This is the second part of a two part episode. In part one,
I discussed the earliest mentions of the devil, both in the Old and New
Testament of the Christian Bible, as well as ancient Jewish literature and the Intertestamental
period, and some ancient sources of inspiration that helped mold the devil into the
archfiend of the Christian God. In part two, I'll be discussing evil entities
and concepts and other cultures, the many names associated with the devil and their
origins, the many descriptions of this entity and his infamy and pop culture,
and the conclusions we can draw from the research devils some folks. One sees
more devils than a vast hell can hold theseus Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
I've mentioned several contributing cultures to the Roland persona of the Devil already, the
biggest of which was Persia. Zoroastrianism and Babylonian mythology not only influenced Jewish writers.
Many stories found in the Bible are straight up retellings of older myths.
Mesopotamia is the epic of Gilgamesh, introduced fantastical entities such as Humbaba, a
figure of terror that guarded the Cedar forest, which the hero Gilgamesh had to
overcome. Ahuramazda fought against the forces of Ahriman, the opposer in an eternal
struggle of good versus evil. In Zoroastrianism, Marduke fought the goddess Tiamat,
who had given birth to dragons, snakes, beasts, and ogres in the
Babylonian Enuma Eleish. Besides being pitted against the head of the Babylonian pantheon,
Tiamat bore a son called Kingu, whom she wanted to rule all other gods.
He was the general of her army, who rebelled against Marduke, but
fell to Marduke's hand, just as his mother had. With the blood of
this malicious god and some clay, Marduke molded the first human, an act
that could arguably be the beginning of original sin and the spark of evil within
everyone. Thenceforth. All these had a hand in shaping the devil in later
Christian theology. But what was going on in other parts of the world.
If evil existed and threatened humanity, Surely it wasn't just in the ancient Near
East. Let's take a trip around the world and see who else was running
amuck, although we'll be getting off to a slow start as we stay relatively
close by heading a bit south to those wild Egyptians. Egyptian mythology is rich
in characters, settings, stories, and traditions. With its portrayals and modern
culture like the nineteen ninety nine cinematic masterpiece The Mummy starring Brendan Fraser and reach
Lies, one could easily believe there is evil everywhere in the mythology and a
god or two in charge of it all. The jackal headed Anubis weighing hearts
and feeding the unworthy to the monster Ahmet is surely evocative of something malevolent.
But I'm going to save you some time here. It wasn't. This pair
was impartial judgment personified a god who was coldly indifferent to mortals and a chimeric
rubbish bin just waiting to snack on rotten souls. Just two judgy boys doing
their jobs. In fact, that job was to annihilate evil souls, So
fair play to the Egyptians. They really shamalan to that one. A closer
representation of evil would have been a pappus aka apep the giant serpent who was
the immortal enemy of the sun god Raw. Every night he tried to stop
Raw's journey in his sunboat by devouring or giving it a hypnotic stare, and
every night Raw his entourage would defeat him. Apophis was considered the embodiment of
chaos, and so linked the concept of isfet. Isfet was for all intents
and purposes, evil in that it was the opposite of ma At, or
truth and order. When Anubis weighed the hearts of mortals, the hearts were
placed on a scale with a feather of maat. Hearts heavier than the feather
got tossed into ahm It's jaws, and the equal weighed hearts got the soul
into the worthy afterlife. Egyptians believed mat and is fet could not exist without
each other, and though one's duty was to rise above is fet, there
still had to be harmony in the universe with both concepts. If anything bad
happened, it was is fet overcoming Maat for the time being, but the
universe would always ebb and flow to bring the two back in harmony. Is
Fet could be violence, but could also be a failed Nile flood, a
disease, or a lego on the floor when you're barefoot. Apophus was sometimes
considered the embodiment of Isfet, but mainly in the sense that he opposed Raw's
light in order. He was primarily a deity of the afterlife, and thus
had little to no dealings with living mortals, which brings us to another deity,
perhaps the one that popped into your head when we arrived in Egypt,
Set, god of deserts, storms, violence, and foreign oppressors. Set
was an enigmatic deity as complex as his portrayals, and by that I mean
what the hell kind of animal head does he have? Is it an ardvark?
Is it a wild dog? Is it a penis with eyes and chopsticks
for ears? Nobody knows. Man. He came to be known for killing
and mutilating his own brother Osiris, living alone in the desert, and helping
foreign invaders conquer Egypt. He was depicted with red skin and the color red
in general, a color Egyptians associated with fire and destruction, and another string
on the corkboard to the devil, and his fight against Osirius's son Horace became
a legendary depiction of good versus evil, although it was really more Shakespearean revenge
against a usurper. However, he is not the archfiend Droid we're looking for,
as he was also depicted helping raw fight off apupphists from time to time,
and was worshiped as patron god of many cities and pharaohs due to his
military power and blessings. Some depictions can elicit fear and all, perhaps even
distrust and enmity, but he's far too complex to be called the main force
of evil. In Egyptian mythology, they did have demonic entities, although the
term demonic now carries many Christian connotations, but in the dark, lonely fringe
areas in the desert, in tombs in caves. Egyptians worried about entities that
were dangerous and carried names like He of the Repulsive Face and He who lives
on excrement. Transfigured spirits called Aku and malicious spirits variously known as Keftu,
Jay and Moot could mess with mortals physically and mentally, but had no leader
directing them. So evil for the Egyptians was in a cosmic balance, with
good manifesting here and there and within various entities, but it was a necessary
part of life. It also helped keep people safe, as they knew to
stay away from the dark, dangerous spots which were scattered all throughout the Middle
East, spots where other cultures also saw evil lurking, not the least of
which was pre Islamic Arab religion. If we fast forward a bit to the
seventh century CE, and entity familiar to many of you begins to emerge in
Arabic literature. The beings of Smokeless Fire Gin are attested in writings during this
time, and while both the origins and details of what they were and where
they came from our murky, we can at least infer that they were supernatural
beings, more powerful than humans but still mortal, and something between man and
God or man and angel. In the hierarchy. People worshiped them, which
has led to the belief that maybe they were pagan nature deities who became demonized
by the other Abrahamic religions and possibly Zoroastrianism. Like the Egyptian spirits I just
mentioned, Gen were relegated to the dark, dismal, dangerous places people dared
not go. They also gained a reputation for hating mankind, being able to
shapeshift and turn invisible, causing violence to people, and even possessing people.
Of course, there are examples of gen who were benevolent and protected people,
and even falling in love with humans, but most people seem to view them
as capricious at best and violent demons at worst, living in fear and awe
of them. The Quran, written in the seventh century ce mentions Gin twenty
nine times, explaining their creation and culture, and how they were made to
worship Allah just like humans, only they were made first. Scholars and theologians
throughout history have hemmed in haut about Gin, and you can get several different
pictures of what they are depending on the source. However, belief that they
were invisible beings who held enmity towards humans and could take over a person's body
has led them to be viewed as demonic. With the location of the people
who believed these stories, it has been postulated that they stemmed from some of
the malevolent entities mentioned in Part one with Mesopotamian, Babylonian and Jewish myths,
but in Islam, there is a distinction between Gin and demons. Demons fall
into two basic categories, shayatin or devils and div or fiends. You can
really smell the Indo Iranian influence with that last one, as Zoroastrianism and before
that, Hinduism used the term deva. Interestingly, the term started out as
the word for a god or deity, then became an entity not wholly evil,
but something to be rejected, and by the time Islam got a hold
of it, it meant fiend, deva, diva div what's next, David
shit? Anyway, Islamic demons definitely try to lead human kind astray in their
mission to counter Allah's will, and are naturally and forever evil beings. A
couple examples of these types of entities are the marid, a dumb, rebellious
giant, and if Fret more cunning and wicked type of demon, and one
often depicted in pop culture as being able to control fire. It makes me
think of Final Fantasy seven, where I think you can summon and effreet in
a spell. With Islam, we also get centuries of prior Abrahamic pedigree,
including what we discussed in Part one with how the figure of the devil became
an entity unto himself, and the Koran was written with a fully fledged arch
fiend called Iblis, who controls the Shaatine and dives. Taking a huge queue
from the tale of the Devil's fall from Grace and Second Enoch, the Koran
tells of Iblis's arrogance and refusal to submit to man. Sarah two, verse
thirty four is of particular interest, saying, and remember when we said,
unto the angels, fall prostrate before Adam, and they fell prostrate, all
Saint Eblis. He was of the Gin, so he rebelled against his lord's
command. Will you choose him and his seed for your protecting friends instead of
me? When they are an enemy into you? Calamitus is the exchange for
evildoers. In this one verse we get the act that caused the devil's downfall
and the fun fact that he was quote unquote of the Gin, like I
said. Scholars have argued all through history on interpretations and versions of Eblis,
with some saying yes, he was a Gin, some saying no, he
was an angel, YadA, YadA. In the angel version, Iblis was
actually Azazel, a name I brought up in Part one, and another one
I'm saving for some fun stuff for later in this part. Either way,
he was sentenced to Hell here called Johannam and specifically Sigen, a prison like
place of torment at the bottom of Hell. Save sixteenth eighteen. Iblis said,
because thou hast thrown me out of the way, lo I will lie
and wait for them on thy straight way. Then will I assault them from
the fourth and then behind them from their right and their left. Nor wilt
thou find in most of gratitude for thy mercies? God said, get out
from this disgrace and expel. If any of them follow thee, hell will
I fill with you all. The Quran skillfully ties up the loose ends that
had frayed and the other Abrahamic religions by giving the devil motivation right out of
the gate of sweet succulent revenge. Then he made a deal with Allah to
be able to impose his will on mankind, to which Allah compromised by letting
him do it to unbelievers only Sarah fifteen thirty six through forty two. Ibili
said, Oh, my Lord, give me then respite till the day the
dead are raised. God said, respite is granted thee till the day of
the time appointed, Ibli said, Oh, my Lord, because thou hast
put me in the wrong, I will make long fair seeming to them on
the earth, and I will put them all in the wrong. Accept thy
servants among them sincere and purified by thy grace. God said, this way
of my sincere servants is indeed a way that leads straight to me. For
over my servants. No authorities shalt thou have, except such as put themselves
in the wrong and follow thee. Having said all that, there are many
interpreters and believers of the faith that take the fact that Allah made Eblis in
the first place and has a divine plan that allows for Eblis to act full
ali ones, because in the end God and goodness will prevail. In this
fatalistic sense, the devil is an instrument of God, and there is a
lot to answer for from all parties involved. Sarah thirty five six. Verily
saving as an enemy to you, so treat him as an enemy. He
only invites his adherents that they may become companions of the blazing fire. Is
that is that entrapped man. Let's expand our magnifying glass a bit and start
heading away from the Middle East. How about we pop over to Greece and
see what the devil looked like. There. We'll start underground, as that's
where Old Scratch eventually ends up. But way down Hades town the king on
the chromium throne, as Hades himself, he's not the devil, so let's
turn back around and go back topside. Hades like the devil held dominion under
the surface where souls could end up. He was connected with snakes and Hades
like the devil eventually could lurk around every corner, but he wasn't the boogeyman.
The devil became sure people were in no hurry to come face to face
with him, but the real fear they bore was more for the finality of
death than the fear of being tortured in fire and anguish. Forever. Far
from evil, he just had arresting bitch face, and in fact was more
interested in keeping balance and judging things fairly. The Greeks had evil deities,
but most were all minor gods and goddesses in charge of specific things. Airis
was the goddess of discord, Inyo was the goddess of destruction, Apata was
the goddess of deceit. You had Demos and Phobos, gods of Panic and
terror respectively, also the names of the moons of Mars. And speaking of
the moons of Mars, Moros was the god of doom. Not sure if
he went on to become God of Doom two, three or any reboots.
