Talk of the Devil: A History of the Prince of Darkness
 

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presents
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“May you be in Heaven half an hour before the Devil knows you’re dead” - Irish proverb

One thing that has been common to probably every religion and pantheon of gods is that there has always been a “bad guy”, someone who upsets the plans of the “good” gods and goes against them, hassles humanity, causes catastrophes both large and small, and basically makes life harder both for his (or her) fellow gods and for those who worship them. This being has usually been called everything from an evil god to a demon, and of course the Devil, though this seems to have been confined to the Christian mythology. Whether called the Devil or not, or by any of his many names, this being, this god, this dark angel is almost always responsible for - or said to be responsible for - all the bad stuff in the world, and is synonymous with the word evil. In many ways, he can be seen as a scapegoat, someone for both gods and humans to blame when things go wrong, don’t go to plan or upset them. Just about every phrase in any language connected with the Devil, to give him a catchall recognisable label, is negative, and refers to doing or saying the wrong thing, coming up against obstacles or being thwarted.

Because gods were seen to be generally omnipotent, and above human affairs, they weren’t expected to play by the same rules mortals did. They didn’t have to care about their worshippers, could keep them safe or destroy them on a whim, treat them like playthings and trifle with their affections just for the hell of it. But among their own kind, they were expected to maintain certain standards. Because gods were created by humans, our ancestors imbued them with human feelings and emotions, human values and ethics, and human relationships. In essence, they were us, only, you know, all-powerful. But most pantheons of gods followed the basic model of the human family unit: there was a father, a mother, sons and daughters, even in-laws and cousins. Everyone was connected, because this is how humanity survived and quite honestly, we couldn’t see any other possible scenario.

Some of the gods were solitary, yes, but most of these tended to turn out to be the evil ones, the ones who would be linked with that religion or belief’s idea of the Devil; the very idea of being isolated from their fellow gods, of not joining in, of being a loner, made them distrusted and often disliked by their brother gods and sister goddesses, just as we tend to look at someone who is different or stand-offish in this world. We don’t easily tolerate any threat to our societal structure, so why then should our gods?

And as a human who stays away from the crowd can tend to be seen as - even if they are not actually so - brooding, sullen, cold and aloof - so too did the gods see those who did not fit into their family unit. Sometimes these gods were pushed further away, as nobody liked them and had no reason to want to be near them, sometimes they removed themselves, scornful of the pursuits of the others and interested in darker, more dangerous things. To some degree, taking gods as, for the moment, autonomous beings and not the extension of human minds and desires, these “dark gods” created their own mythology, based around their difference from - or indeed, indifference to the other gods, and “became” evil, either intentionally or as a consequence of how they were seen and treated by others.

The earliest mention any of us who are Christians, even nominally so, hear of the Devil in our lives is in the tale from the Bible, where in the Book of Genesis he appears as a snake in the Garden of Eden, tempts Eve and gets she and Adam kicked out of Paradise by a wrathful God. Job done, thinks Satan. But of course the Bible only goes back about two thousand years or so, and civilisations such as the Egyptians, Babylonians and Greek and Roman predate it by many more. It’s not at all surprising that the Satan, Lucifer or Devil written of in the Bible appears in similar or often quite different form in the lore of other religions; Christianity was never an original religion, and almost all of its pantheon is taken from other beliefs, suitably changed to suit the new teachings of Christ.

So what is the truth about the Devil? Where did he come from? How did he develop, down the centuries, sliding into our literature, our art, our music and later our television and movie screens, to become as much a part of our world, our consciousness as God Himself? When did he become a force for rebellion rather than just evil, and when did people begin worshipping him? How has he fared, and how has he changed through successive transformations from one mythology to another, and what is the truth of his genesis?

In this latest journal my intention is to dig into the origins of the creature we came to know as the Devil, to rummage around in mythologies that were ancient before Christ was even born, to try to build a picture of the overarching figure seen now as the epitome of evil, of darkness, of rebellion and of resistance. I’ll be seeing how the Devil - mostly this will be the Christian idea I expect, as most literature and art was dominated by the Church for the first half of the millennium at least, though I’m sure other religions have used him in their literature and music and art too - has done on the printed page, the oiled canvas and the silver screen, big and small. I’ll be looking at how his presence has influenced musicians, from those who use him or references to him in their lyrics, to those who actually believe in him and one or two who are believed to have actually sold their soul to him, and I’m not talking about Black Sabbath here.

While the Devil may not be real (no I’m definitely not crossing my fingers behind my back, you must be thinking of someone else) there are a lot of people in this world who believe he is, and the worship of the Prince of Darkness, what gets termed colloquially as Satanism or Satanic worship, may be as prevalent now as back in the dark ages, when innocent women were burned for believing to have communed with him. Wicca is white magic, but there’s also a whole lot of black magic out there too, and no, I’m not talking about the chocolates.

On the other side of things, the Devil has also been ferociously lampooned in all forms of media, whether the idea is to deprive him of his power by mocking him or just to jump on the bandwagon and make a buck. He’s been used as everything from a corporate logo to a team mascot, and from the name of geological features to rock songs. But superstition still holds strong in many parts of the world, and where there’s superstition there’s usually the Devil. There are even reported instances (how reliable or not I don’t know) of people undergoing near-death experiences where they found themselves in a place that was, well, not Heaven.

Of course, I don’t expect to uncover any truth about the existence or non-existence of the Devil, black magic or even Hell. Those questions, to paraphrase something I read by Dickens this morning, are better left to theologians and men far more learned than I, which would not be hard. No, all I intend to do here is to trace the colourful and interesting history of the Devil and assess his impact on our society, right up to the present day.

So step into the circle with me if you dare, take off the crucifix from around your neck and don’t bother saying your prayers. They won’t help you where we’re going.

Perhaps there’ll be Hell to pay, but come on, let’s do it!
Let’s summon the Devil.

Chapter I: Born to Darkness - The genesis of the Devil
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Note: For those who believe that all I do for these journals is cannibalise and transcribe pages from Wikipedia, let me set you straight by saying yes, yes I do, but that’s not all. I always try to use as many sources as I can to back the research I do on Wiki, and I never copy anything verbatim, except in a few isolated cases where I use quotes, and they’re always attributed.

For this journal I’m referring to the following works:

The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil’s Biblical Roots by T.J. Wray and Gregory Mobley (Palgrave MacMillan, 2005)

The Prince of Darkness: The Devil in History, Religion and the Human Psyche by Joan O’Grady (Element Books, 1989)

The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil by Paul Carus (Open Court Paperback, 1991 - written approx 890)

And possibly

The History of the Devil by Anonymous (1727)

It’s from the first book that I approach the question, which I’ll be dealing with in considerably more depth a little later, why do we need the Devil? Wray and Mobley posit the answer by looking back even further than the Bible, or any written record, to the dark unknown that lurked outside the cave homes of our ancestors, by the wild cries in the night that presaged danger, and even the voice of the wind or the crack of the thunder which would have unnerved and spooked our forefathers, as, to be fair, it can still do to each of us when the circumstances are right. The question morphs slightly, from “why do we need the Devil?” into “why do we want or need to be afraid?”

Taken in its simplest form, the answer should be, we don’t, but that’s not the case. How many horror movies have you watched, scared but unable to resist? How many times have you crossed the road against traffic, broken a red light or walked down a deserted alley in the darkness? Or to put it on an even simpler and more mundane level, how many rollercoasters have you ridden, how many motorcycles, how many mountains have you climbed and how many times have you sought out danger, excitement, adventure? This triplet, perhaps its own (un)holy trinity in ways, is inextricably linked with fear. You can’t really be excited without a certain amount or type of fear attendant, even if it’s only the fear that this may end too soon. Danger goes hand-in-hand with fear of course and adventure? Well, that’s kind of nothing without a healthy dose of fear, is it?
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So not only do we need fear, we seek it out. It might be a little condescending to say boys look for fear more than girls do, and in this I mean young kids, but it is true. While the girls are playing shop or skipping or dolls tea party, the boys are scuffling, kicking, punching each other and taking forbidden paths into forests and the ruins of old houses and to the lips of quarries, and any other place they’re told not to go. Dangerous people - the woman rumoured to be a witch, who captures children and eats them, the strange, bespectacled man who keeps stuffed carcases of animals in his house, the guy rumoured to be a gang boss - attract us, and stories of houses said to be haunted, graveyards, marshes and moors all have an irresistible pull on our imagination at that age, and though we fear them, we fear perhaps more the disdain of our companions if we avoid them, the accusation of being a coward.

So humanity as a whole likes to be scared, and to scare, and that in itself is no terrible harm. Fright gets the adrenaline going, can spur you to get the hell out of a dangerous situation, can warn you when danger is near. It can also be a powerful adversary; have you ever crossed the road and suddenly found a car bearing down on you? What do you do? You should keep going, run, but inevitably you stop, frozen in your tracks. Frozen by fear, which has fused your muscles and stiffened your limbs, and dulled your brain so that the urgent signals to MOVE can’t get through, and you stand rooted to the spot.

