Episode 225: America’s Favorite Queer Teenage Satanist Influencer, Mary MacLane

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• DRAG ME TO HELL: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rosa-robadas-drag-me-to-hell-tickets-1989349708530? 
• From The Story of Mary MacLane, Mary MacLane, 1902: January 13: I, of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane, for whom the world contains not a parallel. I am distinctly original innately and in development. I have in me a quite unusual intensity of life. I have a marvelous capacity for misery and for happiness. I am broad-minded. I am a genius. I am a philosopher of my own school. I care neither for right nor for wrong—my conscience is nil. My brain is a conglomeration of aggressive versatility. I have reached a truly wonderful state of miserable morbid unhappiness. I have attained an egotism that is rare indeed. I have gone into the deep shadows. I have hunted for even the suggestion of a parallel among the several hundred persons that I call acquaintances. But in vain. There is none to compare with me. I think at this moment, however, of two minds famous in the world of letters between which and mine there are certain fine points of similarity. These are the minds of Lord Byron and of Marie Bashkirtseff. Byron is truly admirable. He uncovered and exposed his soul of mingled good and bad for the world to gaze upon. He knew the human race, and he knew himself. As for that strange notable, Bashkirtseff, yes, I am rather like her, but in most things I go beyond her. Where she is deep, I am deeper. Where she is wonderful, I am still more wonderful. Where she had philosophy, I am a philosopher. Where she had astonishing vanity and conceit, I have yet more. She suffered with the pain of a woman, young; and I suffer with the pain of a woman, young and all alone. Nothing on the earth can suffer like a woman young and all alone. When I was four years old I was taken with my family to a little town in western Minnesota. My father died when I was eight. My life, though unsatisfying and warped, is fraught with poignant misery. I have nothing to occupy. So I write every day. I wish this [account] to be published and launched into that deep salt sea: the world. There are some surely who will understand it and me. Can I be possessed of a peculiar rare genius and yet drag out my life in obscurity in this uncouth, warped Montana town? If I thought the world contained nothing more than that for me—oh kind Devil, deliver me from it!
  • January 15: I find myself a genius, a thief, a liar—a general moral vagabond, a fool more or less, and a philosopher. Even this cannot make one happy. It serves, however, to occupy my versatile mind, to keep me wondering what it is the Devil has in store for me. I sit for two hours on the ground by the side of a pitiably small narrow stream of water. It is not even a natural stream. Still more pitiable than the stream is the dry, warped cemetery where the dry, warped people of Butte bury their dead. It is a source of satisfaction to me to walk down to this cemetery and contemplate it, and revel in its utter pitiableness. Its condition is more forlorn than that of a woman young and alone. It is unkempt, choked with dust and stones. A great many of the headstones are of wood and are in a shameful state of decay. Those that are of stone are still more shameful in their hard brightness. The Devil must rejoice in this graveyard. And I rejoice with the Devil, and so the Devil and I rejoice. The world is so constructed that its treasures may be damned each in a different manner and degree. I feel about forty years old. And I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. They do not feel any of these things at forty. At forty the fire has long since burned out. When I am forty I shall look back to myself and my feelings at nineteen—and I shall smile. Or shall I indeed smile?
  • January 17: I want Fame more than I can tell. But more than I want Fame I want Happiness. None of the other fools desires Happiness ]as I desire it. I am ready and waiting to give all that I have to the Devil in exchange for Happiness. I have been tortured so long with the dull, dull misery of Nothingness—all my nineteen years. The Devil has not yet come. But I know that he usually comes, and I wait him eagerly. I am fortunate that I am not one of those who are burdened with an innate sense of virtue and honor which must come always before Happiness. They are but few who find their Happiness in their Virtue. But with me Virtue and Honor are nothing. I long unspeakably for Happiness. And so I await the Devil’s coming. The Devil has given me some good things—for I find that the Devil owns and rules the earth and all that therein is. He has given me, among other things—my admirable young woman’s-body, which I enjoy thoroughly and of which I am passionately fond. I have grasped the art, the poetry of my fine feminine body. This at the age of nineteen is a triumph for me. At such a time this young body glows with life. My red blood flows swiftly and joyously—in the midst of the brightness of October. My strong and sensitive nerves are reeking and swimming in sensuality like drunken little Bacchantes “It is good,” I think to myself, “oh, it is good to be alive! It is wondrously good to be a woman young in the fullness of nineteen springs, to be a healthy young animal living on this charmed earth.”I am intensely thankful to the Devil for my two good legs and the full use of them under a short skirt, when, as now, they carry me out beyond the pale of civilization away from tiresome dull people. There is nothing in the world that can become so maddeningly wearisome as people, people, people! And so, Devil, accept, for my two good legs, my sincerest gratitude.
