He's known by many names, the deceiver, the slanderer, the tempter,
the serpent, the great Dragon, the evil One, the many handed One,
the Father of Lies, El Diablo, Iblis, Beelzebov, Beliel,
Mephistopheles, Apollyon, Lucifer, Lord of Darkness, Prince of Hell, Old
scratch, Old nick Old, Harry, slew Foot, split Foot, Jimmy
square Foot, Satan, and an unholy host more. But most are content
with just the Devil, a figure referenced all over the world. The entity
known as the Devil is said to be the source of woe and ruin for
us all. He is feared, cursed, avoided, and sometimes defeated in
fiddle contests. But he's always up to some of no good, and always
ready to strike those not vigilant in guarding against his tricks. Or so it's
taught. But where did this embodiment of ultimate evil come from? And why
do so many fear the goat legged, horned, bat winged, forked,
tongued, pointy tailed, red complexioned man, And why do so many dance
with him, run with him, shout at him, raise him, chase
him, turn and face him. This is not the greatest blurry photos episode
in the world. No, this is just a tribute. Everyone. Welcome
to Blurry Photos. I'm your host, David Flora. Welcome in. Make
yourself nice and comfy. We have a ton of ground to cover on this
two part episode. This is one many of you know I've been working on
for months, and it's a topic I've been more and more curious about as
I've learned more and more comparative mythology over the years. And that is the
topic of the history of the Devil. And this is primarily the Christian devil
aka Satan, aka Lucifer, aka none of the above, which we'll get
to. And I'm excited to share my research with you guys about this figure
of religion, which I'll go ahead and say seems to be one hundred percent
misunderstood in our current time period and culture. I have read a couple books
in the research which I'll be pulling a lot of sighted info from, including
Gerald Massardier's A History of the Devil and the Birth of Satan Tracing the Devil's
Biblical Roots by T. J. Ray and Gregory Mobley. Both are excellent
reads, certainly different from each other, but incredibly insightful in an academic style.
I also spoke with Jason from the Dragons and Genesis podcast. He'll be
shown up here and there throughout the episode a quick audiobook update and film update,
and then we'll get started. Volumes one, two, and three of
It Stalked Me by Tom Lyons are now available on Audible. Those are my
newest audiobook offerings to go along with Bigfoot Frightening Encounters and the ever popular Living
among Bigfoot series, all by Tom Lyons, so check those out when you
get a chance. You should be able to get a free audiobook download by
going to audibletrial dot com, slash blurry or by visiting blurry photos dot org
and scrolling down until you see the link to get yourself a free audiobook and
a thirty day trial membership, which you can can so any time, but
you get to keep the free audio book they give you, so feel free
to use it for any of those titles I just mentioned, or go out
and get yourself whatever you want. I'm not the police of you, and
Shadows in the Desert is still waiting to be sold for distribution. Derek said
his contact has spoken to studios like ten ninety one, Bloody Disgusting and Discovery
Channel, so we're hoping to get a meeting very soon. And we are
now into creating the bonus content for the Blue Rays, and apparently you can
get bonus content on digital streaming platforms now. In fact, we just had
a meeting yesterday to talk about all the stuff we wanted to include as bonus
material. So it's agonizingly slow, but it is moving forward, and judging
from how impatient I am right now, I can only imagine how you guys
feel, and I sympathize with you and appreciate your patients with this process.
Back to the entity of the hour the devil. The base image i'd like
us to start with a is that of the goat legged, horned, goated,
winged, pointy tailed, and forked tongued troublemaker with red skin who delights
in tormenting humans, collecting souls, inciting all kinds of evil, and playing
a random violin. Here and there, we'll get into lots of that stuff,
like maybe he's not just a red devil. Maybe he's a slick haired,
handsomeman in a sharp suit. Or and bear with me on this one,
maybe he's neither. Maybe there's a lot more to think about and consider.
So I'll ask a huge favor of you, and that's to leave your
preconceptions at the door, put aside what you've been taught, what you've heard,
even what you believe, and listen to the information I'm going to present
with a completely open mind. I'm going to give you a historical and academic
presentation of facts I've researched with as little sarcasm or snark as I can muster.
Spoiler alert, there's going to be a little bit just to break things,
but at the end I'll offer a bit of my opinion on it,
although I'm mainly interested in passing along historical context and scholarship so that you can
have the most complete picture of the Devil you never knew you needed, and
then you're free to form whatever opinion of your own you'd like. I find
this stuff terribly fascinating, and I hope you will too. In this two
part episode, I'll be covering the earliest mentions we have of the Devil,
including some sources of inspiration, starting with the lore of the ancient Near East
Jewish literature and the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. We'll jump into some
more sources of inspiration, then with Zoroastrianism and mythology from Babylon and Mesopotamia.
Then we'll circle back to the Christian New Testament with some important info about the
Intertestamental period, and you'll start to see how the figure takes shape and begins
coming into its own. That'll be our first part. In part two,
I'll be discussing the Devil and other cultures, and this is where it's a
little murky, but still interesting. Each culture has some kind of take on
evil, even if that take is that there is no evil, and I'll
highlight a few of those for you in the hopes of giving a more well
rounded experience. Then we'll talk about the many names of the Devil. We'll
see if we can track down the origins and backstories of some of the more
well known ones. I'll then tackle the Devil in modernity and bring us into
the twenty first century with how the Devil got his looks and the popularity he
enjoys in pop culture over the years. Finally, I'll have a conclusion section
where I hope to point out some philosophical, sociological, and contextual aspects of
this figure based on the information presented. I'll end with my thoughts and try
to keep them as short as I can, because this episode is not about
what I think. It's about bringing history and context to a concept rarely discussed
academically. After researching this, I fully believe it's better the devil you know
than the one you don't. So adopt a devil may care attitude, because
we're going to give the devil as due and trust me, we're going to
have a devil in the town. Thus I clothe my naked villany with odd
old inns stolen out of Holy writ it, and seem a saint when most
I play the devil Richard the Third Shakespeare's Richard the Third. If someone asks
you what the earliest appearance of the devil is, what springs to mind?
Would it be Genesis Chapter three, when the serpent tempted Eve to eat the
apple in the garden of Eden. While Satan has mentioned several times in the
Bible culminating with a full realization of maleficence in the Book of Revelation, Genesis
was not actually one of those times. This is a point I'll circle back
to later, but I'd like to take a step back from the scripture for
a moment to point out something. The author of Genesis, thought to be
written around the sixth century BC, describes a paradise where sickness, death,
and sin were unknown. However, just three short chapters into the book,
temptation, disobedience, and punishment suddenly appear in God's perfect creation. When King
kills Abel in chapter four, it's clear something's up, and it sure seems
like evil is afoot. At the time of its writing, most cults were
henotheistic, meaning they worshiped a single god but did not deny the existence of
other gods. In Vedic religion, the Rigveda mentioned several gods that had a
unitary essence. Zoroastrianism followed a hiromazda, but allowed for minor gods and goddesses
to exist and also be worshiped. Followers of Yahwism, the worship of the
god Yahweh in Israel, recognize the regional gods around them, including the Canaanite
pantheon headed by the chief god l So one might think there would be a
chief god of evil they could point too and blame for spoiling the garden of
earthly delights. We find in Genesis, thus opening the door for Satan to
stroll right on through. But this doesn't seem to be the case again.