But fear can be used too, of course, as a weapon. It doesn’t take a genius to see that World War II would never have happened without the addition of fear in the equation; indeed, most wars are driven by fear, whether real fear that your homeland is under threat, or projected fear used by the ones who want to wage war, want to send you to war; the fear that may or may not be manufactured, a total lie, or may have a grain of truth supporting it, but which will give you the impetus to accede to the wishes of the warmongers, and go to, or support, a war which in all probability you know little or nothing about.
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Which makes fear a tool for control, perhaps the ultimate tool, and when you want to ensure that people stay on the straight and narrow, to quote Iron Maiden, fear is the key. The key to control. The key to power. The key to obedience. The key, almost, to the very human heart itself. Frighten people enough and they will do what you want. Keep them in a constant state of fear, threaten them incessantly, roar it from the pulpits, write about it, warn about it, create verbal vistas of horror to show people how terrible the consequences of disobedience can be, and you have yourself all but a slave populace. Ally that to religion, to faith, to dogma, and you have the beginnings of the need for the Devil.

As a child, you were warned about everything that was bad or dangerous, but simply being told was not enough: there had to be some reason why you should not do or say this thing, something undesirable that would definitely happen to you. Some, most in fact, was and is harmless, mostly superstition or completely made up. Make a face, and your mother would tell you if the wind changed you’d remain that way forever. Be good and Santa Claus would bring you toys. And some are practical and rooted very much in reality: don’t stick your head out the window when travelling on a train, as another one coming the opposite way could knock it off. Don’t touch the fire, even if it looks pretty, as it will burn you. Don’t talk to strangers, they’re just waiting to take you away. And as we get older, don’t stay out all night, don’t go with strange boys, don’t smoke, and so on.
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One of the oldest and most effective (when we’re very young) warnings is the bogeyman. Do this (or don’t do this) or that and he’ll get you. The bogeyman is an amorphous, ill-defined creature of the night, emerging from places unknown to capture bad boys and girls and drag them to, well, places unknown. Stupid really, and hardly well thought-out, but when we’re very young it works. We really do believe in the bogeyman. The innate and ingrained mistrust of strangers allows us to see every stranger, no matter how harmless, as the bogeyman or one of his many deputies. To calm a crying child on the bus, a mother only has to point to any man - driver, conductor, other passenger, that guy with the hood and the scythe who’s already gone past his stop - and say “here’s the man!” for the child to decide to shut up. A dark dread of “the man” is enough to instil fear and often immediate compliance, lest these shadowy figures we have been warned about, threatened with, make good on their evil promise.

So the Church needed its own bogeyman, because people don’t just behave because you tell them or ask them to. The eternal question “What if I don’t?” must be answered with a dark and forbidding alternative, to make compliance infinitely preferable to disobedience. The bogeyman is quickly supplanted by the Devil in our young lives. Naive as we are as children, we soon outgrow the notion that there is a faceless figure slouching around the world, hiding in closets in bedrooms and under beds and up chimneys and on roofs, waiting to spirit us away. We lose our fear of him primarily because, somewhat like Santa, at a certain point not only does our own developing intelligence inform us such a being could not exist, but our parents admit to the scam: it’s all been made up. There is no such thing as the bogeyman.

But the Devil? Well now, that is another kettle of herring entirely. If the family is a devout Abrahamic one, they either believe in the Devil or if not, know enough to realise that he is a very good substitute for, even progression from and successor to the now-discredited bogeyman. And the thing about him is, he exists! Well, he must, mustn’t he? The priest says so, the Pope says so, your parents say so, your school teachers (probably) say so. It’s a little hard to discount or discredit a figure so many adults seem to believe in, not so easy to relegate the Devil to the position of fantasy and fairy tale. Depending on how strong faith, belief or naivete in the family is in religion, you might end up believing the Devil is real, walking this world, all around you, just waiting, like that discredited bogeyman figure, for you to slip up and commit sin so that he can drag you screaming down to Hell.
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Just as a way of illustrating how powerful the image of the Devil can be, here I present, verbatim and taken from their book The Birth of Satan: Tracing the Devil’s Biblical Roots, the childhood experiences of both the authors. While of course each of these can be put down to an overactive imagination, too much indoctrination both in school and church, and the somewhat naive view of youth that there are in fact monsters living under the bed, they do serve to show how effective the mere idea of a dark demon waiting just out of sight to catch those who sin can be on young minds, and how those “experiences” can be carried through to adult life, often altering the person’s worldview entirely.

Wray recalls:

I had actually seen the Devil a few times. Once, just moments after teasing my little sister until she cried, I saw his shadow pass from behind the laundry room door in our basement into the family room. I remember bolting up the stairs and slamming the cellar door, terrified and breathless. “What on earth is wrong with you?” my mother asked. “I saw a spider,” I lied, adding yet another bead to the necklace of naughtiness I had been fashioning for myself for years.

On more than one occasion I had seen Satan scurrying through the thin trees beyond our back fence. I was convinced he was spying on me as I sloppily raked leaves or deposited the trash in the rubbish bin, leaving the lid off out of pure laziness. Indeed, there were days when I was too terrified to venture into my own backyard for fear that the Devil and his minions were lying in wait for me, eager to include yet another bad little girl to their fold. But perhaps my scariest “Satan sighting” of all happened at one of the most unlikely places of all—church.

One Friday afternoon during Lent, as I exited St. Frances de Chantel Holy Roman Catholic Church after my weekly confession, I was sure I saw him lurking just outside the heavy glass doors of our church. Father Anthony had prodded me to search my tenyear-old conscience for graver sins than swearing and punching my sisters. “Honest, Father,” I had stonewalled, “I haven’t done anything else that I can think of.” I neglected to tell him, of course, that I often skipped Mass, regularly ate meat on Fridays (even during Lent), frequently took the Lord’s name in vain, and, oh yes, lied to priests. As I rushed down the church steps that afternoon, skipping out halfway through my ponderous penance, I was certain the Devil was hot on my heels. Hunched in the back of my parents’ old Plymouth station wagon, I fended off terrifying images of Satan’s bony red fingers clutching my ankles and dragging me into his fiery pit. At the ripe old age of ten I was convinced that, as in Dante’s famous inscription, I should abandon all hope. “I’m going to hell,” I thought miserably.

Satan also appeared in my dreams occasionally—his face red, his teeth pointy and yellowed, sneering and breathing long streams of gray smoke through hideously engorged nostrils. He had a twisted horn on either side of his head and a scruffy-looking black goatee. Most frightening of all, he carried a pitchfork, his personal instrument of terror, used to spear bad children like shrimp on a cocktail fork. Petrified for weeks after one of these Satan sightings, I learned to never, ever sleep with my back to the bedroom door for fear that the Devil might catch me unawares.

Mobley also has his story:

In my nightmare, the most vivid dream of my life, I was watching television with my feet dangling over the edge of the living room couch. The Devil grabbed my feet and began pulling me into the chasm between the department store sofa and the bare wood floor. I could not get any purchase on the slick vinyl and was descending, kicking and screaming, into hell. I could see my savior, my paternal grandmother, in the adjacent kitchen, but even she, the adult in my world most powerful in love, seemed blind and dumb to my plight. I must have been about seven or eight. For the rest of my childhood, I crouched on top of that couch, legs bent at the knees, a clenched-up ball of vigilance against the Adversary, who as a roaring lion prowled about suburban domestic crawl spaces, seeking whom he may devour.


From the very first recorded stories written or even told by humans, the idea has been that there are two great opposing forces controlling, or vying for control of, man’s destiny, his heart and his soul. One is generally considered to be Good, Light, Order - it goes under many names - the other Evil, Darkness, Chaos and so on. Because our ancestors were so convinced that higher beings had charge of their lives, most likely because we were unwilling or unable to take responsibility for our own failings, and refused to accept the basic lack of fairness in the world we saw around us, and there was so much we were not equipped to make sense of or understand, both these forces had to have, if you will, generals; beings that marshalled the forces of either Good or Evil and directed and regulated our lives in the direction that suited them.

This didn’t mean that “Good” gods always did “good” things. They could be as capricious and as unfeeling and heartless as the blackest demon. But the belief was that if you kept the gods on-side, as it were - performed your sacrifices, said your prayers, attended church/temple, led a good life and didn’t anger them - then you would probably be all right. To our forefathers, the only people the gods punished were people who deserved it, who had displeased them in some way. But overall, the gods were good as long as you didn’t piss them off. As for the embodiment of evil, well, now that was a totally different matter.

You see, the gods were generally, as has been outlined above, gods of order, gods of fruitful women and plentiful harvests (or is that the other way around?) and wanted to be good to us. They were seen as our parents, high in the sky, looking down on us - hopefully in approval - and watching over us, guiding our steps and keeping us on the right path. Of course, we were their children and so when he stepped out of line we had to be punished, but our ancestors accepted this and knew it was necessary. The dark one, though, wasn’t at all interested in that. He, in fact (almost always personified as a male, which is no surprise as few of the pantheons, as I mentioned in my Of Gods and Men journal, had many goddesses who actually did anything or had much power, with a few exceptions) wanted us to be bad. He was the natural enemy of the gods, the wreaker of chaos on order, the reaver, the destroyer, the angry and petulant one who would destroy us just for the fun. We needed to keep well away from him.
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But he was a god, of sorts, too, and we were mere mortals, so we needed protection from him. That protection came, of course, from the gods, and we sacrificed and prayed and led good lives and honoured and revered them in the hope they would keep us safe from evil. It’s even in one of our own Christian prayers, an actual plea to keep us safe from dark forces. That doesn’t come for free though, and like the gangsters walking into shops and clubs and “accidentally” knocking something over or setting something on fire, that shield would only be deployed in return for payment, in the case of the Christian God, blind and unswerving faith and obedience. In earlier times, it might be a blood, even a human sacrifice, the building of a statue or temple, the naming of a child, the undertaking of a pilgrimage or a hundred other concessions to the celestial Mafia.