Actually I know he wasn't the god of doom two because I was suck it
cyber demons. So Greece did not have the devil and was not super instrumental
in shaping the devil we know personality wise. Anyway, we'll come back to
that. One could possibly argue there are ties with a few similarities I just
mentioned for Hades, but Greek god were royal a holes out for themselves,
as they were made in the image of the culture that worshiped them. Less
mythological and more philosophical. Was a concept put forth by Plato in his Symposium
of a type of ethereal spirit called a Theamone. Centuries later, Christian luminaries
would pick this term up and bastardize it to denote beings of pure evil who
worked for the devil and attack humans in a variety of ways, But the
original meaning, as imagined by Plato, was that of an unseen intermediary between
man and the gods, inherently good and trying to influence man to use reason
and good judgment. Plato's student Aristotle expounded on the idea, probably to everyone's
detriment, by saying there were evil daimons who incited evil actions in both men
and gods. You can bet later Christians loved this idea, as it took
the heat off both God and men and put the blame squarely on these evil
beings. Plato also described the concept of an absolute, perfect capital g good
in the Republic, but what he maybe didn't realize was that the idea also
implied an absolute evil, which would have been a bingo for us in our
quest to track the devil down. But he didn't say anything about the search
continues. What do Asian and Polynesian cultures have for devilry, Well, not
much actually. The religion of Buddhism is mostly concerned with how to prevent suffering,
and evil is born out of the greed and desire that sometimes arises within
us. If we take the concept of evil as just discussed with Plato,
the implied absolute antithesis of good, it's not really a concept found in Buddhism.
For one thing, if you were to consider someone evil, becomes possible
to justify committing harm against them, and that does not fly in Buddhist teaching.
The Damapata chapter twelve, verse one sixty five says, Bible it self
indeed is evil. Dune by oneself is one to five by oneself is evil
left undune by oneself indeed is one purified. Purity and impurity depend on oneself.
No one purifies another. Evil is not an outside force in Buddhism.
Thus there's no need to fear a devil, at least the outside force version
of him. A story of a divine being called Mara describes a time where
princes said Artha was tempted by three beautiful women, possibly Mara's daughters. Mara
is kind of like the personification of the seven Deadly sins, and his daughters
were trying to seduce said Artha to keep him from enlightenment. They were unsuccessful,
but Mara is often pointed to not as the devil whereafter, but at
least as an opponent to the Buddha. There is, however, a hell,
or more precisely, sixteen hells sixteen eight hot eight cold. You go
there according to your karma, but there is no lord of the underworld to
stop by and bring you cookies. From time to time. The cookies are
spiders. The earthly realm just above the hells, oddly enough, is the
Patala Loca or hungry ghost realm, with beings who perceive the world differently than
humans and wander around dark, abandoned places seeking fulfillment. Sounds a little familiar.
Chinese mythology has some similar concepts about hell and plenty of monsters, ghosts,
and goblins, but it's not unlike Greek mythology, with no devil figure
heading it all up. Same with Japanese myth If you ever come across a
translation of the devil in Japanese with the word akuma, it comes from a
malevolent spirit of fire in Japanese folklore. It's used in place of the name
Satan in Japanese translations of Christianity, but the actual entity is an evil,
fiery, sword wielding flying creature who brings misfortune and can be responsible for mental
illness. And just in case you're wondering, Hinduism does not have a devil
either. There's no need as karma keeps things balanced. I did find some
mentions of an entity called Papa Poorisha, who is the embodiment of all sin,
though I couldn't find an origin for him. There is also a Khali
Poorisha, an ugly and malevolent entity not to be confused with the goddess Kali.
Legend says Lord Brahma created Kali Purisha to inspire sin in people, and
thus he's just doing his job, which also sounds familiar. As far as
Oceania and Polynesian cultures, there's no single entity who is the arch fiend of
a single benevolent god like we have in the Abrahamic religions. There's one that's
closer to the concept of set in Egyptian mythology, and I'll get to that
in just a minute. But many of these cultures consider natural disasters, illness,
even death to be a type of evil, just not the devil.
Someone might consider these things the work of bad forces or demon of some kind,
but none of these terms carry the same meaning that you're probably used to.
A witch doctor could be consulted to deal with any demons causing disease,
or a shaman could help with rituals to ward off a typhoon, but all
these things were still natural phenomena or human ill will that were just a part
of life. The closest you might come sounds good on paper, but it's
really just another character in a pantheon. As I mentioned previously, Feo personification
of evil. In Maori mythology, Theoo didn't like the overworld and was jealous
of his brothers and sisters. He fought his brother Tana, god of forests
and birds, but was defeated and exiled to the underworld. Legends say he
is the cause of all evil in mankind if he's not placated with offerings.
Again, we see gods made in man's image, and humans are kind of
caught in the crossfire. To compare, Christians don't make offerings to the devil
to keep him satisfied in Mopi in Hell, but if you had to pin
evil on a singular entity. In Polynesian myth Theoo comes closest to the devil
and seamlessly integrated with the devil when Christianity spread there. Norse mythology paints a
similar picture to Greek myth wherein you find human like gods and trickster figures,
but no devil as we know him. Loki is an obvious target here,
being the complex, trickster god of the Norse pantheon, but any one story
about him will show that he is no prince of Hell. Ironically, however,
he was the father of Hell, goddess of the underworld and Hellhane,
and a figure not unlike the Greek Hades, trolls and Drowger Pepper the tales
of the Edis and Sagas, But any mention of the devil in legends comes
from post christianization of the culture. Celtic myths have a similar refrain God's made
in man's image, with bad and tricky figures capable of help just as much
as harm Brie Crew of the Poisoned Tongue is a figure of Irish mythology of
the Ulster cycle and was pretty much a Loky clone. He just liked causing
trouble, not rebelling against the ultimate God and deceiving mankind out of pure,
unfiltered hatred. Same with Sirdon of the Nart Sagas from the North Caucuses of
Eurasia. These European gods were complex and held many roles, and not one
was the ultimate evil. We find in today's capital d devil over In South
America, the Olmec, Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, and Incan cultures had
plenty of gods and goddesses, but details are still relatively unknown to us compared
to European pantheons. Like other cultures, there were gods of the underworld,
and evil creatures are monsters, but these were cultures that worshiped the sun,
agriculture, the sea, in other words, more practical things. The closest
you might come to a devil figure is that of Kaizen, meaning god of
death, and Mayan culture with a name that derives from the word for fart.
He was nicknamed the Stinking One and had control over earthquakes and delighted in
torturing the souls of evil people in Shibalba, the underworld. Post conquest by
the Spanish, it was easy to draw parallels to the Christian devil with this
guy, continuing a pattern you're probably already seeing. The First Nations people of
North America were very far away from a devil figure in their mythology. In
fact, good versus evil wasn't really conceptualized the way we've seen in the Abrahamic
religions. Native Americans lived in a kinship with nature, plants, animals,
landscape. Whether if evil was ever discussed, it was in terms of what
a person does or ways to unbalance that kinship they shared with the natural world.
Things could be bad. I sure you have skin walkers, windigoes,
and other monstrous beings, but it was a path of corruption these entities followed
or came to on their own, not the influences of a great, almost
all powerful, evil being. And in the service of brevity, the same
can be said for most African mythologies, with a common concept that evil comes
from humans. So it seems the world at large has no consensus on evil
being encapsulated in one figure. Indeed, just the civilizations in the ancient Near
East seem to have come to this idea. But that's just a taste of
world mythologies. Honestly, each culture could have its own podcast, not just
an episode, a whole show. But there's other things for us to get
to. So let's move on to what I consider one of the most important
sections of this episode. The many names of the devil. Y'all blow Yah
blow. The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman Edgar Shakespeare's King Near Your Eyes
may promise Paradise the only Life. Let's revisit one of the older and most
popular names for the devil, Satan. In Part one, I laid out
how the term was first used in the Christian Bible and the original meaning of
it. Jason from Dragons and Genesis podcast runs it back for us, So
Satan or Shaitan, and I've heard a few different pronunciations on that one.
While while I don't know a great deal about its presentation in the Quran and
other Islamic text because that's not really my field. From what I understand,
basically, the Hasaitan of the Hebrew Bible and the the Shaitan from Islam the
basically the different. The main difference in there is Christianity. The figure continue
to develop throughout the early Christian period, and from there it entered into Arabia
and became the the Islamic version. So the Christian Satan is the closer representative
of that figure, and that because essentially Islam was almost it's basically descended from
a group of Christians, so you kind of have that stepping stone, you
have the Hastatan. Eventually it becomes the Christian devil, and the end it
becomes the Islamic you know, sheitan, so that it's it's a bit closer
to what we would think of as a satan. At least that's my understanding.
Like I said, I don't really study Islam that much, only insofar
as it pertains to you know, like early Christianity and how things kind of
spread around. The term comes from a Hebrew roote relating to opposition or accusation.
If you remember, satan or hasatan was a job title, not a
specific being. After the Babylonian exile and Intertestamental period, writers began fabricating stories
using a specific evil entity, and since the Old Testament had opposers already,
they lazily just attached the term to this brand new villain. The Arabic word
Satan was a reinterpretation of the Hebrew and was used to mean demon or gin
and eventually the main opponent of Allah. Once the Bible began to be translated
ad nauseum, the word satan began popping up everywhere there was a reference to
something acting against God. It was foisted upon the public as a proper name,
and once John Milton got a hold of it in Paradise lost, it
was all but sealed as the name the devil went by. The newly created
arch fiend of God in the New Testament was referred to not only as Satan,
but the devil, Beelzebub, Abadon, Belile, Lucifer, Apollyon,
and the great Dragon. I'll try to be quick but thorough with these,
and I'll briefly start with the word devil. The Greek diabolos is where this
term started, with a translation of the term slanderer from the words dia and
balaine, which together meant to throw across. Once it got to Old English,
it was deoful and from their devil it sounds pretty dealful, jeez.
It was used in translations wherever the Hebrew Satan was found. Thus the two
became interchangeable, and like Hasitan became the Satan, Diabolos became the devil Beelzebub.
This one is murky, but a fun kind of murky. Referenced in
the Book of Kings, the name was baal Zebul, a deity worshiped in
the Philistine city of Ekron and thought to be associated with the Canaanite deity Ball.
Just the name Ball meant lord, and Zebull meant heavenly mansion. But
scholars think the Israelites referred to this deity with a derogatory pun with the name
baal Zebub, a term derived from the word for poop, So instead of
Lord of the heavenly mansion, he became lord of poop. Oh man,
if Michael Flatley was Lord of the dance, Michael Flatulencely was lord of the
poop. Sorry, anyway, since there was a strong connection to flies with
poop, he was eventually called Lord of the flies. Second Kings one two
and a Hasia fell down through a lattice in his upporchunity that was in Samaria,
and was sick, and he sent messengers and set unto them go inquire
of Baalzebub, the god of e crime, whether I shall recover of this
disease. It's not exactly painting Beelzebub in any light here, let alone a
nefarious one. It's not until we get to the pseudopographical Greek text, the
Testament of Solomon, written in the first or second century CE, that we
find baelz Abul has become a prince of demons who was formerly a high ranking
angel in heaven. Who inspires all kinds of sin in men. You can
clearly see the connection to our fiendish friend, the devil. Here. The
Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke mentioned Jesus driving out demons by Beelzebub.
And I still can't wrap my head around what the hell this means.
Matthew twenty five through twenty seven, and Jesus knew their thoughts, said,
unto them, every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every
city or house divided against itself shall not stand. And if Satan cast out
Satan, he is divided against himself, how shall then his kingdom stand?
And if by Beelzebub I cast out demons by whom do your children cast the
mountain, therefore they shall be your judges. Clear's mud. Jason hits us
with some more details. So originally it wasn't bill Zibub, it was baal
Zebul, And what that meant was lord of the manor. It was essentially
a title for a Canaanite deity, and it basically meant the lord of the
heavenly Palace. And the way their beliefs worked, they had this great mountain
called Mount Zaphon, which was in western Syria, and this mountain called Mount
Zaphon, which would later they would later change the location of it to far
to the south, right outside Jerusalem, and the name would eventually become Mount
Zion. But in its oldest version it was called Mount Zephon, and it
was farther to the north, and atop it was said to be this great
garden, and inside it was a tent and then later a palace, and
this is where the gods lived. And the lord of this palace had the
nickname Balsa Bull, and this meant the lord of the manor, So this
was the one who kind of ruled this godly palace, you know, is
basically just saying man of the house. And this was the Canaanite god Bald
also called a DoD or Hadad, and this was a green god associated with
fertility, not like human fertility, but like fertility of the land. So
you know, if you wanted your crops to grow, if you wanted your
nation to prosper, this is the god you would make sacrifice too. And
one of his nicknames is the Lord of the Manor or the Lord of Heaven.
