Free Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood Page B

in Hogg’s novel it duly makes its appearance. One of his first encounters with the mysterious stranger is in a church, where the enigmatic one is found reading something that at first glance looks like a Bible:
I came up to him and addressed him, but he was so intent on his book that, though I spoke, he lifted not his eyes. I looked on the book also, and still it seemed a Bible, having columns, chapters, and verses; but it was in a language of which I was wholly ignorant, and all intersected with red lines and verses. A sensation resembling a stroke of electricity came over me, on first casting my eyes on that mysterious book, and I stood motionless. He looked up, smiled, closed his book, and put it in his bosom. “You seem strangely affected, dear sir, by looking at my book,” said he mildly. “In the name of God, what book is that?” said I. “Is it a Bible?”
“It is my Bible, sir,” said he.
    Quite soon the mysterious stranger starts talking of blood bonds, and we readers know who he is: for the blood bond and the shockingly bad book are two unmistakable attributes of the fifteenth-to-nineteenth-century Devil — the literary one, at least — who tempts you into making a contract with him that you have to sign with your own sanguinary fluid. Hogg’s evil book seems to be a satanic version of Scripture, though more usually the Devil’s tome is an account book, in which the souls of the already-purchased are noted down, ready to be collected when the fatal moment comes. Céline has a novel called Death on the Installment Plan, and that is in effect what the Devil is selling: you buy now, you enjoy the benefits of whatever goodies the Devil provides, and then you pay later, forever.
    Patrick Tierney, in his fascinating book The Highest Altar: The Story of Human Sacrifice , comments on the different — and older — traditions that prevail among the shamans — or yataris — of the Lake Titicaca region in South America.
Here the very masochistic, and Christian, notion of selling your own soul to the devil in exchange for a treasure never caught on — or made much sense. The Aymara yatari’s more practical approach was to sell someone else to the devil, “body and soul” . . . the way to avoid harm in making a pact with the devil was simply to give the devil a human victim. . . . Obviously, someone is physically killed in this diabolical exchange. Not so obvious, however, is the sinister underlying deal whereby the soul of that person is permanently enslaved. . . .
    In former times, before the coming of Europeans to this region, the sacrificial victim — usually a young, innocent person or child — was mentally and emotionally prepared in advance, feasted and flattered and convinced to take on the role willingly, thus becoming a volunteer guardian spirit for all — a powerful conduit for spiritual forces that served the entire community. In this way the victim was akin to the Sin Eater, and thus to the scapegoat: a taboo figure, “accurst,” as the Sin Eater in Precious Bane is called, but also blessed; a figure who after his sacrificial death was revered, approached with fear and trembling, and given sacrifices in his or her turn.
    Among present-day Lake Titicaca yataris and their customers, however — says Tierney — individual pacts with the local deities are undertaken for selfish ends involving worldly wealth and power, and the victim is far from willing. In fact, he or she is lured to the sacrificial spot and murdered, and the soul is enslaved and made to do whatever the entrapper wants. Those performing the sacrifices are said to live in fear of the souls escaping and then wreaking vengeance, like Spartacus or the wives and daughters in Germinal — resentment at unfair treatment being a universal unpaid debt that cries out for a balancing of the scales.
    Early in human history, lists of such offerings to the supernatural forces, and pacts with them, and debts owing to them, wouldn’t have been