Crossroads Demon

Before there was a devil at the crossing there was already someone there receiving offerings. In Greece Hecate was called Enodia, she who is in the road, and Trioditis, she of the three ways; on new-moon nights the so-called suppers of Hecate were left at the crossing, food that afterwards no one in the household was to touch. Rome treated the spot the same way: at every compitum, the point where several estates met and their paths joined, stood an altar of the Lares Compitales, and the Compitalia were celebrated exactly there, on the boundary that belonged to no house. The crossing was a place without an owner and without a door, good for leaving whatever should not come back indoors. That is the ground Christianity inherits, already loaded with dealings with whatever walks at night.

With Christianisation the threshold becomes enemy ground. The crossing lies outside the churchyard, and there are buried those who cannot rest in consecrated earth: suicides and the executed, in some places with a stake driven through them, and always at a point where, so it was said, the dead would not know which way to take to get home. There too the gallows were raised, on the parish boundary and in plain sight of anyone arriving from outside. The custom lasted in England until an act of 1823 forbade burying suicides at crossroads. From such a place to the place where the devil is called is a short step: it is unblessed, it belongs to no one, and whoever goes there at night knows perfectly well that he has stepped outside the parish.

The idea of signing with the devil is older than the crossing and comes in by another door. The legend of Theophilus of Adana, circulated in Latin from the ninth century in the version ascribed to Paul the Deacon, tells of a church steward who hands over a written document in exchange for his office and who later gets it back through the Virgin's intercession: the contract exists, and it can be broken. What joins that contract to the crossroads is a book printed at Frankfurt in 1587 by Johann Spies, the History of Doctor Johann Faust. There Faust goes out at night to a crossroads in the Spesser Forest near Wittenberg; between nine and ten he traces circles with his staff and conjures; the devil arrives in the midst of a great storm and appears in the habit of a grey friar, giving the name Mephostophiles. The term is twenty-four years and the document is signed in blood. Marlowe brings it to the stage around 1592 and Goethe rewrites it between 1808 and 1832, but the scene of the crossing, the circle and the signature was already fixed in that book of 1587.

It is worth separating what is documented from what was added later. European folklore knows no demon holding the office of attending crossroads: the crossing is where you call, not a post assigned to anyone, and whoever comes may give any name he likes. Nor does it fix a single term, since the twenty-four years belong to the book of 1587 and not to a general rule, nor does it know the kiss that seals the bargain, nor a pack of hounds charged with collecting the debt when it falls due. All of that belongs to the screen fiction of the twenty-first century, which rearranged the old material into a closed, easily narrated rulebook. What the tradition does offer is the opposite of a rulebook: a place without an owner, a written contract, and the possibility, open ever since Theophilus, of getting the signed paper back. And the figure who tunes guitars at the crossings of the American South is another branch, with its own documentation and another line of transmission.