And this bals Zabul later on the Jews. They would they would sort
of insult him and also his priests. And one of the things that they
did was they sort of made this pun. They would say, instead of
baal Zebul, lord of the manor, they would say baal Zebub, which
meant the lord of flies. And scholar's best guess is that they were essentially
saying that their their deity Ball was a pile of animal excrement and his priests
were the flies buzzing around him. And this is actually where you get the
book title Lord of the Flies. It's a reference to that, and so
that that's where this name balls Abub or bills a bub comes from. It's
a play on the nickname Lord of the manner. They've changed it to lord
of the flies. And this deity Ball would basically become a sort of villain
for Yahweh. And this happens all the way back in the Jewish Bible.
The priests of Yahweh and the priests of Ball were seemingly in conflict. The
exact nature of this is uncertain, as the only the only literature we have
on it comes from the Yawistic side, you know, which is hardly going
to be unbiased. We don't really have anything from the opposite side, and
we certainly don't have anything as impartial. But there was this this conflict between
these different groups of worshippers, and what they frequently do is they take all
of the different bad traits, whether it's from the deity itself or even just
human behavior, and they attribute it to this other God. And so,
you know, ball worshippers they commit adultery, they worship idols, they commit
human sacrifice, all sorts of wicked heathen things. Of course, these were
things that everyone did, and they also depict them as all being foreigners.
It was all these evil foreigners that did this. But then there's a few
times in the Bible where they slip up and they talk about how they're doing
it or their ancestors are doing it, and they should stop doing it.
And so it looks like they used to, you know, they used to
engage in these practice and then they stopped doing it. And then when they
were retelling the story, you still like, oh, make sure you change
that line to say that it was those you know, the evil Moabites and
Canaanites that did that. No, don't say it was Grandpa the Kurds that
it was the impetus for a massive brexitus. I think, yeah, yeah,
so uh so, yeah, that's that's basically what it is. They're
they're taking this god who wasn't an evil deity. He was the patron deity
of the land, and they're recasting him as a villain, and every chance
they get there, they're basically saying, oh, look, everything evil.
Yeah, it's because of that old god. And since one of his symbols
was a bull, which was, you know, a symbol of a lot
of ancient deities, including el and yahweh, because it's a symbol of strength.
I mean, like there are a few things out there on land that
are stronger than an angry bull, you know. I mean, like just
go out to a yellowstone and look at a bison. That's frightening. Okay,
I'd rather face a bear, So, you know, I mean,
these things, it's it's like if you know, a locomotive ate grass and
then occasionally just attacked people, you know, So yeah, they're they're they're
scary. And so this was a symbol of these different deities, you know,
and a lot of them had this, you know, as a sort
of symbol and these were symbols that you know, uh decorated the Jerusalem Temple,
you know, our descriptions that we find talk about, you know,
all the different statues of bulls that were there, so that this was accepted
iconography. But eventually they start to get away from that and they say,
okay, well, no, no, the only gods that are depicted by
bulls are those evil gods like bald, you know, and he's just a
steaming pile of bull crap buzzing with priestly flies. And then later on they're
like, oh, baal, he's full of corruption and excrement and debt Satan.
And so by the time you had a like with early Christianity, they're
they're taking these different things like bal and Leviathan and stuff like that, and
they're just rolling them all into one thing. And it's basically anything they don't
like gets categorized as being a trait of Satan. Abadon and Apollon. These
names are connected in that Abadon comes from the Hebrew word for destruction, and
Apollon comes from the Greek translation of Abadon and means destroyer. Though the term
was not used as a name in classical Greek texts the Hebrew Bible portrays Abadon
is just destruction or a place of destruction, often interpreted as where the dead
bide not to be outdone, and taking a concept and repurposing it. The
New Testament renders Abadon and Apollyon and entity Revelation nine eleven. And they had
a king over those, which is the Angel of the bottomless pit, whose
name in the Hebrew tongue is Abadon, but in the Greek tongue hath his
name Apollion. None of these are directly saying this is another name for the
devil. The best you can get is Angel of the abyss. I found
several sources saying The apocryphal gnostic text Acts of Thomas, written in the early
third century CE, states Abadon is the name of a demon or the devil.
But I searched through several translations of that text and saw not one mention
of Abadon being the devil. There was one single mention in one version that
said to you, I speak offspring of Gehenna, and Abadon. Gehenna was
a real place said to be cursed and was a figurative equivalent for Hell.
And as mentioned, Abadon was a bottomless pit. This passage is speaking to
beings from those places, not literal children of an entity Belile. This is
a peculiar one, as the origin is murky, and many scholars have disagreed
as to the meaning of the word, appearing twenty seven times in the Hebrew
Bible. It's been translated as either worthless, yokeless as in throwing off the
yoke of heaven, never to rise as in never to do well sedition,
and a land from which there is no return. There's definitely a negative connotation
with all these, but it's a wide array of possibilities. Deuteronomy thirteen thirteen
states, certain men, the children of Belial are gone out from among you,
and have withdrawn the inhabitants of their city, saying let us go and
serve other gods which ye have not known. In this sense it becomes idolaters,
and the term sons of or children of was a Semitic idiom, basically
meaning those who do this. Some scholars believe it was a purposeful corruption of
the name of a Babylonian goddess, Belily. It's also been argued the opposite
is true, that Babylon borrowed the name from Jewish writings, but it seems
like consensus lies with the former thought. Belile and the Aramaic pronunciation of Beliar
are found quite a bit in the Dead Sea Scrolls, where it is a
singular entity in charge of the sons of darkness, or those who didn't think
the same way the Essenes did at the time. One scroll says, you
made Belile for the pit angel of enmity in darkness is his domain. His
counsel is to bring about wickedness and guilt. All the spirits of his lot
are angels of destruction. They walk in the law of darkness towards it goes
their only desire. Other fragments equate Belial as an angel against God and in
one the angel of darkness. In another he is named the king of evil
and Prince of darkness. Several other apocryphal texts relate the word as a name
for the devil. It occurs once in the New Testament Second Corinthians six fifteen.
And what concord hath Christ with Belial or what part hath he that believeth
with an infidel? Once again, it seems we have a term that started
as an idea or adjective that after the intertestamental period became just another name for
a villain, the Great Red Dragon. Red dragons are the most covetous and
greedy of all dragons, forever seeking to increase their treasure hoards. They are
obsessed with their wealth and memorize an inventory accurate to the last copper. Oh
sorry, I accidentally picked up my D and D Monster manual. The devil
has been linked to a dragon motif since the Book of Isaiah in the Hebrew
Bible, and likely reflect Mesopotamian and Canaanite legends before that. You you still
sort of have this idea though, of the Leviathan, 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, 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 fe
of this water dragon, so you have another scapegoat, you have another source
for calamity, and so the dragon motif gets wrapped up into the ideas of
this sort of this cosmic destroyer, and that's where you get the idea of
chaos and fire and stuff like that being wrapped up. In the Book of
Revelation, Satan is frequently referred to as a dragon. This comes from the
Book of Daniel, which is referring all the way back to the stories of
Leviathan, the great fire breathing whale, crocodile, sea serpent that would live
in the Mediterranean and sink ships. And so that's where your dragon motif comes
from. So anytime you see Satan being referenced as a dragon or a serpent,
it's taking the story of Leviathan and recasting it as this source of darkness,
destruction, and chaos, which just represents the primordial earth before the gods
came in and separated things and began organizing the whole creation. A direct naming
of the devil as the Great Dragon doesn't appear into the Book of Revelation,
written in the late first century CE, Chapter twelve nine says and the Great
Dragon was cast out that old serpent, called the devil and Satan, which
deceiveth the whole world. He was cast out onto the earth, and his
angels were cast out with him. And in chapter twenty two, and he
laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil in
Satan, and bound him a thousand years. The simple phrase that old serpent
effectively rhet conned centuries of prior understanding forever afterward. The serpent in the Garden
of Eden thus became synonymous with the devil. An apologists jumped on the chance
to take some blame away from Yahweh and mankind. Lucifer. That brings us
to a big one, maybe the granddaddy of all misinterpretations, Lucifer. Jason
kicks it off for us. The idea of Lucifer are really the name Lucifer
comes from two different places in the Hebrew Bible. This is Isaiah chapters fourteen
to twenty and Ezekiel chapter twenty eight. And what it's talking about in these
two places are two different kings. I think Assyria and Babylon, and I
used to know the actual names of those kings. So in the case of
Isaiah fourteen to twenty it's Sargon the second and Ezekiel eight it is King Ifebal
the third, who is the King of Tire. And what's going on here
is they're they're giving a bunch of sort of like prophetic imagery concerning these two
kings. And basically what you have is these kings they've each done something that
has angered the Israelites and by extension, angering their God. And these kings
have failed at something. And so if someone has failed and you know,
they suffer a defeat, or they get sick, or they die, you
know, or some sort of calamity befalls them, then it was thought that
they had done something to anger at God and within receiving punishment. And so
in this case they're talking about these two different foreign rulers, and I believe
one of them was supposed to go and conquer somebody. I don't remember.
Anyway, these two people were being perceived as being punished for something, and
so they're talked about as if they were these great, lofty kings who have
been cast down. And essentially they were too prideful, and yahwe just gave
them the boot. And so they had started off up on high, and
now they had been brought low, and all of this gets wrapped up in
astrological imagery because a lot of people thought that, you know, stars and
comets and things like that could tell you things about what was going to happen
with important people. So if you saw a shooting star, that probably meant
that a king or a prince had done something wrong and had been cast down
or had died. And there was actually this this belief that stars were essentially
angels that were the heavenly copy of people on earth, and so your fate
was linked with the fate of a specific star, or rather you were a
copy of the star, because the star, the stuff going on in the
heavens is the real event, and what's happening on earth is basically a dim
representation of it. So when you have these two different stories concerning these two
different kings from Ezekiel and Isaiah, what you have is these two different kings
who were being sort of demoted or punished by Yahweh for their deeds and sister
being wrapped up with this astrological imagery. One of the things that many kings
were associated with was the last star that you would see just before the dawn,
and this would come up over the eastern horizon and it was extremely bright,
and it actually wasn't a star, it's the planet vena Us. And
then right after it and in very close proximity, the sun would come up,
and so there would be these stories about how a king or you know,
someone being represented by this star would try to usurp the Ultimate power by
you know, ascending First they're like, ah, look, you know that
this star Venus, the morning Star, is trying to come up before the
sun. But then the sun comes up and it's so bright you can't even
see Venus anymore. It just burns out its light altogether. And so they
had these stories about the morning Star, you know, attempting to usurp the
ultimate power and then being like cast down or burned away when the sun comes
up. And this was retold as a king because they were often associated with
the brightest stars in the sky, things like Jupiter and Venus or Mars.
