The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith (1893–1961)
Listen Here:
The story "The Devotee of Evil" was first published in the American fantasy and science fiction pulp magazine Weird Tales, appearing in the issue dated July 1933. It was part of Clark Ashton Smith's mature period as a writer for the magazine, overlapping with his better-known Zothique and Hyperborea tales, though it stands apart as a more contemporary, psychological piece. The story has since been reprinted in various Smith collections, most notably in the Arkham House volumes that consolidated his short fiction, and in later paperback and small-press anthologies devoted to his work and to classic weird fiction more broadly. Exact pagination and placement vary by edition, but its original context was firmly within the interwar "weird" milieu that Weird Tales cultivated.
Smith finished writing it in early 1930 but had difficulty finding a market for it. After failed submissions to Ghost Stories, Galaxy, Illustrated Detective Magazine, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, he included it in his self-published The Double Shadow and Other Fantasies in June 1933, alongside "The Double Shadow" and "The Maze of the Enchanter." Almost a decade later it reappeared in the February 1941 issue of Stirring Science Stories. The New Orleans submission is a detail worth noting — Averaud himself is from New Orleans, hence Smith's attempt to place it there.
The story's working title was also "The Manichaean," which is revealing — Smith's synopsis describes it as a tale of a devotee of absolute cosmic evil who finally evokes pure evil in the form of a black radiation that leaves him petrified into an image of eternal horror.
Zoroastrianism
Averaud mentions Ahriman — the Zoroastrian name for the evil principle — only to distance himself from it ("a Satan? No"). Zoroastrianism is the prior tradition to Manichaeism: Ahura Mazda versus Ahriman, light versus darkness, a cosmic dualism that Mani inherited and systematised. The Zoroastrian tradition is where the idea of evil as a personal cosmic force with genuine metaphysical standing first achieves clear articulation in Western religion. Averaud rejects the personal form of the tradition — he doesn't want a Satan with intentions and a biography — but keeps the structural claim: that evil is a fundamental principle, not a human failing or a theological problem to be explained away.
Manichaeism and Cosmic Dualism
The working title "The Manichaean" is the key. Manichaeism — the third-century Persian religion of Mani — held that the universe is the product of an eternal conflict between a God of Light and an absolute, co-equal Principle of Darkness. Not evil as the absence of good, which is Augustine's position and orthodox Christianity's, but evil as a positive, primary force with its own ontological status. The light-particles of the soul are trapped in corrupt matter; the whole physical world is a prison created by the dark principle. Averaud's theory is recognisably Manichaean: evil is not a deficiency but a radiation, a positive force emanating from a cosmic source. The dark sun. He even has Beausobre's monograph on Manichaeism in his library — Smith placed it there deliberately.
Manichaeism was condemned as the great Christian heresy precisely because it denied that creation is good. If evil is a co-equal force, then the physical world — matter, bodies, decay — belongs to the dark principle. Averaud's extension of this to "chemical reactions, the growth and decay of trees, flowers, minerals" is not his own eccentricity; it is straight Manichaean cosmology. He is a nineteenth-century Manichaean who has decided to treat his theology as a scientific hypothesis.
Augustine versus the Manichaeans
Augustine was himself a Manichaean for nine years before his conversion, which is why his refutation of them is so forensic. His counter-argument is that evil has no independent existence — it is privatio boni, the privation or absence of good, the way darkness is the absence of light. Evil cannot be a thing because only God can create, and God creates only good. What we call evil is the corruption of a good thing, a turning away from being toward non-being. This is crucial because Augustine's framework means you cannot evoke, summon, or concentrate evil — you can only diminish good. Averaud's whole project, the attempt to manifest "pure absolute evil," is theologically incoherent on Augustinian grounds: absolute evil would be absolute non-being, absolute nothingness. Which is, in a way, exactly what he becomes — a black statue, charred, the opposite of light and warmth and life, the most complete image of non-being Smith could render in physical form.
Smith has his cake both ways here. The story dramatises the Manichaean view — evil is real, it can be summoned, it is a positive radiation — but the end result, the petrified statue, is consistent with the Augustinian: Averaud doesn't gain access to an absolute positive force of evil; he encounters absolute negation, absolute death-in-life, absolute non-being. The black sun turns out to be a black hole. But it is not quite Augustinian either, because the black hole is still something, and the statue is something, not nothing.
