Chapter II: Figures of Evil:
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Devil
So after some pretty exhaustive research, we’ve tracked down and traced the origins of the phenomenon of the Devil, the role he plays in the human world, and his influence on the minds of men and women. But what we’ve uncovered is merely the concept of an all-powerful evil being, a creature directly opposed to (and yet, still subservient to and serving, if reluctantly) the will of God. But if we’re to really know the Devil, we need to clothe the notion with flesh. In other words, it’s easy to scare children about a bogeyman, but when you start describing him in more graphic terms, that’s when the belief begins to take hold.
So, we all know the popular representation of the devil, which varies from religion to religion and even era to era, but how did that image come about, and how has it changed - or not changed - over the centuries? How did the Devil go from a dragon and then a serpent to the humanoid being with horns on his head and a forked tail we all recognise as the character of Satan now?
One problem as Christianity grew and became more popular was that, to the perhaps chagrin and surprise of its leader, prophets, popes and bishops, and especially its missionary priests and monks, other religions neither bowed down easily before it or vanished in a puff of smoke. There’s a line in the series Vikings which is, more than likely, made up and not attributable to the real Ragnar Lothbrook, but still more or less encapsulates what they, and other non-Christian invaders, much have thought of the new religion, the so-called all-powerful One God. Pointing at a crucifix (as they ransack the church it’s in and murder all therein) one of the raiders grins “Look! Their god is dead!”
This is, or was, a fundamental problem for the fledgling religion. Almost every other major religion had gods who were powerful, strong, vibrant - to some of the civilisations they were even believed to be living yet (Vikings firmly believed in Valhalla, where Odin and Thor and the heroes sat, and where they hoped to go, and of course the Romans believed their gods could even visit them if they chose) so to ask people to sign up to a religion whose god had been put to death was a tough sell. Yes, Jesus had come back to life, but even so. Christianity also preached peace and brotherhood, turning the other cheek and loving your neighbour, sentiments not exactly shared by what we might call the more aggressive religions.
So perhaps the idea might have been to have presented the strength, not so much of God, but of his darkest creation and eternal enemy, Satan. Here was a guy you could deal with! Here was a suitable opponent for Thor or Quetzlcoatl or Buddha (wait, what?) - if we consider Satan the enforcer of Christianity (overlooking the small detail that he wishes to destroy it, of course) then you have someone who might just make you feel that your own gods might have a smidge of trouble kicking his arse.
But originally, Satan was just a vague concept, evil in its purest form, mentioned only in the Bible, Christianity’s, um, bible, as a serpent or a dragon, and once I think as a roaring lion. In order both to present him, if you will, as a candidate for a strong leader (or anti-leader) in the new faith, someone who could give Loki a wedgie and kick the crap out of Jupiter, he had to be given a form. A scary form. And even leaving aside the idea of attracting new converts from old religions via his supreme nastiness, he was going to be the one to keep all those already signed up in line, and again, for that, he needed to take physical representative shape.
Because animals were and mostly still are seen by Christians as base, wild creatures, without souls, they were the perfect starting point for the Church’s early line sketches of the Devil. And given that the Bible uses the word sheep in a positive sense, to represent the faithful (probably the only religion that does; mostly sheep are seen as weak and ineffectual) and goat for those outside the faith, it’s no real surprise that the first, and indeed lingering, image of Satan would be goatlike. But then, Christian priests were notoriously lazy and unimaginative, and also wanted to kick down what they saw as the pagan houses of cards built up by those worshipping what they deemed to be false gods. And Greek belief had one goat-creature ready made for plagiarisation: Pan.
Now, poor Pan did not deserve in any way to be linked with the Devil. He was a harmless, mischievous little sprite, hardly even a god. He liked to do the things we all do: sit in the forest, play the pipes, drink and chase maidens (in his case, nymphs, and why not?) but he certainly was not evil. He was hardly even dangerous. A god of nature, a god of harvest, a god of music and dancing and, um, sex, he hardly seems like the kind of figure to go on to be “reborn” as Satan.
Or does he?
Remember that the Church frowned on almost all of the above - other than sitting in the forest, but if you did that you had better have holy thoughts on your mind, and if any nubile maidens passed through you had best just resist the temptation! - and would have seen poor little Pan as a disgusting, debauched little guy only interested in his own pleasure, and what’s wrong with that? Plenty, if you’re a God-fearing Christian. Incidentally, why is it always God-fearing? If God is so nice, why isn’t it God-loving, or God-thumbs-upping? Why are you supposed to fear the deity who has apparently won the Nicest God in the Universe Award infinity times and counting? But I digress. Back to Pan. Am I being a little unfair to Christians here? Well, no, I don’t think I am. Go back to what I said about goats. The Bible calls the faithless ones, the pagans goats (apparently) and Pan is nothing if not a goat. I mean, he can’t really deny it, can he? Just look at him!