And then he's essentially trying to use surp the great High God of Israel,
l l Yon or Yahweh as L and Yahweh were merged, and so you
have a story of the morning Star, which another word from morning star is
Lucifer trying to use surp the heavenly throne and then ultimately being cast out by
God. And this was a story not about any angels. It wasn't about
any celestial entities. It was about kings who had failed and their prideful ways
had ultimately led to their downfall. But since it was tied up with all
of these disastrological imagery and themes, it was easy to link that at a
later date with other stories concerning evil and prideful angels, such as the ones
we find in the Book of Watchers. In First Enoch, the word comes
from the Latin words lux or LUs meaning light and fur meaning bearing together it
makes light bringer or don star. Lucifer was a godly personification of the planet
Venus, son of the goddess of dawn Aurora, and one of the brightest
objects in the sky. Indeed, Roman poet Catulus called its evening aspect noctifer
or night bringer, as it could still be seen as the sunset. But
here again we see the translation bug biting hard, as the term Lucifer found
in the Bible was translated from the Hebrew hellel beIN shehar shining sun of the
morning. A term the ancient Hebrews used for the planet Venus. The Greek
translation rendered the term Hiosphoros, the Greek word for bringer of dawn, so
you can see where the Latin term lucifer came from when they was translated once
again into the Latin Vulgate around three eighty two CE. This was done by
one Dude Jerome, born in the Roman Empire around present day Croatia or possibly
Bosnia. He learned Latin and some Greek early in life, then tried to
learn Hebrew later after he converted to Christianity. Working from the Greek Septuagint itself,
a translation of the Hebrew Bible, Jerome translated Heosphoros as Lucifer. You
could also point to origin of Alexandria two hundred years later, saying certain passages
were about the devil. Later English translation kept this name instead of its meaning,
and it has caused a whole heap of trouble. The particular Bible passage
to blame is Isaiah fourteen twelve. How art thou fallen from Heaven, oh
Lucifer, son of the Morning, how art thou cut down to the ground,
which just weakened the nations with the popularity of the Devil's Fall from Heaven
myth, this one verse suddenly tacked a whole new name onto the devil's growing
list of monikers. But if someone had taken two damned seconds to pay attention
in a reading comprehension class, this would never have been considered another name for
the devil eight short ass verses earlier. The scripture is crystal clear that this
is a taunt against the current Babylonian ruler, stating in verse four, thou
shalt take up this proverb against the king of Babylon and say how hath the
oppressor ceased? The Golden City ceased? And this taunt continues for about twenty
more verses, including the one with Lucifer, which obviously was a sarcastic jab
at the Babylonian king, but it fit too well with the later repurpose tale
of the Fall from Grace. And yes, I will mention John Milton owning
some responsibility in this mess with the characterization of Satan as Lucifer in his seventeenth
century Paradise Lost. And you know what, Dante two for the Inferno in
the fourteenth century, never ever, ever, was Lucifer the name of the
devil. But because of numerous translations from language to language to language, coupled
with the popularity of a made up story and biblical apocrypha, here we are.
Now we have a Fox slash Netflix show that ran for six seasons,
which I haven't seen a single episode of, but as far as I can
tell, is mostly just a good looking dude running around naked a lot.
We're halfway through the names. Stand up, take a water break. Mammon.
Some medieval ding dongs equated the name Mammon with devil, pointing to passages
like Matthew four twenty four, which states you cannot serve God and mammon.
Once again, we have a term that has been stolen to use as a
proper name. Mammon comes from the Aramaic word for wealth or profit, basically
money. In the Middle Ages, it became the name from one of the
seven Princes of Hell, appearing in fourteen o nine, the anonymously written and
redundantly titled The Lantern of Light manufactured a classification system for the seven deadly sins
and the demons that preside over them. Mammon was the name given to the
demon who presided over you guessed it lust, just kidding it was greed.
And now that I'm looking over this list, let's knock a couple other names
for the devil off. You've heard most of these by now. Funnily enough,
you'd think someone would have stepped in and said, Hey, that can't
be the name of the devil. It's the name of this demon but low.
So we have Mammon for greed. We also get Lucifer for pride.
Beelzebub is envy out a left field, Satan is wrath, Abadon is gluttony,
Belfagore is sloth. And this was a Canaanite derived entity originally called by
all poor after a mount and called Piore and Moab where Ball was worshiped.
And lastly, we have Asmodius for lust. Asmodius was mentioned in Part one
as the right hand d bag of Ariman and Zoroastrianism. Honestly I put him
as the demon of wrath, since Zoroastrian cosmology listed him as the demon of
wrath. But anyway, how about Samael. Here's another one with a pedigree
as strong as the fall from Grace story. First appearing in First Enoch,
he was a fallen angel whose name meant venom of God. Jewish literature of
the Second Temple period had him painted all sorts of nasty, variously, saying
that he was the serpent. In Eden, he was the incarnation of Evil,
chief of all Satan's commands, demons fathered kine, dated Lilith, ordered
his pizza with no sauce what, and was responsible for all evil brought upon
Israel and Judah. Apocryphal writings in the first century CE and beyond and equate
him directly with the devil, the two being interchangeable. Now here's one that's
become more and more interesting lately, Moloch. For a long time, Moloch
has been regarded as a Canaanite god who demanded child sacrifices, a coursul.
John Wilton. Milton had him as a chief demon and pagan god in Paradise
lost first Molach horrid king, besmeared with blood of human sacrifice, and parents
tears though for the noise of drums and timbles loud, their children's cries unheard
that passed through fire to his grim Mino. The term in the Greek Septuagint
the first seven Books of the Old Testament has been translated as king. And
then the New Testament Book of Acts, chapter seven, verse forty three says,
YEA, he took up the tabernacle of Moloch in the star of your
God reb fan figures which he made to worship them, and I will carry
you away beyond a Babylon. The ambiguity to something evil is odd, but
it has come to mean a god that you make child sacrifice to, and
has even been linked to the infamous Bohemian grove ritual, the cremation of care.
However, scholarly opinion on this figure began shifting in nineteen thirty five with
some very interesting research by German theologian Otto ice Felt. Jason goes into detail
about this fascinating development. So, for centuries there was this figure named Moloch,
this evil deity that was worshiped throughout the land of Canaan, and it
gives reference to numerous times in the Bible where people would actually conduct human sacrifices
to this god named Moloch. And Moloch is usually depicted as almost almost like
an Egyptian god, where you have like a human with an animal head,
in this case the head of a bull, and this Moloch he would basically
live in like fiery tunnels beneath mountains, so it's almost like a volcano god,
and he lives deep in the earth. And if you wanted to make
a sacrifice to Moloch, you would take usually your firstborn child and burn them
on an altar. And this seems absolutely horrible, you know, but sometimes,
you know, ancient people did some horrible things. And this was the
belief up until the early twentieth century when scholars came to realize that some of
these texts in the Old Testament that were referencing this Moloch the phrasing was off.
There had always been a problem with the phrasing, but as people began
examining earlier copies of the text and digging a bit deeper, they began to
realize that this wasn't just like a copyist error. Something had been deliberately done
to the text. And what they discovered is that the way the phrasing had
worked, they weren't making an offering burnt like a child burnt sacrifice to a
god named Moloch or Molech. They were making a molek sacrifice. So this
is a Moloch was a specific type of sacrifice, and in every instance that
I can find. It basically means that you took one of your children,
you know, typically the firstborn and usually the firstborn son, and you burned
them alive to a god, not to a specific god named Moloch with a
bullhead, but to whatever deity you prayed to. And so a Moloch wasn't
a god you sacrifice to. It was a type of sacrifice to whatever god
you were making a sacrifice too. It could be to any deity that you
worshiped. And the troubling thing about this is the places where you find these
Moloch sacrifices being referenced are all places where the primary deity being worshiped was Yahweh.
And so it looks like these were sacrificed. In many cases, these
were like child sacrifices to Yahweh. And that's why the phrasing of the text
got changed to essentially cover up the fact that some of the ancient Israelites used
to make human sacrifices to Yahweh. And we actually find a few instances,
like there's one of them that pops to mind in the Book of Exodus,
where it actually commands people to make human sacrifice to Yahweh. It says you're
you know, it's laying out, you know, the rules for sacrifice,
and it says like you're the firstborn of your cows, and your goats and
your sheep, and your own children will be given to Yahweh. They get
to stay seven days with their mother, and on the eighth day you sacrifice
them to Yahweh. Now, later in the book they repeat this command,
but when they do, they say, but for your firstborn child, you
can substitute like a goat or a lamb and not kill your child, because
we don't do human sacrifice anymore, which is sort of the whole point of
the Abraham and Isaac's stories, like no, no, no, no,
we don't. Okay, yeah, we used to do that, we don't
anymore. We substitute the human with an animal. That's what gets sacrificed.
And so that's what the Moloch ordeal was all about. It was originally human
sacrifice to a deity, and in many cases these would have been conducted to
Yahweh. And at some point, probably around the seventh sixth centuries, somewhere
around there, they were switching away from human sacrifice and they said, okay,
we're gonna say this was not to Yahweh, and eventually the text got
so confused that it looked like they were sacrificing to a god that never was
never mentioned. It was never existed, There was never a Moloch. It
was just a confusion of the text. So does that mean then that there
was an original story of Abraham and Isaac that did have him sacrificing Isaac,
and then they came in later and changed it. Yes, there there's actually
evidence in the story that Isaac never came down off the mountain, because right
after that you have Abraham and Sarah hanging out and there's no mention of Isaac,
and then after that Sarah dies, and so you've got this whole little
section after that story from the end until the time that Sarah dies, where
basically Isaac just doesn't exist. And so some scholars have actually suggested that in
the original story, Isaac was sacrificed, and then later the story got changed
so that in that scene it's substituted with a ram which that scene is actually
borrowed from a scene with someone was supposed to be sacrificing their child to Zeus
and one of his messengers. I forgot who shows up. It's like no,
no, no, take this sheep and dad, and then they sacrifice
the sheep. And then this sheep is used at some point to like mop
up a bunch of water that has like gold in it, and it later
gets hung up on a tree in the Caucus Mountains and it becomes the Golden
Fleece. Huh, and then my namesake has to get on a ship and
go try to find it. So so yeah, there's actually a lecture series
you can get off of Audible about the Old Testament from a professor Amy Jill
Levine, and she actually talks about this, the possibility that Isaac was sacrifice
and that it was Ishmael, who inherits everything you know, is Abraham's son
with the slave Hagar, which is why we have the whole story about her.
And then Ishmael, like Jacob, ends up having twelve sons, one
for each of the tribes. But then they say, oh no, they
get sent off and they go elsewhere and have twelve other like the fathers of
twelve other tribes. So it looks like it may have been that Isaac was
sacrificed and it was his son Ishmael who carried on his line. How did
they figure out that this was an action as opposed to a deity. Does
this term show up in other Hebrew texts or did they take the structure of
the word and say, this actually is a verb, it's not a noun
or something like that. My exposure to this came from several articles and a
book that i'd read a couple of years ago, and I hadn't looked at
him in that particular context much since then. There's a book Human Sacrifice in
Ancient Israel, Heath dural Uh, that goes in depth into this particular topic
H and he cites all of the relevant uh scholarly literature on the the these
discoveries and the more accurate renderings of those passages. But that that would be
the best I can't remember all the details of it off the top of my
head, um, because it's been some years since I was looking at that
material, but that would be the place to go for it. And that's
a relatively recent take it. Yes, yeah, that's UH. That is
based on the latest scholarship and um, I want to say, it's only
a few years old. So this stunning reversal seems to be a name that
became a term not became. It always was, but I've gotten tired of
hearing about terms becoming names. Who knew Yahwei had such a thirst for children
blood? I find this terribly fascinating, but I shouldn't be too surprised.
As Jason explains, Yahweh had a taste for just about any kind of blood.
At the end of Second Samuel, we have a thing where Yahweh is
once again upset with the Israelites, and the reason given is that during the
time of King Saul, he didn't There was like some group of people his
at war with, and Yahweh commanded him to kill everybody, but he didn't
kill all of them. He only killed some of them, so it was
genocide, but it wasn't a complete genocide. He allowed some of them to
live genocide light. And Yahweh got upset with that, and so he I
think he visited another plague on him or something. So the Israelites are being
punished for something that their previous king had done, and there there's a great
famine. I think, like all of their grains stopped growing or something.
I think that was the problem, and the only way to fix this was
to take a bunch of the male descendants of King Saul. So Saul's already
dead, he's been dead for years. David has to go and round up
a bunch of the male descendants, so a bunch of his sons and grandsons,
and they're all taken up onto a hill outside of Jerusalem and they're all
impaled as a sacrifice to Yahweh so that the famine will be over. And
it's like, oh, that's kind of horrible. So we have like this
mass human sacrifice of a whole bunch of innocent people, but not burned,
right, right, right, So we have this and they're all they're all
crucified to appease Yahweh to ensure a good grain harvest. But we have another
one in Um in the Old Testament involving Jeptha's daughter and up that he's going
to fight I believe the Ammonites, and he asks Yahweh to basically help him.
I think this is in the Book of Judges. He asked Yahweh to
basically grant him victory in battle. And the deal that jep the Yahweh make
is that jep Theo will be victorious in battle, but at a cost.
