Soul Scrolls Machines

The Soul Scrolls Machines are automated prayer-printing devices franchised throughout the Republic of Gilead, where they serve as a state-sanctioned, profit-generating substitute for genuine religious devotion. By allowing Commanders' Wives to order mass-produced prayers by Compuphone, the machines transform piety into a quantifiable transaction, replacing the personal act of prayer with a mechanical, repetitive output that is immediately recycled into blank paper. They represent the regime's ultimate commodification of faith: a system in which devotion is performed, counted, and debited, while the human voice and heart are rendered superfluous.

Design and Operation

Each Soul Scrolls outlet is a franchise, present in every city center and suburb, and is said to generate substantial profit. The storefront is fitted with shatterproof windows, behind which rows of printout machines—known irreverently among the Handmaids as "Holy Rollers"—stand in operation. These machines print prayers on continuous rolls of paper, which then feed back through another slot to be recycled into fresh paper, creating a closed loop of mechanical devotion. The prayers are ordered remotely by Compuphone: a customer selects from five standardized categories—health, wealth, a death, a birth, or a sin—punches in her own account number so that her account is debited, and specifies the number of repetitions desired. The machines talk as they print, emitting toneless metallic voices that repeat the same words over and over. Inside the building there are no people; the machines run entirely by themselves. Each machine bears a gold eye painted on its side, flanked by two small golden wings—the same winged-eye symbol that appears on the black vans of the Eyes and on the checkpoint barriers, linking the prayer machines directly to the regime's apparatus of surveillance and control.

Religious and Political Function

Ordering prayers from Soul Scrolls is regarded as a sign of piety and faithfulness to the regime, and Commanders' Wives engage in the practice heavily because it helps their husbands' careers. The prayers themselves are not offered to God in any personal sense; they are a public performance of orthodoxy, a visible transaction that can be audited through the Compuphone system. Offred, standing outside the store with Ofglen, reflects on the machines and wonders whether God listens to them. Ofglen whispers that she does not think so, and Offred agrees, comparing the practice to Tibetan prayer wheels—objects moved by the wind rather than by human intention. The comparison underscores the emptiness at the heart of the ritual: the prayers are produced and consumed mechanically, with no human heart behind them, yet they are treated as valid currency in the regime's economy of virtue.

Contrast with Forbidden Reading

The existence of the Soul Scrolls Machines throws into sharp relief the regime's prohibition on reading and writing for Handmaids. The Bible itself is kept locked in a box in the Commander's study, and Handmaids are read to from it but never allowed to hold it. At the Red Center, the Beatitudes are played from a tape so that not even an Aunt would be guilty of the sin of reading. Yet the Soul Scrolls Machines produce endless written prayers—text that is printed, spoken, and recycled without any human reader ever engaging with it. The machines thus embody a paradox: the regime that bans the written word for women simultaneously generates vast quantities of mechanically produced text, treating the written prayer as a commodity rather than as communication. The gold eye on each machine, identical to the symbol of the Eyes, suggests that the true audience for these prayers is not God but the state itself.

Narrative Significance

For Offred, the Soul Scrolls Machines represent one more layer of the regime's hollowing-out of meaning. She remembers that the storefront once sold lingerie—pink and silver boxes, colored pantyhose, brassieres with lace, silk scarves—and the contrast between that vanished world of personal adornment and the current world of mechanical prayer underscores the loss of individual expression. The machines are also a site of risk: it is outside Soul Scrolls that Ofglen first tests Offred's loyalty by asking whether God listens to the machines, a question that constitutes treason. The moment marks a turning point in their relationship, as Offred's whispered "No" crosses an invisible line and initiates her entry into the Mayday network. The machines, designed to produce orthodoxy, inadvertently become the backdrop for the first act of subversion between the two women.