  • January 21: Often you hear a dozen stories of how the Devil was most ready and willing to take all from some one and give him his measure of Happiness. And sometimes the person was innately virtuous and so could not take the Happiness when it was offered. But Happiness is its own justification, and it should be eagerly grasped when it comes. A world filled with fools will never learn this. And so here I stand in the midst of Nothingness waiting and longing for the Devil. There are persons who say to me that I ought not to think of the Devil, that I ought not to think of Happiness—Happiness for me would be sure to mean something wicked; that I ought to think of being good. I ought to think of God. These are persons who help to fill the world with fools. At any rate their words are unable to affect me. What is wrong? What is right? What is good? What is evil? The words are merely words. The Devil is really the only one to whom we may turn, and he exacts payment in full for every favor. But surely he will come one day with Happiness for me.
  • January 28: I have acquired the art of eating an olive. I take the olive in my fingers, and I contemplate its green oval richness. It makes me think at once of the land where it grows, where the men are eager and passionate, and the women gracefully developed in mind and in body, and their two breasts show round and full [82]and delicately veined beneath thin drapery. I set my teeth and my tongue upon the olive, and bite it. It is bitter, salt, delicious, and my tongue is a happy tongue. As the morsel of olive rests in my mouth and is crunched and squeezed lusciously among my teeth, I think of some adorable lines of the Persian poet: “Give thyself up to Joy, for thy Grief will be infinite. The philosophy of my stomach is wholly Epicurean. Let it receive but a tiny bit of olive and it will reck not of the morrow, nor of the past. It lives, voluptuously, in the present. If this be vanity,—vanity let it be. Go hang yourself, you who have never been comfortably seated and eating an olive! I experience a feeling of fervent gladness that I am a female thing living, and that I have a tongue and some teeth, and salivary glands. “Avaunt, pale, shadowy ghosts of dyspepsia!” says my Stomach. “I know you not. I am of a brilliant, shining world. I dwell in Elysian fields.” I am now a gross but supremely contented sensualist. Where now, Devil, is your damnation? If this be damnation, damnation let it be! If this be the human fall, then how good it is to be fallen! At this moment I would fain my fall were like yours, Lucifer, never to hope again. If it please the Devil, one day I may have Happiness. But meanwhile I shall eat.
  • February 17: I walked over the hill where the sun vanishes in the afternoon. I stood in the valley below the hill and looked away at the gold-yellow mountains. It all reminded me of the Devil and the Happiness he will bring Someday the Devil will come to me and say: “Come with me.” And I will answer: “Yes.” And he will take me away with him to a place where it is wet and green—where the yellow, yellow sunshine falls on heaven-kissing hills, and misty, cloudy masses float over the valleys. And for days I shall be happy—happy—happy! For days! The Devil and I will love each other intensely, perfectly—for days! He will be incarnate, but he will not be a man. He will be the man-devil, and his soul will take mine to itself and they will be one—for days. Imagine me raised out of my misery and obscurity, dullness and Nothingness, into the full, brilliant life of the Devil—for days! The love of the man-devil will enter into my barren, barren life and melt all the cold, hard things, and water the barrenness, and a million little green growing plants will start out of it; and a clear, sparkling spring will flow over it—through the dreary, sandy stretches of my bitterness, among the false stony roadways of my pain and hatred. And a great rushing, flashing cataract of melting love will flow over my weariness and unrest and wash it away forever. We will be saturated in the yellow light of the sun and the gold light of Love. Not one faint shadow of the wretched Mary MacLane will remain. There will be instead a brilliant, buoyant, joyous creature—transformed, adorned, garlanded by the love of the Devil. Think of living with the Devil in a bare little house, in the midst of green wetness and sweetness and yellow light—for days! My grandest possibility will be realized. 