Jung Again
Here we need to make a move that the theologians, for all their ingenuity, never quite made. Whether you are a Manichaean locating evil in a cosmic dark principle, or an Augustinian insisting it is merely an absence, you are doing the same thing: looking outward. Evil is always somewhere else — in the cosmos, in the void, in the Enemy. It is never in the person doing the looking.
Jung noticed this. It was, for him, the central psychological fact about evil — not its metaphysical status but its direction. The question he asked was not what is evil, but where does our sense of evil come from, and why does it always seem to live outside us?
His answer was the Shadow.
The Shadow is Jung's term for the contents of the psyche that the conscious personality refuses to acknowledge — the darkness, the destructive impulses, the capacity for cruelty and selfishness and dissolution that every human being carries and most will not look at directly. It is roughly equivalent to the Freudian unconscious: all the things we do not want to acknowledge are denied and either repressed or, in this case, projected. In Jungian terms the Shadow is not evil, though it feels evil to the person encountering it. It is simply what accumulates on the other side of the ego's bright self-image: the unlived life, the rejected qualities, everything we have decided we are not. The danger is not in having a Shadow — everyone does — but in refusing to know it.
Because what we refuse to know in ourselves does not disappear. It goes somewhere. And the place it goes, almost invariably, is outward — into the world, onto other people, onto cosmic forces, onto the Devil. Jung, drawing on a Freudian idea, called this projection. We take the unowned contents of the inner life and throw them onto the screen of the external world, where they appear to us as objective features of reality — fascinating, threatening, numinous, absolutely real — because we have no sense of their origin inside ourselves. The more charged the shadow content, the more powerful the projection. The more powerful the projection, the more completely the interior has been evacuated in its favour.
Jung gave this insight its classic formulation. It appears in several variations across his Collected Works, most notably in Aion (CW 9ii):
"The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict."
A more concise and widely cited version is:
"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."
Another formulation from the Collected Works (CW 9:126) puts it this way:
"What is not brought to consciousness, comes to us as fate."
And here, at last, we can see Jean Averaud clearly.
Jean Averaud has spent years — his entire adult life — in passionate, systematic, intellectually rigorous study of evil. He has traced it through demonologies and ancient religions, through chemistry and history and poetry, through the decay of minerals and the growth of trees. He has built a cosmology around it. (In my view he has mistaken entropy for evil, but I will come back to that.) He has modified a house to further his study. He has dressed himself in a Faustian costume to receive the darkness. And in all of that time, through all of that devotion, he has never once asked the question that would have saved him: what does my fascination with evil tell me about myself?
Every impulse toward cruelty that we repress, every destructive thought we disown, every capacity for selfishness and dissolution that we decide is not us — it builds up behind the bright self-image of the conscious personality, growing charged, growing autonomous, growing restless. Because Averaud will not look at it directly, it finds another way to make itself known. It goes outward. It becomes the world's darkness rather than his own. It becomes the evil out there — in other people, in cosmic forces, in a black sun somewhere in the depths of space.
The diagnostic key is this: the energy of the projection is proportional to the charge of the content. The more powerful the fascination, the more completely the shadow has been externalised. Averaud's obsession is not merely intellectual interest. It is total, lifelong, organised around evil with the devotion of a saint organised around God. That quality of absolute orientation is the measure of his shadow's size. He has thrown everything outward. The interior has been completely evacuated in favour of the cosmic exterior.
Which Brings Us to Fifine
Fifine is Averaud's anima — in Jung's framework, the inner feminine figure who carries the feeling function, the relational capacity, the bridge between the ego and the deeper life of the unconscious. She is the part of the psyche that knows before the ego knows, that feels the temperature of the soul, that sounds the warning when the conscious personality is heading toward destruction. And she does know. From the first moment Hastane visits the house, she is reading the situation with complete accuracy — that expression of maternal tenderness and anxiety he notices as she passes through the library is not decorative detail. She has been watching Averaud with that face for as long as she has been with him.
But she cannot say a word of it.
In Jung's energic model, the anima draws her power — her capacity to act on the ego, to interrupt its one-sidedness, to break through with the feeling-knowledge she carries — from the libido generated by the tension between the ego and the shadow. The shadow is the reservoir. Its accumulated charge gives the anima her urgency, her numinosity, her executive force. A man who has done even partial shadow work has an anima who can reach him, who carries enough charge to make herself felt as a genuine counterweight to the ego's trajectory.
