The Satanic Rape of Catholicism in Rosemary's Baby

THE SATANIC RAPE OF CATHOLICISM IN ROSEMARY'S BABY Robert Lima" Ira Levin is a professional writer with an ear attuned to the elusive tempo of the times. He is the author of No Time for Sergeants, an unforgettably funny satire of contemporary military life, and, more recently, of the futuristic novel This Perfect Day. Between the two he delved into a theme which fetters present and past in a supernatural bond. Knowing that this is the age of Aquarius, as the musical Hairmakes clear, Levin sought to reflect the resurgence of interest in the occult by writing a popular, yet well-informed, book on the most bizarre of its facets. The result was the immensely successful novel of New York City Satanism, Rosemary's Baby,1 with its unnerving revelation that the "black arts" of the Middle Ages are alive and well, if secreted in such "caves" of modern cities as the Victorian apartments of the Bramford. The novel is in the tradition of H. P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror," which features the incarnation of an evil deity through the agency of a woman in depraved coalition with a sinister plot to reinstate the old gods; it also has a kinship to Arthur Machen's "The Great God Pan" wherein an unsuspecting woman becomes the seedbed for a Panic offspring. Rosemary's Baby contains elements similar to those in these classic short stories. But Levin's novel is the most horrific of the three works because of its proximity to contemporary reality and its rude reminder that evil is not a thing of the past. In fact, Rosemary's Baby points to the continuity of antique traditions; it does so through a plot which allies modern Satanists to ancient venerators of evil deities. A historical synopsis will show this alignment. Some ancient religions held that the major deity possessed a dual nature. In Zoroastrian dualism, for example, the positive and negative principles of the god were personified in the respective names Ormuzd and Ahriman. This duality was not an enigma but an article of faith reasonably arrived at, and worship recognized it as such. In dual systems there was no condemnation of one nature and exaltation of the other; rather, both were considered integral to the divinity and held in equal "Professor Lima is Chairman of the Department of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. 212Robert Lima esteem. This was possible because the human concepts of goodandevil were considered inapplicable to the divinity. In the beginnings of Judaism, too, the deity had a similar dual nature. But the religious cosmopolitanism of the Jews, which grew partly out of their Egyptian and Babylonian captivities, eventually taught them the need to reevaluate this duality. The Jews reinterpreted their deity in terms of good and evil by separating the beneficent characteristics from the malevolent ones. They assigned the latter to separate entities, many of which derived from the demons of Egypt and Assyria. In so doing Judaism followed the practice of other religions and became polydemonic. However, the early Jews did not personify evil to the extent of identifying one being as its source. Despite the deep-seated belief of strict-structuralists, the Old Testament term "satan" is not such a personification. In the contexts in which itis employed theword means adversary or accuser; it is used to indicate an agent of opposition, either internal (guilty conscience) or external (human enemy). It is more often seen in the second sense in the major episodes where the term appears.2 Nowhere in the Old Testament is there reference to the Satan which is the bulwark of the Christian personification of evil. TheJews simply did not have any such being. But Christianity did cause to evolve the creaturewhich the Satanists in Rosemary's Baby worship and serve.3 Christianity gave form and substance to a distinct demonic personality through misreadings and verbatim interpretations of Biblical passages, apocryphal texts, and those works labeled pseudepigraphal. Among the latter is the Book of Enoch. This is an apocalyptic treatise written by many hands between 200 and 100 B.C. but disguised as an older prophetic work to assure its acceptance. The Book of Enoch encompasses an...