• From Mary MacLane: Herself, Michael Brown, 2025: In late April of 1902, a book was published by the arty, mildly adventurous Chicago firm of Herbert Stone and Company, an explicitly egoist work of Amazonian feminist self-postulation. Edited to tone down the 19-year-old author’s striking stylistic elements and controversial content–for instance, originally titled I Await the Devil’s Coming, it was changed to The Story of Mary MacLane–it was an immediate sensation in every sense. The instant uproar was the writer’s blessing and curse. It made her a household name and brought the wealth and the freedom that she had longed for, but it also overshadowed her. Since the 1970s there have been several waves of MacLane rediscovery., The 19-year-old author from Butte was the fourth child and the third and last daughter of John MacLane, who could not have known but might have suspected what was coming in the person of his quiet ,willful daughter. Mary recorded nothing of her early life in Winnipeg; the memories she later wrote about began after the family left Canada, when she was four. Mary remembers her early connection to Nature in Minnesota, the small lakes, the large brick house her parents built, and the outskirts of the town which for her was small. Mary at 14 came to love the nature books of New England novelist Maria Louise Pool. Her first surviving written works began in 1897, in a high school newspaper column called The Miniature World, for she views school as just that. A writer who spent time with her recalled, later, that she spoke in a mix of slang and prose “of almost classical purity.” Her writing imparts powerful personality, assertive first personness, and Amazonian individualism. Her sister Dolly took the Butte Library exam, got high marks, and started as a substitute assistant. In solidarity Mary tested as well. She found the questions boring; after eight of 25, she wrote a single essay in response–off-topic. She was not hired. Mary endlessly walked in every weather. At home she read and wrote and thought. What was to be done? Mary began to write a book. Her life, family, and, to an extent we’re still learning, American literature, would never be the same. 
  • The eventual publisher lightly edited the 47,000 word manuscript. She disliked the new title. The book is a public diary, and it covers three months in 1901, January through April, a symbolic journey from winter to spring. Unique and its immediate passion, it displays many registers and degrees of irony, and ranges from depression’s depths Into the air of possibilities. It is a fundamentally sincere document. She had written on a 10-cent dictation book and, defying all editorial rules, had written on both sides of the pages. Byron Cooney, a newly published writer who had gotten to know her, read aloud to his brother Percival, would get notice for several novels of his own in the mid-1910s. “I do not believe we made any suggestions of importance; certainly we did make any suggestions that Mary accepted.” When the manuscript reached the office of Stone, Mary joined such eminences as Ibsen, Chopin, and Conan Doyle, whom Stone’s Chief reader and literary editor Lucy Monroe had previously discovered. Lucy found the manuscript astonishing, she urged Herbert to accept it, and Stone announced release for April 26th The startling writing and the author’s arresting photo resulted in a national pandemonium. An article in Inter Mountain observed “This book is the work of either insanity or genius It is Young and radical and Pagan, but if you could it without reading more, you are not gifted with curiosity.” Reviews and editorials began appearing in extraordinary numbers. They ranged from shock and disgust to stunned admiration. Reports of her earnings differ, but a safe estimate is $20,000 the first few months, almost $720,000 in 2024. Stores could not keep it in stock, and copies were rented out at 25 cents a day. Mary had to duck into cafes and quickly walk ahead of Rowdy Newsboys calling out quotes from the book. At points police had to disperse crowds around her; when an ingenious fan got past the landlady at her rooming house by alleging interest in a room next to hers and shared lingering eye contact with her, thev wrote an exalted account of it for a newspaper. She left Butte. Mary took to journalism. For $150 per week, expenses paid, she wrote features under headlines like Mary McLane at Coney Island, Mary McLane on Wall Street, Mary McLean In Little old New York. Humorist Opie Reid was determined to meet her, and she granted a brief interview. He found her earnest and deeply serious. He believed in her book she’d “shredded her soul and hung it in the blaze of the noontide Sun. The waters she navigates are dark. She is a strangely original creature, containing the universe within herself.”
