Episode 224 – Limping Devils, Satanic Bodies, & Disability

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• From Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame, Benita Eisler, 1999: On Tuesday, January 22, Catherine Byron was delivered of a son, named for her father, George Gordon. The baby was born with a caul and a malformed right foot. For Byron, his deformed foot became the crucial catastrophe of his life. He saw it as the mark of Satanic connection, referring to himself as “the lame devil.” He persisted in blaming his mother for the abnormality, citing her “excess of delicacy”during the period immediately preceding the delivery. This phrase has been taken to refer to Catherine’s insistence on wearing corsets in the last stages of pregnancy. Byron’s accusation seized on the most damning charge he could find to describe his mother: She had cursed, crippled, and symbolically castrated her son. Physically painful in his early years, making him an object of mockery or pity in childhood and adolescence, Byron’s deformity would cause emotional injury beyond any other psychic wound he would ever sustain. Turned inward, his rage became depression, but also something more insidious: the sense that he had a special dispensation from the moral sanctions imposed upon others and a lifelong entitlement to the forbidden. Byron’s foot came into the care of a Nottingham quack named Lavender, whose prescribed course of treatment consisted of rubbing the afflicted foot with hot oil; it was then twisted into a “normal” position and forced into a sort of wooden cast, designed to hold it rigidly in place. Lavender’s therapy was not only torture, but also proved to be without any benefit. Typically, Byron was stoical about the excruciating pain of these sessions. Byron’s lawyer John Hanson took Byron to see a Dr. Baille: This eminent specialist confirmed that “the right foot was inverted and contracted; if it had at first been forced into a frame by constant and gradual pressure, the whole of the Evil might have been cured. But little could be done after the lapse of ten or eleven years.” This bleak prognosis notwithstanding, Baillie was not planning to give up the case. He recommended an adjustable brace worn on the foot and ankle, a welcome change from the highly visible iron contraption from ankle to shin that he had worn. Now, however, the foot was supposed to be kept bandaged at all times—a great deal to ask of a boy. Baillie does not appear to have visited Byron at school until December , when he reported gloomily, “I found his foot in a much worse state than when I last saw it,—the shoe, entirely wet through and the brace quite loose;. Byron’s neglect of the deformed foot actually points to his happier state of mind: He was beginning to make friends and to be included in cricket, swimming, and nocturnal escapades that involved sneaking out of the boardinghouse to play in the dark, marshy meadows. Slowly he found himself appreciated for his loyalty to friends, and he was not going to jeopardize this newly won acceptance by doing anything to call attention to his lameness, such as fussing with bandages or a brace.
  • The Devil as Doppelgänger in The Deformed Transformed, Charles E. Robinson, 2025: Byron’s The Deformed Transformed is a complex, fragmentary, and uneven drama which has received little critical attention and less praise since its publication in 1824; yet the potential effect of this drama prompted Montague Summers in an unguarded moment to express “infinite regret” that Byron “did not finish the piece, which has an eerie and perhaps unhallowed fascination all its own.” Summers undoubtedly praised this drama because of its unorthodox plot containing a pact with the devil, its perplexing incompleteness, and its autobiographical revelations. The first scene of Part I is by far the most imaginative and intense: Arnold, the deformed hero, was rejected by his mother and reminded of his hunchback and lame, cloven foot by his reflection in a fountain. Arnold despaired but was approached by a Mephistophelean stranger who miraculously appeared from the fountain and offered Arnold a new body; after engaging a compact with the stranger,Arnold was transformed, and the stranger transformed himself into Arnold’s rejected old body. The protagonist and antagonist in new forms then mounted their coal-black horses and raced to “where the World / Is thickest,” to “where there is War / And Woman”. The remainder of the unfinished drama presents Arnold’s and the stranger’s exploits. The Deformed Transformed was “suggested” by his own lameness and by the “rage and mortification” he experienced when his mother ridiculed his deformity. But if Byron sought to purge these feelings, he also offered the following comparison between his own lameness and that of his friend, Henry Fox: “But there is this difference, that he appears a halting angel, who has tripped against a star; whilst I am the Lame Devil,—a soubriquet which I marvel that, amongst their various nominis umbrae, the Orthodox have not hit upon.” Byron, by portraying the diabolical Stranger’s assumption of Arnold’s deformed body, with both hunchback and cloven foot, was evidently provoking the critics to compare him with the cynical and deformed devil. 
