![]() ![]() We made him up because we don’t quite understand God. The modern argument is that to a great extent The Devil as we know him is our invention. Voltaire is often quoted as saying that if God did not exist we would be forced to invent Him. We may be projecting our own evil on the figure of The Devil. The evil may be not in The Other but inside ourselves, as the Gnostic gospel of Philip suggests. Professor Pagels sees this anti-Semitism and the demonization of all sorts of enemies, real and imagined, the tendency to identify The Other with the work of The Devil, as still virulent in the world today. This gets stronger in the three subsequent gospels. Certain Jewish groups are beginning to be demonized. Those who are against Christ are identified as of The Devil’s party. It’s Christ and the angels against Satan and the demons. Following His baptism in the Jordan, Christ goes into the desert and is tempted by Satan. In the New Testament Satan appears first in Mark. It is an invention of the first century of Christianity-but not of Christians. ![]() Pagels’s social history of The Devil starts with the fact that the fallen angel as adversary (Satan) is not in the Hebrew Bible. As our notions of evil have changed, so has The Devil. Paul Cams even before Russell completed this survey wrote The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil (1974) and more recently Elaine Pagels has closely examined The Origin of Satan (1994), following up on her studies of The Gnostic Gospels (startling documents were discovered in the desert of the Holy Land in 1945) and Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (The Devil in Genesis). Jeffrey Burton Russell has a notable trilogy (Cornell University Press) on how the concept of Satan originated and continually changed over the centuries. When the divine is most completely conceived as unity, the demonic is also so conceived and over against God stands Satan, or the devil. A tendency towards the simplification and organization of the evil as of the good forces, leads towards belief in outstanding leaders among the forces of evil. As phenomena are good or evil, produce pleasure or pain, cause weal or woe, a distinction in the character of these agencies is gradually recognized the agents of good become gods, those of evil, demons. The primitive philosophy of animism involves the ascription of all phenomena to personal agencies. The famous 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica may have the very best concise description of how The Devil came to be: For…the knowledge of the other world can be obtained here only by losing some of that intelligence which is necessary for this present one. If we balance against each other the advantages and disadvantages which might accrue to a person organized not only for the visible world, but also, to a certain degree, for the invisible (if ever there was such a person), such a gift would seem to be like that with which Juno honoured Tiresias, making him blind so that she might impart to him the gift of prophesying. Immanuel Kant, Dreams of a Spirit-Seer (1766, translated by E.E Goerwitz): MAIL IN YOUR MIND AND BELIEVE IN THE OCCULT All the angels who fell with him and come from hell to torment mankind are referred to interchangeably as devils and demons, and we shall use devils and demons also for all the shedim or foreign, evil gods of Deuteronomy and elsewhere. ![]() In common usage, there is only one entity called The Devil. 1 His Satanic Majesty THE DEVIL AND DEVILS AND DEMONS
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