I'll come back to our serpentine friend later. But in fact, the first
time we get the words Satan in writing is in the fourth Book of the
Old Testament, Numbers, chapter twenty two, verse twenty two. But the
anger of God was kindled as Balem was going, and the Malahashem, the
Angel of God, stood in the road Satan against him. This does not
mean Hell's chief himself challenged Balum and the donkey he wrote in on Satan in
this case and indeed for all cases in the Old Testament, is a noun
meaning adversary, opponent, or accuser, and comes from a verb meaning to
stop, oppose, or obstruct. It was written as just Satan many times
in numbers first and second Samuel and first Kings, and sometimes written with the
definite article ha, meaning the In Job and Zachariah, its use signified a
role or a job as opposed to a singular being. You could translate Hacitan
as the opponent or the adversary. Jason reinforces this point in the details of
the Book of Job. The earliest depictions that we have of Satan aren't of
a bad guy, They're not of an evil figure. So we see one
depiction of Satan in the opening chapters of the Book of Job, and there
the character isn't an individual per se, it's more of a job title.
Yahweh is sitting in the Divine Counsel along with all of the other sons of
God, and among them is a representative called a Satan or a Hasatan,
and he's just come up from Earth, where he's basically been patrolling looking for
wicked people. And Yahweh asks this Hasatan, which is a job title,
not a specific name, if he has encountered Job, who is a faithful
servant, and this Satan figure basically replies that Job is only faithful because he's
been given everything, you know, everything he has has pretty much been handed
to him, and he has this cushy life. He's very prosperous. He
has all this land and livestock and perfect health and everything else. And he
essentially tells Yahweh that if some of that were taken away, then Job would
turn around and curse Yahweh to his face. So Yahweh gives this this figure
the Hasatan permission to test Job, but he gives him certain restrictions. He's
not allowed to attack him personally or to take his life. And so the
this Satan character he goes down and he gets in there to basically take away
his property and his family, and so Job's children die, a bunch of
his servants die, his livestock is wiped out, a bunch of his property
is destroyed, and he's still faithful. So then the whole scene basically repeats
there. You know, the Satan is up in heaven. He's talking to
Yahweh and he's like, okay, but look, he's only faithful because you
placed these restrictions on me. You didn't let me take the gloves off,
let me attack you personally. And Yeah's like okay, but you can't take
his life. So then he goes down and he afflicts Job with all of
these horrible conditions. You know, he has like a skin rash and just
all sorts of things, and so his health has drastically declined, but he's
still alive and he continues to praise Yahweh. He's like, well, I
don't really know why this is happening, but there must be a reason,
and then the thing goes into the whole big set of dialogues which makes up
the body of the Book of Job. But the depiction of this character,
he wasn't an opponent of Yahweh. He is essentially like an undercover agent.
He's there to test the will of people, you know, to find out
what they're truly made of. And the name you know, which basically means
an adversary or an opponent, it doesn't mean he's an opponent of God.
He works for God, he is he's basically just set as someone's opponent.
In this case, he's being Job's opponent. And we see this elsewhere in
the Bible where the name you know, this name Satan or Hastaitan can basically
just mean any opponent, and it's even talked about in the first Book of
Samuel, where David could be a satan to King Saul. It doesn't mean
that he's going to be evil. It means that he could become a political
rifle, which eventually he does. And so it doesn't mean that someone is
evil. It just means that they're an antagonist towards you for whatever reason.
And this is what these angels serve and They're essentially there to be placed in
someone's path to prevent them from doing something, to prevent them from getting by
with some sort of falsehood, like a false belief, proclaiming that they're just
and pious when an actuality they're not. And that's the purpose of him.
In the Book of Joke we see how a satan's role in the Hebrew Bible
is one of opposition and obstruction and little else. In fact, as Jason
said, Satan's worked directly with and for God. As Gerald Massie says in
his work A History of the Devil quote, Satan is thus the instrument of
the deity end quote. Other Old Testament appearances of the term satan appear in
conjunction with King David and King Solomon. First Samuel twenty nine four sees the
Philistines send David away from their ranks during wartime for fear that he may turn
again to his home which thou hast assigned him, and let him not go
down with us to battle, lest in the battle he be as satan to
us. In other words, get this guy out of here, so he's
not in the way or a hindrance to us. In Second Samuel nineteen twenty
two, David is restored as king after a rebellion and customarily swore an oath
not to execute a man who had cursed David. Previously a military leader by
the name of Abishai wanted death for the man, and David said, what
have I to do with you, ye, sons of Zeroya, that ye
should this day be as satan unto me, saying why are you going against
my word here in front of everybody? What are you this guy's lawyer?
Now? In first Kings, Solomon speaks of the times being good to build
a temple to God, saying, but now Hashim Melohai have given me rest
on every side, so that there is neither satan nor peggara misfortune. Later
chapter eleven, God is angry at Solomon, not for having so many wives
and getting it on a lot, but for having foreign wives and giving them
freedom of their own religions. For this abominable transgression, God raised up satan
unto Solomon Hadad the Edomite, and Eloheim raised up against him another satan resin,
the son of Eliada, and he was a satan to Israel all the
days of Solomon. In addition to the mischief that Hadad did. So God
was stirring up adversaries to Solomon because Heaven forbid he married a foreign girl and
let her do her own thing, literally, Heaven forbid. These are examples
of satan being a title that could be used for anyone by anyone. For
examples of hasaitan or a specific being called the satan, we turned back to
Job and reference what Jason just told us. Hastan in that tale was an
angel of the heavenly court, but not the devil as we would call him.
Rather, it was like saying the lawyer of the heavenly court. The
specific angel didn't matter, nor was that his name. He was his job
title. And this was what Jason related to us. Job won six.
Now, there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves
before the Lord, and Hasatan came also among them, and that's when God
was like, hey, what have you been up to? And the Satan
was like just strolling around earth and God said, hey, did you see
Job. He's pretty much my favorite, and YadA YadA. I won't rehash
what Jason said, but the point is that the Satan challenges God to test
Job, and it was not the Satan's fault what all happened to him.
In fact, he's not seen or mentioned again in the tale after chapter two.
The Book of Job is forty two chapters alone by him a devil.
And then you want to blame for you cause me to crime to suffer.
I am an angel, and you are the cause your love man, I
was your lover. The devil lurks in the best of us. An angel
lives in the rest of us. Angel a devil. It's all up to
you. I can be wicked or I can be true love me whatever.
The term Satan appears in Psalm one oh nine, speaking of adversaries against love,
and Hasitan makes another appearance in the Book of Zechariah chapter three. And
he showed me Joshua, the high priest, standing before the Angel of the
Lord and Hasitan at his right hand, to accuse him. Zechariah witnesses a
heavenly courtroom drama where an angel Satan challenges the court to prove Joshua worthy of
leading the priesthood. God overrules the prosecution, going so far as to reprimand
Hasita and saying even all of Jerusalem reprimands it. So God seems to regularly
clash with a Satan figure in heaven, but it's not the epitome of evil.
He's doing it with. It's angels. He's tasked with the sole purpose
of clashing with him. If I I'm a devil, I'm spiteful and mean,
and you hurt me, a trick me or tease me, I am
an angel, uncommon, serene, and you kiss me, A love me,
A please me. And the devil lurks and the best of us an
angel listener, rest of us, angel a devil, I'll do what you
say. You are the sculptor, and I'm a claim love me whatever.
There is a being named in the Hebrew Bible that carries some interesting connotations,
and one could argue was later incorporated into the legends of the proper noun Satan
Mashie the destroyer, the instrument of God sent to kill swaths of people at
a time. You can find these entities in Exodus twelve twenty three, Second
Samuel sixteen, Second Kings nineteen thirty five, and First Chronicles twenty one fifteen.
It's mentioned as the emissary of death during passover, bringer of death to
Assyrians and to destroy Jerusalem. Here and there the last instance First Chronicles,
chapter twenty one can arguably be considered a turning point in Jewish literature and thought
process. King David is told by Satan to conduct a census in Israel.