He's going to have to sacrifice the first thing that exits his house. When
he returns home, he goes into battle, he's victorious. He comes home
and his oldest daughter walks out, so he has to bring her to a
big pile of wood and set her on fire and burn her alive. And
so we you know, and so in this one, like there's no ram
that shows up at the last moment. You know, they're like, she's
a woman. We don't need to apologize for this. Yeah, and uh,
they end up using this. This is an ideological tale to explain a
certain festival that's done at a certain time of year. Guy Fawkes night.
Yeah, we have another story in which a person sacrifices their own oldest child
too. Yahweh. And it's actually a burnt offering, it's a Moloch sacrifice.
So yeah, the story of Jeptha's daughter is definitely one and there's no
intervention to savor in that one. What book did you say? That was?
Judges Judges Chapter eleven. Mephistopheles, The last big name association I want
to discuss is one of the youngest ones Mephistopheles today. This name and its
abbreviated version mephisto are interchangeable with the devil, but the character of Mephistophiles has
always been a demon in service of the devil. Its first appearance came in
Der Fausboch, a chat book or small forty page story book written around the
fifteen seventies in Germany. It concerned the Historia von doctor Johann Fausten, a
fictional account of the real Doctor Faust, a German alchemist who had died about
thirty years earlier. In the tale, doctor Faust summons a demon named Mephistopheles
to broker a deal whereby he would live deliciously for twenty four years with Mephistopheles
as his servant, and then the devil could have his soul for eternity.
The tale was not original. A similar German folk tale existed prior and inspired
the anonymously authored work, but it in turn would inspire countless other works of
the same tale. Some of those include Christopher Marlowe's sixteen sixteen play The Tragical
History of Doctor Faustus Gerta's eighteen o eight play Faust, Barelioz's operatic musical dramatic
legend La Damnation de Faust in eighteen forty six Lists eighteen fifty seven Faust Symphony,
and an incredible host more composers, songwriters, films, shows, art
and literature too many to name. Because of the appeal of the moral dilemma
involved, the Deal with the Devil metaphor has gained wide popularity from then on,
and no doubt helped in attaching the name Mephistopheles to the devil, even
though there is a clear distinction between the two in the play. We'll be
revisiting Mephisto here in just a little bit, but for now, I'll run
down through some other devilish names that have been conjured, up, tacked on,
invented, and improvised over the years, just to give you a little
cherry on top. Tinebriffer or shadow bearer, snakey, cacodemon, shown spiegel
or pretty mirror, the Boogeyman, ragamuffin, crooked nose, the many handed
one, Ribald, the father of lies, gentleman Jack, the goodfellow,
error, Dickens, dickon less, dick, old nick, old rip old
horny, old Harry, and old scratch. And that's just old scratching the
surface. And speaking of surface. What in the world does the devil look
like? That's almost as loaded as the names he carries. Let's go through
the many looks for the devil over the years up to and including the modern
Devil. I don't want you, but I'd hate to lose you. You've
got me in between the devil and the deep blue sea. I forgive you
because I can't forget you. You've got me in between the devil and the
deep blue sea. I ought across you off my list, but when you
come knocking at my dog, that seems to give my heart and twiz,
I'd come on it back. I should hate you, the guest, I
love you. You've got me in between the devil and the deep blue Who
makes wakes the devil and the deep The devil hath power to assume a pleasing
shape Hamlet Shakespeare's Hamlet. The Devil has had one hell of a costumer.
I've described what I guess you could call the classic devil look of horns,
wings, redskin, et cetera. I'll get to that, but it's hardly
how he began or ended up. Let's go back to ancient Canaan and a
figure I mentioned in Part one. How by you, if you'll remember,
he is a demon described as the lord of horns and a tail. Other
ugurritic demons carried associations with fire. At least a couple were described as sea
monsters or giant serpents, sometimes with multiple heads, as in the monster low
Tan the mighty one with seven heads that'll come up again. In fact,
the whole reason I'm bringing these examples up is because the many looks of the
Devil all have roots in these myths and legends, and you can tie a
string on the corkboard to most of them and try and keep track of all
the animal imagery, as the Devil has taken on aspects of all kinds of
beasts. This is likely due to the fact that it's always been the fashion
to characterize one's enemies in a chimeric, chaos monster way, especially in apocalyptic
literature like the kinds that were being written pre impost Jewish exile in Babylon.
For example, Daniel chapter seven describes four great beasts from the sea, one
with a lyon body and eagle wings that stood like a man, one like
a bear, with ribs between its teeth or a mouth in its ribs,
or something. One was a foreheaded leopard with chicken wings, and the last
just says it's a strong, dreadful, terrible beast with tin horns and iron
teeth. He was describing the empires of Babylon, Media, Persia, and
Greece. Jason discusses the line of thinking at the time, and so like
Hell then becomes this fiery place, but at the same time, it's also
dark, and it's like full of filth, and you know, pests and
stuff, and everything is foul and stinky and corrupt. And he looks like
a dragon but also likes like a person, and he's covered in horns,
and you know, it's like you can't really describe him because you're trying to
describe like five different things at once. That's why our depiction look so bizarre.
He's got like a snake for a tail, and he's got all these
heads, like seven heads and ten horns, and you know, all sorts
of things. They're trying to take too many things and merge them into one,
which is essentially what the modern satan is. This type of image salad
can also be found splattered across the Book of Revelation, and we finally get
a description of the devil, who at first is called the great Red Dragon
Revelation twelve three through four. And there appeared another wonder in heaven, And
behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven
crowns upon its heads, and his tail drew the third part of the stars
of heaven and didn't cast them to the earth. We get the color red,
horns and a tail, probably even flying if he's up in the heavens
and the us all would serve later descriptions of the devil by people who were
clearly making it up as they went along. Images, art stories all drew
from these ancient concepts of composite beings to make the devil a composite himself.
So far we have horns, wings, a tail, and snake imagery,
not to mention the color red. And there's more to come. However,
the imaginative Intertestamental period would throw a curveball with the fanciful fall from Grace story.
The devil's arrogance, pride, and narcissism would lead to his expulsion from
heaven. People have taken that idea and decided that his vanity came from his
almost inconceivable good looks. So now we have a couple of options of devil
flavors to choose from. By the Middle Ages, depictions of the devil were
many and varied, and to be honest, pretty hilarious. He often looked
like a wild, warned, hairy ogre type humanoid, sometimes with a tail,
sometimes with just mouths all over his body. I mean, these people
were absolutely hammered on lead or pure grain, alcohol or psilocybin, or lack
of sex or something. Speaking of weirdos, Saint Jerome blasts back into the
picture. He's the donut who gave us the Latin Vulgate Bible, if you
remember. But he also gave us another lion vehicle to add to this vultron
of an entity. After ruminating on Isaiah chapter thirteen, where it's said Babylon
was the place Harry Ones danced, Jerome decided it must be talking about satyrs,
the half men, half goat, all horny creatures of classical mythology.
To Jerome, that meant they were demons. So that demonic imagery associated with
satyrs looks to have come from Jabrome. I mean, Jerome, what is
the devil but chief of all demons? And soon you start getting the art
rolling in with a half man, half goat, allhorny with horns tailed troublemaker.
This also led to one particularly remarkable instance, if you'll allow a short
but compelling tangent, the story of Sister Magdalena of the Cross, the nun
who made a pact with the devil. Born in Corti, Baspaine in fourteen
eighty seven, Magdalena de la Cruz was a nun of the Franciscan order who
displayed great devotion to the church at a very young age and throughout her life.
She was said to have had a vision of Jesus when she was five
years old, and claimed to have visions repeatedly after that, simultaneously gaining fame
and notoriety at the time. Not long after, she was said to have
cured a man's limp and made a mute man able to speak, acts that
were considered miracles. At the age of ten, According to her legend,
she thought herself too beautiful and that no amount of covering up would atone for
her beauty. So she did the logical thing and crucified herself to her bedroom
wall. To her this was an act of atonement. She nailed her feet
in and got her left hand nailed before passing out from pain and falling off
the wall, breaking a couple of ribs in the process, though a doctor
patched her up. She wanted to feel the pain as a form of penance
and kept removing her bandages, which led to infection and near death. But
apparently on Easter Sunday fourteen ninety seven, she had a vision where Jesus appeared
to her and cured her, and she sat up in bed, ripping her
bandages off and screaming in joy. At sixteen, she whipped herself in penance
and claimed the wounds were healed. The next day, she had two fingers
that didn't grow normally like her others. Maybe nailing your hand might have led
to complications, but people said it was because Jesus touched them in a vision
when she was younger. I mean, that's a red flag to me,
but we'll keep going. She became a nun at seventeen and really upped her
devotion game by carrying a cross around, starving herself, kissing other nun's feet,
and whipping herself some more. At age twenty two, the day she
became an official nun. It was said that during the ceremony, a dove
flew down from the ceiling and landed on her shoulder, seemingly whispering into her
ear, before eventually watching some more of the ceremony and flying away into the
sky. Her fame grew and she was considered a living saintant. She began
having more visions where she seemingly predicted the future and was able to know things
that happened all over Spain as they were happening or shortly after. And then
in fifteen eighteen, she told her abbess that she was miraculously pregnant with the
baby Jesus. This divided her convent with nuns who thought it was a miracle
and nuns who threw squints and side eyed glances due to skepticism. Magdalena responded
by mutilating herself more. The archbishop sent three midwives to examine her, and
all three concluded her virginity was still intact. She claimed to have given birth
alone on Christmas fifteen eighteen, to a radiant baby that her hair changed to
blonde and grew long enough to wrap the baby in. Then the next morning
she woke up and the baby was gone and her hair had changed back to
brunette. I'm gonna skip over a bunch more bonker stuff and bring us back
around. In fifteen thirty three, she was elected abbess and became a real
terror to the nuns, making them perform horrible acts of penance publicly. Her
brutal regime change, coupled with some failing prophecies and visions, led to doubts
about her from the community. In fifteen forty three, she got sick and
started acting weird around priests, including going into convulsions. A doctor was called
who stabbed her with a needle to no reaction. However, after dipping the
needle in holy water and trying again, Magdalena led out a moan of pain.
Shortly after, an exorcist came along and discovered there were two demons possessing
her. Their names were Balbon and Petorio or Patonio. Having demons driven out
of Magdalena caught the full attention of the church, and an inquisitor was sent
to get to the bottom of the situation. Under the belief that she would
die within the year, she confessed some thing amazing. She had made a
pact with the devil at age five, where she would be granted fame in
respect for her obedience to the dark Lord. It wasn't Jesus, she saw,
it was the Devil. For about forty years she had copulated with these
demons, and the devil described as having goat legs a human torso. In
the face of a satyr whose child she berthed in fifteen forty six, she
was subjected to an otto da fay, otto da fay. What's an auto
da fae? It's what you oughtn't to do, but you do anyway.
These were public penances by the Spanish Inquisition, highly ritualistic and usually consisting of
whipping, torture, and even burning at the stake. Since the demons were
to blame, she got away with lifetime imprisonment and supposedly died in fifteen sixty,
still quite repentant. I came across the story in the research and thought
it too good not to share. But the main point of including it is
how the imagery of the devil having sator features was a prominent thing at the
time, and the lengths people have gone to throughout history to portray this character
and his powers are extreme. Continuing with the Devil's looks. I wasn't able
to find a direct source saying Jerome was responsible, but his imagining of Satyr's
being demons made me wonder if he also associated devilish looks with that of other
Greek mythology. Indeed, some scholars, like Jeffrey Burton Russell believe this to
be the case, as he points out in his nineteen seventy seven work The
Devil Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity. Quote. The devil's pitchfork
derives in part from the ancient trident such as that carried by Poseidon, which
symbolizes threefold power over Earth, air, and sea, in part from symbols
of death such as the mallet of Karen, and in part from the instruments
used in Hell for the torment of the damned end quote. I would also
love to lump in one more contender for inspiration. Hades obviously the first figure
you'd point to in that mythology, though wrongly as I pointed out earlier,
But here you have the ruler of the underworld and damned souls, and lo
and behold. He was often depicted carrying a biden't or two pronged instrument.
