Why I Like To Dress Up as Satan At Halloween

    I love Halloween, 'cause it gives me a chance to don my horns and play the most interesting character in all of religion: Old Scratch, Lucifer, the Devil himself. Let's face it, virtue may good, but it is booooooohring. I mean, what kid would want to dress up as a saint for Halloween?

    Well, maybe going out as Saint Sebastian, the human pincushion, would be fun. But, aside from getting to pretend you've got feathered shafts sticking out all over your body and blood running down your thighs, there's nothing much you can do with St. Seb. It's not like he earned his halo for hilarious stand-up while tied to a tree having arrows shot through him. In fact, according to all the medieval paintings, he just stood there, looking saintly.   

    Beelzebub, on the other hand, has real personality. John Milton, considered by many England's greatest poet, saving the Bard, cast Satan in the starring role in his epic work Paradise Lost. For blank verse, Milton was your go-to poet. He gave Lucifer some wonderful lines, such as this zinger: "Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n." That's tellin' 'em!

    Unfortunately, for all his poetic gifts, Milton had about as many jokes in him as a letter from the Internal Revenue Service. It fell to American writers to bring out that splendid side of Satan. Washington Irving had a little fun with him in his story "The Devil and Tom Walker":

    "What are you doing in my grounds?" said [the Devil], with a hoarse growling voice.
    "Your grounds?" said Tom, with a sneer; "no more your grounds than mine: they belong to Deacon Peabody."
    "Deacon Peabody be d--d," said the stranger, "as I flatter myself he will be, if he does not look more to his own sins and less to his neighbour's.

    Okay, so he's not Chris Rock. But it was a start. Soon, a rich tradition of Satanic humor took root in America. It fell to Mark Twain, the greatest of American humorists, to fully exploit Satan's comic potential. In Twain's hands, Satan displays a fine sarcastic wit, as in this letter from Earth to his friends back in Heaven:

    "…Moreover — if I may put another strain upon you — he [man] thinks he is the Creator’s pet. ...  He prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn’t it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered. The daily affront, the daily defeat, do not discourage him, he goes on praying just the same. There is something almost fine about this perseverance. I must put one more strain upon you: he thinks he is going to heaven! He has salaried teachers who tell him that."

    Yowtch!

    Unfortunately, the well of Satanic wit seems have gone dry in the last few decades. Perhaps this is a good thing. It may indicate that the only people who still actually believe the devil is at work in the world are humorless evangelists and ayatollahs. The rest of us see natural forces, pitiless and uncaring though they may be, behind the epidemics, accidents, disasters, and, yes, even the human frailties that beset us. That insight comes as a hard-won gift from 500 years of science.

    Yet, it would be a pity to lose the devilish fun that comes with
mythology. So, what the hell. I'll keep my horns and cloven hoofs, ready to bring them out again next Halloween.