspiciously cloppity gate. Maybe strange heels on his shoes. A large roomy hat he won’t take off, even inside. Maybe he’s a little reddish, strangely, almost supernaturally sunburnt.

And possibly, you might swear that as he walked away, you saw something that looked suspiciously like a tail peep out the bottom of his trouser leg. 

This chap, for all his sartorial curiosities, is usually a wonderfully smooth-talker, oh-so soothing. Charming and helpful, he knows exactly what will dry your tears. Almost eerily so.

His solution is perfect and he claims there is no cost, no cost at all. He’s simply happy to help… and when you are all but lulled into a false sense of security, he will add on the end..

That actually, he does ask one thing.

This is when it usually gets a bit weird.

Because the thing he asks for usually has a bit of a flavour of ‘can I have access to your immortal soul?’ Or someone else’s immortal soul. Like your firstborn child’s. Or something soulful, like your freedom or dignity, or something that it’s easy to denigrate until you lose it and then it’s the most valuable thing in the world. And the cost is usually not to be paid right away, but at some distant point in the future. And of course we are asked to pay this future price at a point when we feel the future is deeply uncertain.

Yup, you guessed it. In the midst of a personal crisis, right then, in these stories, that’s when the devil, or perhaps a minor demon, or even some kind of nasty but rather glamourous witch shows up. And these characters decide, even though we, as readers, can see it’s a terrible idea, that it’s a good idea to make this deal.

Now, Christian theology to one side, I want to talk about what this means to me. Because I think this is deeply deeply relevant to all of us. I think we are offered deals with the devil all the time. And what I mean by a deal with the devil is when we sign up to something whilst squeezed by life that is definitely appealing more to our lower nature than our higher one.  

We allow ourselves to be fooled on multiple levels. Firstly perhaps by timing.

Good timing only means good timing. It doesn’t mean good person.

It’s tempting when you’re tired and lonely and someone arrives offering good food, kind words and promises of a warm bed to think they are sent by, you know, upstairs.

You prayed and the seemingly perfect answer to your prayers appears. But there’s something I’ve noticed in my own life enough to say something on that.

Yes it’s true. Angels and angels in human bodies and all those helping souls have terribly good timing. They sense when someone needs succour. But do you know who else has a nose for sensing who is on the floor and in desperate need of help? Predators. And do you know when we let in predators and mistake a perfect fit for someone’s teeth perfectly fitting our wound? When we feel desperate. 

It’s actually not about being stupid. We only make a deal with the devil because from where we are standing, the terms look good.

This is not to blame. We can only see what we can see when we can see it. And it’s more wounded not to trust than to trust sometimes.

But it’s worth asking ourselves why we thought the terms were good.

More often than not, for the terms to look good, we have to have bought into a devilish view of the world or ourselves in some way.

A devilish deal is one where we have to deny our basic goodness or the basic goodness of the world in some way. That things are hopeless and have to be fixed now.

Where there’s never enough and people always let us down, where there is no such thing as grace or miracles or happy endings. Where our souls are worth trading.

We, probably, like the characters, don’t even know the type of deal we’ve made until we’ve done it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it. Like I said. We aren’t stupid.

But do it enough times, and you start to get to know yourself there.

I know, for me, I risk making a deal with the devil every time I think there’s no way out. I risk making a deal with the devil every time I believe I have to accept whatever is in front of me, rather than holding out for something that I actually want. Every time I won’t admit to what I truly want.

Or conversely, whenever I fail to see the good in what is in front of me. 

I risk making a deal with the devil whenever I believe there is not enough (time, money, love) or I am not enough.

But most of all I risk making the deal when I am in shame about any or all of this.

Perhaps when I pretend that life is easy and I can do everything, and I am not tempted to make any deals, or that being tempted is not part of life. 

And when I think I have to handle all of that really difficult stuff on my own and I shouldn’t ask for a second opinion on the deal I am about to make. (No one asks for a second opinion in these tales, don’t you notice?)

Because here’s the thing I don’t think we can get away from. We all make deals with the devil. And even if we didn’t, or haven’t yet, our parents probably did at one stage or another. In fact we might still be paying the price on that one. (Watch out all ye first-borns). But there is hope. 

And that’s why the stories exist. To show us how we can work our way out of those deals. That there is a way through and we can claim back ownership of our souls.

It’s tempting to read these stories as precautionary tales. But I often think at least part of the moral of the story is not that we should never ever make the deal, but to find our humanity in the very act of deal-making itself.

To forgive ourselves for the deals we made in our bid to survive. To forgive ourselves for the perspective we had when we could see less than we can now. To congratulate ourselves for making it this far.

To see ourselves not only in the naiviety of the characters that broker the deal but in the resilience and humanity of the characters who make it out. And know that in most of the stories, the devil never wins. Not really. And the characters in the end, are that much the wiser for having done a deal with such an unsavoury individual and escaped. Because in the end, actually, everyone is fundamentally working for upstairs.