• From Biblical Things Not Generally Known, Robert Tuck, 1892: There is a strangely widespread belief that Satan is lame, and that this was caused by his fall. In classical mythology we find limping Vulcan, who was lamed by his fall when hurled by Zeus from Olympus. Our idea of the devil always includes the clubbed or cloven foot. South Africans have a “deity whose occupation it is to cause pain and death; his name translates to ”Wounded Knee.” Dr. Livingstone says of another people of South Africa, “It is curious that in all their dreams or visions of their god he has always a crooked leg, like the Egyptian Thoth.” In South America they believe in a treacherous demon who in dark forests puts on a friendly shape to lure Indians to destruction, but the huntsmen say they can never be deceived if they examine this demon’s foot-track because of the unequal size of the two feet. The native Australians believed in a demon who was conceived as black and deformed in his lower extremities; they attribute to him many of their songs and dances, but also a sort of smallpox to which they were liable. The same idea of the fall of angels into demons may possibly explain our figuring demons with horns:. The origin of those horns may be the halo, or golden rays about the head, which we find depicted in artistic representations of saints and angels. Satan is depicted with such a glow in various relics of early art, and, in our old illustrated Bibles, Moses is shown with two shining rays rising from his head, which might easily deteriorate into horns when applied to evil beings.
• From The Devil In Legend and Literature, Rudwin Maximilian, 1931: “You fancied I looked different, did you not?” Satan asks the boy in the 1887 novel “Little Johannes, “That I had horns and a tail? That idea is out of date. No one believes it now.” The Devil now moves among men in their own likeness, his diabolical traits appear no longer in his body. But although the Devil can now discard his animal parts, he cannot rid himself of his limp, which is the result of his cloven hoof or broken leg. He still limps slightly, like Byron, but notwithstanding his defect in walking, he steps firmly on this earth. The traditional explanation for the Devil’s broken leg is his fall from heaven. This idea was suggested by the scriptural saying: “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” in Luke. One of the most striking indications of the fall of the demons from heaven is the wide-spread belief that they are all lame. This idea has probably been derived from the crookedness of lightning, although the poet Heinrich Heine is of the that the Devil has finally succeeded in correcting his defect in walking. Mephistopheles retains, however, his limping leg in Goethe’s faust, and Asmodeus in LeSage’s 1707 novel “The Lame Devil” appears as a limping gentleman, who uses two sticks as crutches. He ascribes his broken leg to a fight in the air with another devil and his subsequent fall. According to rabbinical tradition, this demon broke his leg when he hurried to meet King Solomon. Victor Hugo offers another explanation for the lameness of Asmodeus: According to this writer, a stone crushed the demon’s leg. In Maupassant’s 1882 story, “The Legend of Mont St. Michel,” Satan had his leg broken when, in his flight from St. Michael, he jumped off the roof of a castle. The mother of the Devil is named in the Alsfeld Passion Play of the end of the 15th century for a type of crutch for the reason that she walks on crutches.
• From Monstrous Offspring, Amba J. Sepie, The Journal of Trespassing, 2017: The spectrum of socially permitted human variation still appears to be very limited. Is there room for such a possibility, or are there still two distinct concepts that have been separated from one another – human and otherwise? To properly grasp how these ideas have been sustained and adapted to the the slightly twisted, quasi-theological set of social scripts we use today, they need to be traced through the medieval period in Europe and the historical subsumation of what we would now call disability under the headings of deformity and monstrosity, contrasting this initially with the Greco-Roman categories of the ‘ideal’ and ‘grotesque’ bodies. The concept of an ideal body may be a divine body, but unusual bodies have sometimes been conceived of as monstrous and sometimes as divine or blessed. This dual framing reveals the transgressive spiritual power that different bodies have long been thought to possess, and the fear and awe provoked by these in equal measure. For instance, children with Down syndrome have historically been called ‘angels’, blindness has been associated with prophecy, and intersexed or ‘third gendered’ children have often been revered (and feared) as manifestations of gods. People have interpreted anomalies in babies as messages from god for centuries: Sixteenth-century surgeon Ambroise Paré told of a woman who birthed a child with wings, a horn and a single foot as a sign of the misfortunes that were to come when Pope Julius II waged war against King Louis XII. Monsters, as defined by Dana Oswald, are outliers within a race or ‘kind’, whether human or animal: the monster is always defined by the normative. The depictions of the monstrous both articulate the fear of the loss of corporeal integrity, and simultaneously allow that fear to be quieted and dissolved, by confirming the normative.