• From Mary MacLane, the Wild Woman from Butte, Hunter Dukes, Public Domain Review, 2025: On April 26, The Butte Daily Post ran an article with the title: “Mary MacLane’s Weird, Pagan Book Scorches Butte.” Critics were predictably scathing. A New York Times reviewer believed that “no one will take the book seriously or think of putting in a dignified protest against any of its ridiculous rot”, before suggesting that this “girl of nineteen” should be spanked.Yet she had defenders — the Washington Post called her debut “the most astounding book that has been brought out in years.” Mark Twain bristled: “Is the young woman a genie?” In the months after her book’s release, MacLane was in the news constantly, for increasingly bizarre reasons, such as when a fifteen-year-old girl was found dead in Kalamazoo, still clutching the text: “Morbidly mad from reading Mary MacLane in the nude, Frances Goodrich put a period to the life that she believed she was tired of.” MacLane demurred: “I am not at all surprised. She lived in Kalamazoo, for one thing.” A month after that, one Samuel Consentino was arrested after plotting to kidnap MacLane, while the head of the Butte Public Library tried to ban her from the shelves: “Mary MacLane’s book reeks with abominable passages”, he announced, “it is injurious to the morals of the city.” A few months later, the young organizer of Chicago’s Mary MacLane Society stole a horse as fodder for a novel-in-progress.  After her arrest, the horse thief gave an interview saying, “Yes, I have read Mary MacLane, but I am a stranger character than that.” Mary MacLane societies popped up across the country. She leased her name rights to a cigar company for $18,000; a Buffalo tugboat was christened in her honor; and the author’s favorite cocktail — an obscure drink called the Slanting Annie — sent bartenders and reporters reeling: “Whole City Guessing. Mary MacLane Nominates a New Poison. Bartenders up a Tree. Confess They Don’t Know What a ‘Slanting Annie’ Is.” With her fortune regained, MacLane traveled east in the summer. Her first stop was Chicago, where she stayed for a time with Lucy and Harriet Monroe, proposing marriage to the latter sister. Monroe, in turn, expressed awe to the press: “She is the most powerful personality I ever saw.
  •  Off the back of the uproar surrounding her debut, MacLane published a second book the following year. Expecting more in the same vein, readers were stumped upon opening My Friend Annabel Lee a surrealist account of the narrator’s friendship with a Japanese porcelain doll named after the Edgar Allan Poe poem. From here, MacLane’s biography gets spotty, a swirl of journalistic gossip, personal silence, and conflicting scholarly accounts. She cycled through jobs and worked for a time as a boxing reporter. She squandered her fortune and was arrested. For many years, she lived with Caroline Branson, the former long-term partner of Maria Pool, a writer whom MacLane admired. She loved to gamble. She freely expounded her controversial views on marriage, family, sex, religion, literature, morality, the idiocy of the rich, and anything else that came to mind. In addition to her articles for newspapers and magazines, MacLane went on to write a final book, I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days, which was announced five days before the United States entered World War I. Here she returns to her youthful eroticism, writing with even greater transparency about desire: “I am someway the Lesbian woman,” and her sexual history: “I have lightly kissed and been kissed by Lesbian lips in a way which filled my throat with a sudden subtle pagan blood-flavored wistfulness, ruinous and contraband: breath of bewildering demoniac winds smothering mine.” 