Averaud has projected the shadow completely outward. There is nothing left in the reservoir. The libido that should power Fifine's warning function has been sent to live in outer space with the black sun. She is present, feeling, perceptive — her emotional intelligence is fully intact — but she has nothing to draw on. She can open doors. She can pluck at sleeves. She can make that ghastly inarticulate sound that the mute makes in extremity. She cannot stop anything. Her muteness in the story is not incidental — it is the precise externalisation of Averaud's internal condition. The feeling function has been rendered literally speechless because the man it belongs to has no interior for it to serve.
Here Jung's encounter with his own anima in the Red Book becomes illuminating by contrast. Jung's Salome is blind — she cannot perceive the external world with any clarity — but she has tremendous executive power. She claims Jung is Christ. She draws him toward inflation and dissolution with the full force of eros. She acts on him, dangerously, with the numinous charge of everything his ego has not yet integrated. The blind anima has power because the ego she belongs to has an interior — shadow material, unresolved tension, the friction of a psyche still in process. Salome is powered by Jung's own unlived life.
Fifine is mute where Salome is blind, and the difference is everything. Salome cannot see the world clearly but she can act on it. Fifine sees everything with perfect clarity and can act on nothing. She is not timid or weak. She is structurally powerless, drained of the libido that would make intervention possible by the completeness of Averaud's projection. The mute anima is the natural companion of the man who has evacuated his interior entirely — she is what the feeling function looks like when there is nothing left to feel with.
Elijah and the Juniper Tree
There is a figure in the Hebrew scriptures who casts an instructive shadow over Averaud. Elijah the prophet — fiery, absolute, consumed by a single vision, withdrawn from ordinary human society to pursue his calling in remote places. In Jungian terms, Elijah is the archetypal Wise Old Man: the figure of spiritual authority, prophetic vision, and hard-won interior knowledge. He represents the masculine spirit that has been through the fire and knows itself. Averaud, by contrast, is the Unwise Old Man — the same archetype inverted, possessing all of Elijah's outward characteristics, the burning fixity of gaze, the total orientation toward the cosmic absolute, the withdrawal from ordinary human life, but hollowed of the interior life that makes the Wise Old Man wise. He is the prophet without the prophet's wound, the seer who has never been broken open and so has never been made whole.
Elijah survives his encounter with the Absolute, and the reason is precisely that interior life. He sits under the juniper tree and asks to die. He flees into the wilderness in despair, not in triumph. He hears, after the fire and the earthquake and the rushing wind, the still small voice — and it is the still small voice, not the spectacular phenomena, that carries the divine. Elijah has the prophetic fire and the willingness to be broken, the capacity to go into the dark interior and receive what is there rather than projecting it outward onto the cosmos.
We can even identify the moment in the story where Averaud refuses the juniper tree. When Hastane warns him of the dangers of his experiment, Averaud waves it away with the serenity of a man who has never once doubted himself: it doesn't matter, he says, he is prepared to accept all consequences. That is his juniper tree moment, and he will not sit under it. A man with Elijah's interiority would have felt that warning land somewhere inside him — would have sat with it, allowed the possibility of doubt and exhaustion and the still small voice of his own uncertainty to speak. Averaud's serene imperviousness at that precise moment is not courage. It is the sealed surface of a psyche that has left itself no interior space in which a warning could arrive. He will not, and then cannot, ask the Grail question — he cannot turn to those beside him, to Fifine, to Hastane, and allow them to ask: what ails thee? He has already begun to turn to stone.
The Ebon Statue
The dark radiation that Averaud has spent years trying to summon from somewhere in outer space was never in outer space. It was always his. And when it returns, it finds no subjective space to meet it — no ego capable of recognising it, no interior structure to mediate the collision, no still small voice to say: yes, I know this, this is mine, I can hold this. It finds only the sealed exterior that Averaud always was, the man who gave everything to the outside and kept nothing within.
The ebon statue is not punishment. It is fate. One hundred per cent projection produces one hundred per cent solidified shadow. The man who threw all his darkness onto the cosmos becomes, when the cosmos throws it back, nothing but darkness made solid. No warmth. No interiority. No subject. Pure object — harder than marble, the story tells us, enduring to all time. The devotee of evil has become the most perfect image of evil that the story can render: not a cosmic force, not a radiation from a black sun, but a human being from whom subjectivity has been entirely removed. A thing where a person was.
And Fifine, who always knew, who could never say, throws herself at its feet.