God gets angry at this and punishes David by unleashing a plague on Jerusalem,
in this case connected with a machete angel. However, this is a retelling
of the same story from Second Samuel twenty four, which begins and again the
anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them
to say, go number Israel and Judah. Second Chronicles twenty one says,
and Satan stood up against Israel and provoked David to number Israel. Here in
lies a theme will be seeing again and again that of whoever wrote Chronicles whitewashing
previous things that make God seem like a real bastard. Now we start getting
the term Satan replacing God as the responsible party for the woes of the Jewish
people, even though it has been firmly established that Hasitan is but a lowly
employee of God himself, doing what God commands and acting in accordance with God's
wishes. It's not the figure we're chasing to match, the evil incarnate,
direct enemy of God and all mankind. But it's a frightening step in that
direction, and it's a seed from which will sprout more nefarious characteristics that begin
to coalesce after monotheism chokes out the henotheistic roots of Judaism, a concept that
festers in the Intertestamental period between the writing of the Old Testament and the New
Testament and the ancient Near East. If I am a devil, I curse,
and I swear, then you rob me of love and affection, bile
an angel. If you answer my prayer, you give me a love and
protection, and the devil works and the best of us the angel lives in
the rest of us. Angel or devil, a curse or a prayer,
I will accept your most challenging dare love me whatever. Before we explore that
time period, and after, let's take a look at some cultural inspirations that
led to concepts of demons and malevolent forces seeping into thought and literature at the
time. Love is a familiar, Love is a definite. There is no
evil angel but love our motto Shakespeare's Love's Labor's lost. The time period in
which many books of the Old Testament were written, from roughly the sixth to
first centuries BC, was tumultuous and rife with war. In the ancient Near
East, the Achaimenid Empire out of Persia was sweeping the land as major population
centers grew. The Egyptian Empire, long the powerhouse of the region, fell
to Persian conquest, which itself was given over to Alexander the Great, and
then the Ptolemys and Romans. Rebellions were everywhere, human sacrifice, dogs and
cats living together, mass hysteria, almost constant turmoil for six centuries. You
can see how cultures mixed and matched with abandoned and with the mixing, new
ideas and concepts began to make their way into the beliefs and teachings of the
many disparate cults that were operating in the midst of this chaos. But this
wasn't a fresh notion. Trade and subjugation had been dispersing ideas for centuries already.
In fact, many of the Old Testament stories came directly from other cultures,
which predated their writing by centuries themselves. The Epic of Gilgamesh, written
in Mesopotamia sometime around twenty one, provided many sources of inspiration for later religious
tales, including the Garden of eden Utnapishtam's arc in a Great Flood, ecclesiastical
advice, giants, etc. You also get the figure of Humbaba, some
kind of ogre or demon adversary of the forest, whom Gilgamesh and the First
man Inka do fight and defeat. He is depicted as grotesque and opposes the
heroes in the story and fun fact, it's also thought to have inspired Greek
tales of Gorgons and Perseus killing Medusa. You may have heard of the demon
Pazuzu, whether from The Exorcist or Futurama, etc. Pazuzu was a destructive
wind entity with an interesting dual aspect. Not only was he a wild,
wandering troublemaker, he was also a domestic protectors spirit, repelling other demons and
guarding pregnant mothers. What a conundrum. The perfect bad boy. His father,
Hanpu, also the father of Humbaba, is thought to have been a
god of evil, but we don't know much about him at all. It
would certainly help us in our mission to trace the devil's origins if we did,
but that's the hand we're dealt. These figures are connected to many evil
entities collectively called Leelu, with one of the most well known being Lamashtu,
a female demon who tried to interfere in childbirth and could steal a baby during
breastfeeding. Other demons were grouped within the Lulu, including the Utuku, Alu,
and Galou, all with specific roles and dwellings in the underworld and dark
and dangerous places. Other notables were Kilili, an assumed demoness associated with owls
and haunted places, nice Ugalu lion headed storm demon, reshef Ugaritic god of
war and plague devor god of pestilence, and Mote also called Mavet from the
Hebrew word for death, a Canaanite son of the chief god El who has
a pit forethrone and lives in a land called filth and for visuals that will
come back later, Howbayu Uguritic lord of horns and a tail who smeared poop
on an intoxicated l Basically, there's a demon for everything, and it just
seems like if some kind of misfortune happened, it was the fault of one
of dozens of entities. Circling back to the term Leelu, we find an
interesting connection with the female version of the term Liliitu, which you might know
as Lilith. Scholars have debated the connection between Gilgamesh and Hebrew texts, wherein
Lilith is the first wife of Adam made from the same clay, but ran
out of the garden of Eden for quote unquote not lying below Adam when he
demanded she do so. Her story could be its own episode as it developed
in later centuries, and we have a lot of rhet conning of her being
named the mother of demons and succubi and big tittied goth girl friends and other
stuff I would very easily fall pre to, Sorry, other stuff mankind would
very easily fall pre to. In fact, there's four demon queens that came
out of Jewish mythology, Lilith, Batmalat, Naima, and Asath. Take
a pick, You're gonna have a good time. And there's one more fun
little tidbit I found that some scholars have connected to the Lilith the Aloka.
It appears in Proverbs thirty fifteen, translated as horse leech but the original meaning
was more akin to vampire, whether a title for Lilith or a descendant.
The Aloka has some strong succubus slash vampi vibes, and it's probably just a
coincidence that the name backwards is Hacula Blah. A major event in shaping inspiration
for the devil came in the period known as the Babylonian Captivity or Babylonian Exile,
following their defeat in the Jewish Babylonian War. After the Temple of Solomon
was raised in Jerusalem. Persian culture influenced Jewish literature heavily. Jason discusses Babylonian
sources of inspiration for old Jewish tales, including the Leviathan so in their stores,
you know, the earliest creation accounts have Yahwe getting in a fight with
leviathin and it looks very similar to what we find elsewhere in the ancient Near
East, where the gods are fighting against a group of water dragons, and
they represent like the primordial ocean and the world is usually just completely covered in
water. It probably has Kevin Costner sailing around in there somewhere. Not positive.
Gene Hackman plays Hastan and now yeah, yeah, so you've got this
whole like what a world thing going, and they what they have to do
is they have to separate the water so or in this case, they have
to kill the great water dragons. And these water dragons they basically just represent
like tidal waves and floods. And in one well known version of this story
called the Uma Leash, the young warrior god Marduk comes up and he basically
makes a deal that if he kills the dragon Tiamat, then he gets to
basically sit on the highest throne of heaven. And so he does this.
He kills Tiamat. The carcass gets divided up, basically the dividing of the
waters, separating salt water from fresh water, and a bunch of the water
the carcass of the dragon gets used to create the farmament, and some water
is stored up there. That's why the sky is blue and that's where rain
comes from. And we have this being retold but de mythologized in Genesis chapter
one. It talks about how the water gets divided up and there's the farmament
set up and the water is placed above it and everything else, and what
they're doing is they're taking the creation by combat myth, which gets retold in
near the end of job that actually has Yahweh fighting against Leviathan in there.
What they're doing is they're taking this myth and they're retelling it, but not
as a work of myth that has like a god fighting a dragon, but
they're retelling it as this thing where their god just kind of sits back and
talks and the spoken word is responsible for everything, which is a comes from
Greece, and it that goes into this whole different thing it would that's a
whole different rabbitrail we probably don't have time for. But it's this whole idea
that they borrowed from ancient Greece because there's a lot of Greek and Babylonian influence
in Genesis one. So they're creation by combat story of Yahwei defeating Leviathan.