The major problem here was that the Devil, like the gods, were pure inventions pulled out of man’s own head, and in reality there was no way to protect yourself from the Devil, because he was inside you. When it gets right down to it, the Devil is nothing more than the physical manifestation of the fears, doubts, passions and indeed the violence and evil inside us all, and nobody can protect you from yourself. That old excuse - the Devil made me do it - it don’t wash, son. It don’t wash. It’s just humanity again abrogating responsibility for the things it has done with which it can’t reconcile itself.

But none of that really concerns us. For the purposes of this journal, and entertainment, we’re going to assume the Devil is real. Not real real, but an actual presence, a being, a god. If we accept the existence of other gods, then it’s not too hard to envisage a dark one working against them, and when we look around and see the state of the world now - a state that has progressively worsened over time but which was, in truth, never that great (no “golden age” for humanity, no matter what people thought at the time, has ever existed, and probably never will) - it’s not hard to believe that the evil we see is controlled, orchestrated and driven by forces beyond our ken.

It’s not. It’s just us. But again, away with such details.

So to return to our original premise, if there were two great forces (for the sake of simplicity -and it is simplistic but never mind - let’s refer to them from now on as Good and Evil) fighting over our souls, then there had to be two great powers driving them. And on the side of evil, its commander, president, general, dictator, call it what you will, was the Devil.

Another reason why the Devil, or his agency, evil, came into being as it were has to do with the belief that god(s) is/are good, and that everything he/they make should by default be good too, but we found and continue to find this is not the case. How many times have you heard someone say (or said yourself) “How can God allow this to happen?” Answer: he doesn’t. He is being thwarted by the Devil, who is out to destroy and warp and corrupt his creation. Much easier to come to that conclusion than accept that we flawed human beings are not worthy (if a god exists who created us) of the wonderful things we have been given, and that we destroy everything we touch. It’s not our fault. Oh no. It’s him. The Devil. He’s the one. He’s evil, he is.

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Snaking into our consciousness: Scales of evil and the origins of the Devil

Before Christianity there was Judaism, and the Jewish religion is where the Christian concept of the Devil, at least for western civilisation, comes, but that was based on writings by one of the most ancient peoples known to us, the Babylonians. They existed almost two thousand years before the birth of Christ, and even they were a fledgling compared to their forebears, the Sumerians, who flourished around about 3,500 BC. But while the Sumerians had their gods of course, and dark ones too - one who ruled the underworld, as in most mythologies - they don’t seem to have had an actual evil one, a concept, if you will, of what we came to know as the Devil. The area of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq and Syria) provided the backdrop for both civilisations, and the Babylonians gave us the legend of Tiamat, the huge female dragon who fought against Ba’al at the creation of the world. Interestingly, if we take this as being the first real example of the Devil, then originally Satan was female.

Tiamat was taken by the Jewish scholars and transformed into Leviathan, whom we read of in the Bible: 'In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan, the piercing serpent, even Leviathan, the crooked serpent; and he shall slay the Dragon that is in the sea' (Isaiah 27:1) A point to note here is, as discussed by me in other journals, the original dragon seems to have been a serpent, leading inevitably to the slithery one’s gatecrashing the first ever Garden Party, which ended with all guests being booted out.
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But from the writings of the Babylonians as transcribed and adapted by the Hebrew rabbis, already Tiamat/Leviathan is a symbol of evil. Also a creature of great power. Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? An evil bug or stick insect or whelk wouldn’t exactly pose any threat to humanity. But God makes no bones about it in the Book of Job, found in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, when he says "Behold, the hope of him is in vain; shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?" (Job 41: 1- 44)

By the time we get to Jewish writings, like the Book of Enoch, the serpent has become a dragon, possibly to differentiate it from the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and has been joined by Behemoth, a land monster, both of which are fated to be killed and “served up to the righteous” at Judgement Day. Here’s what God has to say about his other chaos creation, again in the Book of Job: Behold, Behemoth, which I made as I made you; he eats grass like an ox.
Behold, his strength in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly.
He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron.
He is the first of the works of God; let him who made him bring near his sword!
For the mountains yield food for him where all the wild beasts play.
Under the lotus plants he lies, in the shelter of the reeds and in the marsh.
For his shade the lotus trees cover him; the willows of the brook surround him.
Behold, if the river is turbulent he is not frightened; he is confident though Jordan rushes against his mouth.
Can one take him by his eyes, or pierce his nose with a snare?
(Job, 40: 15-24)
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But of course, when you’re dealing with something as ancient, intricate and complex as the origins of the Devil - one might say, the very origins of evil itself - that’s only half the story. For the other half, we have to look east, to the ancient kingdom of Persia, modern day Iran, and its greatest religious leader, who founded a whole system of belief based on the concepts of good and evil in a way nobody else had considered up to then.
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Zoroaster (anywhere from 1700 BC to 550 BC)

As you can work out from the above, nobody has any real idea when he lived, or indeed exactly where, though it’s believed he resided on the Iranian Plateau. What is agreed is that he was a prophet, and like most of them, a rebel who challenged established belief in his native land and went against the accepted order, having had an epiphany when he met the god Vohu Manah, a “shining Being” he encountered near a river. Vohu Manah taught him about Ahura Mazda, the creator god of the Persians, and his opposite number, Angra Mainyu, explaining to him the concept of good and bad, or good and evil, or light and dark, or whatever you’re having yourself. He defined them as Asha (order) and Druj (deception). You may be surprised to find (I certainly was) that many of the principle precepts of what is now Christianity, Judaism and Islam - the Abrahamic Religions, as they are known - began with Zoroaster: concepts of good and evil, as I’ve already mentioned, but also Heaven and Hell as places, the resurrection of the body, Judgement Day and the promise of eternal life after death all came from the religion he would establish, which would become the accepted religion of Persia, and would be known as Zoroastrianism.

In a scenario we now recognise as very familiar, Angra Mainyu (possibly, though I can’t confirm, where the word anger comes from?) fights the creator god Ahura Mazda, is cast down out of Heaven with his attendant daevas (demons, but surely one origin of the word devil?) into Hell, where he rules and tries to upset the plans of his enemy. From his base in Hell, Angra Mainyu - also known as Ahriman, one of the many names that would be attributed to the Devil - can go forth into the world of men and seek to corrupt them, and the idea is born of an eternal and endless battle for the soul of humanity played out by these two opposing forces of good and evil. Being seen as good, Ahura Mazda or Ormazd as he is sometimes known is the essence of purity and truth, while Angra Mainyu or Ahriman is the personification of untruth, filth and death, possibly giving rise to our epithet for our Devil, Satan, the Father of Lies. This whole concept of two separate forces though goes against ancient belief.

The Egyptians and other civilisations believed that everything came from the supreme creator god, and so both good and evil were part of him and were gifts from him. Though there are conflicts among the Egyptian gods, none are seen primarily or solely as evil. Even Set, who attacked and killed Osiris, was seen as a powerful creator god, though later, as other influences joined the mythos he was indeed reimagined as an evil, dark, hostile being, the very personification of darkness and evil. As Egyptian pharaohs very often took Jewish slaves, many of whom may have been involved in building structures such as the Sphinx and the Pyramids, the influence of their legends may have leaked into the teachings of later Hebrew texts, and helped to create this evil being who would be known as Satan.

Hinduism, though its pantheon includes gods of darkness and destruction - notably Kali and Shiva - does not hold one particular god or goddess as being evil, as each god is a mirror image of the other, with good and evil to be seen in both. Kail, the destroyer, is the obverse of the mother god who nourishes all things. The Jews seem, from what I can see, to have been the first major race to have postulated, created or decided to follow the principle of there being only one god, a supreme being who did not have other gods under his control; no wife, no sister, no brother. Yahweh says 'I form the Light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things.' (Isaiah, 45:7) however later doubts began to grow. How could Yahweh be God, the great and good, and yet be associated with evil? Surely there was a way to separate the evil from the good?

Jews came under the influence of the Persians during the Babylonian Exile around 600 BC, when King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon forced them into slavery as punishment for the refusal of the King of Judah, Jehoiakim, to pay tribute. First he took nobles captive as well as the slain king’s son Jeconiah, who had succeeded him, back to Babylon, but when Judah again rose against him, this time under the new king’s uncle Zedekiah, Nebuchadnezzar returned and this time burned the city, captured Zedekiah and his sons, had the boys executed in front of their father, who was then blinded and taken prisoner along with “many others” in about 587 BC. The Babylonian Chronicles relates the story:

In the seventh year, in the month of Kislev, the king of Akkad mustered his troops, marched to the Hatti-land, and encamped against the City of Judah and on the ninth day of the month of Adar he seized the city and captured the king. He appointed there a king of his own choice and taking heavy tribute brought it back to Babylon.

