Satan continued to lose his personal glamour where the Jews are concerned: by the 1940s he had dwindled to `little more than an allegory of the evil inclination among humans'.51 This sophisticated interpretation remains fairly constant today, certainly among Liberal Jewish congregations. Christianity was, and often still is, rather different in this respect.
In the New Testament, Satan is Antikeimenos, the Adversary or enemy, the `archon of this age' - arction ton aiomon touton - or `ruler' of the early Christian era, according to the Church Father Saint Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch. Since the Fall, the Devil had held sway over humanity, but now the incarnation of Jesus, God's son, has shaken his influence, which will finally be exploded by the `Parousia', or Second Coming of Christ. In the meantime, however, the individual can ensure a place in Heaven via the doctrine of Atonement, a phrase first used by William Tyndale in the first English translation of the New Testament, in 1526. In fact, he had to invent the word - meaning `at-one-ment' - to convey the nowfamiliar idea of reconciliation, itself a term that did not exist in his day 59 This is also found in the later King James' or `Authorized' version of 1611, in New Testament passages such as `We also [have] joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement' 60
However, Jesus became the man-god substitute for a much older idea of the Jewish scapegoat, when the chosen animal was ritually heaped with the sins of the people and sent off into the wilderness to die. But as Barbara Walker explains, `The Jews' Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement, was based on the Sumero-Babylonian kupparu, an atonement ceremony in which a sheep was ceremonially loaded with all the community's sins, and killed.'61 Jesus was symbolized as the sacrificial Lamb of God - although certain heretics, as we shall see, had a startlingly different version of this concept.
The New Testament declares `Thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ:'62 that is, victory over `sin, death, and Satan' 63 This triumph was accomplished by Christ's willing death upon the cross, and the spilling of his holy, redemptive blood. As it says on posters outside countless churches: `Christ died for your sins.' Jesus atoned for the sin of Adam and Eve by his sacrifice, and in dying became our saviour. After the doors of Paradise were slammed shut, his blood was the price that re-opened them. However, to non-theologians this presents a complex and rather contradictory conundrum, for if Christ has already died for our sins, why do we need to be baptized, live a good life, and die in a state of grace to hope to reach Heaven? This scenario had not bypassed the Church Fathers: as Barbara Walker notes:
Among medieval theologians there was a general opinion that Jesus' sacrifice was not really effective; only `a few' were saved by the Savior's death. St Thomas Aquinas and others claimed the vast majority of people were still doomed to eternal suffering in hell' Thus the theory of atonement for all time or for all humanity was actually denied by the same church that pronounced it as a basis for worldly power 65
Take the concept of Atonement out of the picture, however, and it makes more sense, for baptism is an outward and visible sign of the individual's cleansing of sin and commitment to lead a good Christian life and deny the Devil. In fact, the early Christians were exorcized before being baptized - no doubt a considerably tougher and perhaps even more traumatic ritual than today's polite dips and modestly clad dunkings. This was hardly surprising, as the precursor of the Christian rite also took that form, the Egyptian baptisms in grand temples dedicated to Isis and Osiris on the banks of the Nile were preceded by public confessions of sins, and dramatic exorcisms 66
Exorcism was necessary for, as we have seen, demons were genuinely believed to be everywhere, in the food the good Christians ate and the wine they drank, in the sidelong glance of a young woman at the well, even in the uncovered tresses of a nubile girl. To the early Christian, everyday life was beleaguered by Satan, a paranoia that in a sense was justified, for who knew which kindly seeming person was actually a spy, about to deliver them up to their pagan persecutors?
