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I began to work with the Old Testament when I gave courses and seminars on perversion in 1982 and 1983 at University College, London, where I held the Freud Memorial Chair. The lectures I delivered formed the core of Creativity and Perversion (1984), which was the first book published by Robert Young, who was in the audience and had just founded Free Association Books in that city. (The American copublisher was Norton.) At that time I was hardly acquainted with the Old Testament, having been raised, due to particular circumstances, in the Catholic religion. Although I am an atheist, I consider that the great spiritual books contain considerable psychic truth. The Old Testament, as well as the Jewish religion, provide a means for understanding perversion in a psychoanalytic way, and indeed reach its very heart. I came to understand that perversions are in fact the scriptures upside down and in reverse. The second paper on “The Secret Ceremony in Shakespeare” is an illustration, in a certain manner, of “Devil Religion” written three years before. “Devil Religion” is a kind of summary of my ideas on perversion as a universal temptation of the mind which may also find expression in collective phenomena. I have deleted several passages from “Devil Religion” as these concerned subjects more broadly treated in my study on Macbeth. However, in order to preserve the internal consistency of the papers, there are some unavoidable overlaps, mostly pertaining to