It gets retold in there, and you you still sort of have this idea
though of the leviathin and it gets you know, downgraded to just being a
created animal, and people begin blaming the Leviathan for different things like floods.
So if you have a flood or any kind of destruction by water, a
tidal wave rex as ship or something like that. Well that was Leviathan stirring
in the deep, and so you now have, you know, along with
a Satan angel testing people, you also have this underwater sea dragon that is
causing destruction. And so any sort of like torrential rains or anything like that
can be laid at the feet or the fins of this water dragon. So
you have another scapegoat, you have another source for calamity, and so the
dragon motif, it's wrapped up into the ideas of this sort of this cosmic
destroyer. If you remember the episode on Angels, you may recall the name
Azazel or Azazel, a fallen angel from the Book of Enoch. In some
accounts, he's depicted like a satyr and has dominion over the wilderness. The
link to devilish connotation should be obvious. But I'm going to save Azizel for
something better at the end of the episode, so keep him tucked away for
now. I've been talking about Jewish demonology, which probably stemmed from Babylonian demonology,
which itself probably came directly from Zoroastrianism. And we've gone far too long
without delving into the fascinating depths of that religion. There's a nice figure that
eventually factored into Jewish theology and bridges us into Zoroastrian demonology, that of the
Prince of demons. Ass that's the Greek name from the Hebrew Ashmadai, itself
likely from the Avestan Ashmadiva, meaning demon of wrath. He is a major
player in the Book of Tobit and the Talmud, as well as later works,
but he started around the ninth century BC as the right hand bastard of
Zoroastrianism's evil entity Ariman. He was often said to go any and everywhere quote,
polluting the earth and spreading disease and death end quote. This proved to
be a popular concept in theologies at the time and later, but as mentioned
Asmodius, was not the end all be all of evil, an honor held
by the aforementioned Ahriman also called Agramanu. Sacred texts of Zoroastrianism teach that in
the beginning there were two cosmic spirits, and each had to make a choice
to be good or to be evil. The spirit known as Ahamazda chose the
path of goodness and righteousness, while Ariman chose the path of evil and corruption.
Thus the battle of good versus evil began with Ariman heading the armies of
the wicked arch fiend of all that is good. According to Gerald Massarayer,
it was Iran who quote witnessed the first appearance of the devil end quote this
is a profound concept. But the fruits of Zoroastrianism were just coming to bear.
There were several stories that directly influenced the stories of the Old Testament,
and no doubt Mesopotamian lore before that. But if you'll allow me to jump
ahead in a flash forward fun fact, six hundred years before Jesus the Christ
was tempted by capital lest Satan in the desert. The ecclesiastical Zoroastrian text the
Vindidade told the story of Zoroaster aka Zarathustra being tempted by Ariman. The evil
spirit promised zoro Aster long life and sovereignty of the world if he would but
renounce his faith in a Hiramazda three thousand years spoiler alert, he didn't.
Instead, he recited a prayer, and, like a high level cleric in
D and D, turned undead until all the demons in arimand fled from his
Holy might. So these are some inspirations that factored into a roiling stew of
ideas during the Babylonian exile and after up into the turn of the millennium.
CE. Couple these influences with the general climate of Jewish culture, a people
grappling with their lot in life and coming to terms with feelings of oppression and
anger, and a stark new chapter begins with the seeds of a new religion
and new characters to relieve those feelings. Let's get back to the earliest mentions
of the Devil the New Testament edition The Devil, All hair comes the Devil,
All hair comes the Devil. Old. The Devil with the Devil says,
I'm about the devil. Look out fa the Devil. Old. The
Devil with the Devil says, I'm you're so afraid of old man Satan.
No, why don't you stop your hesitating? You're gonna be a long time
dead soul. The Devil with the Devil says, I, you're always giving
me the dickens, telling me that life's no easy pipkins. But just as
long as I have fun. Why the devil with the Devil says I the
devil can cite scripture for his purpose. Antonio Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice.
I'll be mentioning the term Intertestamental period frequently in this section, and the dry
definition of that is the period of time between the events of the protocanonical books
and the New Testament. The time span is roughly fifth century BC to first
century CE, and it's also known as the Deutero canonical period in Catholicism.
Many New Testament books and other works like the Dead Sea Scrolls were written in
this period, though a solid handful were written forty two, one hundred years
after the attested death of Jesus, and that includes a few books that aren't
included in today's Biblical canon. Some major events in this time period were the
first translations of Hebrew scriptures into other languages, the Maccabean Revolt, establishment of
the first synagogues, and, like many cultures experienced at the time, the
heavy influence of Hellenistic Greece. This meant aspects of Greek culture began showing up
in other cultures, including more emphasis on education philosophy are in rituals associated with
the Greek pantheon. It caused a divide in Jewish culture, namely between those
that accepted these new influences and those that wanted to keep things orthodox and fought
against change. But an arguably bigger rift was underwear. You can have your
social ties and bingo for your father, but the things I like to do,
you stop me one by one. Now, even if you make me
stronger, that ain't gonna make me live no longer. So even if I
go to the devil, where the devil says I, the devil, where
the devil says I. The stories and the old scriptures showed a God that
was simultaneously loving and perfect, and a God that was jealous, capricious,
and responsible for every suffering endured by the creation he supposedly loved. Not only
did every blessing come from this God, every evil did as well Isaiah forty
five seven. I form the light and create darkness. I make peace and
create evil. I the Lord do all these things. And remember, it
was God who first told David to take a census, then punished him for
it. It was God who decided to test job and take everything from him.
It was God who destroyed all but eight people in a great flood.
It was God who sent bears to kill children. It was God who ordered
the killing of the firstborn of every creature in Egypt. It was God who
blatantly supported slavery. This was a people already tired of the bs persecution they
had faced for centuries, and they started questioning the worship of such a figure,
which was the beginning of their Theodyssey, an attempt to justify or defend
God in the face of evil. Why would a loving, perfect God not
only permit evil but author it to many people? There had to be another
explanation, something else that was causing such horror to happen despite God. This
is when the Satan Hositan started to become the Satan capitalist, a figure with
his own agenda, no longer a servant of God, but an independent character
and a thorn in the side of all that is good. And with the
aforementioned inspirations from other cultures, it was pretty easy to start constructing a figure
that embodied such negativity. Jason talks a bit about the confusion stemming from Theodyssey.
This confusion, it pops up at a rather convenient time, and it
actually serves a theological purpose. So at this time, the Jewish people are
drifting away from polytheism and into monotheism. But when you do this, you
run into the problem of explaining where evil comes from. And their concept of
evil is a bit different from people in Christianity. So in Christianity, evil
is it's basically like a wickedness, but it wasn't that restricted. In ancient
Judaism. Evil just meant anything bad. So a natural disaster, the word
for a disaster, for calamity, for misfortune, all those it was all
the same word, and it's the same word that they used for evil.
So evil didn't just mean, you know, someone was plotting something wicked it.
It could just mean that they were going to do something that might inconveni
nance you, and that maybe they're invading your city, you know, or
maybe there's a hurricane that's about to hit New Orleans. You know, that
is considered an evil, and it doesn't mean that it comes from some supernatural
evil. It just means that it's bad news. And so their definition of
evil was much more expansive, but they came into this theological problem with explaining
where that comes from. In the past, and in most polytheistic cultures,
you have, you know, an easy way out if you worship a certain
deity, like say Hera, and something bad happens, well you could blame
that on Aries, you know. Oh well, you know Aries caused this
army to come in here and invade or whatever. Hephaestus made that spark fly
out of my fireplace and burn down the house, you know. So these
these things were a lot easier to deal with. You just blamed it on
some other deity, and that's people did. But the Jews had gotten rid
of all of their other deities, Moat and all the others. They had
been shoved aside, and they no longer worshiped them. They no longer some
didn't even acknowledge that they existed. So now they have the problem where does
evil come from? You know, your disaster and calamity and misfortune, And
borrowing this Persian idea would definitely help because now they could blame it on someone
else. Post Exilic writings began to hint at Satan being a figure unto his
own, but not fully fledged. The Book of Daniel, thought to be
written around the second century BC, doesn't have a Satan figure as we know
him, but does allude to occupying foreign rulers being quote unquote monstrous beasts.
