I need to know about that staple of Saturday morning cartoons; the representation of the eternal battle of good and evil that lives in our heads: The Shoulder Angel and Shoulder Devil.
When and where did they first appear?
Well, this isn’t exactly a case of “shoulder” angels/devils, but there’s an instance of something similar in Christopher Marlowe’s play “Doctor Faustus”, from 1604. In the play, Faustus sells his soul to the devil, and he’s visited on a couple of occasions by a “Good Angel” and “Evil Angel” who give him their advice.
Of course, Marlowe’s play didn’t originate the Faust legend, but I don’t know whether he invented the angels for his play or not.
I don’t know whether the Saturday morning version of this was inspired by those scenes or not, but this shows that at least the general idea has been around for a few hundred years.
The idea of a devil on your left shoulder and an angel on your right has fairly established roots.
The superstition of throwing salt over your left shoulder to ward off bad luck was based on that it would blind the devil.
Marlowe incorporated some of the traditions of medieval drama, particularly the morality play, in Doctor Faustus – that’s where you get things like the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, and the good and bad angels. The mankind character in The Castle of Perseverance (or go here if you want the original Middle English) is equipped with similar angels. This is probably the most direct ancestor of the Saturday-morning-cartoon angels.
BTW, Faustus was published in 1604, but it was written earlier – around 1590 or a little before. (My edition says 1588-9).