These images could very well have inspired later artistic portrayals, though Jeffrey Burton Russell
wasn't exactly convinced. He went on to point out the more contemporary thought that
monks and church leaders could simply look out their windows and see the peasants shoveling
hay who were scared to death, they would be handled the same way by
the devil. To him, that inspiration made more sense than the thousand year
old influence of another culture's mythology. I leaned toward Hades and his Biden being
the source personally. Dante returns to us in the fourteenth century, introducing batlike
wings in his description of the devil. Milton strikes back with the devil being
beautiful. The Faust folk tale also helped the image of the devil, with
productions in the seventeenth century onward portraying Mephisto wearing Renaissance clothing and bright red and
black silks, often with red tights and makeup of black hair and a Van
Dyke goatee. Nowadays, it's fashionable to portray the devil as a good looking
guy in a sharp suit, someone enchanting and likable who puts others at ease
and charms his way in and out of situations. But there's not really one
look the devil carries anymore, as you can just as easily find images of
an all red, pointy tailed, snake, tongued, two horned, batwinged,
goat legged, vandyke, sporting trident toting humanoid, or even all that
but a horrendously ugly oglike face. It's really up to you how you see
or don't see the devil. One symbol appearing a lot these days, especially
with the modern Satanic temple, is the image of bothamet. This is the
goat legged human torsoed winged figure with a goat head that appears along with several
other bits of iconography. Many people equate it directly as a representation of the
devil, but of course it's not. The term originated around ten ninety eight
in a letter from a French crusader, and was used as an alternate term
for Muhammad. It's seen in several works of literature in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, but in the early fourteenth century appears in transcripts for an inquisition against
the Knights Templar as the templar order was being attacked more and more frequently by
the church. Accusations of the worship of Bahamet kept popping up, and eventually
the name was seen in forced dubious confessions of templar knights. It was never
described the same way twice, since it was a non existent thing, but
church leaders decried the worship of a false idol and used this uproar to torture
and murder knights. In the nineteenth century, French esotericist and author Eliphus Levy
wrote a book on high Magic in which he drew a depiction of Bahamet as
a Sabbatic goat, a figure associated with the Sabbath. His goal was to
portray a quote symbolization of the equilibrium of opposites end quote with a good depiction
of balance and perfect social order. So the image he drew had both male
and female, human and animal, and good and evil features. The Satanic
Temple, who again do not worship a literal Satan, has taken up this
figure as a mascot of sorts, while evangelicals absolutely lose their damned minds over
it and proclaim it to be the literal definition of devil. Worship, or
at the very least, demon worship. You can find this guy more and
more in pop culture. And while its meaning has gotten lost over the years,
and the image was fabricated by a French magician, it was originally an
alternate name for the prophet Muhammad. Never in history has the Devil enjoyed such
success in pop culture as the time we're currently living. In film, art,
literature, music, games, you name it, the Devil can be
found there. Good omens, Rosemary's Baby, The Mysterious Stranger, The Devil,
and Daniel Webster to name a few novels. The Devil's Advocate, The
Prophecy Constantine, The Witch with Everybody's favorite Dancing Goat. But those are some
notable films, Ghosts and Goblins, Cuphead, Diablo, and one of my
favorites, Dante's Inferno. Are some notable video games featuring him running with the
Devil, Shout at the Devil, sympathy for the Devil, The Devil went
Down to Georgia, Devil Inside Devil's Haircut. There's some bangers involving the Devil
in music, Lucifer, Southpark, Futurama, Supernatural, the Twilight Zone.
For some TV shows, the Devil, perhaps ironically to those scared shitless of
him, is all around us. Some people feel the devil around every corner,
see the devil in every shadow, hear the devil in every baby laugh.
In addition to these fanciful and varied portrayals of him and culture, this
is no better illustrated than in the infamous Satanic Panic of the late eighties and
early nineties. Parents were being inundated with news segments about serial killers, kidnappers,
razors and candy, heavy metal, goths and yes, of course and
btggs. It created an atmosphere of pure paranoia, which resulted in people's brains
literally opening the tops of their skulls, climbing out and running away, never
to be seen again. Okay, not literally, but honestly exhibit A gestures.
Vaguely, even poor D and D felt the wrath of a thousand karns
descend upon it, gathering in closed door rooms or dark basements, casting magic
spells, talking about demons and resurrected corpses, magic missile and charm undead.
A huge backlash befell the simple tabletop RPG, but luckily it managed to weather
the storm, as more and more moms learned it was just nerds sitting around
doing math. And I don't know about you guys, but I'm getting the
sense another satanic panic, because right around the corner it feels like evangelicals are
getting more and more empowered to call anything they don't like satanic. If you
need examples, I offer the past few years and the names Lil nas X,
Sam Smith and Rihanna. These guys are like professional Jimmy rustlers. It's
like they're paid a commission for each singular Jimmy they rustle. It's hilarious.
It's also kind of sad. I hope it's just me, but it seems
we're edging closer and closer toward the constitutional Church and State wall being torn down
in America. I guess time will tell, But something that has stood the
test of time is the devil's involvement in superstitions. I can't get out of
our pop culture section without a few funds superstitions. So here's ten. Hang
a mirror by the door to keep out the devil. He's so vain,
he'll get distracted by his reflection and forget to enter. If you spill salt,
throw a pinch over your left shoulder from Da Vinci's The Last Supper,
which shows spilled salt by Judas and the Folk. Belief that the devil is
always whispering in your left ear, so throwing salt might hit him. Squaw
in the eye. Cover your mouth while yawning, from the belief that an
open mouth will allow the devil to jump inside. No whistling at night,
from the belief that it will summon the devil. Don't have two mirrors facing
each other, from the belief that it opens a portal to hell the devil
can climb through. Watch out for leaves turning in the wind, from the
belief that the devil is in that spot. Never leave a woman alone during
the first six weeks after childbirth, from the belief the devil has more power
over them then. Don't cut off both ends of baked bread from the belief
that it would cause the devil to fly over the house. Don't whistle inside
a cemetery, from the belief that doing so would so in the devil.
Don't light three cigarettes with one match, from the belief that the flame represents
hill and the devil, and lighting three SIGs with one match is seen as
disrespecting the Holy Trinity. The devil, as you are fully aware, is
a huge topic. So as not to make you feel anymore like you've already
made it to hill, let's some stuff up and think about it a bit.
The devil is an unrecuse. He thinks he's pretty wise. He's always
after me, but he ain't figured on my thighs. He hangs around and
hangs around and shoot me full of sin, but he might as well be
on his way. I'll never let him. I'll never let's devil win.
I'll never mess around with him. He may try me from the outside,
he may try me from within, but never devil win. Hell is empty,
and all the devils are here Ariel Shakespeare's The Tempest. Here are observations
I've made in my research. The first time the world saw a devil figure
came from Zoroastrianism. Historian and religious studies scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell wrote, quote,
Ariman is the first real devil in world religion. End quote. I've
bet you never heard a song like admapool. Well, he points me out.
Most religions in the world didn't have a figure like that. Hell Judaism
didn't have a figure like that. Babylonian myths and legends, Zoroastrianism, and
the epic of Gilgamesh heavily influenced Jewish writings both pre but especially post Exhiloic period,
even down to the first stories in the Old Testament. And this is
a point we'll come back to here and there while putting this comparative mythology into
context to go into a bit of detail with things to consider, we have
no further to look than the story of Adam and Eve, where the common
conception is that the devil, in the form of a snake, seduced Eve
into eating a forbidden apple. He slips some fruit into my hands. Say
that, old boy's a site, he says, now here's a great,
big, juicy apple. Will take a bite. Mis have never bothered me,
folks, And I'm not going blind, So or dropped it for I
knew it was a lemon all the time. I love. Let the devil
win on. The problem is neither of these concepts has any basis in Jewish
scripture. Has pointed out in Part one, the serpent is never called the
devil or satan anywhere in the text, and the apple is never called an
apple. In fact, it wasn't until the Bible was being trans eat it
into Latin that the referenced fruit was named as an apple. Ray and Mobley
in the Birth of Satan postulate that since the word for bad in Latin is
malice and the word for apple is malum, the apple began to be identified
with the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil in a sort
of play on words. Yet the joy Bone Jason gives us some more detail.
So in Genesis chapter three we have the the Fall of Man story where
Eve is tempted by a serpent who gets her to eat from the Tree of
Knowledge, and she then shares this fruit with Adam. This upsets yahweh.
They get kicked out of the garden, and the serpent is then cursed with
having to crawl on its belly, which kind of doesn't make sense because that's
what serpents already do, But it's it's meant to serve as an ideological tale
for where we got snakes, you know, and why these weird looking lizards
don't have any legs. Well, this is you know, frequently depicted as
the earliest appearance of Satan. That it's Satan in the Garden of Eden.
But the story never says that. It says that this is a nahash,
which means a serpent, and it was never meant to be evil. And
some people say, oh, well the serpent lied, but if you actually
read what it's what it says. The serpent simply tells them that if they
eat from the tree of knowledge, then their eyes will be opened and they'll
be given knowledge. And then they eat from it and they can suddenly,
you know, their eyes are opened, which is a term that we find
frequently in the wisdom literature. It doesn't mean that you're you know, you're
blind, that you couldn't see. It means that they're blowing the let it
off. And so what happens is the serpent tells them to eat of this
fruit, and they do, and they suddenly gain more knowledge. This is
a parallel story to Azazel giving people, you know, the skill of blacksmithing
and waging war and cosmetics. It's just sharing of divine knowledge. It's a
you know, it's a Prometheus type story. And he actually says, you
know, the command they had been told was that if they did this,
then on that day they would die. And the serpent says, well,
no, you won't, and of course they don't die, they continue living.
And so people are trying to say, okay, well, how is
it that Satan is like telling the truth here? Well, it's because it's
not Satan. This is a serpent deity named Nahash who used to be worshiped
in the Jerusalem Temple. And one of the purposes of this god was to
guard the tree that was the representation of Ashera. This was essentially a tree
that would grant eternal life and divine knowledge to the gods. This was essentially
the whole purpose of the Garden of Eden. It was to be a garden
for the gods where they would have their divine fruit that would give them all
of their superpowers and the knowledge that they possessed, and the immortality is what
separated them from humans, which is why at the end of the chapter,
Yahweh says, like, imagine what would have happened if they also ate of
the fruit of life. They would have become like us, like the gods.
That that's the whole purpose of it. It's there to give eternal life
and divine knowledge to anyone who eats it, and that separates humans from deities,
and this deity Nahash or Hushtan would guard this particular tree that way,
you know, only certain people could could eat of this fruit, and if
you weren't supposed to eat it, he wouldn't let you. If you were,
then you could eat the stuff. And basically like the goddess Asherah or
some of the other deities could decide who got to eat it. And we
find something similar in the epic of Gilgamesh when he finds the fruit that would
grant eternal life, and then the snake comes along and he steals it.
You know, so then Gilgamesh realize he's going to have to die the same
way that Adam and Eve will. And so this is a similar sort of
setup. It's a similar deity. And these serpent gods in the ancient Near
East were typically associated with wisdom and healing. And there's a there's another example
of this in I Believe numbers twenty one numbers twenty one versus five to six
I believe, And what happens is there are some angels or angel snakes that
attack the Israelites when they're wandering in the desert because they did something wrong.
And so Yahweh sends these it's called saraphum serpents. It's basically fiery snakes,
maybe cobras, we're not really sure. But they start attacking people, and
all these people are inventimated and they're dying, and Yahweh tells Moses to erect
an idol to the serpent god Nahushtan, and so he makes this big bronze
serpent and he puts it up on a pole in the middle of camp,
and anyone who prays to it is in cured of their snake bites. And
the story finishes up by saying that this little statue was then brought to the
Jerusalem Temple, where it was still present today, and it's essentially there to
try to give a m a y'allwistic pedigree to the presence of an idol to
another deity. The story is there to say, okay, look, we
know this is another god, and we know that you're praying to it and
making offerings to it and everything else, and it's okay because y'away said it
was okay. Back when Moses, you know, first built the idol,
whereas originally it would have been you know, people were suffering from some ailment
and an idol was erected and they prayed to it and it cured them.