Winding Up
Here, finally, is where I want to offer my own reading.
In my view, evil is not a cosmic force. It is not a radiation from a black sun. It is not Ahriman, not the Manichaean dark principle, nor is it Satan. A hurricane is not evil. A flood is not evil. The tiger is not evil, nor the parasitic wasp, nor the cancer cell following its blind imperative to replicate. These things cause suffering — tremendous, real, sometimes annihilating suffering — but they do not choose. And choice is where evil lives. Evil is what happens when a human being chooses their own good over the human good, when they treat other people as furniture, as background noise, as objects in the service of a project. It becomes demonic when the human being begins actively to seek the suffering of others — when cruelty becomes not a side effect but a pleasure. So there is evil, and it can be satanic or demonic, but it is always a human business. The cosmos does not care.
What we as embodied humans feel as evil is often entropy. Loss. The knowledge that everything made will be unmade, that everyone loved will be lost, that the island will sink from sight. This is not evil — it is the condition of existence, the price of having been here at all. The stone does not grieve. The spider does not mourn. The sun at noon is indifferent to what it illuminates and what it scorches. Grief and heartbreak and the long aftermath of loss are particularly human concerns, which means they are ours to carry. We cannot send them out into the cosmos and find them there, hanging in space, radiating from a dark centre. We cannot build an instrument to receive them and stand back and study them as objective phenomena. Evil is not objective. It is personal. It must be dealt with in here — the only place where it can be processed, integrated, lived with, and hopefully overcome.
Albert Camus understood this. The absurd — his word for the collision between our hunger for meaning and the universe's absolute silence — cannot be resolved by a leap toward any external absolute. Not God, not History, not Cosmic Evil. The leap is always a flight from the human condition rather than an engagement with it. What Camus called revolt — the only honest response to the absurd — is the refusal to leap, the insistence on staying with the tension, on facing the silence without flinching and continuing to live and love and make things anyway. It is not triumphant. It is not consoling. But it is ours.
Averaud makes the leap into his projection. He finds the external absolute he needs and orients his entire being toward it. He becomes, by degrees, what he was always in danger of becoming: a man so entirely given over to the outside that there is nothing left within. A narcissist in the most precise sense.
To me, narcissism is twofold. First, it is the absolute indifference to the suffering of others because only self-gratification matters, and others are merely furniture to be moved or broken. Second, it is the fragility of the eggshell: the person who cannot afford to acknowledge any taint of darkness in themselves — not won't, but cannot, because the self-image is so dependent on its own unblemished surface that genuine self-knowledge would shatter it. If they admitted for a second that they have darkness inside them, it would destroy their functioning mind. So the shadow must go out. It must live in the world, in other people, in cosmic forces, anywhere but here. Anyone who tries to suggest otherwise — who tries to bring the darkness home, who offers the mirror the narcissist cannot look into — will be ignored or, if they persist, destroyed.
Averaud is never cruel to Fifine. He never raises his hand to Hastane. But he is utterly, permanently, structurally unreachable — and that unreachability is the violence the story is actually about. Fifine's mute devotion, her anxious watching, her plucking at sleeves in the corridor — none of it lands. It cannot land. The defensive structure of his psyche admits nothing that might complicate the projection, nothing that might whisper: the darkness you are seeking out there is in here. He has made himself safe from self-knowledge, which means he has made himself safe from everything — from warning, from love, from the still small voice, from the last chance the feeling life offers before it goes silent.
The ebon statue is the logical end of that safety. When you have sealed yourself completely against the possibility of being known, you have already become, in every meaningful sense, a stone.
Averaud projected one hundred per cent of his shadow outward. When it came back to him, it could not be accommodated within him because he had no interior that could hold it, process it, come to terms with it. He projected his shadow as one hundred per cent object outside himself, and so when it came back he became himself one hundred per cent object: an ebon statue with no subjective awareness at all.
Which is why the work — the only work that matters, the specifically human work that no cosmic force can do for us — is to stay. To stay with the grief and the loss and the heartbreak and the knowledge of death. To stay with the shadow, to look at it, to say: yes, this is in me, this is mine, I will not send it away. To remain soft enough to be reached by the Fifines of the world, whose mute grief at our feet is the last warning the feeling life can offer before we pass beyond all warning into stone.
This is the Grail question: to turn to those beside us and find enough time and interest in them to to ask — what ails thee?