  • Monsters and hybrids were just as essential to the cosmology of the time as angels and god, as the universal spectrum was broad enough to contain at one end holy perfection and at the other the physically evil. When the humanness of a body is inscribed by such representations, the monstrous occupies a middle ground between human and animal. In the context of early European normalcy, the construction of human exceptionalism was assigned to a single human group who were denominationally Christian. As 12th century historian Geoffrey of Monmouth writes of monstrous offspring: “Sexual mother, rapacious incubus, and infant monster are the vertices of an unholy family triangle that obscenely contrasts with the Virgin Mother, Holy Spirit, and divine Son.” Ultimately, this sets up comparatives that were previously unknown and establishes the very specific kinds of hierarchies and separatist, elitist ideologies that have become problematic in the contexts of modernity, and by the 15th century demons and devils became absorbed into a new, rigid system, and human abnormalities were reframed as demonic. By the 16th century, the discourse on monsters became explicitly racialized, raising serious philosophical questions as to the humanity of the ‘others’ that inhabited newly discovered lands. America’s Christian settlers, for instance, were alarmed by the presence of Indians and could not understand how it was that they even existed: Explorers overtly queried the species-membership – or the humanity – of the people they encountered.
• From a Disability History of the United States, Kim Nielsen, 2012: Many Europeans believed that a pregnant woman with inappropriate thoughts and women who engaged in deviant actions could produce deviant offspring. Theological and popular literature in 16th and 17th century England warned that monstrous births signified Divine displeasure. Puritan theology emphasized hierarchy and order. Just as god lovingly and wisely ruled the people of his kingdom, almost male household heads lovingly and wisely rule their households. While sin always tempted one away from God, those who carried out good works and adhere to the community Covenant would become God’s elect. Anne Hutchinson, a highly educated woman and eventual mother of 15 children, arrived in Massachusetts in 1634. Once in Boston she began hosting theological discussions in her own home and began to emphasize the ability of all to communicate directly with god rather than through clerical intermediaries. At Hutchinson’s heresy trial in 1637 a minister stated bluntly to her, “You have been stepped out of your place.” In the midst of this, Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop accused Hutchinson and her follower Mary Dyer of monstrous births. Dyer had delivered a stillborn child in October 1637, of which Winthrop testified, “Its chest and shoulders were full of scales and sharp thorns. Instead of toes it had on each foot three claws with sharp talons. On its back were two great mouths and at each a red tongue sticking out.” In 1638 Hutchinson also had what Winthrop characterized as a monstrous birth, and he later wrote that she had 30 monstrous births “Some of one shape some or another, none at all of them a human shape.” Each of the 30 births represented one of Hutchinson’s heresies. Female challenges to patriarchy and Theological power combined to render the bodies of Dyer and Hutchinson’s children, as well as those of Dyer and Hutchinson, deviant and threatening. Disability was material reality for many European colonists, but it also served as a potent metaphor and symbol. Of all the women in North America, these two most threatened religious, Political, and gender hierarchies. They’re supposed monstrous sins manifested in the supposed monstrous beings that literally developed in their wombs; and as Joseph Winthrop charged, giving birth to these beings proved the women’s sinfulness
• From Resisting Eugenic Legacies, Elizabeth Leach-Leung, Child As Citizen, 2025: Concepts of eugenics are buried within Western mythology and folklore. Using the changeling myth as an example, David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder describe how even after the professionalization of modern medicine, literature continues to serve an important explanatory function in the cultural understanding of disability. The substitution story is a folktale that describes how fairies would take newborn babies and replace them with their “changeling” or fairy children. Motivated by their quest to obtain an immortal soul, the changeling fey would acquire both beauty and a soul if they were nursed by a human mother while the stolen human child could ennoble fey bloodlines through marriage. Naturally, human families did not want a fairy child but their own human baby and many of these stories featured gruesome ends where changelings reveal their true fairy nature. Scholars as early as 1891 have read the changeling myth as a tale for parents to cope with their children born with disabilities. From the word’s etymological roots, changeling was used as an insult to denote “a dwarf ” or “a simpleton.” Susan Eberly draws connections between common changeling traits and a wide range of congenital disabilities, including cerebral palsy, Hurler syndrome, hypercalcemia syndrome, Down syndrome, carp mouth syndrome, progeria, and dwarfism. While physical markers of congenital disabilities clearly align them with the described changeling, there have been disputes over how intellectual disabilities were identified. C. F. Goodey and Tim Stainton argue that changelings were only associated with intellectual disabilities as late as the mid-seventeenth century. In their article on disability in changeling stories, Goodey and Stainton end with the thought-provoking phrase, “the concept of the changeling is thus itself a changeling.” The changeling myth, when reworked and reversed, can allow us to investigate ableist constructs built into children’s literature and culture.
