The Devil and Bill Ellis

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As we zip around rural Pennsylvania in a Honda Odyssey van that is the color of dried blood, Bill Ellis recalls a time when his daughter worried about the books on the occult that were piling up in his study.

"She's in college now," says Mr. Ellis, who is an associate professor of English at the Hazleton campus of Pennsylvania State University, "but at the time, Elizabeth was 10 or 12. I guess she and her friends had been talking about some of the books I had around. They were probably worried about why I would want to read them. So I explained that it was a research project, and that studying Satanism didn't mean I wanted to practice it." The answer must have been satisfactory, because the topic never came up again. "But I think she still would have preferred that I not have them around."

It is difficult to imagine Mr. Ellis as a man possessing awesome and sinister powers. The fact that he is driving a family van may have something to do with it. But Elizabeth's concerns may have had deeper cultural roots than the usual preteen discovery of just how embarrassing one's parents really are. The anecdote illustrates a central point of Mr. Ellis's new book, Lucifer Ascending: The Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture, published this month by the University Press of Kentucky. At the core of Mr. Ellis's work is the relationship between knowledge and power -- a matter that preoccupied sorcerers long before it came to the attention of Michel Foucault.

According to the widespread traditions that Mr. Ellis analyzes, a volume of magic spells is not merely the professional literature of the practicing occultist. Rather, it is something like a piece of radium, emitting rays. It is a contact point between the human and the supernatural. Indeed, the unwary soul who picks up such a book is in danger of "reading himself fast" -- becoming so fascinated that he (quite literally) cannot put it down.

The word "grammar," Mr. Ellis writes, had an old vernacular usage, meaning "the ability to do magic." That overtone survives in "grimoire," the term for a book of spells, as well as the word "glamour," which was originally "an illusion of beauty created through black magic."

A sorcerer, then, is a kind of scholar, and vice versa. As for glamour, Mr. Ellis's career has not had much of it. There is a quality of darkness about him. Not that he is gloomy. As he drives, he provides a running account of the region's history, with particular emphasis on its legends of ghosts and mysterious personages. He seems happy, or at least in his element. But when he describes his professional biography, you can make out the contours of the shadow hanging over him; and you begin to wonder if Mr. Ellis might be under a curse.

Off the Beaten Track

Mr. Ellis received his Ph.D. in English from Ohio State University in 1978. In that long-lost era, he says, students were told not to worry about the job market, so he didn't. He wrote his dissertation on the image of the mother in country music, drawing on Northrop Frye's theory of archetypes. It would take him six years to find a tenure-track job.

Meanwhile, he taught English as an adjunct, and met his wife, Carol Ann, who was then a graduate student at Ohio State. He found work preparing the annotations to editions of Nathaniel Hawthorne's letters and notebooks, which gave him some credentials as a specialist in American literature. In 1984, the family (now expanded to three) moved to Penn State's small branch campus in Hazleton, where, at the age of 34, Mr. Ellis finally made the transition to a regular appointment.

It was not a position designed for a scholar. Most of the 1,200 students here are freshmen and sophomores who, if they continue in higher education, will go on to Penn State's main campus in University Park. Mr. Ellis usually teaches two or three composition courses each semester. That means grading roughly one thousand pages of student writing per course. It is rare that he gets to offer an upper-division class, and rarer still that the topic is folklore, his primary field of scholarly interest. As for conducting a graduate seminar, the possibility never comes up because the campus has no graduate programs. At one point, he hired a placement service to look for a position elsewhere. Nonacademic employers "were not especially interested in someone with my background," he says, "while academics saw me as an aging community-college teacher with marginal research interests."

He says he relies heavily on interlibrary loans, and twice mentions his appreciation for finding a supportive scholarly community on line. Each time, he gestures toward his laptop computer. "I started getting involved in listservs and online discussion groups in the early 1990s," he says. He refers to himself as a "lone wolf."

"Bill has never been part of the mainstream of folklore scholarship," says Gary Alan Fine, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University. "His work has always been quirky. But those of us who study contemporary legend, folk narrative, and rumor know Bill's work and respect it highly. How he's been as productive as he has while out there in Hazleton, I just don't know. It's a service school. They wouldn't care if he never wrote a thing. If he were here at Northwestern, Bill would be a full professor by now."

