Time Warp, Part Six

The Devil at the Crossroads, According to Sergei
​Translated from Russian

The Devil at the Crossroads is a case study in how modern mythologies take the elements mankind has always known and revisit them with a different angle. There is no real origin to the idea of meeting a dark spirit at the borderlands between two places, or the not-space past the walls, to make a deal with a steep cost that seems acceptable—maybe even sensible—at the time, but proves to be too much. That this being becomes the Christian Devil probably has more to do with Faust than any specifically Christian belief about that Devil. Perhaps it is taken from his attempts to tempt Jesus, where on his final try he offered the whole world in exchange for a moment of worship; but there is little else he does, at least as my Russian Orthodox parents described him, that sound much like bargaining.

The Devil at the Crossroads has all the makings of an old world myth being draped in Christian imagery in the new world. This is incredibly pronounced in African-American folktales, where slaves brought their stories with them and then clothed those stories in elements from the Christianity they began to accept over later generations. He is the wandering spirit of the land just out of reach, offering his wares for a great price. I do not know much mythology from Africa, but I have trouble imagining they did not have such concepts in the stories they brought, and calling him The Devil some centuries later follows a known pattern.

Whatever true name the Queen (or King) of the Crossroads originally had, they have acquired numerous titles and names and faces ever since. Hecate is almost certainly not her original name; her basic function—guardian of the edges, great magician, the cycle of life and death tainted by the fearsome undeath—would almost certainly have become a necessary spirit the moment people began to have edges and recognize death and seek power. This would have happened well before humans reached Asia Minor. Petitioning that being is older than history, magic predates writing. Maybe it had something to do with wandering traders, people from ‘outside’ meeting a community at the edges and bringing them exotic things. Maybe it’s just because some early people felt there was something powerful in the dark and wanted to reach out to it rather than run from it. We will likely never know; the point remains, when people first went to the limits of their known pocket of the world and called out for an audience, something was there to receive them. And century after century, when people from some new land went out to the forest, or the crossroads, or the sunset, or the graveyard, they were received anew, and gave the thing that welcomed them a name they understood.

​The Devil at the Crossroads is just this, again. Robert Johnson walks away from the community that knows him, and when he returns he brings with him a gift of music no one could explain. His community seeks an answer, and they look to the edges. And the thing they see lurking there, the eyes in the darkness, has acquired a name. A name associated with the first musician, even. Satan, the one whose voice once echoed through heaven with the tones of instruments mortal and divine, cast into the darkness where he now draws people to their doom. This Devil, Johnson’s community decides, must have welcomed a wayward soul and given him some of that music. Oddly enough, it is not the one who seeks the Thing at the Edges that names it, but those who stay behind and seek to warn others not to follow that path. We don’t know if Johnson even did make such a deal—I suspect he did not—but if he had, I wonder what name he called his patron. Would we know the Devil at the Crossroads as a devil at all, if we had learned of it from someone who cried out to it, and was embraced by it, rather than those who feared to seek it?

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