Satanic Pacts/Diabolism

Abstract

This chapter explores the satanic pact, the voluntary decision to sell one's soul to the devil, which emerged as an important plank in European witch lore in the early modern period. The trope of the satanic pact dates back to the early Middle Ages, and was generally associated with some kind of tit-for-tat: a sinful human would exchange his soul — and in the earliest versions it is usually a man entering such a deal — for money, career advancement, knowledge, power, or sexual favors. The idea of a satanic pact provided early modern demonologists with the causal mechanism they wanted. Fueled by invidious notions about female bodies and minds, demonologists adumbrated ideas about how women were driven by envy, greed, and insatiable lust to turn to demons to satisfy their desires. Legends of male pacts with the devil circulated in Byzantium as well as in the medieval West, and some of these stories crossed over into the Slavic Orthodox world, but they never rose to the fore in trials of witches in Russia as they did in the West. Building on this observation, subsequent scholarship has confirmed that this finding held true both in the Russian and in the Ukrainian lands and continued through the eighteenth century.