Abstract
The devil embodied by Mick Jagger in the Rolling Stones’s 1968 “Sympathy for the Devil” is a radical departure from the entirely pejorative devil of previous centuries in England. The context of the English Civil Wars and John Milton’s poetry transformed Satan into a figure with a recognizable psychology. A new readership, the Romantics, then re-evaluated, responded to, and empathized with Milton’s Satan. This chapter attempts to identify the specific path that took Satan from being the ultimate metaphysical threat to a rock icon. Drawing on original readings of the seventeenth-century pamphlet record as well as critical responses to Milton, Jagger, and the Romantics, it argues that the devil of “Sympathy for the Devil” is as much a product of the 1660s as the 1960s.
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- 1.
At the time of writing, the comedy/drama Lucifer has been renewed for a third season on a major American broadcast network. The tone of the show is clear from an early promotional image: a handsome male lead with superimposed neon horns and the tagline “Hot as Hell.” Guardian TV critic Eric Thurm sums it up: “This version of evil is basically a charming Los Angeles asshole with a not-so-secret heart of gold.” See Eric Thurm, “Sympathy for the Devil: Damien and Lucifer Make Antichrist’s TV Moment,” The Guardian, March 8, 2016, www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/tvandradioblog/2016/mar/08/lucifer-damien-a-and-e-tv-devil?CMP=share_btn_link.
- 2.
Douglas Cruickshank, “Sympathy for the Devil,” Salon.com , January 14, 2002, www.salon.com/2002/01/14/sympathy/.
- 3.
Alan Clayson and Paul Du Noyer, The Rolling Stones: Beggars Banquet, Legendary Sessions (New York: Billboard Books, 2008), 15.
- 4.
Philip Norman, Symphony for the Devil: The Rolling Stones Story (New York: Linden Press/Simon & Schuster, 1984), 269.
- 5.
Part of the change is in the term “cool” itself, which has evolved from “a term of exclusively or primarily countercultural approval” to something more “generically positive.” See Ilan Dar-Nimrod et al., “Coolness: An Empirical Investigation,” Journal of Individual Differences 33, no. 3 (2012): 183.
- 6.
Milton’s poems and prose are cited from Paradise Lost, John Leonard, ed. (Penguin, 2003) (PL); The Complete Works of John Milton (Oxford, 2008) (CW); or the Complete Prose Works (Yale, 1980) (YP).
- 7.
Philip C. Almond, The Devil: A New Biography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), xvi. See also: Nathan Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History Index (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jeffrey Burton Russell , The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Neil Forsyth, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987); Keith Thomas , Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971).
- 8.
See Blair Worden, The English Civil Wars: 1640–1660 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2009); J.S. Morrill, Revolt in the Provinces: The People of England and the Tragedies of War, 1630–1648. 2nd ed. (London, New York: Longman, 1999); J.S. Morrill , Paul Slack, and D. R. Woolf eds., Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G.E. Aylmer (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Richard Cust and Ann Hughes , Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics, 1603–1642 (New York: Longman, 1989).
- 9.
Keith Thomas has argued this is because the various warring factions and allegiances shared a belief that they were upholding both natural and divine law. See Religion and the Decline of Magic, 470, 477.
- 10.
See, e.g., Newes from Hell, 2, 4. This tract was re-set and reprinted in 1642 with a more ornate woodcut and variant spelling of the title (“Nevvs”).
- 11.
For example, denouncing the New Model Army as “under the power of the Prince of darknesse,” A brief Warning, [A2v].
- 12.
It is not my contention that the events of the 1640s created such attitudes; perhaps Charles’s insistence on imposing single-minded authoritarianism forced an existing culture of dissent to the surface. For the “republican heritage” that preceded the events of 1640–1660, see David Norbrook , Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Also cf. Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism, 212, 252 on the uniquely public nature of radical debates in the 1640s and 1650s.
- 13.
Cf. Thomas’s and Newman’s essays in Public Duty and Private Conscience, 29–56 and 225–41. On the role of pamphlets as public, rhetorically directed manifestations of individual consciences, see Sharon Achinstein , Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6–9.
- 14.
The sociologists Norbert Elias et al. articulated this concept of individual psychological structures and larger social structures as “interdependent aspects of the same long-term development” (452). Thus examining individual psychologies, as conveyed in written works, can illuminate large-scale social structures that are not themselves reducible to individual psychologies.
