A few days ago, a hike to the road and mailbox
brought an anonymous letter addressed to me in handwriting I didn't
recognize. The missive contained a vile
little pamphlet alerting me to the fact that Satan gave Roman Catholicism and
Islam and evolution to the world so mankind might be deceived and lured into
eternal damnation. This was a fact I
hadn’t known and one which I still thankfully do not know...
 |
| John Milton's Paradise Lost |
This venom spewed out in the name of a loving
God bore the imprint of an outfit called Chick Publications which offers to
send the reader a sample assortment of more titles for a mere $12.95. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers the
firm to be a band of hate mongers and it is hard to disagree with such an
assessment after looking at even a single tract. Page 8 of the pamphlet I received reminded me
"Jesus hates Catholicism and calls her the Great Whore". Additionally, it berates former President
George W Bush for urging Americans to distinguish between deeds of terrorists
claiming to act in the name of Allah and a faith deeply held by a billion
people...
While Jack T Chick's cartoon collection is
likely best used as a floor liner for the cage of a diarrheatic ape, he
certainly isn't the first English language writer to pontificate on the Prince
of Darkness and his misdeeds. Nor will
he be the last...
Paradise
Lost,
John Milton's epic poem exceeding 10,000 lines of blank verse, tells the story
of a rebellion in Heaven against God led by Satan who, along with his
followers, is cast down into Hell where he plots to corrupt Jehovah's newly
formed Earth and lead our primeval parents Adam and Eve into death and sin by
convincing them to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and
Evil...
 |
| Satan is cast from heaven in Gustave Dore's 1866 illustration for Milton's Paradise Lost |
Milton obviously told his story well since
many people assume it reflects the Biblical tale of Eden although the poem
bears little if any resemblance to the account to found in the Hebrew
scriptures. Genesis tells us in Chapter 3 the serpent who led Adam and Eve to
open their eyes and be like divine beings in knowing good and evil was the
"shrewdest of all the wild beasts the LORD GOD had made." Here, the wily snake is a trickster not much
different from those in other origin stories found elsewhere in the world...
[An identification of Serpent with Satan
doesn't appear to have taken place in Judaism until the early part of the
Common Era (CE) shared with Christianity.
A Hellenistic work, the Greek Apocalypse
of Baruch, which may date to as early as 130 CE, is among the first works
to link Eden’s snake to the darkest of angels.
Other scholars believe the earliest hint of such an identification
occurs in The Wisdom of Solomon,
dating to about two centuries earlier.
Others say the first clear merging of the two figures comes in The Apocalypse of Moses, likely penned
in 1st Century CE.]
Satan makes very few appearances in Hebrew
scripture. He never does so as a force
even remotely capable of challenging Yahweh's authority. (Giving him power to do so would encroach on
the sovereignty of God Who, in Isaiah
45: 7, clearly claims to form the light and create the darkness and to be
author of peace and maker of evil.)...
In the 21st chapter of First Chronicles, Satan arises against Israel and incites David to
conduct a census. God becomes angered by
the presumption that God's people can be numbered like cattle and sets
pestilence upon the land, killing 70,000 men.
Still filled with wrath, God relents after David looks up to see
"the angel of the LORD standing between heaven and earth with a drawn
sword in his hand directed against Jerusalem" and begs the Almighty to
direct vengeance against him and not the innocent people of Israel...
 |
| Emil Jannings as Mephisto in a 1926 film adaptation of the Faust legend |
Readers familiar with the Bible may recall an
older version of this story is to be found in the 24th chapter of Second Samuel. But, here, it is God who prompts David to
"go and number Israel and Judah."
David-- as in First Chronicles-- does the proper kingly thing and asks
the Lord to punish him and not his people...
The difference in the two accounts may be
explained by when each work was written.
We know the earliest possible date for First Chronicles would be 539 BCE based on the history it records and
also that the book was likely put down on a scroll, give or take a decade,
circa 300 BCE. Samuel belongs to earlier times-- three centuries or more-- with
its final story taking place during David's reign, or roughly a thousand before
Jesus. Attitudes about God's direct
involvement in human misery were clearly evolving during the centuries between
the tales told in the Chronicles and
the penning of Samuel...
 |
| William Blake: Satan smiting Job with boils, 1826 |
An unfortunate chap named Job has his own
experience with ha-Satan, The
Adversary, who presents himself to the Lord alongside other members of the
celestial court one fine day. God asks if Satan has come across Job, "a
blameless and upright man who fears God and shuns evil" in the course of
his roaming across the earth. The
Adversary answers Job honors God because God constantly blesses Job, making him
richer and more comfortable with each new day.
