Why Does The Devil Make You Nervous?

Last year I took a class called The Story of The Devil, which was really cool. We looked at the devil mostly as a literary character, his evolution from the bible, to stories like Milton's Paradise Lost, to Russian folklore and then Russian literature. For our final project, we were told "do a project." So, we basically had freedom to make up whatever we wanted, as long as we related it somehow to the class. 



The project I came up with was a sort of very unofficial experiment. I went around asking people (mostly people I knew, but quite a few I didn't) to draw a picture of the devil. At first I was doing this because I was interested in just collecting a bunch of pictures, and then using them to make a photomosaic or somethign like that. But, after awhile, I started noticing that interesting things were happening when I asked people this seemingly simple question. 



If I asked you, "draw a flower,"  how many questions would you have for me? Maybe a few like color or black and white? how big? what kind of flower? I basically told people, "draw me your conception of the devil, whatever that may be, however you want to represent it, whether or not you believe this devil exists." This seems simple enough, right? If you believe in a devil from your religion, draw what you think that looks like. If you don't believe in the devil, then draw your conception of the devil as a character, or as an icon for evil. Not terribly difficult. It can be a stick figure, it can be horrible drawing, it can be something you saw in a cartoon. There are nearly as many ways to draw a flower, but for a flower, I don't believe I would have encountered anywhere near the anxiety I encountered with the devil.



Because I was only looking for pictures to use in a collage, I wasn't expecting to be looking in detail at each picture someone drew. I just wanted visuals to contribute to the overall project--at least at first. So that's why I didn't expect the anxiety I encountered. People literally freaked out, and got very upset at this question. They would tell me they couldn't draw well, and so they couldn't do it--they would be very, very concerned that they were simply incapable of drawing whatever was in their heads, far beyond the point where anyone drawing a flower would be feeling. They would also try to ask me so many questions, before and even during the time they drew the picture, and I would try to answer as few as possible once I became more interested in the process than the outcome. What kind of devil? What if I don't believe in the devil? Can I just draw my concept of evil instead? Can I use words too? Does it have to be a person? Is it okay if it doesn't look like the "normal" devil? A lot of people wanted to use words because they felt their picture was not doing justice to whatever it was they wanted to represent--even when I was telling them that I just wanted pictures to use in a collage. When they thought that I was not going to study their drawing at all, that it wasn't going to be looked at in detail by anyone, that their name wouldn't be on it, that it in no way mattered what it looked like just so long as I had some sort of picture to use--even then, they were very, very worried about what it looked like. 



Most of the people I asked were adults, but at one point I did approach a group of teenagers and asked them to participate. One young girl got very upset with me, and seemed to think that there was somethign sacreligious about drawing the devil. I explained to her that I was just trying to find out different things tha tpeople thought about the devil, not that I was trying to worship him or anything. I told her that it didn't even matter if she believed in the devil--she could draw her religion's devil, or she could just draw a character like the one you might see in movies or on tv. Eventually, I managed to convince her that I wasn't trying to convert her to Satanism or something, and she drew me a picture, but it took an awful lot to get her there. She seemed to think there was something inherently bad about drawing that picture. 



In the end, there were definate themes to the pictures (I collected around 80 or so pictures). I got a lot of pictures of your typical devil, the little red guy with horns and a pitchfork. Then there were the pictures with the more classically themed devil--with goat's legs, clawed feet, wings, more of a gargoyle look. And then there were the purely conceptual drawings, like a scribbled black cloud with different evil things written in it (like rape, torture). And of course a very few jokes, like a picture of Dick Cheney. 



But still, I am most interested in everyone's reactions. Why were they soo nervous? What were they scared of? I also wonder, the people who believed in the devil versus the people who didn't--were they anxious about the same things, or was it a different experience? Obviously, for everyone, it's probably very difficult to put such a vague concept into the form of a picture, especially if you've never really thought about it before. But as much as it may be difficult, I still wonder why it was so terrifying--what did people think would happen if they couldn't make it look the way they wanted? What could be so bad about that?