- 15.
See e.g., The Martyr of the People, 4; An Apologetick for the Sequestered Clergie, 10; Taylor, Mercurius Melancholcius, 4; The Quakers fiery beacon , [4a]; Pomroy et al., A Faithful Discovery, 1; Bradshaw , The Quakers Whitest Divell, 1; Firmin , Stablishing against shaking [H3r]; Thomas, Rayling Rebuked [B3v]; A Sad Caveat to all Quakers, 4.
- 16.
See Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 188–92; William C. Braithwaite , The Beginnings of Quakerism (London: Macmillan, 1912), ch. 2.
- 17.
See Kate Peters, Print Culture and the Early Quakers, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History Index (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- 18.
For example, “the faithfull servants of God, have in all ages, through the malice of Satan and his instruments been traduced as Arch-incendiaries when only their accusers are indeed guilty,” Cornelius Burges, A Vindication of the Ministers of the Gospel, 2.
- 19.
Many critics have argued that Milton intended his writing at least partly to train and trial a discerning reading public. Most influentially, Achinstein in Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, but there are others, e.g., Daniel Shore , “Eikonoklastes and the Rhetoric of Audience,” Milton Studies 45 (2006): 129–48.
- 20.
Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 127.
- 21.
CW 6:285.
- 22.
David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 10.
- 23.
C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 102.
- 24.
See, e.g., PL 3.374 “Eternal King”; 6.886 “victorious King.”
- 25.
See especially John Leonard, “The Devils in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 21 (1985), 157–78.
- 26.
Forsyth, Enemy, 4.
- 27.
PL 5.860–1.
- 28.
Matthew Schneider, The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles, Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 74.
- 29.
Thomas, Religion, 681–98.
- 30.
Peter A. Schock, Romantic Satanism: Myth and the Historical Moment in Blake, Shelley, and Byron (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 26.
- 31.
William Hazlitt, “On Shakespeare and Milton,” in The Selected Writings of William Hazlitt, ed. Duncan Wu, vol. 2, 224.
- 32.
On the Devil, and Devils (1819). Shelley repeated these lines almost verbatim in his A Defence of Poetry (1821). Both versions are cited in Joseph Wittreich, ed., The Romantics on Milton, 534–5, 538.
- 33.
Fusée 16, translated in Pascal Pia , Baudelaire (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 90–1.
- 34.
Schock, Romantic, 38–9.
- 35.
Lucy Newlyn, Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 19.
- 36.
Schneider, Road, 74–6.
- 37.
Löwy and Sayre, Romanticism, 10.
- 38.
Lester Bangs “Rev. of Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!” (Nov. 1970) in The Rolling Stone Record Review, 110.
- 39.
At the time, this would have read, in part: “Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Requests and requires in the Name of Her Majesty…”.
- 40.
Jann S. Wenner, “Mick Jagger Remembers,” Rolling Stone, December 14, 1995, www.rollingstone.com/music/news/mick-jagger-remembers-19951214.
- 41.
Laura Lunger Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza, Milton in Popular Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 9.
- 42.
A very similar version aired on the Frost on Saturday show with David Frost in November 1968, just prior to the release of Beggars Banquet . Jagger performed a live vocal over what seems like the instrumentals from the album. The lighting and kinetic camerawork emphasize the lead vocalist’s prominence, and it ends with a shirtless, spent Jagger collapsed on the studio floor. It must be said that the segment seems quite radical for the venue. A 2-disc UK-region DVD set including this performance is available for purchase from Network Distributing Limited: http://networkonair.com/other/1227-frost-on-saturday.
- 43.
Norman, Symphony, 300.
- 44.
Pattison, Triumph, 27.
- 45.
John Milton, A Treatise of Civil Power, YP 7:242; Eikonoklastes, CW 6:285.
- 46.
CW 6:409.
- 47.
Mikal Gilmore, “The Rolling Stone 20th Anniversary Interview: Mick Jagger,” Rolling Stone, November, 5, 1987.
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LaBuzetta, E. (2018). Empathy for the Devil: The Origins of Mick Jagger’s Devil in John Milton’s London. In: Rovira, J. (eds) Rock and Romanticism. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72688-5_2
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