Of course all pagans were deemed to be inherently heretics, followers of the Devil, although, according to the Church Father Irenaeus, a heretic was any individual whom a bishop had singled out as a heretic. As Jeffrey Burton Russell remarks dryly, `Since no objective definition of "heretic" is possible, this definition was almost inevitable.'67
The pagans were clearly satanic, for their gods had even dared mimic Christ's life and death. The Egyptian Osiris, the Persian Tammuz and the Roman Mithras - not to mention several other dying-and-rising gods, such as the Greek Orpheus and Dionysus - were born at the winter solstice around 25 December in humble surroundings such as caves, their nativity attended by new stars, shepherds and Magi. They all died (on a Friday) in spring, to be resurrected miraculously a few days later. Incredibly, even today, some Christians explain away this awkward fact as a sort of diabolical parody on the part of the pagan myth-makers, even though this stretches blind faith rather thinly as most of these stories predated the life of Jesus by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Sometimes it is suggested that at best these stories were invented as a rehearsal, a sort of feeble dry run for the real 'thing68
Even membership of the Church was no guarantee of a pristine soul. Bishop Ignatius declared that anyone who acted without the approval of his bishop was a Devil worshipper, although he admitted to being tempted himself by Satan to shirk his `duty' of martyrdom - an interesting theological and moral point. Here we have the Devil tempting him to save his life and the good God requiring him to commit a form of suicide, although of course that is a modern view, for which, no doubt, some wretched demon would have been blamed, had it been voiced in those far-off days. Ignatius wrote `I long to suffer, but I do not know whether I am worthy ... I need the meekness in which the prince of this world [Satan] is undone' 69 As Jeffrey Burton Russell notes: `Torture and death were [Satan's] work, and even kindness on the part of the pagans was a diabolical snare, since it might weaken the martyr's resolve' .70
Distasteful though this holy masochism may seem to most modern eyes - although Catholics are still encouraged to `offer up their suffering to God', who surely must be hoping for someone to offer up their joy and pleasure by now - it must be remembered that these zealots firmly believed that Christ was about to return at any moment and claim his own. (In fact, it is highly unlikely that Jesus ever intended to found a church for posterity, being apparently firmly of the belief that the end of the world was imminent. Certainly his disciples expected him to return in glory, signalling the end, at any moment. Ironically, Saint Peter's founding of the Church of Rome can be seen as the direct result of Christ's failure to return as promised in the Apostle's lifetime.) In the meantime a martyr's death would guarantee the early Christians eternal bliss.
Perhaps it was one way of glorifying, even simply of coping with, the persecutions that took the willing and unwilling alike and had them disembowelled by wild animals in the Colosseum or used as human torches. The arena became a potent metaphor for the battlefield between good and evil - indeed, an early Latin sermon depicts Satan as a gladiator attempting to ensnare the good Christians in his net," a perhaps unfortunate analogy, reinforcing the image of the enemy's virility at their own expense. (And ironically, this early Christian insistence on those who cause pain and humiliation being evil - and who can doubt it? - sits uncomfortably with later Inquisitorial justification for its institutionalized sadism.)
Yet for at least the first two centuries of Christian belief there was no coherent set of articles of faith, not even a shared set of holy writings, a New Testament. Attitudes to the Fall of Adam and Eve and the nature of God and the Devil differed massively from Christian group to Christian group throughout the Roman Empire. This confusing state of affairs only ended when Constantine created a state religion out of Christianity, the old slaves' faith, in the fourth century CE. By then, of course, any individual or group who took a different line from that of the Catholic Church was anathema.
Lords of light and dark
Although most shared the view of Church Father Polycarp that `Anyone who twists Christ's words to suit his own desires and says that there is no resurrection, or judgement is the first-born child of Satan',72 there were always dissenters, who were inevitably accused of `twisting Christ's words' to suit themselves. By and large, these were the Gnostics, who were to lose out to the Roman Church and, by doing so, become persecuted almost to extinction as the perceived servants of Satan. Certainly, they were to entertain some extremely thought-provoking notions about good and evil, even daring to reverse the usual role of God and Satan ...
`Gnostic' derives from the Greek gnosis, which means knowledge, referring to a sense of personal relationship with the deity, maintained by intuition, revelation and incremental initiation. Gnosticism was basically a knowledge of self - Gnothi sea uton - 'know thyself': `what united the various Gnostic sects was the belief that the world is completely evil and cannot be redeemed.'73 To them the world was so terrible that it could only be a shadowy, inferior realm, a grotesque parody of something far finer, more spiritual, which existed beyond our material senses.
Even the less extreme Gnostics assumed that the Creator himself was formerly a benign spirit who had fallen, like Lucifer. Indeed, they often identified this blind, ignorant and evil entity with the Devil, and, after the Greek Gnostics, called him the `demiurge' or `partial mover', the opposite to the prime mover, God. Robert McL. Wilson writes: `The Demiurge of Gnostic theory is simply the Satan of Jewish and Christian theology . . . transformed by the dominant Gnostic pessimism into the creator of the world, its present ruler. 171
To the Gnostic it made no sense to debate the likely outcome of the battle between Good and Evil - or as they frequently symbolized it, Light and Darkness - if, as most Christians believed, the Devil was already known to be doomed to defeat. Like the ancient Persians, most Gnostics were dualists, seeing the world in a constant state of flux between the powers of equal but opposite forces of Light and Darkness. The only problem, to put it bluntly, was knowing which was which ...