    • In 1918, MacLane capitalized on the silent film era’s fascination with vamps, co-writing and starring in a ninety-minute feature, now believed lost titled, “Men Who Have Made Love to Me.” Addressing the audience directly, MacLane recounts her amorous affairs with six men. And then, just over a decade later, in 1929, MacLane’s name splashed across British and American newspapers yet again: the originator of the “modern sex novel” had been found dead at the age of forty-eight, “in a lonely room on the fringe of Chicago’s poorest quarter”.She had long been frail — fighting bouts of scarlet fever and tuberculosis — but did not pass away lonely and alone as obituaries luridly proclaimed. In reality, she lived out these last days in the care of her final female companion, a Black photographer named Lucille Williams. In one of her last living appearances in the press, as a respondent to a 1925 query in The American Mercury asking if the author was still alive, she wrote: “Yes, I am alive. I am fond of the memory of my book of 1902. I don’t quite know what has become of me, but I’ve changed remarkably little.” MacLane’s books were out of print and difficult to find for decades, but in 2012, an Australian actress wrote and acted in a stage adaption of The Story of Mary MacLane. In 2013, MacLane’s first book was republished with its original title. In 2025, the first book-length biography of MacLane entered the world. Yet still her influence has not been fully excavated. “Always I wonder, when I die will there be anyone to remember me with love?” https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/i-am-making-the-world-my-confessor/#fn51 
• From Satanic Feminism, Per Faxneld, 2017: Central to the Story of Mary MacLane is the author’s burning desire to become Satan’s bride, and the exclamation ‘I am awaiting the coming of the Devil’ is repeated over and over again. Earlier research on MacLane has more or less neglected the fact that her use of Satan is quite clearly directly related to an established tradition of literary Satanism and also overlaps with contemporary esoteric and political use of the figure. MacLane highlights familiar motifs like the liberating demon lover, Satan as a voice of cultural criticism, diabolical lesbianism, and so on. MacLane’s challenges to gender norms were a major issue in the reception of her book. The San Francisco Call designated MacLane’s work the ‘worst trash that printer and publisher ever spent time and money on’ and its author a ‘silly maid’ who had written down ‘freak expressions of opinion.’ Newspapers played up the Satanic theme strongly, with drawings of MacLane and Satan in tender embrace or asking the author questions about the Devil in interviews. Headlines like ‘Loves the Devil Says Reckless Montana Girl Who Hankers for Notoriety’ and photo captions like ‘Mary MacLane, Here Without the Devil’ are typical. Gideon Wurdz’s satirical The Foolish Dictionary has the following entry for the Devil: ‘An old rascal now reported engaged to Mary MacLane.’ The Anaconda Standard offered a parody interview in which Mary declared: ‘Come Satan, Lucifer, Ahriman, Belial, Samael, Zamiel, Beelzebub, Titan, Shedim, Moloch, Asmodeus, Mephistopheles, Abaddon, Apollyon, come one, come all; I am not a polytheist; I am a polydiabolist.” MacLane herself actively contributed by offering up lurid demonic sound bites in interviews, telling the Hartford Herald ‘I love the devil. I want him to come for me.’ MacLane’s partisans at times felt compelled to offer apologetics for her use of this motif. Harriet Monroe stated: ‘All that talk about the devil–what imaginative young girl.’ 
  • The book oscillates between being joyously life-affirming and deeply morbid and pessimistic. The exuberant celebrations of life are, as we shall see, intimately tied up with Satan in MacLane’s world view. Satan is not simply a benevolent figure. He simultaneously symbolizes all that is dark and disturbing in MacLane’s soul, aspects of her that she, however, is not at all ashamed of, and there is clearly a Gothic streak in MacLane’s book, with an air of misanthropy and ghoulish delight at the horrible. MacLane asserts: ‘Death is fascinating—almost like the Devil. Death makes use of all his arts and wiles, powerful and alluring, and flirts with deadly temptation for me.’ Satan, however, is at least a temporary bulwark against the death drive: ‘First the Devil, then Death.’ Satan’s coming is a symbol of joy in the here-and-now, and she repudiates all ideas of being rewarded in an afterlife: ‘Upon dying it might be that I should go to some wondrous fair country, but I want the earthly Happiness. I am not high-minded and spiritual. I am earthly, human- sensitive, sensuous, and sensual.” The satisfaction Satan is going to bring her might seem of an objectionable kind to some, though MacLane, of course, cares little about their opinions. To MacLane, Satan is (metaphorically) her god, and the one who has bestowed upon her everything that is to her liking.
