Jacqueline Simpson | Letters to Ambrose Merton # 19, 1999

It was quite a common medieval notion that we all have not only one Good Angel (+ Guardian Angel) but also a Bas Angel (= Demon) assigned by Satan to be our own individual tempter. An early-ish literary use of this idea is in the 15th century morality play, Everyman. The hero is accompanied through life by an angel and a demon who both try to influence him. A very clever modern version is C. S. Lewis’s Screwtop Letters, though there the focus is on the demon.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 144 exploits the theme:

Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still;
The better angel is a man right fair.
The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill.
To win me soon the hell my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side…

I think there is a convention in art that an angel would stand on the right of the human being, a devil on the left, and that this is the origin of the stage convention, still observed in pantomime, that the Demon King witches, etc. enter on the left. I’m afraid I can’t precisely document this, though I do note that Philippe Aries in The Hour of Our Death (Part 1, section 3, “Hour of Death: Final Reckoning, p 195 in te paperback edition ) describes an illustrated treatise of 1736, where at the deathbed of a sinner, “to the left we see the devil presenting him with a book which contains the history of his evil life”. The ultimate source would obviously be the Last Judgement sheep-and-goats imagery from the gospels.

Also, when we throw spilled salt over the left shoulder, we are told this is to blind the devil who lurks there.