After generations of exposures to Zoroastrian dualism and Ariman as an arch fiend, sentiment
toward God not being responsible for evil was growing, and intertestamental literature began including
him along with a host of demons and minions. Indeed, Gerald Massarier credits
Zoroastrianism with inventing demonology. Before the Babylonian exile, Jewish teachings had no bodily
resurrection, little thought of what happened after death, no eternal torture in a
burning hill, no armageddon, and no one but God to pin every event
on Persian religion. Did Jews could finally square the concept of why they had
such misfortune wrought upon them, And by the time Jesus rolls into town,
there's a nice universal conspiracy playing out, wherein a nefarious, metaphysical villain was
hiding in every shadow, orchestrating every malady, and most importantly, being the
absolute cause of strife, more than their loving God or any of their own
actions or coincidences. Ray and Mobley write, quote, the enormity of misfortune
experienced by the Jews seemed measurably greater than their errors end quote. They were
victims and they finally had a devil to blame, and it was a perfect
fit. After all, the Persian Ahriman also carried the epithet the opposer.
What did that translate to in Hebrew Ariman hasatan? And the authors at the
time were like, shit, this thing writes itself. You have this linguistic
issue that arises when you start talking about Areman from Zoroastrianism, which we'll talk
about later. His full name is Aarman the opposer, So when you say
that in Hebrew, it's Araman Hasatan, which is a figure they seem to
already have. So that leads them to incorporate features of Ottoman into the identity
of these opposing angels who work against people who may or may not be doing
something wrong. The First Book of Enoch, one of the more interesting religious
texts written at the time and a favorite of this show in Dragons and Genesis,
is thought to have been written around the third to second century BC,
and takes the Persian dualism and demonology and absolutely runs with it. For Enoch,
Isaisl was in the crosshairs. First Enoch nine six, thou seest what
Isaisl hath done, who have taught all unrighteousness on earth, and revealed the
eternal secrets which were preserved in heaven, which men were striving to learn.
And ten eight. And the whole earth has been corrupted through the works that
were taught by Isaizell to him ascribe all sin. Interestingly, the words Satan
appears a few times in Enoch, but it seems to be both as a
proper noun and as a title. Chapter forty has Satan's plural not being allowed
before God. Chapter fifty three, verse three says, for I saw all
the angels of punishment abiding there and preparing all the instruments of Satan proper noun,
And that's to cast the kings of Earth down and punish them. And
chapter fifty four to six says, and Michael and Gabriel, and Raphael and
Fanuel shall take hold of them on that great day and cast them on that
day into the burning furnace, that the Lord of spirits may take vengeance on
them for their unrighteousness and becoming subject to Satan and leading astray those who dwell
on the earth. And in chapter sixty five he mentions mankind having learned all
the secrets of the angels, and all the wrongdoings of the Satans and all
their secret power. So which is it, Biggie, Are there Satan's ah
Satan or just Azazel running them up? It was all of them, because
between the beginning of the writing of the book and the end, time had
passed and the idea of one entity carrying the name of the adversary was well
underway. Jason gives us a refresher of Azazel and some bonus tidbits about the
beginnings of the concept of hell. So after the idea of the godly kings
being cast down, that idea gets merged quite seamlessly with the story of the
watchers that we find in the early sections of First Enoch, and the two
in particular would be Semiaza and a Zazel. One of them wants to have
sex with human women, and that creates a race of giants. The other
one wants to bring people forbidden knowledge, which merges quite well with the Garden
of Eden's story. And so Asaizel, this deity who's sort of like a
prometheus figure, he comes down and he teaches people all sorts of things like
how to do witchcraft and read signs in the sky, like you know,
decipher the future by listening to thunder, which is called brontomancy. It has
nothing to do with dinosaurs, which is disappointing. But yeah, he teaches
them about cosmetics, which is like the most destructive knowledge in the world,
you know. I it's what's wrong with society today. You know, maybe
it's Satan, maybe it's Mabel Lane. So Asaizel does all this stuff.
And because of these things, you know, Azazel and also Samyaza, they're
they're booted out. They're kicked out of heaven because they basically corrupted the world.
And so this explains the origin of evil, and it also demotes a
bunch of these different angels. So they get kicked out, and this idea
that these deities or these these sons of God are introducing corruption into the world,
you know, because they were trying to you know, establish themselves as
a great power. They get kicked out. They end up down on earth.
And that idea that being kicked out for your own prideful ways and disobedience
and sharing forbidden knowledge and corrupting the perfect creation that gets merged with the idea
of these kings being kicked out and cast down for their prideful ways. And
these angels, as we see later in Enoch, are gathered up and cast
into a fiery pit in the desert, and then it's covered up with stones,
and there they are tormented by angels of torment that Yahweh sends to torture
them, and and wicked people will also be thrown into those fires to likewise
be tortured by the angels of torment. All of these ideas will eventually play
a part in the development of the idea of Hell and the demons. Like
the Satans who would go and test people and stand against them, which were
Yahweh servants, the demons of Hell were originally thought of as angels of torment
who worked for Yahweh to torture the evil angels, the watchers, and the
wicked people who served them. And so that's why it like, it never
made sense, you know, why would the demons torture you for being bad
if they were bad? Because originally the angels that tortured people weren't bad.
In the oldest literature, they were good guys who were torturing the bad guys.
But eventually people just said, okay, well, everything down below is
bad. Everything up above is good, and they just divided everything. So
that's where your demons come from, and that's where some of your early depictions
of Hell come from. As a fiery underworld, it was a place of
torment for the watchers, where they would be tortured by angels of torments sent
by Yahweh the Watchers aka the fallen Angels. According to Enoch, we're all
about that human booty. And unfortunately, the misogyny already present in the culture
was only amplified by other cultural influences, namely the Mathray cult and its penchant
for fraternity among men, and so we sadly see a turn against women around
this time that just grows from there and can be seen in the demonization of
sexual encounters in particular. We'll revisit this idea later, but the concept of
incubi and succubi really takes hold here and will go on to flourish in the
culture and later in medieval Europe. Another apocryphal book that shows the devil's evolution
during this period was the Book of Jubilees, believed to be written in the
early second century BC. Jubilees is basically a rehash of Genesis up through Moses
getting the Ten Commandments, but with changes, not unlike the Chronicler's whitewashing of
the David census story Jason tosses as a refresher. So the books of Chronicles
were actually meant to completely replace Samuel and Kings. And what would happen is
occasionally a different group of people would sort of come into power in Jerusalem and
they would rewrite certain bits of scripture or history to suit their own theological and
political needs. In this case, the theology had shifted by the time the
Chronicler came around. By the time these limtical priests were were in charge,
and their solution to dealing with troublesome theology was to simply erase it. And
the best way to do that was to replace it with something else. And
so the purpose of the Chronicles was to get rid of Samuel and Kings and
create a new book. So if it weren't for the fact that you know,
the books of Samuel and Kings were so widespread as to be scattered throughout
the Mediterranean, if it weren't for that, then we wouldn't have those books.