"But lay Your hand upon all that he has," Satan counsels the
Lord, "and he will surely blaspheme You to Your face"...
 |
| Marc Chagall's 1960 depiction of the despair of Job |
Thus began the tribulations of the righteous
man named Job who eventually hears a Voice challenging him out of the whirlwind
to gird up his loins like a man and answer where he was when the Lord laid the
foundations of the earth or say he can dispatch the lightning on its
missions...
[Job, incidentally, holds an important place
in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In
the latter religion, he is considered a prophet and Islamic narratives about
his misfortunes are broadly similar to the Biblical account. Shaitan, aka Satan, plays a much more
malevolent role in the Koran and Arabic folklore, however: after he overhears
angels praise Ayyub as a righteous man, the Devil takes it upon himself to
corrupt Ayyub and his wife. Knowing the
two will remain faithful despite any evil worked by Shaitan, Allah permits them
to suffer temporarily.
Modern scholars believe Job's story took on
its current form between the 6th and 4th Centuries before the Common Era. Job
was likely cobbled together from multiple sources, one of which may have been
the product of an Edomite author. Students
of the book cite linguistic constructions and a general lack of Jewish
"color" to support arguments the unknown writer lived somewhere south
of the Dead Sea. Other experts suspect
early versions of Job's tale date back to to ancient Sumer, the city-state
which flourished five thousand years ago in the area of current day Iraq.]
Earlier, we noted a gradual tendency to avoid
directly attributing evil to God. This
may have been due to the growing regional influence of the teachings of a
Persian prophet named Zoroaster who lived about six centuries before the Common
Era. A vegetarian who condemned animal
sacrifices, Zoroaster taught a monotheistic faith in which Ahura Mazda, sole
and Uncreated Creator of the universe, constantly battles Angra Mainyu, source
of sin and evil and father of demons.
Angra Mainyu may be strong, Zoroaster said, but Ahura Mazda will
ultimately defeat evil through the aid of good men...
 |
| Angra Mainyu, the force of darkness ever in contention with the force of light in Zoroastrian thought, attacks the cosmic bull in a carving at Persepolis (photograph by Mary Loosemore, 2008) |
As the new religion of Christianity took
root, its chroniclers incorporated an encounter between Jesus and Satan into
the Gospel stories. The writers of Matthew, Mark, and Luke speak of
the Temptation of Christ by the Devil as he fasts in the wilderness...
Understanding the nature of this encounter
requires an understanding of the Gospels in which the story appears. The briefest version is found in Mark, suspected by scholars of being the
oldest of the four canonical Gospels.
Written in Greek shortly after the destruction of the Temple in
Jerusalem by Roman legions, Mark
seems to be the work of an unknown writer living in Syria. It dates as early as 70 AD. This is less than forty years after Jesus'
execution-- and may contain accounts of his life that can be linked to a
historian's Jesus vs a theologian's Jesus...
[Mark's
narrative is a sparse account from the "this is what happened"
school. It does not open with an account
of a miraculous Virgin Birth and concludes almost immediately after Jesus is
raised from the dead and instructs his disciples to go forth into the
world. Satan appears only indirectly
when the writer says the Holy Spirit drove Jesus into the desert for forty days
after his baptism at the hand of John the Baptist. In the desolation, Jesus finds himself
tempted by Satan but no other details are provided.
These missing details show up in Matthew (probably written around 80 CE
by a person of Jewish birth) and Luke
(likely composed at around the same time as Matthew
by the same person who recounted The Acts
of the Apostles). It is not likely
either man knew the historical Jesus in the opinion of Biblical scholars.
Matthew's intended audience
appears to be Jewish (he doesn't take the time to explain customs referenced in
his narrative, implying a belief his audience would be familiar with them) and
we can assume his account of Satan coincides in some degree with the thinking
of his readers. During the Temptation
episode, Matthew says, Satan presents
himself to the Nazarene as an alternative god to Yahweh, offering Christ the
kingdoms of the world if he would but fall to his knees before Satan.]
 |
| Duccio: The Temptation on the Mount, 1308 |
All three Gospels, we note, were written
during a time of barely comprehensible change in the Jewish world, in the
aftermath of a horror comparable to the Holocaust...
The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE
effectively ended the Jewish rebellion against Rome. Caesar's armies were unable to claim total
victory until Masada fell three years later but it was a hollow win for the Roman
legions since the fortress' defenders chose suicide over submission to tyranny. Flavius Josephus, a contemporary historian,
tells us that over 1,000,000 people died during the siege of Jerusalem and
97,000 more were taken prisoner and enslaved.
Survivors scattered throughout the Mediterranean world...
Mystery religions and Gnosticism flourished
in these places where the survivors found new homes...
