The “occult world,” or occulture, is a term that has developed a very wide meaning in modern academic discourse. The full panoply of occult thinking is enormous. While always mindful of the broader definition of the subject, this essay is largely limited to what the author believes would be an acceptable vernacular definition of the occult as essentially referring to black magic, and most especially to the satanic. This has been a subject with enormous resonance for American history and culture. The argument in this chapter is that Satan has played, and continues to play, a central – and on occasion a decisive – role in American cultural and political life. He is a figure deeply in the American grain, a vivid and personal presence in the lives of many millions of Americans, given powerful and recurring embodiment in American popular culture, in particular. But he is also a presence centrally informing some of the classic works of American literature.

In the seventeenth century there was still no clear distinction between the child’s interiority and the adult’s, since ‘saving’ grace could arrive at any point in the lifespan. However, a rudimentary developmental idea was already defining the category of childhood more sharply by calendar age. This becomes clear in the principles behind the experimental primary schools established by the Jansenist wing of French Catholicism, including figures such as Antoine Arnauld and the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, as an alternative to Jesuit education. The Jansenist schools aimed at preserving the purity of children assumed to be elect (i.e. those of their own families) from contamination by the surrounding mass of reprobates in thrall to the Devil. The educational method was precisely not religious instruction but a secular, humanist curriculum based on reason. This went hand in hand with close control of the children in a panopticon; school discipline switched from physical punishment to moral shaming. The history of education as an academic discipline shows an unwitting bias towards being a history of the elect child.