It was probably around this period that the ideas of Zoroastrianism discussed above made their way into Jewish belief as a handy way to, as it were, account for God’s having created evil. Now it was not he who brought evil, but his Adversary, his Enemy, whom Hebrew texts would soon name as Satan, the Accuser or Adversary. Now God had an antagonist against whom he struggled on behalf of man, and the whole Fall of Satan story was copied-and-pasted into the early Jewish texts, amended, of course, as they saw fit. In terms of the Abrahamic religions at any rate, Satan had been born. The Devil had arrived.

So Satan became the enemy, both of God and man, the one who tempted, the one who tried to corrupt, the one who was against all God’s works and wished to destroy them, including what was seen as his greatest creation, man. Believers no longer had to struggle to understand the worrying duality of God, in whom originally good and evil had resided equally. Now, the evil had been surgically, or theologically excised from the bright flesh of God, and he was pure and good, the evil being essentially formed into a mass and fashioned into what we know now as the Devil. While Kabbalah, a school of thought in Jewish mysticism, held to the notion that God was good and evil, and from his right hand proceeded all that was good while from his left came death and destruction, and that his left hand separated itself and became evil, the accepted origin of evil codified itself in the story of the Great Fall, which romanticised the idea of Satan and gave much fodder to writers such as Milton, Virgil and Dante.

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It may be surprising, given how long ago Zoaraster created his religion and related the original tale of War in Heaven to his followers, that it was only(!) written down in Jewish belief from about 200 BC. The Book of Enoch, one of the Jewish Apocryphal books, tells us of the disobedience of the angel Lucifer, whose followers, like him, descended to Earth and lay with mortal women, and who, when berated by God for such actions, rebelled against him, culminating in the great War of Heaven. I personally have never read, nor had nor have any urge to read the Bible, but I am somewhat surprised to find that (according to O’Grady in The Prince of Darkness) the story of the Fall is not there. It’s in the Jewish Apocryphal Books, as I said above, but not considered religious orthodoxy and so not in the Bible. I have, however, read Paradise Lost, and so I know the gist of the story, though I expect Milton took a few liberties and exercised artistic licence with his version.

The story though of the rebellion, though it ended in defeat for Satan and his allies, does show how the Devil immediately became a figure for revolt and resistance, the archetypal teenager shouting at his constricting parent “I hate this place!” and being summarily kicked out. Yes, that’s very simplistic, but you can see how kids chafing under what they would see as their parents’ unfair restrictions on them would identify with the original rebel and seek to emulate him, and conversely, why any God-fearing parent at that time would warn their rebelling child that they were imperilling their soul by going against the commandment given by God, thou shalt honour thy father and thy mother. So the Devil becomes both a rallying-call and role model for rebellious, restless youth and a shadowy, dangerous influence over their children for parents, the very thing that if they’re not careful will corrupt their sons and daughters and condemn them to Hell. Indeed.
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In the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, God makes no bones about how rebels are to be dealt with, when he says of Satan (who is here named Satanel) 'One of these in the ranks of Archangels ... entertained the impossible idea ... that he should be equal in rank i~ my power. And I hurled him from the heights.' So much for a merciful God then. In another of the Apocryphal Books, The Book of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Fallen Angel is called Belial. He offers mankind a choice, choose your side: 'Do you choose light or darkness, the Law of the Lord or the works of Belial?' In yet another one, the Book of the Jubilees, he is called Sammael, but eventually from the name Satanel Hebrew theologians decide on the name Satan, which means the Adversary, and though he holds and answers to many other names, it is to this one we will return most when we think, write or speak of him.

The Fall of Satan, or Lucifer, is of course mirrored in the Fall of Man, when the dark one tempts them in the Garden of Eden, and persuades Eve to taste of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. God, possibly thinking “does nobody listen to a word I say? Not this again! What is it with kids?” or possibly not, loses it in fine Old Testament fury and exiles the first man and the first woman from Paradise. Satan, in the form of the serpent, exults: his plan has begun to work. Evil has come into the world, and he will be able to capitalise on and expand its influence through his workings. As God has given man free will, he cannot command his creation not to listen to Satan; that is his choice, and many will opt to do so, as the blandishments whispered in their ears will be better received and promise finer things than the slavish obedience to and worship of God can possibly provide.
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Another thing that had come into the world, as we all know from being taught it in school and at mass, was death. While in Eden, Adam and Eve were, it seems, basically immortal, as was everything around them - animals, trees, grass, and so on. Only when they were exiled from the Garden was death allowed to have sway over them, as a power of Satan, and as he had been responsible for their hasty exit through the gates of Eden, it was within his gift to shorten and threaten the lives of men and beasts with the power of death. Man had given up his right to immortality along with his innocence by disobeying God, and if he died now, well, he just had better not come crying to Heaven. Assuming that was where he was bound.
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The story of Christ’s being tempted in the desert by Satan is taken, at least in part, from the story of the Buddha, who, sitting under the Bo tree, waiting to attain enlightenment, is approached by the evil spirit Mara, also known as Varsavati (“he who fulfils desire”), who attempts to persuade him to give up the search and embrace the pleasures of the world. As in the later Bible, the Buddha tells Mara to get bent, and achieves Nirvana. But from these texts, written about the sixth century BC, we see Satan (Mara) portrayed as a tempter, a persuader, one who will try to sway the course of holy men and turn them to the path of sin. In the fourth or fifth century BC collection of Buddhist ethical verse, the Dhammapada, Mara is described as 'He who is looking for pleasure only, his senses uncontrolled . . . Mara will certainly overthrow, as the wind throws down a feeble tree.'

This idea that man must always struggle to overcome his base desires, turn his back on the pleasures of the flesh, of the pursuit of wealth or glory, is central to both Buddhist teachings and those of the Christian and Jewish faith. All imply humility, subservience and abstinence as the way to go if you want to attain enlightenment or be welcomed into the Kingdom of Heaven. So it’s easy to see why Satan is so successful in tempting mortals from this path of righteousness: few people like to deny themselves the pleasures of this world and all it can offer, and Satan winks and says hey, you don’t have to. This naturally makes him a more attractive prospect than God, who demands you toe the line and be a good boy or girl, or else. If there’s a carrot and stick thing going on here, it’s probably not too far from the truth to say that God holds the stick while his Adversary waves the carrot in our direction.

As Zoroastrian teachings influenced the captive Jews, so did Buddhism make its impact on Zoroaster, who imported and included the idea of Mara the Tempter into his religion, thus giving the Jews, and later the Christians, a Devil who was both an Enemy of God and a tempter of man. Now, men and women who sinned could be, not excused but their behaviour explained by saying they had literally been tempted by the Devil. To a large degree, though there were terrible punishments for breaking commandments, people weren’t so much held responsible for these acts as was Satan, leading of course later to the idea of demonic possession, where the Devil physically manifested his presence through the control of mortals who either did his will or spouted obscenities and showed how God’s wonderful creation, man, could be twisted and warped into purposes for which it had not been made.

Not much point in being the Tempter, though, if you don’t have anything to tempt with, and the Devil has everything. All the material comforts of the world, all the women, or men, or both, all the riches, all the power, all the glory. Whatever you want, if it can be gained in life the Devil can get it for you. Of course, he won’t do that for free, therefore this would lead, much later, to the idea in literature of the bargain or deal with the devil, wherein one’s heart’s desire could be had for the low, low price of one’s soul. The Devil’s interest in human souls, Hell and damnation, are all part of his desire to thwart and oppose God, and we’ll look at those in greater detail later. Right now what it would be prudent to remember is that epithet I spoke of earlier, remember? Satan is the Father of Lies; nothing he says can be trusted or taken on face value, so if you make a pact with him, the chances are, like the djinn of the later Arabian Nights and other tales, you will find yourself cheated some way. One thing the Devil does not do is play fair, and the dice are always loaded in his favour.

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Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name (it’s legion)

With the evil figure known generally as the Devil or the Evil One or the Adversary appearing in most religions, it’s not surprising that so many names are attributed to him. Originally identified as Lucifer, the morning star, brightest and best but also most forward and challenging of God’s angels, this name is still used to describe him, warped and contorted from its original meaning, which some people may not even know. Leading up to his Fall, he was called the Adversary, as neither the Persian nor the Hebrew writers seemed to have settled on an actual name for him. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, around 287 - 247 BC, the Greek for the word Satan, “adversary” was diabolus, meaning accuser or assailant, which in turn over time became Devil.

Belial was a name, as already mentioned, used in The Secret Book of Enoch, and may have come from, or been translated to Ba’al, the Hebrew word for lord. Zebub means flies, and as flies were used for divining the future in Babylon, Ba’al and Zebub may have been joined, to make “lord of the flies”: Beelzebub, another name for Satan that has survived down the ages. There are also names which some priests, monks, bishops and scholars have invented as names for the principle demon rulers of Hell, but many of which have been at one time or another ascribed to Satan, and have become linked with him to such an extent that they are more or less taken as being alternative names for him. Among these we have Abaddon, the angel of the pit, the demon of despair; Azazel, standard bearer of the armies of Hell; Baphomet, who induces men and women to give in to their carnal desires, and who was said to have been worshipped by the Knights Templar (though this was probably just a trumped-up charge needed by King Philip in order to curb what he saw as the unacceptable power of this secret organisation); Mephistopheles (sometimes shortened to Mephisto), seems to have been invented by Goethe in Faust; Behemoth, whom we’ve already mentioned; Eurynmous, prince of death; Mammon, god of avarice; Moloch, a holdover from Babylonia; also Nergal; Sammael, Angel of Death; Ahriman, as we have seen, and many others.