Although colourful, with their wild prophecies and speaking in tongues, the Gnostics' cosmology - apart from being immensely, not to say ludicrously, complex - was ultimately somewhat depressing, as acknowledged in the passage quoted above. They saw men and women as vulnerable slivers of spirit trapped in a gross fleshy package: to them originally mankind had been pure spirit, but had been caught by the evil aeon. Of course by espousing the idea that Yahweh was Satan, they were doomed to a not very peaceful future among the flock of the emergent established Church, the Roman Catholics.
It was usually left to the heretics to point out that there was a basic and disturbing discrepancy between the harsh, tyrannical Almighty of the Old Testament and Jesus' loving Father of the New Testament. Indeed, John Milton, who sought in his poem Paradise Lost famously to `justify the ways of God to Man' - and only succeeded in firing up luminaries of the Romantic Movement such as Percy Bysshe Shelley and William Blake with admiration for Lucifer, who saw him as the hero of the work - wrote of a truly sadistic Yahweh:
Almighty ... Have left us this our spirit and strength Strongly to suffer and support our pains That we may so suffice his vengeful ire.75
He seems little better, and because of his status and omnipotence even worse, than the Inquisitorial torturers who revived their victims so they could suffer further agonies, even (as we shall see) pulling them half-consumed from the flaming pyre to writhe for an hour or two before returning them to the fire. God has ensured that Adam and Eve had enough `spirit and strength' with which to suffer, to appease his own pathological anger. Yet even here, Milton seems unwilling to have the first man and woman wholly and irretrievably tormented, for although they were condemned `to work and suffer' the situation was `not without hope'.76 And while Satan was to suffer `torture without end', this somehow represented `Eternal justice'.
Indeed, many early Christians (and some more recent thinkers) became exercised over the vexed question of whether a just God would leave even Satan to languish in Hell for eternity - although gradually they came to accept that even the average sinner would be condemned to the infernal regions for ever. The Church Father, Clement of Alexandria, believed that in the fullness of time, all sinners - even Satan himself - might be saved. To Clement, the existence of free will meant that even the Devil retained the right to repent. But it was left to Origen to develop the concept of apocatastasis, `the ultimate return of all beings, including Satan, to the God from which they sprang'?? Today the Vatican proclaims that even the most dyed-in-the wool sinner can be forgiven by the Church, if he is genuinely repentant.78
However, the Gnostics with their intense anxiety about the real nature of God, had not plucked the idea of a good Lucifer out of thin air. Their sympathy for the Fallen One was similar to the ancient Greeks' admiration for Prometheus (whose name means `Forethought'), who stole fire from Zeus and gave it to mankind, only to be condemned to be chained to a mountaintop where his liver was torn out by `his own totemic eagle and nightly restored to be devoured again'79 The wretched Prometheus lamented: `I rescued mankind from the heavy blow that was to cast them into Hades . . . Mankind I helped, but I could not help myself."' Admiring this altruistic anti-hero, and seeing in him true Luciferanism, Gnostic icons depicted Prometheus creating the first man out of clay - according to the Greek legend. Perhaps they saw behind the myth, for, like Lucifer, Prometheus, who gave Man the `fire' of intelligence, was ultimately the loser. With his fellow Titans, the giant spirits who roamed the earth even before Zeus and his pantheon took up residence on Olympus, Prometheus lost the ensuing battle for supremacy, and was chained in bondage under the planet.
This story was one of the inspirations for the Judaeo-Christian `war in heaven' and the fall of Lucifer," although Prometheus seems also to have been the prototype for trickster gods, such as the Scandinavian Loki. According to Barbara G. Walker he played a trick on Zeus that also surfaced in the Old Testament in another guise:
... Prometheus tricked Zeus into accepting the less edible parts of sacrificial animals, such as the fat and bones, on behalf of the gods, while human beings were allowed to consume the meat. This was not what Zeus intended, and he swore vengeance on both Prometheus and his human friends.82
Zeus was forced to accept the offal because he had made a sacred oath to take the sacrifice, but when the similar thing happened to Yahweh - the priests being instructed that they `shall remove all the fat ... and burn it on the altar as an aroma pleasing to the Lord 181 'the Jews simply claimed that Yahweh preferred it'.84
Significantly, however, it was `Prometheus' excessive contribution of rationalism"' that effectively brought the Olympian religion to its knees. Intuitive and mystical religious sentiments fade like the morning dew under the bright solar glare of too much thought, too much `right-brain' logic. (We will also see this in action when the scientific Age of Enlightenment of the eighteenth century helped sweep away the religious dogma and superstition of the ages, although some claim that science itself has become the modem bigotry.)
