Bible tours are a familiar sight at the British Museum. There are many artefacts in its collections that are associated with various books of the Bible - the current exhibition Babylon makes these links explicit. But why should Christians have it all their own way?
The devil too has left traces in archaeology. In the British Museum's Mesopotamian galleries you may chance on a case containing small bronze and stone figures of an Assyrian demon called Pazuzu. He has a face of pure malignity. This wrinkled monstrosity resembles at one and the same time a medieval gargoyle and a Chinese dragon. It was, however, a more specific association that stopped me in my tracks when I came across it a few months ago. It can't be, I thought ...
I'd just watched The Exorcist. Fans of William Friedkin's 1973 horror film will recall that the exorcist played by Max von Sydow is also an archaeologist, and when we first meet him he is excavating a site in a middle eastern city. There, strange intimations of evil trouble him among the ruins. And presiding over the eerie ancient site where he has this revelation is a timeworn sculpture with the unmistakable face of Pazuzu, exactly as it appears in the British Museum.
This is not a chance reference. The scene was filmed near
Nineveh. The demon in the film is very specifically intended to be Pazuzu. Yet the surprise of encountering this demon from The Exorcist in the British Museum is actually an insight into why this is such a memorable film. There is obviously a vast amount of literary and theological material behind it, similar to the densely specific apocalyptic plots of comparable films such as The Omen and its sequels. But what's so clever and haunting about Friedkin's film is that while all these complex intimations are there, the least hint of explication has been ruthlessly edited out. There is no long-winded explanation offered by anyone for what is happening. Everything is suggested, rather than explained, and connections are left hanging in mid-air. Why, for example, does the possession take place in Washington DC? Is there a political implication - or not? We are never told. And yet Watergate-era Washington is brilliantly portrayed, in a way that makes the film's location seem significant.
Horror rarely has the sense to leave explanations so eerily lacking. And yet the research is real, the context is real. Pazuzu is real. Because the film does not explain the connection between ancient Assyria and the devil, but implies it, there is something genuinely diabolical about encountering its villain at the British Museum.