New Devils for Old

Again perhaps surprisingly, given its heavy emphasis on revenge, punishment, violence and disasters such as the Great Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the fall of Jericho and so on, the Devil does not really appear in the Old Testament much at all. He’s in Genesis as the serpent but that seems to be about it. It’s only when Jesus is born and reaches manhood that Satan puts in an appearance, as if he has been waiting for this messiah, this son of God who is going to take away the sins of the world and leave him and his cohorts out of work. So the New Testament is where Christians are really introduced to the idea of the Devil as a force in the world at large (beyond Eden, which has been left far behind) and warned about how he can corrupt men and steal souls, prevent God’s chosen getting to Heaven and basically balls the big guy’s plans up a treat.

When you’re living in a world where you’re constantly oppressed by, at a minimum, the Egyptians, Romans and Persians, it’s probably not hard to question your faith, and devout as they were, the Jews did not wish to blame God for their misfortunes (mostly, they would have seen them, probably, as trials, God testing their faith as he had Job), so the idea of an evil entity opposed to God came certainly appealed, and when they looked back to, as already mentioned, the writings of Zoroaster, there was a ready-made bad guy they could blame. So the idea of God and the Devil struggling eternally against each other, fighting over mortal souls became a running theme when the New Testament was written. Jesus casts out demons, denies Satan and even meets him in the desert. After his crucifixion and before his triumphant resurrection, he is said to have engaged in what the Bible calls “the Harrowing of Hell”, where he descended into Hell and organised a jailbreak for those souls there which he considered worthy of salvation. Finally, Satan is the “big boss” at the end of the Bible, when Revelations tell us of the coming confrontation between the forces of good and evil, Armageddon.
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From the time of the New Testament - apocryphally after Jesus has lived and died - as Christians or readers of the Bible we’re constantly warned about the Devil, to be on the lookout for him, to be able to recognise him, to resist him and reject him. 'Be sober, be diligent; because your adversary, the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.' ( 1 Peter 5:8). St. Paul goes further: 'Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the Devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places' (Ephesians 6:12). As usual with many books, you have to wait till the end of the Bible for the good bits, when St. John in his Apocalypse or Revelations looks back to the story of the Fall from Zoroastrianism and the Book of Enoch when he tells us 'And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world, he was cast out into the earth and his angels were cast out with him.' (Revelation 12:9).

As ever, history (or in this case, doctrine) is written by the winners, so to speak, and it’s possibly unfair that we only have one side of the story. Of course, with all due respect to any practicing Christians reading this, I don’t personally believe this ever happened - if you do, that’s your business and I would never oppose your right to an opinion, especially on religious grounds - and am therefore treating this as mythology. But just to take off my atheist hat for a moment and assume it did, what is the only version we have of the story of Satan’s Fall? That of God, the victor in the Heavenly War, and his shall we say sycophants. We can’t of course ask Satan because (apart from the fact he doesn’t exist*) we’re told he’s the Father of Lies, so how could be trust anything he said? Also, the vanquished in any battle is bound to try to paint himself in the best light possible.

Nevertheless, you can construct a certain rationale for Satan’s rebellion, and perhaps expose the hypocrisy behind a supposedly all-forgiving God, in passages like 'How art thou fallen from Heaven, a Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, . . . for thou hast said in thine heart, "I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God" (Isaiah 14:12-13), but it seems that if we are to really look into the story behind the Fall of Satan we need to check out this guy, an ancient theologian who lived in Alexandria, in Egypt, around the second century, and from whose writings most of of the idea behind this part of the Devil’s myth originates.

* As far as I'm concerned, that is.

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Origen (no, that’s a state) Adamantius (c. 184 - c. 253)

This was one smart guy. He wrote over 2,000 treatises on religion and theology, was the biggest influence on early Christian belief and has been described as “the greatest genius the early Church ever produced.” He had initially wanted to martyr himself, but his mother had the final say on that: “No martyring for you young man! Go and clean your room!” or words to that effect. In the end, he got his wish, as he was tortured as part of the Decian Persecution in 250, when the Roman emperor Decius ordered every citizen of Rome (that included anyone in the empire; you didn’t have to actually live in or be born in Rome to be a Roman citizen) perform sacrifices to the gods and pray to them for his health. Those who did not, including obviously Christians, were tortured and killed. Although Origen was not killed in the crackdown, he died four years later as a result of his wounds, so it’s kind of the same thing. He was declared a martyr, finally realising his life’s ambition, by Pope Dionysus the Great. His story, however, would not end there, as we shall see. But back to this pesky sacrifice thingy.

The sacrifice had to be witnessed; it wasn’t the sort of thing where the Romans could knock at your door, Monty Python-like and say “Here you: sacrificed?” And you would nod and say “Sure,” and they’d go away. No. Every sacrifice had to be witnessed by a Roman magistrate, and you then got a certificate (no, really) to say you had done your duty and obeyed the law. One like this:

To the commission chosen to superintend the sacrifices. From Aurelia Ammonous, daughter of Mystus, of the Moeris quarter, priestess of the god Petesouchos, the great, the mighty, the immortal, and priestess of the gods in the Moeris quarter. I have sacrificed to the gods all my life, and now again, in accordance with the decree and in your presence, I have made sacrifice, and poured a libation, and partaken of the sacred victims. I request you to certify this below.
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Jews were a special case, and were exempted. Respecting their tradition - and probably trying to avoid yet another costly uprising (do you know the price of wood these days? We can’t just be building hundreds of crosses every day!) Julius Caesar had established a precedent whereby Jews were allowed to practice their own religion and were not expected to sacrifice to, or even recognise, the gods of Rome. Christians, on the other hand, were the new kids on the block, and Rome did not take them seriously. Well, be fair here: Judaism had been around for thousands of years, whereas Christianity at this point wasn’t even 250 years old. So it was looked on as more a sect, a cult than a religion, and therefore not allowed any exemption. Christians could go and do their superstitious little practices, but they had better service the real gods or there would be trouble.
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And there was. There is no surviving record of how many Christians were killed for disobeying the edict, though large numbers of them did do as they were told, causing something of a schism in the fledgling religion, as those who had fled rather than compromise their faith, remembering the braver (or slower or less organised) ones who had died for their God, sneered at and reviled the weak ones, and refused to let them back in to the club, as it were. Dark a period as this was in the history of Christianity, it is nevertheless amusing to me to read that the city of Carthage was overwhelmed with requests for forms needed to perform the sacrifice, and many had to be told to come back tomorrow. Bureaucracy, huh? “Nah nah mate, you need a form 19 A! That’s a 19F! What? Over there, just beyond the armed guards. Nah they won’t touch you. Just tell them you need a 19A Form. Yeah. Next!” Or picture the face of the aghast Carthaginian civil servant on his first day: “Nobody told me it was going to be like this! I turned down a position in Rome because I thought this would be quieter! Where have all these people come from? Sorry? You need a what? Let me go get my supervisor…”

Horrible as it was, the edict only lasted a year, as Decius died in 251, but things were about to get a whole lot worse for Christians until the epiphany of Constantine made their religion not only legal, but the state one. But back to Origen.

Like I say, he was a busy boy. Having been thwarted of his attempts to sacrifice himself for his religion, he dedicated his life to writing, teaching about it and explaining it. He was the first to produce a critical edition of the Hebrew Bible, along with five Greek translations; he postulated the theory of the Ransom of Atonement, by which Jesus died for our sins and attained for us forgiveness from his father, he promoted Christian pacifism and free will, and helped to explain the concept of the Divine Trinity. And without any god damn shamrock to help him. Take that, Saint Patrick!

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Right. So that’s nice and clear, then. :rolleyes:

However, not everything he wrote was accepted by the later Church. For example, he postulated that souls has been created before the universe, and had been part of God but then had fallen away into physical forms. I’m only guessing here, totally out of my depth, but I wonder if this was an attempt to explain the angels that attend God? In any case, the Church gave this one the big thumbs down. He was also said (though denied) to have believed that anyone could attain salvation, even Satan himself. "after aeons and the one restoration of all things, the state of Gabriel will be the same as that of the Devil, Paul's as that of Caiaphas, that of virgins as that of prostitutes." That was too much for the Church, and in 543 the Emperor Justinian I declared him a heretic, and ordered all his writings be burned. The Second Council of Constantinople also disagreed with many of his theories and declared them heretical.

Other things the Church did not agree with were Origen’s view that Jesus was born with a human soul, that he was essentially an angel - the greatest of them but still one of them - and that he had come to earth in a human, not spiritual form. His theory of the ransom of atonement, mentioned above, is interesting. He put forward the idea that Jesus died on the cross as a ransom to Satan, in exchange for the removal of sin from the world, but that the bargain was a double-cross, as Jesus being a divine being could not be taken into Hell and Satan had no power over him, as he was free of sin. Not surprisingly, the Church rejected this, and when you think about it, romantic though the notion is, Satan would have to have been pretty thick to have fallen for that one, wouldn’t he?
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He also had a novel take on why the world seems unfair, why some people are born into richness and splendour and why some are fated to live and die in poverty. This all linked back to his theory of souls having had a pre-existence before they are incarnated in human bodies, and the circumstances that attend their birth, and their later lives, are dependent, apparently, on what their incorporeal souls did before they were born. Seems a little unfair; I must have been a right bastard before I was born then. He had some odd notions about pacifism though, believing that “earthy war was not the Christian way.” Yeah. Tell that to the Crusaders. Or the many Popes who kept their own armies, or.. Or, well, any Christian really. He believed, nevertheless, that it was impossible for a Christian to fight in a war as God had expressly forbidden violence, and that if all the world were Christian there would be no need for wars. Ah, bless. He doesn’t know he’s born, does he?

