Culture Slut: Demon Boyfriends, Fulfilling Relationships and Summoning Love
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A couple of years ago, during quarantine, I, like many others, tried my hand at some new skills. I tried to summon my own demon boyfriend. I had watched a contemporary Italian horror film that I cannot for the life of me find again, I think it was set in the south and had a haunted house and old witch folk magic and demoniacs and grimoires, and it just seemed like a great mix of a lovely holiday setting and spooky ambience. Kind of like Call Me By Your Name, but instead of your son being seduced by a grad student, he’s being stolen by a demon. And hey, what with the cannibalism and all, maybe they really aren’t that different.
Anyway, I started looking up famous old spell books and tomes of magic before settling on The Book of St Cyprian, mainly because I liked the sibilance of the title. My research revealed that it was actually several different grimoires from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, all pseudepigraphically attributed to the 3rd century Saint Cyprian of Antioch, who was claimed to be a powerful pagan sorcerer before converting to Christianity. It sounded thrilling, obscure enough not to be in every goth baby bat’s starter kit, but also legitimate enough not to be sold in anything remotely resembling a wellness section in a crystal shop. That demon boyfriend was as good as mine, all I had to do was to wait for the courier to arrive.
There’s lots of demon boyfriends in pop culture, from the vampire boom of the 90s and 00s, to the haunting pictorials of medieval manuscripts, renaissance art and the neo-classicism of the 1800s. Octave Tassaert’s erotic 1859 portrait of La Femme Damnee (The Cursed Woman) has found new life as a meme, an inevitability for all good art that was designed to frighten and stimulate the illiterate.
The painting shows a nude woman being, ahem, attended to, by three other figures at the same time, one kissing her mouth, one sucking her breast, and one at her crotch. The title tells us that this woman is cursed, but to a contemporary eye, it looks like a great night out. Nothing gets the juices flowing like surrendering yourself to eternal damnation. There is also the very viral story of the Lucifer statue that was too sexy for the church, which has now found a home on Instagram and TikTok, but I remember first seeing it as a Tumblr text post.
A Belgian cathedral in 1837 commissioned Joseph Geefs to create a sculpture of Lucifer (L’Ange du Mal) for a grand tableau of “The Triumph of Religion over The Genius of Evil” but the figure of Lucifer was too damn sexy and the clergy worried he would tempt the more sensitive ladies of the congregation. The Devil is too Sublime! They promptly removed the statue and commissioned Joseph’s brother Guillaume to make a more sinister Satan for them. But this version of Lucifer (Le Genie du Mal) was just as dreamy, if not more so, than the first attempt. His gesture was more emphatic, his build slightly more muscular, tiny horns poking through his romantically waved hair, and more of a picturesque broodiness, the ultimate bad boy boyfriend.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Buffy the Vampire Slayer found her soulmate in Angel, the most sadistic vampire in European history (sorry Dracula) and girls everywhere swooned over the mysterious hunk in a leather jacket that always turned up to save the night. Unless, of course, you were a Spike fan, a different vampire hunk in leather, trousers and trench coat this time, but meaner and less predictable, plus he had that bleached hair and a very questionable accent. Love never dies. Then came Bella in Twilight, choosing between a carnal, physical love (werewolf) or an intellectual, symbiotic love (vampire). Funny how even in a Mormon abstinence allegory the perfect boyfriend is an undead monster from the pits of hell (and Washington). Don’t even get me started on The Vampire Diaries with Elena choosing between good vampire Stefan and bad vampire Damon - more good women have had their time wasted by Ian Somerhalder than by all high school fuckboys combined. Some nice spooky imagery and crow-work though, lots of leather jackets there too. Bad boys in life, worse in death, but with a glimmering prospect of redemption through the pure love of a good girl.
One trope that never fully goes away is that of the Reanimated Boyfriend, who comes from the Victorian Gothic poems of Edgar Allen Poe, and stories like The Monkey’s Paw where hapless young men are haunted by the ghosts of dead fiancées, not to mention the scientific necromancy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A great example of this comes from American Horror Story: Coven (the best one), where two teenage witches build a perfect boyfriend from the dismembered limbs of a fraternity who got sliced and diced in a bus crash. When Evan Peters - who else would it be - arrives back in the land of the living, the witches have to teach him how to be human again, and how to truly love them, thus creating an idealised love slave.
However, not all boyfriends are worth reanimating. In Practical Magic, sister witches Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman use forbidden magic to resurrect Nicole’s abusive boyfriend (who thought that would end well?) only to immediately kill him again and then be troubled by his possessive spirit. In Hellraiser, horror icon Julia Cotton (played by Claire Higgins) tries to bring back her brother-in-law and secret lover Frank by feeding him the flesh of men she seduces in bars. She eventually succeeds, but is quickly disposed of by Frank in favour of a younger woman. I’ll say it again: not all boyfriends are worth reanimating.
Forget all those other losers, if you want a really fulfilling relationship you need to raise your expectations, aim for one of the demon princes of Hell, or even Lucifer himself.
Forget all those other losers, if you want a really fulfilling relationship you need to raise your expectations, aim for one of the demon princes of Hell, or even Lucifer himself. One of my favourite bands, Twin Temple, croons “Lucifer, my love, the candles are burning bright. Give me a little death, take me as human sacrifice. I’m just a fool, a fool in love with you. I’d never sell my soul, but I’d give it freely to you,” in the romantic ballad “Lucifer My Love”. In fact, their whole first album is a demonic love letter, with songs like “The Devil (Didn’t Make Me Do It)” and “Sex Magick”, all imbued with their highly individual brand of satanic doo-wop. As Pete Burns once said on Celebrity Big Brother, “I’d rather reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
At last, my book arrived. First off, it’s a soft cover, with low grade paper, it doesn’t feel very impressive. It’s thick, at least. I open the cover, and what do I see on the first page? A warning! Perfect, that gives us an air of potential power. But what does it say? “This book will not teach you how to summon demon princes, for that is too dangerous for us to instruct you in, foolish novice.” Fuck. Instantly my dreams are dashed. All the romantic fan art I saw on Tumblr of King Paimon from Hereditary slips away and I am left with nothing.
Maybe not nothing, maybe this can still be salvaged. I turn to the section on love spells. Maybe I can turn my real boyfriend into the rat he is, or inspire a new lust in him at the very least. I find an appropriate spell, a spell to make one’s wife more receptive to sex. There’s no list of equipment necessary, not even grave dirt or hair or a rabbit's foot to hide under the mattress, just some simple instructions. “To make your wife more agreeable, do not use harsh words with her, or strike her.” That’s it. That’s the spell. Thanks a lot St Cyprian.
Lucifer means Light-Bringer, or Dawn-Bringer, and he was said to be the most beautiful of Heaven’s angels. Prometheus brought fire down from the sun to the mortals, and he was punished by the gods. Lucifer was hurled into eternal damnation for leading an uprising against a totalitarian God and resides in the fiery bowels of the earth. American folk singer King Dude tells us “Lucifer is the Light of the World. Lucifer is the Sun of the World. Lucifer is the Love of the World.”
This year I made a Spotify playlist called My Demon Boyfriend and I paired that song with Debby Boone’s iconic “You Light Up My Life”. “You light up my life, you give me hope to carry on, you light up my days and fill my night with song. It can’t be wrong when it feels so right, cause you light up my life.” I’m still waiting for my demon boyfriend, but at least I’m not a 17th century peasant woman hoping that her husband will stop hitting her in the name of sex magick. The dawn will come soon. Happy Halloween.
Words: Misha M-N