Religion Undercover

"It only looks like I'm prolific," says Mr. Ellis about the three books he has published since 2000. "Some of the work goes back 10 or 20 years. Only recently have I been able to pull it together." In 1999, he was diagnosed with Ménière's disease, which has cost him most of his hearing in both ears -- a development that he says gave him "the kick in the pants that moved me into a productive phase."

His latest book, Lucifer Ascending, is also the capstone to his work, the most concentrated synthesis of the ideas developed in the course of his research. Mr. Ellis discusses chain letters, grimoires, good-luck charms, and the Harry Potter series -- as well as the practice of "legend tripping," during which adolescents go to graveyards and other spooky locations to get stoned, or laid, or both. (What sounds like juvenile delinquency may actually provide a key to the occult's role in creating rites of passage, through which we deal with sex, death, and difficult personal changes.)

"One of the problems with folklore research," acknowledges Mr. Ellis, "is that it examines things that sometimes appear trivial, so people assume the results are trivial." From his investigations of the quirky, however, he has pieced together an analysis of occultism's role in what he calls "folk religion," a complex dimension of social life that is often hidden in plain sight.

A "mainstream" religion offers a fixed account of the world and of humanity's place in it. It is also an institution, with rules governing who gets to formulate doctrine and perform rituals. Anyone seeking to make contact with supernatural forces through "unauthorized" means is viewed with suspicion, at the very least. Practices such as divination or spell casting are de facto violations of the religion's monopoly on ultimate meaning. At worst, magic is seen as a counter-religion that blasphemes the true faith, through which people can traffic with evil forces in pursuit of selfish ends.

Mr. Ellis suggests that the dichotomy between established religion and anti-establishment magic is too simple. A variety of "grass-roots occult traditions" have emerged over the centuries, not so much to defy orthodox religious beliefs but as a necessary supplement to them. The practices are seldom institutionalized. While a few people in a community may specialize in the occult, for most it is just part of the familiar pattern of life and belief. Someone who scoffs on Monday might have bad luck on Tuesday and decide to try an old ritual on Wednesday.

Marginalized or oppressed groups developed magical traditions intended to give them some degree of control over their lives. (Mr. Ellis shows how the idea of the rabbit's foot as good-luck charm emerged from African-American "conjure" practices of the 19th century.) But people without any particular conflict with the social status quo could also use occult practices "to resolve their doubts about religious beliefs through direct experience" of the supernatural.

"Hence," writes Mr. Ellis, "the occult may not be an adversary of organized religion, but an alternative way of validating its dogmas." Someone who routinely makes fun of churchgoers might perform a ritual to "raise the devil" -- not in order to worship the Dark One, but to command him, in the name of Jesus, to increase the summoner's good fortune. And if, indeed, his luck changes for the better, that would suggest that Jesus is a lot more powerful than Satan. The conjurer might well find himself going to church, after all, just to be on the safe side.

Most of the time, the grass-roots traditions of occultic folk religion coexist uneasily with the more-established reli-

gious institutions. The eccentric old woman known to cast spells from a copy of the grimoire The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses is left to herself -- her social marginality and access to occult knowledge reinforcing one another. But for young people to experiment with magic is much more worrisome, particularly when the dabblers are adolescent girls, whose sexuality is the focus of intense regulation by the community.

If people who normally are expected to be subordinate cease to "know their place," the familiar elements of folk-religion begin to appear threatening. "Experts" emerge who claim to be able to diagnose and cure occult influences. Mr. Ellis cites a German study of such Hexenmeistern ("witch masters"). Those accused of occult practices were usually female. The "masters," restoring order, were nearly always male. The same pattern emerged in the Salem witch trials.

Board Games

The term occult means "secret." But much of the lore that Mr. Ellis describes is out in the open. It forms part of the common culture, handed down from generation to generation without any institution seeking to preserve it. A case in point is the Ouija board -- one of the "spirit boards" that Sears Roebuck began selling through its mail-order catalogs in the 1890s.