They would have all been destroyed and replaced by first and second chronicles,
and that would have told the history to go from the end of the time
of Judges to the Babylonian exile, and we would have to guess as to
the contents of Samuel and Kings, trying to figure out what had originally been
there. But instead we end up with two different versions, an older version
and newer version. So yeah, it was a different group of people writing
a couple hundred years later who or longer than that, actually, probably about
three hundred years later, who wanted to replace the older version with the new
theology. One of the changes concerns Abraham sacrificing his son Isaac. In Genesis,
Yahweh tells Abraham to prove his faith by sacrificing his son, a task
Abraham proceeds with, only to be stopped at the last second by an angel's
voice. It really is a dick move on God's part. But in Jubilees
the story is retold with a new character called Prince Mastima issuing the challenge to
Abraham. Thus God looks like a chill guy who ends up swooping in to
save Isaac. Mastima, while not necessarily Lord of the Unholy damned is at
least a jagbag of an angel, if not some kind of high ranking demon.
The biggest WTF rewrite is arguably the story of Moses and Yahweh almost killing
him over foreskin in Exodus chapter four. Yahweh gets all pissed off that Moses
hadn't circumcised his son yet and comes down to Earth to kill Moses by hand.
He must have been out of lightning bolts that day, or heart attacks
or aneurysms, or runaway carts or boulders that got loose from a mountain and
rolled down a big hill but got stopped by some trees and comically bent and
bent them until they snapped, and it kept rolling, except now it was
a boulder and a bunch of big logs, and we can say there was
a bear or two that had climbed up into the trees and they didn't know
what was going on, but they were really mad about it. And there's
a big cloud of boulder and trees and angry bears come smashing down the mountain
towards the end where Moses was staying, and crashes right into that end,
and Moses died. But here's the kicker. He was in the other side
of the end, and he died because he saw this, and he got
so startled that his heart stopped. But Yahweh wanted to kill him by hand.
And Moses's wife quickly chopped off her n's foreskin and threw it at Yahweh
and was like what now, perv And Yahweh was like, Goku cool,
and then turned and left. That's actually in the Bible. Jubileese just replaces
Yahweh with m Stima, so the name has attached itself to Satan's but low
a twist. Satan is mentioned as well, separately and clearly sovereign over quote
unquote malignant evil ones on the earth and now creeping toward the first century.
See we have it in writing. The Dead Sea Scrolls, just finishing up
at the time, begin polishing this idea in style, and since their discovery
in the mid twentieth century, most archaeologists have believed the works were written by
a Jewish sect called the Essenes, one of the big three sects of the
time, along with the Pharisees and Setissees. Esscenes practice piety, celibacy,
voluntary poverty, and communal life. Jason gives us a little more perspective on
them. Without the New Testament, you don't really find any reference to the
es scenes, which is weird because they were around at the time, and
a bunch of different Jewish groups are reference, like the Pharisees and the Sadducees
and a bunch of these others. They get referenced by New Testament authors,
but they never referenced the es scenes, and people thought, okay, well,
did the Christians just not know about the es scenes? And then later
scholars said, well, why would they like the es scenes? Wouldn't necessarily
talk about themselves as Esceenes, you know, I mean, that's like speaking
of yourself and the third person. However, one of the things that the
Escenes did was they referred to themselves as the poor and that they followed the
way. And then you find this throughout the New Testament. They frequently talk
about themselves and the people who are going to who were blessed by this theology
as the poor and how Jesus is the way. And then they look at
and say, okay, well, these people may not be you know that
they're not saying the word es scene because that's not how they you know,
talked about themselves. They talked about themselves as being the poor because the es
scenes they were, they were essentially like outcast from the Jewish Temple. Uh
and a lot of them kind of lived in a little small communities out in
the desert, you know, and they were very poor people. Also,
if they had any money, they would basically just use it for the entire
community. So no one ever really had any wealth. And we have references
to like Paul basically doing like fundraising trips all over the Mediterranean to give them
money because you know, they needed to buy food and stuff, and you
know, none basically didn't look like they really had jobs. They just lived
off of, you know, what Paul would give. They were communists,
yeah, those filthy commies, and so there they were basically like proudly poor,
and they seem to have seen this as an an identifying trait that would
distinguish them from the wealthy and from their perspective, corrupt Jerusalem Temple. And
they would say them, oh, well, look they're dressed in you know,
fine clothing and you know, adorned with gold and jewelry and even wear
makeup. Those evil, filthy heathens. We're proudly poor and destitute, you
know. And so we actually see these ideas all the way back in Enoch,
where they would distinguish themselves from the Jerusalem Temple by saying they're rich and
powerful and corrupt. We're poor, but we're following the correct path and will
eventually prosper and they'll all be brought low. And we see the same language
in the New Testament. I said that the other day about myself. Yeah,
so it looks a lot like they were a lot of these things they
were doing was to distinguish themselves from the groups that they thought of as evil
and corrupt. So yeah, yeah, Early Christianity and the es scenes,
even if they're not the same. Early Christianity came from a group that was
very similar to the es scenes. So and it may not have even come
from just one group. It may have come from like the es scenes and
the Ebeanites and like half dozen others throughout the Dead Sea scrolls. It's clear
that Satan to them was the arch fiend of Yahweh, leader of the evil
forces, battling against the forces of good and gobbling up victims left and right,
turning them to the dark side. In the last days of the Earth.
Turns out that was basically anyone who didn't think the way they did,
include a majority of fellow Jews. In fact, they called themselves the Sons
of Light and believe themselves to be engaged in a war against the sons of
darkness, again, anyone who didn't subscribe to their particular brand of BS.
Besides the smugness of thinking themselves better than everyone else, with all the other
aforementioned tenants, one would have to think Zoroaster was smiling wherever he was in
the afterlife, because in all smacks of Zoroastrian dualism. The es scenes I'm
guessing inadvertently tripped over the Theodyssey problem in their haste to pins suffering on Satan
and his minions. One of the scrolls, known as the War Scroll,
brings up an interesting point in column thirteen, you yourself made Belile for the
pit an angel of malevolence. His dominion is in darkness, and his counsel
is to condemn and convict Belile. Here is another name for Satan. I
haven't brought it up before because I'm saving it for the name section in part
two of the episode. But the point is God himself is to blame for
the world's suffering, and I'm not sure that's the message they wanted to convey.
There are a couple more apocryphal books I'd like to highlight before getting into
the proper New Testament, the first being The Life of Adam and Eve,
likely written around the first century CE. I bring this one up because someone
finally decided to do an origin story for the Devil, with huge implications for
future descriptions. The entire reasoning behind Satan's enmity toward man is laid out in
a conversation between him and Adam, and with a heavy side of devil's space.