And the story didn't have anything to do with Yahweh because in here it's it's
sort of a clumsy adaptation because Yahweh sent the curse and then Nehushton overpowered the
curse. So it's almost like Nehushtan is more powerful than Yahweh. And so
the authors are that the redactors of these stories, they kind of they didn't
do the best job, you know, so it kind of doesn't really make
too much sense to be pro Yahweh, but it was the best they could
do because they had to explain why people were still worshiping a bronze serpent in
the Jerusalem Temple. And eventually this bronze idol and the worshiped to Nehushton was
ended and the idol was tossed out. And we have a reference to that,
I believe in the story of I Think Hazekaya, where he goes through
he institutes these reforms, and they take a bunch of the idols out of
the temple and they get rid of them, and I believe they throw them
all in a valley and destroy them. But this idea. You know,
as Yaoism became more prominent, they were getting rid of these other idols,
you know, and the god Nehushtan was one of the ones that gets tossed
out. This sort of set up a sort of rivalry between the priests of
Nehushtan and the priests of Yahweh. And so as these Nehushtan priests are no
longer welcome, you know, they either have to just only worship Yahweh or
get out, then their their deity was essentially demonized. And they're saying,
oh, well, you know, the Nohushtan, you know, he wasn't
just you know, another deity. It was a false god or in some
cases he was evil. And we even find references in various spots in the
Bible where they equate Nehushtan to Leviathan and they call both of them, uh,
the twisting Serpent. And so it's almost say, oh, yeah,
this wasn't just a god you know that you worshiped. This was like an
evil agent of chaos. And so because of this link that was essentially there
to um to disparage this one deity, this serpent eventually becomes linked with Leviathan,
and thus with Satan, and that's how you end up with the Eden
story, where it's actually about a bunch of people who sort of get in
some ways liberated. They gain new knowledge. They can then go off and
start civilization. They understand all these things they learn about procreation. You get
a whole race of people because of this. Their eyes are opened, they
have better understanding, and this is how, you know, basically a bunch
of monkeys become humans. Now it's turned into the story about the fall.
Everything was perfect and now it's all corrupt, and you know, so that
this snake is in a way blamed as the origin of evil, when originally
it was just a protector of divine knowledge who guarded the garden of the gods
and also helped you cure yourself from snake bites. It wasn't until the testamental
apocryphal literature that the snake is connected to the devil, in particular the Life
of Adam and Eve and the Wisdom of Solomon. Gerald Massadaye goes on to
say that the expulsion story is illogical, asking questions such as why would God
consider knowing the difference between good and evil bad enough to keep it from his
creation when demanding the fear of God makes that knowledge necessary. And what motive
did the snake have? It just shows up, tells Eve it's fine to
eat the fruit and is never mentioned again. And finally, if the snake
was evil or even the devil, how did it get in the earthly paradise
God created? And when did evil come into the picture. The Hebrew Bible
paints God as the original bad guy Isaiah forty five seven. I form the
light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I the Lord
do all these things Amos six. Shall a trumpet be blown in the city
and the people not be afraid? Shall there be evil in a city?
And the Lord hath not done it? First Samuel sixteen fourteen. But the
spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord
troubled him. Gerald Massardier, making a point that stands for the whole Old
Testament, wrote quote, the Creator was acting like a feckless despot. The
first book thus portrays God as an angry, tyrant, wrathful and unjust,
a stranger to the idea of forgiveness, who, in his ire decides to
drown the whole world end quote. Any reference to Satan as the antithesis to
God appearing in the Old Testament has been applied retroactively and ignores the fact that
God created him and he is just following orders. The bad guy Satan was
created to make God look better. Massardier goes on to point out the oddity
of Jesus being tested by the Devil in the Gospels. To him, it
makes no sense for three reasons that Jesus's divinity was being questioned. That the
devil comes across as stupid, testing the son of God while knowing he would
not be successful, and that Jesus didn't use his magical powers to get rid
of the devil, nor did he perform a single simple miracle that would have
shut the devil up then and there. To massadier it was a crappy attempt
to introduce the world to the devil as the ultimate evil, one worthy to
be the opponent of God. This new villain, carelessly appropriated from the Essene
dualism of the Intertestamental period, acts bizarrely arbitrarily doing things to people with no
clear purpose other than to serve as an entity to dislike. Again, the
need for a villain arose from the unavoidable question of theodyssey, or the defense
of God's goodness and omnipotence in the view of the existence of evil, and
in this case the evil perpetrated by God himself, it seems the answer for
authors at that time was to temper God's wrath and shortcomings and assign them to
another being. This is very clear in the books of Chronicles and Jubilees,
which sought to rewrite earlier stories to make God look like less of a douche.
Jason swoops in with a refresher 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 you know,
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, and 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 inconvenience you, and that maybe they're invading your city, you know,
or maybe there's a hurricane that's about to hit New Orleans 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 Harrah, 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 Hephestus made that spark fly out of
my fireplace and burn down the house, you know. So these things were
a lot easier to deal with. You just blamed it on some other deity,
and that's what 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.
And we see the first inklings of this popping up around the time that the
chronicler is rewriting the books of Samuel and Kings. So we have four books,
first and Second Samuel and First and Second Kings, and this tells the
story of the entire Jewish monarchy, starting with King Saul and going all the
way up to the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. And during this whole
period, the whole thing gets rewritten by a levitical priest or a group of
levitical priests, and they retell the story of those four books to serve their
own theological purposes. And by this point the idea of the Satan as a
sort of scapegoat begins to show up. And what we have that there's a
perfect example of this. We see the first telling of the story in Second
Samuel, chapter twenty four, and what happens is Yahweh commands David to conduct
a census, and he does this because he's angry at Israel, and we're
never told why, but he commands David to conduct a census. David does
so, and after he counts all the people in the nation and he comes
back with the final count, Yahweh gets upset that he conducted the census as
commanded, so he sends the Angel of Death to come in and kill seventy
thousand Israelites. David then has to go to the threshing floor of this one
little place where they process grain, conduct a sacrifice and appease Yahweh, and
yahwehvan backs off. He recalls the Angel of Death and the pestilence, the
disease, the plague that's killing all the Israelites, it sea, and everything
goes back to normal. When it's retold in First Chronicles twenty one, it
tells us that Yahweh didn't conduct a census. A Satan angel came in and
told him to conduct a census. So this lets Yahweh off the hook.
He didn't command it, but instead it becomes a test, as we find
in Job where this other angel is basically like, hey, David, you
know, why don't you, Why don't you do something wrong and go conduct
a census. Then Yahweh can punish him for falling for the Satan's trick,
and so Yahweh then is essentially exonerated. It lets him off the hooks.
He didn't command David to do this, He didn't want a census. A
satan tested David's loyalty because I guess David should have known that we didn't want
to census, but instead he did what this angel told him to do.
And so the same story is told, but this new figure is inserted into
the story to let Yahweh off the hook and to sort of wash his hands
of it. So Yahweh's actions are now passed on to the actions of this
other figure. And this is sort of the origin of the Satan figure.
He's basically put in there to take the wicked things that are seen to be
the works of God and push them off on another character. And it's sort
of the beginnings of a I guess the beginnings of a mental split. You
you would have the good ideas of a deity, and then you would have
the bad deeds, and you need to separate them and This is where we
really see the beginnings of it is in this part right here, where the
wicked actions of the deity are being extracted from him and passed off onto another
figure. Now, the Satan is an evil. He was just there to
tempt David to see if he was actually going to do the right thing or
not. And David failed the test, and that's why the nation of Israel's
punished. But we do see the beginnings of that split in the idea,
And there's actually something similar to that in Zoroastrianism, where Hara Mazda and Araman
were basically two versions of the same great spirit, the good side and the
bad side, and they separate. It's very similar to what we have going
on in there. And this serves the theological purpose. You now take the
first steps towards blaming disaster and calamity and disease on someone other than Yahweh,
because before this we had the idea like in Isaiah forty five seven, where
Yahwah says I form the light and create darkness, I make peace and create
evil. I Yahweh do all these things. It was all under the purview
of one God. And with this you can separate it out into two distinct
figures. And so while the Satan still works for Yahweh, Yahweh's hands are
clean of those deeds. So the Satan is basically testing you. And that's
where evil comes from. And Jason briefly mentioned it, and I told you
in part one we'd be coming back to it. And now it's time to
pay the fiddler who Osaizel is a name that is sometimes attributed to the devil,
And you're never gonna believe this, but it never was the Devil.
I'll explain what it actually was here shortly. But the earliest connection to devilry
seems to have come from first Enoch, where Isaisl was a leader of the
fallen Angels who taught humans warfare and weapon smithing, makeup which craft, how
to play yuker, and was in turn taught BDSM by the archangel Raphael and
chained to jagged rocks in the darkness of Dudaiel, a place in the underworld
like Tartarus ord Gehenna. In fact, the text goes so far as to
say, quote the whole earth has been corrupted through the works that were taught
by Azazel to him. Ascribe all sin end quote sounds pretty Promethean, probably
because it was, but he wasn't the devil. Not until Origin of Alexandria
in the third century CE was he equated with the devil, along with Nomineitas
in the thirteenth century, who identified him as a demon. Interestingly, the
name is also found in Islamic literature, though not in the Quran, not
to be confused with Azazil, which was another name for Eblis or the devil.
In Islam, Asaizel was an angel who almost turned his back on heaven.
No. Originally, Azazel was a place where a scapegoat was sent in
an old Jewish ritual during Yam Kapur, detailed in Leviticus chapter sixteen. The
ritual involved two goats, one of which would be sacrificed to Yahweh, while
the other would have a priest grab its head, pronounce all the sins of
Israel and its people over it, and send it off into the wilderness or
possibly toss it off a cliff. Thus the goat takes the sins with it,
thereby cleansing the people of the filth on their souls. Hence scapegoating,
singling something out and absolving yourself of blame. It wasn't too much of a
leap to translate that idea onto a figure, just like it wasn't a leap
to borrow stories and ideas from Mesopotamia and Persia, like the idea of the
immortality of the soul, for instance, concept going all the way back to
Vedism. The Zoroastrian idea that a soul is immortal seeped into Jewish teachings and
ultimately into Christian theology. Couple that with some Greek influence of orphism, a
wild set of religious beliefs that could be its own episode, and you can
really see the roots of Christianity forming. Orphism seem to lend the idea of
good versus evil, original sin, and humanity trying to regain its divinity to
attain salvation. If you'll pardon the brevity of the example, I don't think
we can know how much truly influenced the creation of the devil as a complete
entity at the time, but suffice it to say there were many and even
the concept eventually branched off, with different versions taking on lives of their own.
Just like we discussed with the looks of the Devil, the idea of
the devil is a chaos monster, a chimera of concept straight from the blender
of countless theologies after soaking in centuries of story telling. The Sadier does not
mince words with that in mind. Quote that the notion of the devil as
God's enemy was borrowed is certain, since the very idea was alien to ancient
Judaism, yet it began to manifest itself the moment the identity of the Jewish
people was threatened. Quote. Judaism at the time was not concerned with an
individual's redemption, Therefore there wasn't much need for a devil. However, Christianity
became all about redemption and thus needed a figure to fight against, a role
that devil fit perfectly. To fortify their position, Jewish authors had to rework
the heavenly employee Satan of the Old Testament into something more useful that would ultimately
be a huge part of Christian theology. Thus God could be written as a
pleasant, non wrathful, non temperamental being going forward, and the devil gets
to be the scapegoat. Then, as Christianity developed, church leaders started questioning
certain aspects, likely in the hopes of bolstering the church's position, but the
Odyssey was a hot topic, with perhaps the biggest question being when did evil
first appear. Assyrian theologian Tatian wrote in the second century CE that the devil
fell from grace first, which caused others to fall, including man. Roman
Christian author Lactantius argued in the fourth century CE that quote the creative will of
God desired two antagonistic spirits, one as the principle of good, the other
as the principle of evil end quote to him, God created evil from the
get go, But no one could really agree when the fall happened or when
evil came into the picture. Was it before the fall after? Because of
if the devil rejected God, then surely that meant evil was around before him.