• From Neurodivergent Narratives, Jennifer Slagus, Brock University, 2025: Well before the nineteenth century, people have attempted to discern where the “feelings of strangeness” toward disabled people have come from, and felt that, because disability was (and still is) conceptualized as a “terrible unending tragedy,” there must be some higher reason for it. Historically, some people assumed disability was the fault of a child’s parents and that maybe they were neglectful. But one of the most dominant narratives that infected history positioned disability as the result of an imbalance in the natural order, due to supernatural or demonological causes, or as a punishment from god. This emerged out of, and simultaneously contributed to, perceptions that aligned disabled people with the sinister. In the Middle Ages, and continuing through the Early Modern period, the domineering presence of Judeo-Christianity contributed to growing social paranoia of the Satanic. From the fifteenth through eighteenth century, widespread accusations of witchcraft were cast against vulnerable men, women, and children. And, while unmarried or widowed mature women were most commonly accused, the opportunity for violence extended to include most obscured persons: poor people, disabled people, those with any number of “disliked traits,” or those who were deemed as having a bad reputation. Today, it’s not possible to know exactly how many poor, disabled, or generally disliked people were victims of witch hunts and trials. While European witch trials ended around the year 1700, the lingering “feelings of strangeness” toward neurodivergent and other othered people remain eerily present today. These themes reemerged in the 1980s when an explosion of moral panic around the rise of Satanism followed the publication of Michelle Smith’s (now discredited) “memoir,” Michelle Remembers. As journalist Sarah Marshall argues, Smith’s book “gave people a villain to look for outside the family” and communicated that they need not “look in the mirror, as the call is not coming from inside the house” but instead at the Satanists and  led to the assumption that all differing ways of being must be the work of the devil.
• From Social Disability and the Diagnosis of Satanism, Johanneke Kroesbergen-Kamps, University of Botswana, 2017: Since the 1990s, many people in Zambia have heard about Satanists, and the threat of Satan and Satanism is everywhere: in school, hospitals, on the road, in the market and even in churches. Satanists may cause illness and death, sell your blood and organs, cause road accidents and try to get you in their thrall by selling you seemingly innocent products. Satanism is portrayed as an organization of evil in which people can be initiated knowingly and unknowingly, willingly and unwillingly. The stories about Satanism are shared as rumours and legends, and spread through the rumour mills that abound in African cities. The most extensive and detailed accounts of Satanism, however, come from testimonies given in religious settings by self-proclaimed ex-Satanists. A sign that points specifically to Satanism is anti-social behaviour: The suspected Satanist generally doesn’t show outright criminal or aggressive behaviour, but is anti-social in the sense of being solitary and wilful, and feeling unaccepted by their peers or relatives. Ex-Satanists often describe themselves as ‘stubborn’, not wanting to accept the authority of their parents. Escaping from their parents’ control is often not so difficult, since many of the ex-Satanists describe growing up in broken and unstable homes. They live with a single parent, or are moved from a parent to a grandparent, or to an aunt. Some ex-Satanists remember that they used to prefer to be alone. A social disability like introversion is seen as abnormal: Abnormal behaviour points to a spiritual affliction, and social disabilities such as being stubborn or introverted are interpreted as a sign specifically of Satanism. 
