Was One Of America’s Most Famous Blues Legends Because Of A Demon Deal
Hellhound On My Tail and Crossroad Blues were great tunes but did they tell of Robert Johnson selling his soul.
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Many people have heard the story but not many people know the history. If you’ve heard the story of the “Faustian Pact” it refers to a 15th-century deal between a clergyman and the demon Mephistopheles. It’s debatable what happened but the Faustian Deal has become an ingredient in many literary, musical, artistic, and cinematic pieces. In recent years the pact with the devil, or demons, has become a recurring ingredient in the just ended television series, Supernatural. Most of those deals centered around the characters of the crossroads demons, most notably the character of Mark Sheppards’ Crowley.
I first heard of the deal at the crossroads while doing some reading during my freshman year in high school. While at the time it was all just in good fun, and by no means research or a book I’d remember thirty-five years later, there was an entire chapter devoted to “The Four Paths” or “The Crossroads”. While following up on the obscure legends and myths surrounding the crossroads deals and crossroads demons I learned that the practice itself, while certainly sounding satanic in origin, was attributed more to early Druidian beliefs and Pagan rituals. What I found interesting, even intriguing, was that nearly every culture over the past twenty-five-hundred-plus years has a belief in pacts with the devil or demons.
The Greeks associated the crossroads with the Goddess Hecate and God Hermes, even building shrines to take to the crossroads. They would mark the crossroads with pillars as travelers associated with the gods as guides during their travels. In Medieval times in what we now call the United Kingdom, there was a tradition of burying criminals and anyone that took their own lives at the crossroads. These areas were commonly used as places to perform executions on convicted criminals. From the dark continent of Africa to the Greek Isles, to Eastern Europe, and Brazil, cultures around the world have had beliefs of the crossroads being centers of supernatural or paranormal power, but why?