Oh, Adam, all my hostility in THEE and sorrow, it's for
THEE, since it is for THEE that I have been expelled from my glory,
which I possessed in the heavens, in the midst of the angels,
and for THEE I was cast out in the earth. Adam answered, what
dost thou tell me? What have I done to THEE? Or what is
my fault against THEE? Seeing that thou hast received no harm or injury from
us, why dost thou pursue us? The Devil replied, Adam, what
dost thou tell me, it is for thy sake that I have been hurled
from that place. When thou wast formed, I was hurled out of the
presence of God and banished from the company of the angels. When God blew
it to thee, the breath of life and thy faith and likeness was made
in the image of God. Michael also brought THEE and made us worship THEE
in the sight of God. And God the Lord spake, here is Adam,
I have made THEE in our image and likeness. And Michael went out
and called all the angels, saying, worship the image of God, as
the Lord God hath commanded. And Michael himself worshiped first. Then he called
me and said, worship the image of God the Lord. And I answered,
I haven't a need to worship Adam. And since Michael kept urging me
to worship, I said to him, what dost thou urge me? I
will not worship an inferior and younger, being I am his senior in the
creation before he was made, was already made. It is his duty to
worship me. Now we have the story of Satan's fall from grace, his
prideful belligerence caused him and the other angels who shared his opinions to get kicked
out of heaven, a prequel that fits nicely into Enoch's Watcher's story. Secondy
Knock, believed to be written in the late first century CE, adds the
detail that a group of rebellious angels, led by one in particular, actually
tried to overthrow God, but God casts them out to fly around above a
bottomless pit. So, with all this intertestamental literature floating around, writers at
the time had plenty of material to draw from when writing the New Testament,
particularly the now freshly baked concept of one entity to villainize, whom Jesus the
Christ can be pitted against and dunk on right and left. The Gospels,
written between seventy and one ten C start hot and heavy with Satan as the
ultimate bad guy, the prince of demons, and someone with whom Jesus must
continually contend. In Mark and Luke, we see the kingdom of God threatened
by the ranks of evil who worked to undermine Jesus at every turn. Matthew,
Mark, and Luke all have Satan popping up as soon as Jesus is
baptized by John the famous Temptation of Christ in the Desert, though Mark leaves
out the three parts of this story refer back to the Zoroastrian tale of Zoroaster
himself being tempted by Ahriman for where this idea came from. And just like
Zoroaster, Jesus channels divinity to turn the forces of evil, who all felled
their saving throws and had to flee away from him for one whole minute cleverly,
although Satan is a fully realized, free floating, full torso vaporous,
ever, and by this point he still fulfills his namesake as an obstacle for
Jesus to overcome. Scholars have been confused by the temptation story in the Gospels
for a number of reasons, not the least being why didn't Jesus use his
magical powers against the devil like he does other times? And why was Satan,
who knew Jesus was divine, fighting a battle he knew he couldn't win
by trying to tempt the Son of God. It makes for a very clumsy
and not well thought out of introduction to the enemy of all good in the
universe. But that was the introduction a figure born of the crucible of the
times, solidified in the Cumran literature of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and fully
utilized with the introduction of the Messiah in the New Testament. The Gospels also
feature a new disturbing aspect of belief popular at the time. Satan's association with
illness and ugliness most likely inspired by the old Mesopotamian idea of demons being the
cause of maladies. It's now demon session directed by Satan himself that causes a
person to be a leper, have her crooked back, suffer from epilepsy,
be blind, have acne, have bacne, get a hangnail, enjoy the
show. Two and a half men decide they should start a podcast or just
be downright fugly towrant God, the good creator of all things, that caused
such suffering, even though he had all the power to fix them, No
twas the devil, and only through the miracles of Jesus the Christ could they
be cured. The original meaning of a satan wasn't entirely forgotten, though,
and Jesus himself even calls Peter Satan when he says, get thee behind me.
Satan thou art an offense unto me, Peter is being an impediment,
an obstacle, a Satan to Jesus, but not thee Satan. The Gospel
of John plays with this idea, while in the midst of Satan being a
real figure and the socioeconomic climate at the time, in political rivals thus either
take the place of Satan or become instruments of his maschinations. It's like a
little text mex of Satan the job title and Satan the bad guy. It
must have been a popular sentiment, though, as Paul's writings post Gospels seem
to continue the trend of branding anyone who thought differently than he did as being
under the influence of the devil or needing to be sent to the devil via
exile. That is some spicy forgiveness, I tell you what. Satan thus
moves on from Jesus and becomes Paul's main rival. Ironically, it's Paul who
suffers from some kind of mystery illness variously interpreted as anything from epilepsy to conjunctive
vitus and something I just pointed out that in anyone else would have been considered
demonic possession. The two never meet in the Paul line works. But Paul
sure thinks Satan works through other people to stop what Paul is trying to accomplish.
Satan here is taking on a more refined role, not just hiding in
shadows or ordering minions around. He's actively influencing human beings and getting into their
minds. But let's go ahead and get to the good stuff, the superci
and final form Satan takes in the Bible and the Book of Revelation, the
ever popular apocalyptic genre was something Jews and Christians alike found maccabley appealing, and
in John of Patmosa's siminar work, the evil One did not disappoint. Despite
the metaphors alluding to Rome and its oppression of Jewish and Christian culture, the
symbolism found in Revelation transcended its original purpose and became a whole slew of new
characters and settings for future church leaders to play with. That's not to say
there aren't depictions of an actual figure of true evil that were also meant that
way, but these two came from centuries of borrowing and mixing concepts of evil
from other cultures for a variety of reasons, as previously discussed. Equivalences abound
in Revelation, meaning a certain beast equates to a certain empire or ruler,
and according to John, association or following of said empire or ruler equated to
worship of Satan. In the book, we see how the idea of taking
pressure of sin off of God or the Jewish people themselves comes to a head
and has applied to a whole army of evil, a whole malicious force that
has conspired against the world behind the scenes all along. Scapegoat is a term
I've avoided using because I'm going to go into marvelous detail about it in part
two. But suffice it to say that was the agenda ever since the Intertestamental
period, and one could argue since the Babylonian exile. The horrors of Revelation
are a train wreck. Readers couldn't take their eyes off of, and it
was easy for future leaders to point at and inspire fear in adherence. Revelation
showed how powerful Satan supposedly was, and people could fully see the threat they
faced in vivid detail. I'm also avoiding many descriptions and names of the devil
here again because I'll be discussing them in detail in Part two, things like
visuals, the ancient Serpent, the Great Dragon, etc. Coming out of
the New Testament. We're going to take a quick jaunt through history with some
examples of how Satan was perceived and evolved. You might be able to guess
the trajectory of this arc as wild things often get more and more extreme with
time, and this kind of progression can be seen in a couple of sects
in the first century CE. A while back, we covered the topic of
Gnosticism on the show, an offshoot of Judeo Christianity that focused on personal spiritual
knowledge and had its own set of concepts that weren't exactly in line with Judaism
or Christianity, but derived from both. To them, anything material, anything
physical experienced on earth was evil. Evil had always existed, meaning the devil
had always existed. Apologies to Jesus, I guess who had to be incarnated
in physical form in a place world by the devil, meaning he was evil
since he was material. Crazily enough, this idea bopped around for centuries,
with church leaders constantly trying to figure out how to use it or lose it.
In those centuries, it seems the origin and purpose of the devil was
lost by appearances. Everyone knew there was a devil and that he was bad,
but had no idea where he came from or why he was there.
And this is what I like to call the cottony joe period of Satan.
The neophied Christian Church struggled to answer these questions, as well as the Odyssey,
which books to include in a standardized canon, and what to do about
sinners and encounters with the many things perceived as evil in the world. They
questioned whether the devil could be saved or whether any perceived instance of him should
be eradicated, and when a church leader spoke up and tried to establish an
opinion or take a stand, if that idea didn't satisfy or agree with the
slim majority of the other leaders, that leader was excommunicated. Bickering and in
fighting were constant. Was a shit show, But instead of truly assessing the
background of the devil and how he got to where he was, the church
decided it was best to just figure out ways to punish those who thought slightly
differently and further index Satan and his minions existence. The Synod of Constantinople and
five forty three CE was a meeting to condemn the writings and views of the
third century CE Christian scholar Origin of Alexandria. But it also codified their stance
on certain demonic matters, eg that Christ can't be arcrificed on behalf of demons
as well as humans, and that any punishment of demons and impious humans will
be forever and they will never be restored, whether they knew or cared or
not. This was the seed planted for future inquisitions and witch hunts to grow.