  • Afflictions like physical illness, mental problems, but also problems in relationships and poverty are widely believed to have a spiritual cause. Christian faith healing is one of the ways to deal with these afflictions, and Satanism is one of the possible spiritual causes for trouble. Other causes are possession and witchcraft. Which of these phenomena is identified as the cause depends on several factors: the symptoms and responses of the client, the suspicions of relatives, and the frame of interpretation preferred by the pastor. Factors that encourage a diagnosis of Satanism are youth, disturbing dreams, atypical behaviour and, especially, social disabilities. From this perspective, physical illness and poverty may have a common cause. Besides doctors and traditional healers, Christian faith healers form a third alternative for a person seeking healing. A diagnosis of Satanism occurs mainly in young people: Often the youth and/or his family have a feeling that there is something wrong. There may be abnormal behaviour or disturbing dreams, as dreams are seen as messages from the spiritual world. The causes can be diverse: As one family told the missionary Bernard Udelhoven, “We don’t really know what is behind this: an evil spirit, or the dead, or witchcraft, or Satanism.”
  • Yoga 80s vrs now
• From Conspirituality, Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, Julian Walker, 2023: Modern yoga and wellness was laundered through aspirational consumerism so that its implications were almost invisible. These were techniques by which we could constantly judge ourselves against impossible ideals of physical and moral fitness, and perform our virtues or confess our sins to dominant figures who held charismatic power. Those authorities assessed us with a warmed-over version of the nineteenth-century pseudoscience of physiognomy— the premise that the appearance and performance of one’s body revealed character and social value. We didn’t recognize the ableism that could easily curdle a wholesome yogic worldview—especially through the influence of American individualism. The twisted message was that if a person was injured or disabled, they were revealing their karmic punishment. Obsessions with strength and purity have always been foundational to the politics of us vs. them that divides the worthy from the degenerate. In this reasoning, the “corrupted” body fails to protect the sacred. This failure opens up society to more degenerate forces waiting at the gates. The perpetrators gel into Illuminati, Satanic Cults, or the “cabal” vilified by QAnon. Figures like Gregg Braden teach that the elemental chemical makeup of human DNA literally spells out messages from god in numerological code associated with Jewish mysticism and the COVID vaccine will change a person’s DNA and make them susceptible to Satan. You can see fascist elements in the modern yoga and wellness spaces if you look closely: The body can be purified through discipline and focus and become a vessel for mystical experiences; astrology, exercise, breathing, meditation, or herbs can produce and nourish a resurrected golden age of supermen, and supermen and superwomen can have superbabies for the dawning of a New Age if they devote themselves to purity and resist “toxins.” etc. Conspirituality draws heavily on fascist anxieties about sexual potency and deviancy. And now with Proud Boys to No Nut November and Tucker Carlson boosting testicle tanning red-light therapy, it seems we’ve entered into a golden age of fascist junk science. 
• From The Devil in the Details, Alexander Luke Ohnemus, 2025: Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often leads to heightened literal thinking. This author’s self-identification as autistic introduces a psychological lens to the interpretation of religious doctrine, one that resists metaphor. The figure of the Devil, particularly in Christian theology, operates as a repository for cultural otherness, deviance, and unredeemable agency. Identifying with the Devil—whether ironically, symbolically, or sincerely—often reflects an internalization of marginality. If the author were “the Devil in human form,” as he speculates, this could be read as both a literary provocation and a genuine response to systems of exclusion. Queerness, neurodivergence, and mixed racial identity all find parallels in Satanic imagery, not because they are evil, but because historical institutions have marked them as such. The self-identification as mixed-race—European, Chinese, and Filipino—evokes the Antichrist archetype not in its theological horror, but in its transgressive hybridity. Historically, the Antichrist has been imagined as a figure who transcends ethnic, cultural, or religious identification. As scholars have shown, posthuman identity challenges the binaries of human/animal, god/devil, male/female, and self/other. This raises a poignant ethical question: when the world’s systems are designed for the normative, is selfishness a sin—or a form of resistance? As autistic, queer, mixed-race, heretical, or even diabolical, identity is not a confession of guilt, but a testament to survival. The Devil may not be evil incarnate, but the symbolic cry of the excluded.
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