Despite this somewhat naive belief in the innate goodness of people (or their potential for it) Origen was one who failed to take the Bible literally, believing most if not all of it was written in allegory. Here’s what he has to say about the creation of the world, and the Garden of Eden, in On the First Principles: For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars? And that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky? And who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? And again, that one was a partaker of good and evil by masticating what was taken from the tree? And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally. (On the First Principles, IV:16)
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These ideas and theories were to have a major impact on the world of Christianity after Origen’s death, and lead to multiple attempts to have him declared a heretic. Mostly driven by the Cyprian bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, who was on a personal crusade to root out heresy in the Church, the attempts began in 375 when he wrote two anti-heretical treatises condemning Origen’s interpretations of the scriptures. When these didn’t work - guess they didn’t quite get on the bestsellers list - he turned to John, bishop of Jerusalem, asking him to denounce Origen as a heretic, but John said "No can do dude: once someone has passed on you can’t accuse them of being a heretic after the fact" (presumably because they’re dead and can’t refute the allegation or stand trial) so he tried again by appealing to him in 394, but John said “Look dude you deaf or something? Didn’t I already say no?”

Epiphanius though moaned “But didn’t you hear that guy Atarbius only last year advance a petition to denounce him? Come on. It’s got to be worth a second look at least, no?” John reminded him, probably, that the somewhat inappropriately-named-for-a-monk Tyrannius Rufinus (sounds like a T-Rex coming through the ceiling!) had scotched the request, but Epiphanius pushed “Yeah but Jerome thought it was a good idea, and he was a student of Origen!” And then “Aw dude! You left it too late! Now that John Cassian has gone and introduced these heretical writings to those gnarly dudes in the west. We screwed now, son.” Or words to that effect. The next year it was Jerome who wrote to John, again receiving a refusal (“thank you for your application to have the writings of Origen of Alexandria censured. As we advised your friend and compatriot Epiphanius twice already in the foregoing years, this is not something we can support. We look forward to your custom in the future, but would ask you not to advance further applications of the same nature, as being excommunicated from your fellow Christians can sometimes cause offence.”

That was it. The two enemies of Origen banded together in a common cause. If they couldn’t get the old heretic they would get the new one, and they put pressure on John together, trying to have him condemned. John appealed to Pope Theophilus in Alexandria, who took his side and even began teaching the Origen way in Egypt. Both Jerome and Epiphanius would have been smugly delighted at the reaction this engendered, causing monks to riot in the streets. Wait, what? I’ll read that again. No, it’s right: monks. Rioting. In the streets.
How would that look I wonder?

"Brother, I love you but... but... oh I'm going to come right out and say it! I'm going to pray for you less!"
"What? Brother, I love you, but you're asking not to be remembered in my prayers!"
"Oh now, you should follow the true path, brother, and if you don't, well, I - I - I may just have to ignore you at Vespers! There: I said it!"
"Truly brother, I will pray for you, but you shall no longer be in my good graces."
"Oh brother! No need to get violent!"
and so on.

As for the chant, well, you can just see it, can't you?
"What do we want?"
"Whatever God wants!"
"When do we want it?"
"Whenever God decides!"

Hmm. Anyway this quickly caused the pope to change his policy in order to avoid an all-out revolt against him, and the two enemies of Origen finally got what they wanted, as Theophilus denounced Origen as a heretic. Now, how this squared with John of Jerusalem’s claim that he was not allowed to brand Origen a heretic after his death I don’t know; maybe our John was just looking for a plausible excuse to refuse Epiphanius’s request, or maybe Theophilus ignored that part. Whatever the reason, Origen was denounced by the Pope of Alexandria, and to my knowledge, no electrical or sporting goods stores were looted, nor were any effigies set alight. The Great Library was, but that back in 48 BC and was, apparently, an accident.

In a move that would have had Epiphanius and Jerome jumping for joy, Theophilus labelled Origen as the “hydra of all heresies” and expelled his monks from Egypt, closing their monasteries and banning the teachings of Origen practiced by the Nitrian monks, although he seems to have had a change of heart the next year and invited them back, all friends again. Those popes, huh?

Another century and a half, another crisis, as the followers of Origen were at it again. It’s almost amusing how these factions and sub-factions fought over what we - well, I - would call small unimportant points of dogma. Talk about angels dancing on the head of a pin! Well, anyway, two factions got really fed up with each other and went to Emperor Justinian I (remember him?) to plead their case. He called a synod, and after examining all the writings of Origen agreed that he was a heretic, and branded him one again, ordering all his books burned. Not quite sure how you can be denounced twice: I mean, if you’re a heretic (in the eyes of the Church, of course) and nobody de-hereticises (or whatever the word is, if there is one) you, surely you remain a heretic? Any need to call you what you’ve already been called? Whatever the case, Origen was once again denounced by the Church and his writings condemned as heresy. This was about 543. Just time for tea, then.

Ten years later, as we have already heard, the Council of Constantinople (no, the second one) made him a heretic for the third time, though much of their ire does seem to have been directed at his disciple, Evagrius Ponticus, but you know what they say: like master, like disciple, yeah?

But the yo-yo nature of Christian belief continued to paint Origen as right, then wrong, then right and so on, until the great Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus championed him, calling him the greatest of all Christian authors, while Martin Luther hated him, though some of his fellow reformers agreed with many of Origen’s ideas. In the end, his teaching seem to have eventually found favour with the Catholic and indeed much of the Protestant Church, and though he was never formally canonised is now often recognised as Saint Origen. No longer a heretic, then.

And where, I hear you ask testily, is the information about his ideas of the Fall of Satan? Well, I’ll be buggered if I know, but it sure was an interesting read, wasn’t it?

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Satan: A Devilish Dichotomy of Divine Dogma

It’s likely everyone knows that Satan, in his guise as Lucifer, is supposed to have been created as a good creature, an angel - his original name, after all, means “shining light” or “light bearer” and identifies him as the “morning star.” But as the Church held that God’s plan and will were inviolable, and that anyone who spoke out against, tried to change or disagreed with it was inherently evil, heretic, and as Lucifer, daring to equate himself with or even overthrow God (this is never made quite clear, more to follow) had been the archetypal rebel against his Creator, he was seen, by about the fourth century, by the Church as being the leader of all unbelievers, the principle opponent of God, and in time, the Antichrist.
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Like I say. I’ve read Milton (the good bit about the battle, not the boring, arse-licking bit in the Garden of Eden where Adam does everything but suck off Michael, it’s fucking nauseating and I stopped there) and he seems to propose a very mild reason for Satan’s rebellion and Fall. He says that God announced that from this point on, his son Jesus was to be worshipped as he was. I suppose you could say fair enough, given that, according to doctrine, they’re the one being, though how the Church has ever managed to hoodwink its followers into accepting that a being could somehow split part of himself off and have that part lead a separate life for thirty human years - and yet, not claim this - has always baffled me. It’s literally not explained. It’s like the diagram above, supposedly explaining or outlining the precepts of the Holy Trinity. What does it prove? Nothing. As for Saint Patrick, he can stick that shamrock where the sun don’t shine. That proves nothing either and is total bollocks.
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Nobody has ever been able to make me understand what the Trinity is, and I don’t even understand why it has to be. Why not have God three people, God himself, the Don, then Jesus his right hand man and son, and the Holy Ghost as his spiritual enforcer? I could understand that (though I’d never believe in it) a lot more easily than somehow three being one but not really one where one can leave three and so can two and yet they’re still one. Oh come on. Give us a chance here, huh? Anyway, the point is that if God said Jesus is my boy, you gonna give him some respect, Satan, I’m not really sure why he wouldn’t do that. I’m certainly not sure why he would go to war against God, especially as he must have known he was going to lose. I mean, this is, after all, God. You’re beaten before you start.
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But other stories about Satan’s pride making him want to overthrow God and take his place? Now that makes sense. As will happen in any autocracy, eventually someone will resent your power and think you’ve grown too old and soft, and maybe the creation of humanity pushed Satan over the edge. Novelist Anne Rice does a good job (while still taking a lot of artistic licence and making sure we understand this is fiction) of painting a picture of a frustrated Satan, who sees God as someone who won’t change, won’t accept that his creation has grown even beyond his wildest expectations, and eventually gets so pissed off that he says the wrong thing and gets kicked out of the house. It’s like the Judas thing, Why do they expect us to believe he just betrayed Jesus for money? There had to be more to it than that. But the Church expects you to take everything they say on, well, faith, and no dissenting opinion is listened to. In fact, a few hundred years ago if you even expressed such doubts they’d make sure you were never cold again....
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Saint Augustine (354 - 430) believed that even the Devil’s Fall was part of God’s divine plan. He postulated that the cosmos was divided into two parts, one good and one evil, one ruled by God (the Kingdom of Heaven) and one ruled by Satan (Earth). He said God had control of Satan but had set him over the Earth as part of his eternal struggle against the Devil. Part of human free will, then, allowed humans to make a conscious (or unconscious) decision whether they chose to follow the paths of righteousness or turned to the ways of evil. With free will being established, I suppose, it would have been easy to condemn those who fell under Satan’s influence, berating them that it was their own fault, their own choice. The Devil would come to be blamed for many of the evils in the world as time went on, as people conveniently forgot the idea of free will, and that even he, as the Prince of Darkness, had not the power to force people into evil against their will. Like a person hypnotised can’t be made do something that is contrary to their nature, so evil had to be acquiesced to, accepted, agreed to. This may have accounted for the beginnings of the tales of deals with the Devil.