Mr. Ellis documents earlier techniques used by spiritualists to get supernatural forces to communicate in writing. The mass-marketed version of the Ouija board reached a much larger public, though, and by 1918, a commentator noted that "there are few families today that have not come into contact" with one. Its use became common during World War I, as people tried to contact their relatives overseas. Sales of Ouija boards have increased dramatically during periods of social tension, such as the onset of the Great Depression, the height of World War II, and the upheavals of the 1960s.

Most of the time, the board is used for entertainment, rather than as a tool for spiritual enlightenment. But it can also serve to crystallize small groups of people who, as Mr. Ellis writes, "generate their own specialized beliefs through common interests and face-to-face contact." He gives as an example the Ouija circles that sometimes form in college dormitories -- short-lived groups that create an experience of communal intimacy as students cope with a difficult life change.

The forces summoned also tend to have a gift for expressing whatever the deepest anx-

ieties of the group might be. A transcript of a Ouija-board session found in theOhio State Folklore Archives illustrates this. Sometime

around 1990, a circle of teenage girls began receiving messages from a spirit who threatened to rape and kill them, and demanded that they call him "master." They responded by belittling the disembodied misogynist in terms no less obscene than he had thrown at them. It was, as Mr. Ellis puts it, a ritual "creating a seemingly invulnerable male opponent, then cutting him down to size."

Pentagrams and Pundits

Mr. Ellis himself is a Christian. He teaches adult Sunday school at Trinity Lutheran Church, in Hazleton, and sings in the choir. On a Sunday morning in early November, the church welcomed a new member into the congregation. The minister asked if he "renounced Satan and all his empty promises." The newcomer said that he did.

Mr. Ellis himself has answered that question in the affirmative, but says he is not sure he believes in the devil as an actual being, evil personified. "There are things in the human heart that account for most of the evil in the world," he says. "I think that might be enough of a devil."

For others, of course, it is not enough. Mr. Ellis's recent work on occultism as part of folk religion is in some ways the prolegomenon to his study Raising the Devil: Satanism, New Religions, and the Media, published by Kentucky in 2000. That book was a response to the wave of "Satanic panic" that gripped parts of the United States in the 1980s and early 1990s, during which scores of people were accused of sexually abusing children in bizarre occult rituals. A number of them received long prison sentences.

Several books and television reports by investigative journalists raised serious doubts about those verdicts, which were often secured on the basis of testimony from children whose "recovered memories" only surfaced after hours of intensive interrogation by therapists who asked leading questions -- and repeated them until they got the most lurid answers. Analogies to the witch trials of earlier centuries were not difficult to draw.

Mr. Ellis's approach was to examine not the court cases but the cultural world of the people who believed that "Satanic ritual abuse" had been occurring for generations. "It's not that there are no Satanists in the world," says Mr. Ellis, who has known a few in his time. "But the things being described bore no real resemblance to what Satanists actually do or believe."

He found that the roots of the belief in Satanic ritual abuse could be traced to religious movements such as Pentecostalism, which encouraged the pursuit of "gifts of the spirit" such as speaking in tongues and faith healing. Before settling on church, people drawn to charismatic movements had often dabbled with the kinds of occult practices that Mr. Ellis has studied. They came to think of the centuries-old rituals of folk religion as part of a vast Satanic underground.

Just as the witch masters of earlier centuries claimed to be able to detect and unveil the work of hidden sorcerers, a new group of "experts" emerged to combat the forces of magic. But the modern Hexenmeistern knew how to translate their beliefs about the occult into the contemporary language of psychotherapy, which made it easier for them to claim legitimacy within the mass media.

As a final turn of the screw, their denunciations of occultism rendered the symbols better known -- thereby making them available to new groups of alienated people, particularly teenagers, who have incorporated them into their own rituals of identity and resistance.

Haunting and Hunting

"I'm done with Satanism now," says Mr. Ellis. "It's like sitting down to a steaming bowl of hot maggot soup. Just how many spoonfuls do you need before you've had enough?"

