“The Demon Pope” was written by Richard Garnett and first appeared in The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales (1888). Garnett (1835-1906) was a scholar, an author, and a librarian with the British Museum. He is best-known for the Twilight of the Gods. “The Demon Pope” is a wry, entertaining story about Gerbert, the legendary demon Pope.

There was a real Gerbert, Pope Sylvester II (c. 945-1003), an erudite Frenchman who was said to have studied in Moorish schools in Spain in his youth before he became Pope. Gerbert was also said to have gained his great knowledge through magic means and an oracular brass head, and to have gained the Papacy through a deal with the Devil.

One day in the tenth century the devil approaches a student and offers to buy his soul in exchange for a few extra decades of life. Unfortunately for the devil, he is dealing with Gerbert, who is not willing to sell his soul for any amount of extra life. The devil is eventually forced to settle for giving Gerbert worldly success for the next forty years in exchange for a boon forty years hence. If Gerbert does not grant the boon, off he goes to Hell, but the devil promises that the boon will be “not your soul, mind, or anything not perfectly in your power to grant.”¹ Gerbert, not seeing much downside to this deal, accepts. Forty years pass, and Gerbert advances, first to the Abbacy of Bobbio, and from there to bishop, archbishop, cardinal, and eventually Pope. The devil reappears, and he and Gerbert have a genial conversation. The devil wants to be made a cardinal, something Gerbert is not willing to agree to. (Lucifer, you see, wants to extirpate heresy, “and all learning and knowledge as inevitably tending thereunto,”² and that’s something Gerbert, a friend of intellectual inquiry, cannot allow). Gerbert makes a counteroffer, one that Lucifer is happy to accept: Lucifer can be Pope for twelve hours, and at the end of those twelve hours, if he is not “more anxious to divest yourself of the Papal dignity than you were to assume it, I promise to bestow upon you any boon you may ask within my power to grant, and not plainly inconsistent with religion or morals.”³ Lucifer takes over Gerbert’s body and assumes the Papacy but quickly discovers that it is not what he had hoped for. The cardinals attack him for talking Arabic, reading Hebrew, and other such things which sorcerers do. The cardinals wrap him up and then begin investigating him for signs of his infernal compact. They find a cloven hoof, which the devil, regardless of shape, carries with him always. This discovery stuns the cardinals, and they quickly change their minds and stash him in a dungeon, which is cold and dark, something the devil finds unpleasant. Each of the cardinals visit him and attempt to flatter him, persuade him that they are faithful followers of his, position themselves for the Papacy once the current occupant passes on, and betray their fellows. The twelve hours pass and Lucifer switches places with Gerbert, but not before imprisoning the cardinals in the dungeon. Lucifer demands of Gerbert–he was owed a boon by Gerbert, remember–that the cardinals be released unharmed, as they are all sympathetic to the devil’s position. Gerbert agrees, although he is disappointed, having hoped that Lucifer would carry the cardinals off. The cardinals continue to think that Gerbert is Lucifer, until Gerbert institutes the policy of kissing the Pope’s foot, and Gerbert continues to carry out good works.

“The Demon Pope” is Garnett’s fictional account of Gerbert's life, and it is an entertaining one. The tone of the story is light-hearted and ironic, with conversational dialogue and a subtextual authorial attitude which is witty rather than judgmental or shrill or too serious, which is how earlier writers would have treated the subject. “The Demon Pope,” with its irony, erudition, and understatement, reads like one of the better stories from the 1920s or 1930s. It is a type of “deal with the devil” story, and as such may put off experienced readers, but it is smart and fast-moving, entertaining, and well worth reading.

It is notable that Garnett felt free to use the life of a Pope—even one who had historically provoked numerous tales and legends—in such a fashion. Personally Garnett was a kind of mystic; he “cherished a genuine and somewhat mystical sense of religion, which combined hostility to priestcraft and dogma with a modified belief in astrology.”⁴ Given his stance toward Catholicism, it’s hardly a surprise that he wrote “The Demon Pope.” But more broadly “The Demon Pope” is representative of the anti-Catholicism of the Victorian era, when mockery of the Church was customary by the English:

In the multi-voiced religious culture of Victorian Britain, anti-Catholic mockery was a popular activity for politicians, historians and sages as well as churchmen. Cultural and social historians have tracked its deployment, suggesting its significance at national and regional levels for understanding the complex relationship between church and state at the time. Non-fiction and imaginative writing associated with overt prejudice against the Roman Catholic Church has also attracted recent scholarly interest for its importance in the formation of nineteenth-century Anglo-American national identities. In her informative study of anti-Catholicism in nineteenth century American literary and historical writing, Jenny Franchot shows how the rhetoric of religious prejudice performed a vital cultural role in the antebellum period, providing oppositional images against which an emergent Protestant middle-class identity could be asserted. More recently, Susan Griffin has built on this approach historically and geographically. By taking her study to the turn of the century, Griffin suggests that Protestant national, political and religious self-definition was a dynamic, fluid process, dependent on the flexible familiarity of anti-Catholic discourse. Juxtaposing American and British anti-Catholic novels, Griffin also reminds us of the transnational nature of anti-Catholic polemic. While each nation had its own national burdens – from the Empire to the impact of immigration on the nature of American citizenship – writing anti-Catholicism was a persistently popular way of writing ‘Protestant’ and of establishing the normative version of America and Britain.⁵

Recommended Edition Print: Richard Garnett, The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2015.

¹ Richard Garnett, “The Demon Pope,” Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1888), 142.

² Garnett, “The Demon Pope,” 144.

³ Garnett, “The Demon Pope,” 147.

⁴ “Richard Garnett,” Dictionary of National Biography, qtd. in Joseph McCabe, A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (London: Watts & Co., 1920), 281.

⁵ Maureen Moran, Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 2.