As for his being the Father of Lies? For that we have to thank the apostle John: 'He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own; for he is a liar and the father of it.' (John 8:44). Satan was seen to be the one turning all concepts upside down (would it be sacrilegious and flippant to call him Mister Topsy-Turvy? Yes. Yes it would), making evil good and light darkness, telling man he is the author of his own destiny, not God, and that the needs and wants of the mortal flesh can supplant the spiritual needs of the soul, in direct contravention to God’s purpose. Not in the official Bible, but explained in the Gnostic Acts of Peter, is this lesson he tries to teach even as he is sentenced to be crucified. Got to admire his perseverance!
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I beseech you, the executioners, crucify me thus, with the head downward and not otherwise: and the reason wherefore I will tell unto them that hear. . . . Learn ye the mystery of all nature, and the beginning of all things, what it was. For the first man, of the race of whom I bear the likeness, fell head downwards and showed forth a manner of birth such as was not heretofore: for it was dead, having no motion. He, then, being pulled down . . . established this whole disposition of all things, being hanged up an image of the creation, wherein he made the things of the right hand into left hand and the left hand into right hand, and changed about all the marks of their nature, so that he thought those things that were not fair to be fair, and those things that were in truth evil, to be good . . .. And the figure wherein ye now see me hanging is the representation of that man that first came unto birth. ('Acts of Peter' 37)

What we’re told in the Bible I believe is merely that Peter did not believe himself worthy of being put to death in the same manner as Jesus, and so asked to be crucified upside-down. The passage above does a better job explaining his thinking behind that. Mind you, you can just imagine the lads waiting to crucify him, can't you: "Doesn't this guy ever shut up? Let's get him nailed up quick - if I have to hear him explain the nature of man one more time I swear I'll be ready for the cross myself!"

The more I read about the early creation and formation of Christianity and Judaism - the Abrahamic religions, let’s say, and include Islam in that, though I have yet to read enough about that to have an opinion on it or be able to speak with any sort of mild authority on it - the more ludicrous it seems, both the people who “invented” it and the people who follow it. It’s a mass of contradictions, one of the most fundamental seeming to me to be the concept of the Holy Trinity, another being that even though God is supposed to be omnipotent he allows evil, in the form of the Devil, to oppose him. We’re never told that the Devil is part of his Plan, that he basically operates under his sufferance, so we assume, as we would, that Satan upset God’s machinations and became a nuisance and then his Adversary, threatening his creation in a way God had perhaps not foreseen.
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Not foreseen? But isn’t God all-powerful? How could he not have foreseen such an event, any event? How could anything be a mystery, a surprise, a spanner in his works? And as per usual, the Bible and the Church don’t attempt to explain this major dichotomy in their teachings, just urge you believe what they tell you and not question it. But if you examine any of these religions in even the most cursory way, cracks begin to appear almost at once and your head starts to shake and you say to yourself, how can people fall for this? It’s a good question, and the only real answer I can come up with is that people want to fall for it. It’s likely a good percentage of Christians, Jews or Muslims know the religion they follow is bunkum, could never be - fairy tale stuff. Rising from the dead? Come on. Living after death up in the clouds? Pull the other one. Bread and wine that transmute into human flesh and blood? What have you been drinking?

But though these questions are easily batted aside with the most simple and basic logic, such a thing is not welcome in religions. Utilise logic and you can only come to the conclusion that this is a load of made-up malarky created to try to first, explain the world in terms men could understand but more importantly, second, establish control over the weak-minded. It’s telling that a religion like Buddhism doesn’t seem to have a Devil, or if it does (I freely admit I know as much about Buddhism as I do about Islam; both could be written on the back of a postage stamp) the idea is not to fear it. Wait, yes, of course there is a Devil: Mara. we mentioned him before didn’t we, when he tempted the Buddha? So yeah, he’s there, but to my knowledge Buddhists are not taught to fear the devil and sin. By its very nature (I believe) Buddhism requires its adherents to give up all worldly goods and all concerns pertaining to the world, and to dedicate their lives exclusively to the pursuit of enlightenment. I could be wrong, but I don’t think Buddhism has a God, as such, just the attainment of knowledge and what is known as Nirvana, a grunge band from Seattle, but also a state of rapturous self-awareness, peace and contentment. Doesn’t sound like Cobain’s crowd to me!

Any religion, in my opinion, that has to force its followers to obey by means of a bogeyman thrown up to frighten them into behaving has no right to exist. It must be one of the most insecure religions in history, forever terrified of its adherents being corrupted by what are seen as “false beliefs” or even “false gods” - even God himself pouts that his people shall not worship false gods; hardly the words of a confident, self-assured deity. All though its history, almost up to modern times, anyone who did not conform or toe the line was disinherited from the Kingdom of Heaven, called a heretic and often helped on to Hell by way of a dress rehearsal, as it were, for the real thing. Priests, bishops and inquisitors all pontificated that they were endeavouring to save the heretic’s soul, when in fact all they were doing was ensuring that disobedience to or disbelief in the Church was punished so severely and so mercilessly that others would fear to follow the example of those who had spouted heresy. All about maintaining control, keeping their world order going, telling the faithful everything was all right, even as their own inadequacies, lust for power and hypocrisy was staring the faithful in the face. One is certainly reminded of Leslie Nielsen, standing before the aftermath of an explosion, calmly exhorting everyone to “go home, nothing to see here.”
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So the term “necessary evil” has to apply to the invention of the Devil. People are, as Nick Cave once sang, no good, basically, and all that keeps most of us from raping our next door neighbour or looting the local electronics store or robbing a bank is the fear of reprisal from the authorities. Well, that’s not true of course: our own moral compass, instilled in us both by our parents and society (and to some extent perhaps, our faith, if we have one) prevents us from doing the really bad stuff. But even the best of us has, I’m sure, gone into a shop and wondered what it would be like to grab something, stuff it under our jacket and leg it out of the store. Of course, driving that desire is an almost harmless adrenalin rush, but we do dream of being able to break the law for our own purposes (while still expecting the law to be there and in operation when someone breaks it and it affects us, of course) and if we’re honest, the only thing that holds us back is the fear of punishment.

So too with our faith. If there were no consequences to bad actions, we’d all be bad. If you were told to pray and go to church and fast and be nice to people, and the question was asked, what if we don’t, and the answer was a shrug, nobody would take such edicts seriously. But if you’re told well, if you don’t do that, then the Devil will get you and drag you down to Hell (and you’re sufficiently ignorant, impressionable or gullible to believe this could actually happen) then you sit up and take notice. If I’m not nice to my friends the Devil will get me. I’d better be nice to my friends. If I take this computer - even if nobody sees me do it and I get away with it - God will know and will send the Devil to take me. And so on. It’s quite as ludicrous as it seems, and really, other than among fundamentalist Christians and Jews, and children, nobody really thinks that way any more. But back when Christianity, and even Judaism was new, as Zoroaster created his own religion in Persia, the idea of a ravening beast-man pursuing you through the streets or coming into your room to eat your soul because you said a bad word to your mother was very real. It was taken literally, not as a metaphor, and no doubt many a child - and adult - who believed they had sinned trembled in their bed at night or looked furtively behind them, expecting the dark shadow to eclipse theirs and a clawed hand to reach out for them.

The Devil, therefore, fulfils a useful purpose for the Church. He is the enforcer, if you will, though he doesn’t make sure you do God’s bidding or else; he offers you an alternative whereby you don’t have to do what God says, but there is a price. And the Church tells you that humans have free will, nobody can make you be good, but if you’re not then what happens is on your own head. Why take the risk? Be good, follow scriptures, honour your father and your mother et cetera and you needn’t worry about the Devil, because God will protect you and the Devil can’t stand up to God. He needs people like you to help him disobey and cause problems for God, and if you don’t, and Abraham in the next street doesn’t, and Ishamel down the road doesn’t, and that boy you sit next to at school, what’s his name, Jacob? If he doesn’t, and then nobody does, Satan will be on his own and all he can do is sulk in Hell.

So the Church may have railed at, denounced and raged over the existence of the Devil, but they needed him, and they knew it. He was what kept everyone in line. He was the dark shadow waiting in the corner, the hand that reached out when you strayed from the path, the whispering hiss in the darkness that tempted you onto forbidden paths, and you needed God’s strength to steer clear of him. Hey, we’re God’s agents on Earth. You know what? We’ll help you. We’ll keep you safe, keep you from falling into Satan’s hands, and all we ask in return is blind, stupid, stubborn and unquestioning obedience and dibs on your immortal soul when you snuff it. What do you say, huh?