We can, at a later date, look to the
Mysteries for clues as to why the new Christian faith became a child alien to
its Judaic heritage. But it is the
Gnostics and their notion of the Demiurge who can help us understand the transformation
of Satan from a Counselor of God to the Lord of Hell...
 |
| Enemies of Freemasonry often assert its followers worship darkness incarnated in the form of the Baphomet, a scurrilous allegation repeated in this late 19th Century illustration |
In the early years of Christianity, there
were a fair number of sects whose members saw the material world as evil and
believed they could find salvation only through gnosis, the knowledge bringing mystical enlightenment and intuitive
encounters with God. Readers interested
in studying the Gnostics in detail, be warned: many groups have cosmologies so
complex and convoluted that it would probably be easier to wade through
graduate texts on subatomic physics armed only with a fifth grade education
than to try to quickly understand the world view of more than two or three
Gnostic sects...
Gnostics also tended to see the material world
as the work of a malevolent Demiurge, godlike but inferior to the true God who
exists outside the world of stone and wood and flesh. Most Gnostic sects did not identify Satan with
the Demiurge but the Cathars, a 12th Century sect influenced by Gnosticism,
believed the Creator God celebrated in the Jewish Bible was the Demiurge whom
they called Satanael...
The
Jewish Encyclopedia,
1906 edition, sums up early views about the Devil by noting the prologue of Job makes it clear The Adversary has no
power of independent action. And we can
elaborate on this by saying, in addition to requiring God's permission to do
his work, Satan doesn't have carte
blanche in what he does. He must act
within limits specified by God...
Contact with the Persian dualism of Zoroaster
and various Gnostic notions modified this early view both among common folk and
the intellectual class. (The 1906 JE offers an opinion that Zoroastrianism
may have influenced the account of David's census in First Chronicles as well as a passage in Zechariah where Satan is The Adversary of the High Priest Joshua.) By the 4th Century CE, the Palestinian Talmud had been compiled and it
reflected evolving views about Satan found in the Apocrypha and New Testament. To some of the rabbis, Satan was
synonymous with both Samael (the Angel of Death) and that inclination in the
heart of man to do evil...
Lest we forget, let us revisit Paradise Lost briefly. Occasionally, when pressed to point to
textual confirmation in the Bible itself of Milton's story of Satan and his
rebellious horde being cast down from Heaven into Hell, devout Christians point
to Isaiah 14:12-20. A careful examination of the text suggests
this is a warning to Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, that his days are
numbered...
 |
| Composer Hector Berlioz musically retold the medieval German legend of a scholar named Faust who sells his soul to darkness for the pleasures to be known in this world. In 1969, the principality of Monaco commemorated Berlioz with a retelling of his version of the story in stamp form. |
The confusion of a wicked king with an evil
angel results from the poetic and beautiful language found throughout King
James' Version of the Bible.
Literate men who lived in 17th Century England could not read Isaiah's
mocking prophecy ("How art thou fallen from the heavens, O Lucifer, son of
the morning") and fail to think of Milton's Satan who arrogantly thought
to displace God...
In Genesis,
we read of Adam and Eve and Serpent in Eden.
We contemplate the Lord God said, "It is not good for Man to be
alone; I will make a fitting helper for him" (from the rib of Man as he
slept) in the second chapter after creating Man, male and female, in God's
image in the first chapter after saying "Let us make Man in our image,
after our likeness". And some of us
wonder if these are not two different stories about creation...
We are not alone in such thoughts. Many a rabbi and common man alike pondered the
words of Moses' Torah before proffering a theory: Adam had two wives. We know who his second spouse was: Ishshah,
or Eve in modern English. Folklore
assigned Lilith as the name of Wife Number One...
In contemporary lingo, Lilith was one uppity
woman. She presumed to think that just
because she was created in the image of God at the same time as Adam that she
was also his equal! Even worse, Lilith
preferred to be "on top" when she and Adam had intercourse out of a
theory she should enjoy sex as much as he did!
She tired of her unimaginative husband, the folktales say, and left him. Then, one day, as she enjoyed the single
woman's life outside the Gates of Eden by the shores of the Red Sea, she looked
up and saw a handsome Devil out to raise a bit of hell on earth...
Love at first sight, one supposes, since
Lilith went on to become Mother of Demons...
 |
| William Blake: The Temptation of Eve by the Serpent, 1799-1800 |
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CREDITS
Note:
All photographs for this essay were located through Google Images or Wikipedia,
without authoritative source or ownership information except as noted:
photograph of Angra Mainyu at Persepolis by Mary Loosemore, 2008. Research for
topics covered in this essay consists primarily of information from readily
available sources such as Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica except as
noted: comments citing 1906 edition of the Standard Jewish Encyclopedia on
origin and nature of Satan from http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13219-satan.
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