ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on this darker side of demonic struggles and situates this discussion within its larger British, Atlantic and European contexts.1 Through examination of the circulation of English texts in Scotland and brief comparison with Reformed communities abroad, it demonstrates how transnational discussions of sin, Satan and human nature informed personal religious experience. Ultimately, this chapter identifies a process of anxiety and self-identification as evil that occurred during introspective, personal engagement with Satan, loosely coined here as ‘internalizing the demonic’.This process reveals the close and consequential relationship between the clerical promotion of self-surveillance and the widely internalized belief in the Devil’s natural affinity with ‘man’s evil heart’.