• From the Devil’s Letters To Mary Maclane, Anonymous, 1903: Dear Mary: I hope you will pardon my delay in replying to your very unusual and unexpected communication. You must know that there are many pressing demands upon me at all times. To say that I am astounded at the nature of your message but meagerly expresses it. As a rule, nothing ever astonishes me, but such an extraordinary communication from a woman of 19 years was a corker for even the devil! Really Mary, you’re overacted your part. If you had sent the message to me privately, that would have been different. But to calmly draw aside the curtains from your treasure house and your charnel house and say to the rabble of the earth behold! Well, Devil as I am, amazed! I can see your soul standing before you in utter nakedness before its final crucifixion! I could see it fall on its knees and beg for mercy. I can see it weeping for the strands of gleaming pearls you have stripped from its white throat and cast ruthlessly before the swine of the earth! The swine are crunching them between their teeth for acorns. Truly Mary, you are a Wonder! I have not been to you personally because I felt sure of you. I give my individual attention to only the pure, white souls who otherwise could escape me. Sometimes they slip through my fingers in spite of all my Endeavors. Is there such a possibility for you? What is the devil to expect of you next? Of course I am interested in all that concerns you, but to be honest and frank, your friend Annabelle Lee is too tame for me. The next time you come, leave our friend Annabelle Lee at home. While the name of Mary MacLane is on the lips of everyone, it’s only just and natural that the devil, to whom your most Earnest please are addressed, communicate to you his sentiments regarding yourself. So cheaply bought, expect to be cheaply prized. And if there may be no other use to which you may be applied, I can at least make a plaything of you. Yours deploringly: The devil.
• From Mary MacLane on Marriage, Chicago Herald, 1917: I have singular views on several subjects in the gamut of human experience. I doubt if my views on marriage are more erratic than some others, but my opinions on it are less likely to change and moderate than almost any others in me. For marriage, as a condition and an institution, looks to me something as sinister and forlorn and as near the old fashioned concept of hell as anything that’s legal. It’s entire end and aim, it’s alpha and Omega, is restriction, and a desolate dependence of spirit. To make marriage an ideal thing, people should marry only those they want to, stay married only because they want to, and should, when they want to, quit. But the statute books make it an airtight as an affidavit and as cold-blooded as a mortgage. They would have us married by the clock, as well as have laws to govern the brushing of our teeth and the wearing of our gauds. Marrying should always be and only be an affair of mutual agreement. But civilization and its conventions are not quite compatible with idyllic marriage. It’s chiefly because we have laws that we break them. It’s because we’re not supposed to steal that 99% of us would lift a diamond necklace or heavy roll of banknotes whenever we saw it not nailed down. It’s because rum is bad for us that so many see it as worth going after. And since saffron tea is good for us, no one’s crazy about it. Because the restrictions of marriage are made watertight by the hand of the law, that is the reason they spring so many leaks. The name of the Dead marriage is Legion. I would rather pass my days in gaiety and peace and lightness of heart,although  it might be in poverty and deprivation in a tent on a hillside, a hut in a desert, or wandering afoot by country roadsides. My slim young body would be quickly worn out, but all the better that I should die with the dying of witcheries. It would be worth even the passing of my life and the losing of the great glittering world and its romance, garlanded with amaranth and perfumed with myrrh. I know there are countless outwardly conventional women in the world whose feelings are equally Pagan. In truth, very many of the things I, Mary MacLane, say openly and get slammed for, are the inward convictions of unconfessed thousands.