Not only that, but the Church and Satan need puny humans. Satan certainly does. Powerful as he may be said to be, he is unable (so far as the Church is concerned anyway) to manifest in his own form on the Earth, and must work through the agency of humans. So he can possess people with his spirit, but that’s a little extreme and he doesn’t often tend to do that. What he does is far more subtle. He enters the hearts of men, touching them with his black fingers, twisting and warping and shrivelling them up, corrupting them and turning them to his evil purposes, and making them do his bidding, or we should say, encouraging or allowing them to do so, for as we’ve already pointed out, man has free will and therefore cannot be forced to do anything he does not want to do. So Satan can’t force someone to, say, burn down a church, but he can put in their mind reasons for doing so, a desire to carry out the deed, assurances that it is the right thing to do and that they will not be caught, and so on.

We end up then with a sort of three-way symbiotic relationship: God and the Church need mortals, for what is God (and more to the point, what is the Church) without worshippers? Satan needs mortals to be the tools by which he works his mischief in the world and thwarts and warps God’s plan, and mortals need both God and Satan, the one to grant them everlasting life and salvation from sin, the other to allow them to express their baser desires and rebel against God if they wish to.

An unholy trinity, indeed.

And all created in the mind of man.

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Life’s too good: Literal Devils

Well I certainly would not have believed it if I hadn’t read it, but apparently a lot of Christians missed the persecution, torture, suffering and death that attended their fledgling years under the Roman Empire, and when Constantine came to power and made their religion the state one, thus legitimising and forever removing the threat of punishment for being a Christian, many of them legged it to the desert, eager to seek new temptations, hardships and horrors. Bloody Christians! Didn’t know when they had it good. :rolleyes: The idea seems to have been, if you can credit this, that Christianity was seen to be based on struggle, hardship and suffering, and once they were free and recognised in the empire there was no more of that. They felt cheated, as if they couldn’t pursue the major point of their belief.

In the desert they were faced - no doubt to their delight - with new dangers, and stories arose from there of monks battling actual Devils. These were probably metaphorical ones - boredom, a sense of loss, the searing heat, thirst etc - but were written in the accounts of, among others, Saint Athanasius and Bishop Palladius. Reading further, there seems to be a certain odd logic in their choice, at least, in the context of their religion. It seems some of the more let’s say hardline monks wanted to emulate Christ by going out into the desert and facing the hardships he faced, the temptations that assailed him. As the man himself said: “Jesus said to him, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ ” (Matthew 19:21).

These people were called the Desert Fathers, and while he was perhaps a little ahead of the curve to be considered one, Saint Paul of Thebes seems to have been the first, going into the desert during that Decian Persecution we spoke of earlier when looking at Origen. It can of course be assumed that life in the desert, especially for someone who has not spent his life there like a bedouin or the operator of a caravan, is going to present a whole lot of problems, and between heat exhaustion, dehydration, hunger, sunstroke and coping with the myriad of insect life the desert uses to refute the allegation it is a dead wasteland, the mind is likely to be put under increasing strain. Hallucinations and visions are likely to be all but commonplace, and so much the more so, I would imagine for holy men, who almost want to see these things, to prove to themselves and others that they are real.
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Which is why I have no problem accepting that the likes of Saint Paul and later Saint Anthony wrote of having actual, real, physical battles with the Devil out there in the wilderness. Grappling with their own slowly slipping sanity and succumbing to hallucinations, these men seem to have truly believed they were assaulted by and battled with the Devil, and because they believed it, and wrote of such encounters with fervour and sincerity, their adherents believed it too. And so the idea grew that the Desert Fathers had in fact managed to recreate the experience of the Saviour, their piety and sacrifice and dedication to God calling forth his Adversary to try to tempt, or slay them, under the burning desert sun.

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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!”
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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.
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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!
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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.
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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.
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Hell ain’t a bad place to be: Honey I’m home!

Again, I’m amazed to find that the idea of Hell is not in the Bible, at least, not in the New Testament. In her book, Joan O’Grady seems a little mystified as to where the idea of Hell, and the Devil presiding over the damned, came from. I expect it was largely a creation of the Church. I mean, much of what is in Christianity is based on the Bible, but a lot is made up by men who lived a long time after its assumed authors had turned to dust. If the Pope and his bishops needed to further terrorise their flock to keep them in check, what better way than to invent a place, the very antithesis of Heaven, where evil souls went after death? The existence of the place is hinted at in the Gnostic Scripture, and certainly people like Milton and Dante built on that image, but I would imagine the main thrust of it came from brimstone-preaching pulpit-thumpers, haranguing the terrified congregation into submissive obedience by warning them that they were all on, as Bon Scott once sang, a highway to Hell, and that the only ride off this infernal interstate was by flagging down Jesus and begging for a lift.

The very idea of Hell is nonsense. If we’re supposed to believe that God is always ready to forgive and love us, then why would such a being create, or allow to be created, such a site of misery? Why would he allow souls to be “stolen” from him, diverted to a dark place of fire and torture and repentance and regret, with no hope of salvation? But as a means of keeping control over a largely superstitious and cowed audience, it’s perfect. Be good or you will never see God when you die is a reasonably worrying warning, but be good or you’ll go to Hell when you die is a lot more effective. The problem there of course is the word good. How do you define that, and how many levels of good are there? If you break one small rule, are you damned forever? If you follow the main rules but ignore the smaller ones are you on Scott’s road to perdition? And what about if you repent on your deathbed? Isn’t God supposed to be always ready to forgive?

Consider too the Harrowing of Hell, again confined to the Gnostic Gospels - most notably the Book of St. Nicodemus - which tells of Christ feeling bored while kicking around the tomb waiting for resurrection day to roll around and deciding to take a trip down to Hell, to see if he can’t release some souls, pass the time that way. Well let’s ask this question: if Hell was supposed to be the place where “bad” souls went, and Christ found “good” souls there - or at least ones he believed worthy of redemption - then what the hell (pun intended) were they doing there in the first place? Was this the biggest administrative cock-up in celestial history? Did St. Peter tie one on the previous night and send a whole bunch of innocent or redeemable souls to the wrong destination? Did someone rubberstamp the wrong form? Was it that damn YTS kid again?

Right. As if.
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Someone (I think it might have been Spock) said if there are self-made hells, we all have to live in them, and I actually think this is the correct interpretation of Hell. Hell could be seen as the removal forever of the possibility of ever seeing God - I think Anne Rice uses this in Memnoch the Devil - the despair engendered by knowing that you have lost your chance of salvation, that God’s face is forever turned away from you, that Heaven will always be closed to you and that you will never walk its green fields could be sufficient punishment in and of itself. If we consider the burning shame, the regret this entails, perhaps that’s where the idea of flames may have taken hold. In medieval times - and later - suspected witches were burned at the stake, but if Christian belief was right, and could be taken literally, then they were shit out of luck because when their suffering ceased on this earth it was going to continue, for all eternity, in hotter flames that never went out. Kind of overkill, no? I suppose to some degree you could look then upon the stake as being a kind of dry run for the real thing.

So Hell becomes the Devil’s domain, and because it’s painted as a place of fire and smoke, lakes of sulphur etc, the Devil takes on its characteristics, and his form gains a new colour: red. Now his skin is red, his eyes are red, his wings are red. He doesn’t necessarily belch fire (because who needs to when you’re surrounded every day by the stuff?) but essentially he’s kind of reverted back to the original figure of the dragon, a being who can survive in, and indeed thrives in fire.

To return to the idea of Hell for a moment, and examine it a little more in detail, consider how any dark place, crack in the ground, chasm, ravine and especially volcano - where red-hot lava comes bubbling up to the surface and spills onto the ground, the very image of Hell spewing its red rivers - is anathema to us. Other than, obviously, those who explore or study such phenomena, nobody would get too close to such places for fear of falling in, or (while most of us would not admit it) something emerging from that place and dragging us down into its domain. We’re taught from an early age that such places are dangerous and to be avoided, possibly why we also conflate the idea of Hell with not say for instance walking into or being driven there, but of falling into it. If holes and pits are terrifying and dangerous, then Hell is the most terrifying and dangerous pit of all. Fall in there, and you won’t just break your neck, you’ll break your soul.

And there’s no way out. This is possibly another of the things I find odd about the concept of Hell. If we’re supposed to always be able to repent, if forgiveness is always just there, if we reach for it, if we strive for it, if we want it, then what is Hell? The point where God folds his arms and says “Nope! You had your chance, now you’re damned.” Anyone who goes to Hell (faith teaches) can never come back out again. Purgatory/Limbo is another matter, a sort of waystation for souls (yeah how stupid is that?) while God decides their fate, but once you’ve been consigned to the flames, you’re there for all eternity. So is it that anyone, facing such horror, would repent, and so that repentance can’t be taken as genuine, driven as it is by terror and the urgent desire to leave Hell? If - to stretch the analogy to almost breaking point - God wanted people to be good, why not give them a short stay in Hell, show them what it’s like, and like those kids who get sent to jail just to straighten them out on reality shows, shake them up, give them a vision of what they’re headed for?

But no. Hell is the final stop, according to the Church, and once you’re there you can’t come back. So then what is the point? If, like the supposed idea of prison, the point is to rehabilitate the soul, where’s the reward waiting at the end? There’s no parole, you’re in for life - afterlife, all eternity - so it can only be a form of punishment. Does that sound like the God we’re supposed to believe in? That he would abandon his children, literally, to the fire, turn his back on them and leave them to their fate?

What a bastard, huh?