The hooves and the horns are a dead giveaway, if nothing else is, and these would be two of the main components always included when the Devil was to be painted, drawn, hacked into a woodcut, or represented in any other way. Horns, of course, are mentioned in Revelation, when John speaks of the “Beast of the Sea” having “ten horns” and the “lamb-horned Beast of the Land”, and horned beasts are among the most potentially dangerous. I mean, would you run from a stampeding rabbit? Of course, this is not to completely exonerate Pan from evil deeds. He’s a god after all, if only a relatively minor one, and they just can’t help but be attracted to the dark side of nature, can they?
Being a god of sex too, Pan was upset when Echo, a nymph, resisted all male advances (possibly also his, not sure) and he sent his followers to kill her, well, tear her apart actually, which they did. Then there was Syrinx, out of whom he made his famous Pan pipes, that instrument that has driven many a strong man to contemplating murder if they hear it one more time over the PA system of a shopping mall twirdling John Denver’s “Annie’s Song”. Syrinx, though, was an act of love. He didn’t kill her, just scared her and she got changed into a reed (as you do) and Pan, unable to suss out which reed was hers just grabbed a handful and made his musical instrument out of them.
He also took part in the war against the Titans, when the young gods kicked the old gods’ arses, though the sum total of his contribution to that mighty primeval battle seems to have been to have screamed very loudly. Panic, then, comes directly from him, as that scream I just spoke about is supposed to be so scary that it unnerves people and sends them fleeing in blind you guessed it.
But other than that, Pan was a nice guy, harmless in his way. He enjoyed festivals, blessed crops, made women fruitful, danced, played his Pan pipes and generally let everyone get on with the business of running the cosmos. No doubt if he had been differently attributed he would not have got onto the blueprint for the Devil, but he wasn’t and so he was. If you get what I mean. So we have Pan’s goat legs and horns, but Pan, as I have taken some pains to point out, was not a threatening, particularly mighty or evil deity, and on his own would hardly inspire terror (unless he opened his big yap) so he could only be a starting point for the figure which would end up representing the Dark One.
In terms not so much of physical appearance, but of nature, next on the drawing board was Dionysus, and he's much more like what the wandering Christian priests, Killjoys United, were looking for. Doesn't he look devilish already, brother? He does indeed brother. He'll do for us.
He was rather like Pan but a bigger noise in the Greek world, and like his little cousin he liked frolicking with the ladies and imbibing the odd snifter of mead at evensong, or possibly a little more. Suffice to say, Dionysian orgies were the parties to go to, as long as you were on the god’s side. If you fell foul of the wrath of his drunken followers, revellers known as Maenads, well, they would quite literally rip you a new one. Therefore not only the dangers of alcohol consumption (frowned upon by Christianity, despite monks making mead and Christ himself more than happy to change water into wine) but those of carnal lust became embodied in and represented by Dionysus and his followers, and his nature was ascribed as evil and devilish, leading people astray and not caring one jot for their immortal souls; too busy getting drunk and jiggy with it. Pan often tagged along on these mythic pub crawls, so he and Dionysus ended up linked and soon enough amalgamated as another facet of the emerging Devil.
Pan and Dionysus were both of course pagan gods - to Christians anyway - and therefore seen as not only an obstacle to heathens being converted to the “true” religion, but actual enemies both of Christianity and by extension of God himself. If there was only one true god, why then all these others must be false gods, and to worship them was to blaspheme the name of the Lord. Therefore, a deadly battle raged between the old gods and the new one, and of course in time the new one was the victor, mostly, I would imagine, due to the conversion of Emperor Constantine the Great in 312, worship of the old Roman gods falling out of favour and they themselves fading into the mists of history and legend. To some degree though, the belief in these gods was so strong that many could not be destroyed and so had to be remade in the Christian image. So in some ways perhaps it’s comforting to think that they sort of live on, albeit in very changed form, despite the best efforts of their adversaries (with a lower case a) to eradicate them.
Popular belief held that Satan had been an angel before Falling from Heaven, and so it seemed politic to afford this new construction wings. However it must be clear that he was a Fallen Angel, not worthy to be linked to the great Archangels of Heaven, and so his feathered birdlike wings were replaced with black, leathery ones, perhaps harking back in one way to the Dragon from where he originally sprung, or indeed the bat, whose domain is the night and who is essentially blind (to the glory of God?), while scales were added, again perhaps recalling the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Not a bad day's work, brother. Glory be to God. With a capital G, of course.