Meanwhile, the ghost of Gnosticism was still flitting about, this time,
making its home in Europe. Between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries CE, a
movement known as the Cathars popped up around France. Among other beliefs, they
rejected the concept of Jesus having a physical incarnation, that he was resurrected,
that baptism was a false sacrament, and that there are two gods, one
good one bad, which struggle for power and may or may not have been
two forms of the same entity. Basically, they thought the God of the
Old Testament was evil and created the physical world which was evil. Humans were
actually angels who had been seduced by Satan and forced to spend an eternity in
a reincarnation loop in Satan's physical realm. The only way to break the cycle
was to renounce the material self. These beliefs are thought to have been influenced
by the asceticism of early Gnostics, and possibly by Buddhism coming over through Byzantine
trade routes in the Silk Road. Catharism was not popular, not on the
whole anyway, and in fact, the Catholic Church, annoyed that they couldn't
reign in the Cathars, ordered a crusade against them in twelve o eight.
This led to a massacre in twelve oh nine, where at least seven thousand
men, women and children, Cathars and Catholics who stood with them alike were
slaughtered by Catholic forces. Morbid fact, it's also said to be where the
phrase kill them all the Lord will recognize his own came from. By the
fourteen century, the Cathars were all but exterminated through Catholic efforts. Hey,
by the way, the Devil's evil just thought I'd throw that out there,
you know, no reason. In particular, the devil's evil. It's the
devil that's evil. During this period of interfaith warring Pope Innocent, the Third
Harhar convened the fourth Latter in Council between twelve thirteen and twelve fifteen. Among
other stuff like calling for the Fifth Crusade, Innocent issued seventy one cannons or
edicts, which established the church's official position on everything from elections and marriage to
cleaning and taking notes at trial proceedings. Hey man, he had two years
to make all these up. They're not all going to be gold. And
yes, Satan was discussed in one cannon. In fact, a monumental decree
came in the First Canon with the passage saying the devil and the other demons
were indeed created by God good, but they became bad through themselves. Man,
however, sinned at the suggestion of the devil. That's huge. The
church officially recognized that the devil was created by God and that man had sinned
at the devil's suggestion, which only reinforced the idea that the serpent in the
Garden of Eden was Satan himself. No mention, however, of how or
why the devil had become evil decree after decree rained down from on high with
language such as, we excommunicate an anathematize every heresy that raises against the Holy
Orthodox and Catholic Faith, which we have above explained, condemning all heretics,
under whatever names they may be known. Those being handed over to the secular
rulers of their bailis, let them be abandoned to be punished with due justice.
Canon three. And since the soul is far more precious than the body,
we forbid, under penalty of anathema, that a physician advised a patient
to have a recourse to sinful means for the recovery of bodily health. Canon
twenty two. We ordain that the predates of the Church be more willing and
energetic in punishing evil words. Canon fifty five. Jews are not to be
given public offices. Anyone instrumental in doing this is to be punished. Canon
sixty nine, The one about the physicians basically saying you got to call for
a priest before you do anything as a doctor to a person who needs a
doctor. The word punish or punishment is in their fifty five times. The
word love is in there twice, always following the word fear, once for
what motivates one's witness testimony, and once for what crusaders must have in their
eyes, quote unquote, the fear and love of God. Most of the
rest of the punishments mentioned in the Canons pertained to the punishment of clerics and
church leaders. But I bring this up to give you an idea of how
language like this and future popal decrees led to countless slaughtering and maskring for the
next seven hundred years at least, crusades, inquisitions which hunts, conversion missions,
gold land, and righteous fanaticism swept across the world, all under the
approval, perhaps even glee, of the papacy. I will not attempt to
go over every instance of these types of zealotry through history, because the podcast
would never end. And I love you and I don't want you to be
punished, and that's a decree from Pope David Canon for twenty sixty nine.
Nor will we hit every example of perceived devilry otherwise throughout history. But I
do have just a few more big ones to pin on here in this section.
In thirteen twenty one, Italian poet Dante Alighieri finishes his infamous The Divine
Comedy, and his first part, Inferno, provides a brand new imaginative mythology
of the devil, complete with a visceral map of Hell. His work would
inspire depictions and descriptions of Satan and his home to this day. More detail
on that later, fourteen thirty one, a nineteen year old woman is burned
at the stake and ruined France for the crime of public heresy. The pro
English church officials condemned her for wearing male clothing, having visions deemed demonic,
and refusing to submit to the Church's judgment. That, of course, was
Joan of arc now a patron saint of France. Too little, too late.
In another example of supreme irony, Joan claimed God had given her divine
guidance on defeating the English and installing Charles the seventh of France to the throne.
An intensely pious and devoted Catholic, Joan made the mistake of getting in
the way of politics with the cherry. On top of being a strong,
willed, capable woman. The trial was a foregone conclusion, as the mostly
pro English clergy, as well as the University of Paris representatives who participated in
the trial were invested in a dual monarchy, with the English king at the
forefront. In this case, though they didn't stop it. The Catholic Church
was not the responsible party for the atrocity, whichwas the politics of the English.
What did the deed, But it is an example of something that had
been happening and would continue to happen with the devil to blame something. Gerald
Massardier wrote very eloquently, quote the accusation against Joan is a clear precursor of
the greatest tragedy of modern times, the universal edification of the devil, with
whatever is different end quote. Sixteen sixty seven, English poet John Milton completes
his first edition of the epic poem Paradise Lost, a creative narrative of the
fall of Man's story. From this work, we can point to several examples
of future perceptions of the devil, not the least of which is how Milton
personifies Satan's fervor in warring against God and the angels and perpetrating evil, and
Milton's outright presentation of Satan as the snake in the Garden of Eden. Milton
follows the secondy knocktale of Satan's fall from heaven along with his followers and the
now winged Satan is free to fly between Hell and Earth to stir up trouble
and seek dominion over Paradise. The idea all but guaranteed the notion of the
fall from Grace narrative over any other Satan origin stories. Interestingly, scholars and
authors over the years have come to regard the character of Satan in Paradise Lost
as the sympathetic hero of the story, a complex character with desires and goals,
driven by the statement that its quote better to reign and Hell than serve
in Heaven end quote. Satan began really filling out a more three D image
than previously portrayed, and by the eighteenth century, the devi Ill was involved
in everything bad, even to the point of ridiculousness, as exemplified in Daniel
Defoe's seventeen twenty six work The Political History of the Devil, in which Satan
influenced many events of the past, including making a pact with Oliver Cromwell.
Satan promised Cromwell power as far as the title of Protector, but not King
of England, a term of the contract that eventually made Cromwell so angry his
spleen burst and he died. Couldn't have happened to a better guy? Do
some folks? Then go delos deaver know some folks, says then, oh
you devils, dead devils, Tom, delve on that hit on my bed,
My beds my Tom, devel hit on my my bed. Go away,
Delve del leave me alone, leave me go way down, de leave
me alone, leave me. This will be the station where the train stops
for now, halfway through our journey to learn how the Devil came to be
and evolved through history. We've covered a hell of a lot of ground,
literally, but we have a lot more to cover. In Part two,
I'll talk about the devils of other cultures, since we've been focused primarily on
the Judeo Christian and Ancient Near East mythology so far. I'll also be breaking
down the origin of many of the host of names associated with the Devil,
including Lucifer Biel's above, Mephistopheles, Beli'll, etc. Etc. Then we'll
talk about the evolution of the Devil's appearance through the years and his portrayal and
pop culture in the nineteenth to twenty first centuries, and I'll conclude with a
strong look at the philosophical, cultural, and socio political implications this character has
had on the world. Stay tuned. If you miss it, you're gonna
have the devil to pay the bottom Oyle pocket book bottom ayu will be seeing
when you won't do nothing? Body shaan't I I don't have to do nothing,
but was sha't? When you marry marry real oald May, when you
marry married real, own name, living to your son or donal