Seven Heads, Ten Horns: The History of the Devil

Getting warmed up for Halloween with the 1973 Hammer Studios film The Satanic Rites of Dracula (dir. Alan Gibson), starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

Faust is back, ready to party, and hopefully get things squared away with the hosts of hell.

This is the first episode of a mini-series-within-a-season devoted to the legend of Faust, a guy who was too clever for his own good and got mixed up with the wrong people--the kind who make you sign a contract in blood. The text discussed here is the anonymously composed 1587 Historia Von D. Johann Fausten.

This episode we close out the Summer Cinema of Sin series with The Devil’s Advocate (1997), starring Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves, and Charlize Theron, directed by Taylor Hackford.

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 7H10H goes into the diabolical, blasphemous, and heretical elements of one of the funniest frenemies in English lit: stately, plump Buck Mulligan, the carousing, poetical medical student based on the historical figure of Oliver St. John Gogarty, Joyce's one-time roommate and rival.RTÉ’s amazing podcast version of Ulysses from the 1982 production recorded by Marcus Mac Donald, directed by William Styles, and performed by the RTÉ Players. (RTÉ is the public broadcasting company of Ireland.)The companion “Reading Ulysses” podcast hosted by Gerry O'Flaherty and Fritz Senn from 2004. Gifford Annotations, Corrected. From the James Joyce Online NotesPatrick Hastings, Ulysses Guide

The Cinematic Summer of Sin continues with John Carpenter’s 1987 Prince of Darkness. Compelling devil cinema but also–-is this at once the best and the worst film about graduate school ever made? Stephen Jay Gould “Nonoverlapping Magisteria”Interview with John Carpenter on Assault on Precinct 13

This week we discuss two films End of Days (1999) and Deliver Us From Evil (2014) both of which blend the police action flick with the exorcism film. What difference does it make when Satan himself is the criminal mastermind? Along the way we discuss the uses of the idea of "evil" in US politics today in the wake of the mass shootings of May 2022. One book mentioned:Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment

Sherlock Holmes, the Devil, and Old Time Radio, all under one podcast roof.Arthur Conan Doyle, “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot” in the Strand Magazine Arup J. Chatterjee, “Sherlock Holmes and the Spectre of India:” The Adventures of the Devil’s Foot Root”

Kicking off our summer cinema series with 2015’s Midwinter of the Spirit, a supernatural British mystery centering on exorcists in the Church of Mystery and their battles against a “Satanist” plot.Watch some it free here.Matthew J. Cressler: “Exorcists, Abusers, and When Catholic History is Horror.”

This episode we deal with our first incognito secret-agent pseudonymous theologian, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the way he blends Christianity with Neoplatonism, and how this impacts his demonology. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works(Free online version.)Marilena Vlad, “Dionysius the Areopagite on Angels: Self-Constitution vs. Constituting Gifts” in Neoplatonic Demons and Angels, ed. Luc BrissonKevin Corrigan and L. Michael Harrington, “Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite” at the Stanford Encyclopedia of PhilosophyChristoph Helmig and Carlos Steel, “Proclus,” at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Colleen Hubbard’s new novel, Housebreaking, on sale now