We are sitting in his study at home. Only a few of the books he has gathered on the occult are visible. (Most of them are now at the Penn State library in University Park, where they form part of the Bill Ellis Research Collection on Contemporary Legends.) Mr. Ellis has taken down from a shelf a large portfolio containing his collection of cels from Japanese anime. "On my salary," he says, "it is the one vice I can indulge after the bills are paid."

Mr. Ellis has been fascinated by the films (someone who is not a connoisseur would say "cartoons") for several years, and he is a member of an online discussion group devoted to the series Cardcaptor Sakura. Anime narratives often involve magic, and the online forums provide community -- two basic elements of his research.

Near the spot on the desk where he puts his laptop, there are books on Japanese vocabulary and grammar. He is not fluent. But he keeps at it. Mr. Ellis jokes that the lurid titles of his books may eventually earn him enough to travel to Japan.

The news media have taken an occasional interest in Mr. Ellis's work, but when he describes his few appearances on television, it is with a note of embarrassment and regret. About his role in a humorous BBC documentary on contemporary legends that aired 10 years ago, he says, "My academic career has never quite recovered from that." (I wonder how many of his American colleagues could possibly have seen the program, but decide not to ask.) The documentary in question was produced by Roger Corman, king of the low-budget horror films, and it bore the title of "W.S.H.," which stands for "Weird Shit Happens."

When the networks contact him now, he says, it is often with the expectation that he will "debunk" beliefs about the occult -- which misses pretty much the whole point of his scholarship. Worse, they sometimes want to portray him as a "real-life ghostbuster," an academic who presumably spends a lot of time in haunted houses, risking injury at the ectoplasmic hands of the undead.

If the news media have not quite come to terms with Mr. Ellis's work, it is nonetheless developing a following among scholars interested in the way beliefs circulate and reproduce themselves over time. It helps that Mr. Ellis's prose is vigorous, precise, and not afraid of humor. In one article reprinted in his collection Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live (University Press of Mississippi, 2001), he analyzes accounts of a ghost in central Ohio that terrorized workers ... at a Pizza Hut. He uses the stories to illustrate the way that there is an implicit code for how tales of haunting are narrated -- with an assumption that some places are appropriate for the supernatural to manifest itself, while other locales make it much harder for the spooked person to get a hearing.

"Bill's impressively consistent output is simply as good as it gets," writes Henrik Lassen in an e-mail message. Mr. Lassen, an associate professor of literature, culture, and media at the University of Southern Denmark at Kolding, says that he worked out the basic framework of his doctoral dissertation after reading a paper by Mr. Ellis that showed how certain contemporary rumors termed "urban legends" actually had a long history. For example, the story that gangs go driving around in cars with their headlights out, then hunt down and kill the first person who flashes his headlights in warning turns out to have been circulating, in nonautomotive form, in ancient Rome.

"Bill is a highly skilled craftsman," Mr. Lassen says. "He weaves his original thoughts about the material he has studied into the scholarly tradition. The links are sometimes so tight that it's not always immediately apparent how deeply original his contributions are."

That praise is echoed in a review of Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults that appeared last year in the journal Western Folklore, which noted that Mr. Ellis "presents complex ideas with a truly clarifying simplicity." Indeed, one suspects that may be part of his problem. Friedrich Nietzsche once suggested that academic success involves "muddying the water to make it seem deep." If Mr. Ellis had a knack for shrouding his research in suitably fashionable jargon, he might well have carved out an academic niche by now. Failing that, it would help if he were more comfortable with the news media, grabbing the title of "public intellectual" with a gusto for uninhibited self-promotion.

Exploring the Margins

It is not surprising that he sometimes thinks of the paths not taken. "If I had been working for the past 20 years in an English department at a four-year college," he says, "by now I'd probably be a respected if unspectacular Hawthorne scholar. But I think I would have been told in no uncertain terms not to explore the topics that I have pursued, because they are not central to the discipline."

Yet he refuses to call his interests marginal -- thus inadvertently denying himself the academic glamour that attaches itself to discussion of "the margin as site of resistance" in cultural studies. "The material I study is not marginal in itself," he says. "We marginalize it by ignoring it. But it's always there. It continues in the face of the opposition, or at least the disapproval, of the authorities."