Was he the cause of it or was he the effect of it?
It was a conundrum of pure existentialism, with theologians wondering whether the devil's existence
had preceded his essence or vice versa, and in trying to explain this cobbled
together belief church leaders eventually throughout all sorts of ideas up to and including evil
hierarchies, and demonology. With the benefit of hindsight, we can observe that
historically evil has always been associated with what was Different authors of the Hebrew Bible
portray this concept here and there, but it's definitely evident in the Intertestamental period
and after, like in the Kumaran literature of the Dead Sea scrolls recall the
sons of light versus sons of darkness on the War Scroll. The New Testament
starts hot with this concept as well, with the Book of Matthew throwing shade
at fellow Jews who didn't agree with the directions some aspects of the religion were
going. The bigger the divide, the more the devil was involved in leading
one's enemy astray. You can find this idea all over Paul's writings as well,
and you can clearly chart the evolution of a culture's gods and goddesses becoming
another culture's demons and devils through historical ages. You see it with but all
ashtarref Pan basically any god that wasn't the Christian God during periods of colonization.
It didn't just happen with Christianity, though Old Tibetan gods became demons when Buddhism
took over, for example, but the idea that anything different is demonic is
not one humanity has been able to escape. Sadly, as mentioned in Part
one, Joan of ARC's actions were deemed demonic. Countless false accusations of witches
and sorcerers have been leveled throughout history. The Kathars also mentioned Part one as
well as the Templars were not the right flavor of Christian so had to be
massacred. Jews have been targeted as evil since pretty much forever. In modern
American culture, Homosexuals, transsexuals, and pretty much anyone who isn't a straight
white Christian is demonized by a significant chunk of the population. And if you
don't believe me, believe the laws that are being passed seemingly each week to
disenfranchise and marginalize these people. And today it comes from the lazy demonization of
political rivals. Anything that is in us, anyone that thinks or acts differently
than us, is in league with the devil. Tale as old as time,
and thus the devil became a political tool. Even a generous analysis of
Intertestamental writings will show that the devil was a basic way of person find one's
enemies. The king you don't agree with the foreign nation that is hostile to
you. The boss that fired you, the McDonald's worker who forgot the barbecue
sauce for your nuggets. They're all in league with the devil. But the
bigger picture is that this concept could be manipulated by those in power. Governments
could rally their people by pointing the foreign devil out. Politicians could gain votes
by equating opponents with the devil. Televangelists could buy private jets by scaring money
out of their followers with threats of the devil coming to get them if they
don't send a crisp new hundred dollar bill today, not tonight, not tomorrow,
not when pay day gets here. Now, God has blessed me with
seventeen cars because of how hard I fight the devil la and he rewards those
that helped themselves and me. So help yourself by sending a hundred better make
that two hundred dollars to me today. Yeah, every dollars center is another
kick on that old devil's behind. This is another concept you can find in
different cultures through history. Egyptian pharaoh's post fifth dynasty decided what was evil,
usually their rivals or anything they didn't like. Islam preached that anything that stopped
short of complete submission to Allah, including any individuality, was satanic. It
was either followed the law of Islam or follow into the devil's clutches. The
Catholic Church used the devil's propaganda to target its enemies and justify filling its coffers.
The devil also served particularly useful for excusing forced conversions and countless massacres.
There is power in wielding the devil, and those in power quickly picked this
idea up early on. Look at any authoritarian government through history. If they
don't outright claim be God's chosen regime, they certainly claim the right to decide
what is good and what is evil, and, in a familiar refrain,
anything that goes against their desires is evil. Theocracies are no different. Even
back to Zoroastrianism, priests commanded a huge amount of power, sometimes up to
and including legislative authority, and still pointed to Ahriman to terrify the public into
submission. Mesopotamian priests taught that humiliation and self abasement, even in thought,
were the ways to achieve a sin free life safe from evil. Church relationships
with monarchies throughout history were always strained, each side jealous and paranoid of the
other getting the upper hand with the devil on whoever side you're not. The
devil was a tool, or perhaps more accurately, a weapon, to be
wielded in statecraft. As Gerald Massardier shrewdly put it, quote, it was
politics that gave birth to the devil, and the devil is indeed a political
invention. Quote. So what were the effects of this invention and subsequent use
throughout history? Nothing good, I'm afraid. Let me try and break it
down a bit and give examples through history. First of all, connecting the
devil to the fall of man's story inexorably connects woman to evil. It wasn't
a new concept, as one could argue in ancient Mesopotamia, women had been
set up to fail by the mythology, such as how they're portrayed in the
Epic of Gilgamesh. Great wisdom is displayed by some female characters, including powerful
goddesses in the work, but perhaps more so, they are portrayed as Harlot's
seductresses, temperamental and vindictive. The Essenes had terrible views on women, not
only does. The majority of evidence point to their not even being women allowed
in their community at Cumran, a fact even old plenty of the elder attested
in writings. It also seems they held zero social status and we're not even
allowed to study scriptures. And there is evidence to say they blamed woman for
all evil because of her role in the exile from Paradise. Women have had
an uphill battle in many religions, especially the Abrahamic ones, and part of
that is due to this connection to the devil and evil as a political tool.
This excuse has been used to suppress women all through history. As a
political tool, the devil has been the impetus for the absolute insanity of the
Inquisition, which began in France in the twelfth century CE and lasted at least
until the mid fifteenth century. We don't know how many people were murdered in
the name of God to fight the devil in this time period, but conservative
estimates put the number in the hundreds of thousands. During the three centuries,
inquisitions were happening all over Europe, not just the Spanish one, which no
one expected. A spinoff of this bloody campaign focused on witchcraft and hunting down
suspected individuals directly involved with the devil, And who did this effect the most?
You guessed it, Frank Stallone, just kidding it was women. Even
fan Thick was written with this gobbled gook in mind. Heinrich Kramer and Jacob
Springer's Mallius Maleficarum The Hammer of Witches, a guide written in fourteen eighty six
on how to torture and kill anyone suspected of being in league with the devil
hell. Even England appointed a cockwaffle by the name of Matthew Hopkins to the
role of Witchfinder General in sixteen forty four. And we can't forget the lunacy
of the Salem witch trials in sixteen ninety two, in which twenty five people
lost their lives, with fifteen before that in a New England witch hunt craze
that lasted from sixteen forty five to sixteen sixty three, and again as a
political tool, church leaders gleefully promoted an ex floyded this fear of the devil
and how easily it caused people to be manipulated. The chains have not been
moved that far in modern times, unfortunately. Take demonic possession for instance,
something that has popped up throughout history and continues to be a topic worried about
even today. Gerald Massarier made a good point when he wrote, quote,
if demonic possession were at all real, one would have to ask why it
afflicts not secretaries of state, famous writers, or TV hosts, but instead
only individuals of average intellectual and psychological status. Either that or Satan is a
laughable enemy who only consorts with the weak end quote. Indeed, it seems
those who hold power are never subjected to the devil's wrath, but it's the
church who holds power over determining who is possessed and who is not. As
a political tool, the devil has taken the eyes of political and marginalized enemies.
And the clear example here is the Holocaust. Religion was wilded as a
tool to rally Germans to the Nazi cause, and even the phrase gott Mun's
God with us appeared on belt buckles of the Wehrmacht soldiers, regardless of whether
or not the soldiers in leadership actually believed that statement or were devout at all.
And there is evidence to the contrary. Religion and the fight against evil
was promoted, and this is a sentiment we have seen echoed for at least
the past century, where so much blood has been spilled for a god against
a devil, the idea permeates everything now. In nineteen eighty nine, Larry
Jones, a Boise, Idaho police officer and editor of the File eighteen newsletter,
published the following in order to aid fellow officers in their pursuit of justice
when unted with those criminals who are led or controlled by supernatural evil bees,
philosophies, or motivations. Traditional police tools are not effective. If a cop
is in a head to head confrontation with the Prince of Darkness or his troops,
then that cop had better have the defeater of Satan on his side,
as well as every bit of spiritual armor and assistance available. Mike Warkey told
me that, in his opinion, the Christian police officers were the best prepared
to be on the pettig edge in the fight against Satanic crimes. The devil
and his henchmen are now walking talking straw men for people like this to target
and an excuse to act in strange, often violent ways. But it also
excuses horrible behavior and in a way lets people off the hook. Of responsibility.
Actual pedophiles, serial killers, and rapists are many times dismissed as satanic
following the will of the devil or acting that way because the devil acts through
them. The obvious mental illness is almost brushed aside in lieu of the idea
that evil exists and must be fought at all times, and in self fulfilling
prophecy fashion, legitimate psychopaths and bad people embrace the idea and act like they
are under guidance of the devil. This figure has become the god of bad
behavior, the champion of deadbeats. So I'll give you my opinion now.
And if you're here purely for the academic stuff, now's the time to fast
forward or stop. And this is just opinion. There's no fact here,
but it's an opinion formed after doing this research and looking at the big picture
from everything you've just heard. Here's your chance to pop ahead or pop out.
If you're not interested in what I think, all right, well thanks
for being interested in what I think. Here it is there is no devil.
There never was. Zoroastrians fabricated the first idea of the devil. The
Old Testament never had a figure of evil in opposition to God's will, and
there is clear evidence of such a concept trying to be rhetconned into previous writings.
The New Testament was written after Jewish writers decided they needed a figure like
this so that the God they worshiped wasn't an almost total prick. Since then,
the mythology of the devil has exploded and taken all sorts of forms,
none of which are real or even based on the book. These ideas supposedly
came from. The idea has been used by people in power to subjugate and
murder, and continues to be used that way. It does not adequately explain
why there is evil in the world, nor why it would be allowed by
an omnipotent supposedly all good being ray and mobilely right. Quote Satan is a
theological coping mechanism end quote, and that it's quote our own fervent desire to
believe that ultimately good triumphs over evil end quote, which keeps the fear of
life from being too overwhelming. I think it is a coping mechanism for sure.
On a personal level, we use the devil as a lightning rod for
all the bad things we have little or no control over in some things we
do. But it's fear that might need to be addressed here, not a
supernatural entity that has been completely fabricated, and ship of theseiast for too millennia.
Fear of the unknown, fear of having no control, and fear of
taking responsibility are what we're grappling with. And blaming it all on a facetious
being is lazy and dumb. English novelist Samuel Butler had a great tongue in
cheek quote quote an apology for the devil. It must be remembered that we
have only heard one side of the case. God has written all the books
end quote. It's a satire that Butler was wise enough to know. For
in truth, Man has written all the books. Man has made God in
his image, and sadly man doesn't realize he's made the devil in his image
as well. I have to again quote Massarier here when he wrote, quote
Satan has nothing to do with any of this, and God even less.
It is human idiocy alone. End quote. That's the devil. A history
in a gigantic read, completely manufactured nutshell. And now for the mistranslations that
have reaked havoc for centuries puns. If you're thirsty as hell, stop on
by England's premier devil themed drinking establishment. BL's a pub. I hear there's
a reboot of an old spaghetti western where Clint Eastwood is going to play the
bad man with No Name, pitting two families against each other, all for
sinful intentions. Beyond the lookout for Mephisto. Full of dollars. Turn the
radio dial to sixty six point six for all evil seventies music, including hits
from the band a'ba Don like Water, Lucifer, mamm and Mia and Thank
You for the Moloch and number one's from the evil Latin rock guitarist Satana,
like Oya Como, Father of Lies, Evil Things Come in Our Way,
and of course Black Magic Woman in Evil Ways sixty six point six Good music,
Gone Bad and speaking of music, Tune in next week on ECMT for
the Evil Country Music Awards, featuring performances by Belial love It, Clint Man
in Black Wayland, Gin Nings, Tim Plar, mcgrawl, samael kershaw Bell,
Fha, Garth Brooks and Diablo Red Allen Them's Puns, Cooled, Hey,
if you made it this far, congrats and thank you. I have
been working on this one for about four months now. As you can see,
it's a massive topic, and truthfully, this was just the surface for
a lot of it. I hope I gave you something to think about and
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For this episode of Blurry Photos, I have been devil. Flora, don't
stop blurring.