To Christians, Lucifer fell because of his wicked presumption. Yet to an objective eye, the Church's story is all too neat, Lucifer's transformation being suspiciously swift. Somehow during the fall, between being God's favourite angel and arriving on earth/in hell, the radiant Son of the Morning had acquired much nastier characteristics than mere pride. The shining Lucifer had become Satan, the literal embodiment of all imaginable evils, a dark creature of mind-freezing horror, who knows no mercy or compassion. He presides over his hellish college of demons amid the eternal flames of punishment and conspires with them to lure mankind into their foul embrace. He is the ultimate vampire, the soul-sucker par excellence, whose chief triumph is to make men evil like him. His underlying raison d'etre is to kill hope, although, as the `Father of Lies', he will first deceive by offering whatever the seeker desires.
Despite Milton's best intentions, his Satan, compared to a God seriously in need o
f anger management, is comparatively normal. Once forced down to Hell - or 'Pandemonium', the abode of devils - Satan seems determined to make the best of it, as a sort of diabolical pioneer, declaring `Here at last we shall be free',86 and, classically: `Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n'.87 And Milton depicts Hell as a sort of Parliament (perhaps he should know, having worked for Cromwell!), where the demons debate whether or not to try to recover Heaven, which sounds really rather democratic.
The early Christians themselves were often confused by the nature of evil and the character of God. Marcion, who was expelled from the Christian community in Rome in 144 CE for musing on the big question `Whence is evil?' came to the conclusion that two gods must exist, the Old Testament demiurge, whom he also called the conditor malorum, `author of evils', and auctor diaboli, `maker of the Devil' 88 The benevolent deity, on the other hand, was allmerciful, but - presumably because there is not much evidence of this characteristic in most people's lives - his ways must be hidden from humankind.
To the Muslims, the Devil is either `Iblis' or `Shaytan', a pagan Arabic term `possibly derived from the roots "to be far from" or "to [be] born with anger".89 He was originally one of the morally ambiguous, shape-shifting djinn, created by God out of fire. These impish beings are associated with graveyards and the underworld, and on occasion they can be `trapped' into servitude as sorcerers' servitors. Satan himself can only tempt, never force, but he is remarkably successful, leading the righteous astray - specifically into apostasy, heresy and blasphemy.
Red god of the desert
Traditionally, the Hebrew Shaitan - who acted as arch-tempter in the Book of Job - is seen as deriving from the ancient Egyptian god Set,90 but there is another, more unsettling and controversial association. Although this would hardly sit comfortably with traditional Judaism or a literal form of Christianity, Hebrew scholar Professor Karl W. Luckert notes an interesting parallel between the Old Testament God and the ass-headed Set (although he is often depicted as a jackal-like mythological beast), the ancient Egyptians' nearest equivalent to the Judaeo-Christian Devil. Once ruler of the pantheon, Set (or Seth) villainously killed and dismembered the good god Osiris, consort of Isis, the mother goddess. In some versions of the story, he also sexually abused both Isis and her son Horus. However, the Egyptians had no out-and-out Satan figure, no irredeemable evil god with no function or purpose except to torment and entrap humans. To them, all their gods were aspects of the one God, so in a sense Set was an equally valued part of the Creator with the likes of Osiris, or Thoth, god of learning and healing. Even Set had his uses, to balance the usefulness and goodness of the others, and therefore should not be blamed for it. (His was also a useful name to utter in spells, as in The Book of the Dead, where the soul uses it to pass by afterlife snares and obstacles, saying `... for I am great of magic, with the knife that issued from Seth, and my legs are mine for ever.')" Set also appears in the Old Testament in human form as Seth, `the supplanter' of the Good Shepherd Abel92
The Secret History of Lucifer: And the Meaning of the True Da Vinci Code Page 4
