Status Updates From Devil's Contract: The Histo...

“Love may not answer or justify anything, but it’s the only genuine and complete resistance that we have”

The first decent chapter of the book. Barely passable and a completely surface level interpretation of the Faust play by Goethe. Shouldn’t have taken 175 pages to get to this point and I am still let down. The only interesting aspect of the chapter was the tie in to the history of the gestapo and the idea of “lebensraum”. A measly 3 pages of the chapter filled with personalized cartoonish rhetoric.

Opinion hasn’t changed about the book now we are going to get into Goethe my wheelhouse. This will make or break my true opinion very close to dnfing

This is a slop book - most pretentious prose for a popcorn history book I’ve ever read. Actually spiking my cortisol to levels unheard of. This first chapter regarding Simon Magus is an absolute stretch and the argument he tries to employ is utterly boring. You have 200 more pages to do something interesting but so far all I’ve learned is the names of 7 gnostic heretical denominations. Wow thanks bro

Bacon has been the victor over Dee, for while the latter may have concurred with Marlowe's Faustus that "necromantic books, are heavenly," the former had the benefit of results. Wizards like Dee held to a faith that from their scrying mirror they were speaking to angels, that Enochian truths were imparted through arcane rituals, but Baconian empiricism led to the entire technological revolution.

Lilith enters Jewish and Christian mythology as a bit of a rounding error. Because the Bible offers two clashing tales of creation--Adam and his partner are first having been described as simultaneously generated from the earth and only later is the more famous story about Eve drawn from Ada's rib recounted--Lilith was introduced as a means of correcting such an obvious disjuncture.

Paradise Regained is an epic which reads as if it were written by a Puritan, a triumph not of the purple but of the plain. Milton's second great epic sings "not of arms/But to vanquish by wisdom hellish wiles." Any attempt at temptation which Satan makes to Christ--neither appeals to pride, power, or knowledge are capable of swaying Jesus from his mission--fails.

Will I ever finish? Will the author ever stay on topic? I really don’t know anymore, but the latter seems especially unlikely.

Am I actually 60% through yet? I'm not sure. Are my notes all still things like "SHUT UP" and "NO"? They are. Does this book just need to stop already? It sure does!

Most of my notes say something like “SHUT. UP.”

So yeah, it’s going great.

I don’t know if I can finish this. It needed editorial attention it did not receive (this book would be at least a third shorter without all the poor phrasing and unnecessary words). It is also not quite what it says on the tin. Furthermore, like many nonfiction authors, this writer strays from the subject of his expertise and makes enthusiastic, grandiose, and completely wrong pronouncements. Sigh.