Devil

• 1. Introduction

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  A devil is the mythical personification of evil, though the shape that personification takes shifts wildly from tradition to tradition. Scholar Jeffrey Burton Russell sums up the possibilities as four: a principle of evil independent from God, an aspect of God, a created being turned evil, or simply a symbol of human wrongdoing. The Oxford English Dictionary needs an entire cluster of definitions to cover the word, stretching from Satan himself down to an affectionate slur, poor devil, aimed at an unlucky stranger. How does one word hold together the supreme enemy of God and a sympathetic nickname for someone having a bad day? And how did ideas born in ancient Persia end up reshaping Judaism, Christianity, and Islam alike?

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• 2. A Word Built From Slander

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  The modern English word devil descends from the Middle English devel, itself from the Old English dēofol, an early Germanic borrowing of the Latin diabolus. Diabolus in turn came from the Greek diábolos, meaning slanderer, a root that resurfaces in one of the figure's own titles, Diabolos, defined as one who lies about God to people and turns them against one another, causing conflict and war.

  The figure collects names the way it collects legends. Judaism calls it Satan, Christianity calls it Lucifer, German folklore calls it Mephistopheles, and Islam calls it Iblis or Azazil. Other titles carry more character than etymology: the Father of Lies, drawn from John 8:44 and contrasted there with Jesus as the truth; Old Scratch or Old Nick, a colloquialism that gave its name to the title character in the short story The Devil and Tom Walker; Ruprecht, a common German name for the devil tied to the folk figure Knecht Ruprecht; and Voland, the name given to the devil character in Mikhail Bulgakov's novel The Master and Margarita.

  Historians of the idea disagree about how precisely the word can even be defined. Jeffrey Burton Russell, in his book The Devil: Perceptions of Evil from Antiquity to Primitive Christianity, restricts devil to mean the personification of evil found across many cultures, reserving Satan specifically for the figure of the Abrahamic religions. Henry Ansgar Kelly, writing in Satan: A Biography, instead flags every use of the Greek diabolos as a proper name by rendering it in small capitals. Scholar Yvonne Bonnetain frames the whole figure more simply, as a mythic explanation, in the form of a personified supernatural power, for death, disease, and everything hostile to humanity.

  Even the figure's appearance refuses to settle. Painters and storytellers have rendered it blue, black, or red, given it horns or left it bare-headed, and cast it as everything from the supreme spirit of Hell down to a demoniac's possessing spirit, depending entirely on which century and which culture is doing the imagining. Dictionary entries stretch just as wide, listing devil as any one of the malignant deities feared and worshipped by what older reference works called heathen peoples, or, in a gentler register, a playful word for a rogue.

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• 3. Persia's Original Dualism

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  In Mesopotamia, evil was sometimes said to derive from primordial chaos, yet no demon or devil there counted as inherently evil, since the same spirits and deities could act well or badly depending on whim. Ancient Egyptian gods were morally ambivalent rather than good or evil, required only to submit to the divine order of the cosmos, and old Hindu deities, too, were understood as both benevolent and fierce at once, reflecting a single supreme reality rather than opposing camps.

  Around 600 BC, the Persian prophet Zarathustra urged his followers to abandon the devas and worship Ahura Mazda alone, and in doing so he proposed something new: evil as a principle entirely separate from God, rather than a part of the Godhead. Zarathustra held that Ahura Mazda freely chooses goodness while the destructive spirit, Angra Mainyu, known in Middle Persian as Ahriman, freely chooses evil, and the two remain locked in an eternal struggle in which neither side is all-powerful.

  Angra Mainyu is confined to space and time and will be defeated at the end of days, but until then he is blamed for every evil in the world, down to the existence of toads and scorpions. Persian Zoroastrians also treated the daeva as devilish creatures, a belief reflected in the Shahnameh, where the term Ahriman Div names the devil outright. This dualistic framework, the first of its kind on record, would go on to shape Judaism, Christianity, Manichaeism, and Islam in turn, though each tradition would strike its own balance between God's power and God's goodness: where Zoroastrianism sacrificed God's total power to preserve his benevolence, Christianity would later choose the opposite trade, keeping its own Devil created and only loosely dependent on God.

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• 4. Devil Takes Shape in Scripture

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  Pre-exilic Judaism had no devil at all: Isaiah 45:7 has Yahweh declare that he forms the light and creates darkness, makes peace and creates evil. The Hebrew term śāṭān meant simply accuser or adversary, applied to human and heavenly figures alike; in the Book of Job, Satan is only one of the sons of God, questioning whether Job's devotion would survive the loss of his family, health, and flocks. Job's answer never wavers, but the term still names no independent enemy of God.

  Persian influence during the Achaemenid Empire began to change that. The Book of Jubilees introduces the evil angel Mastema, who can act only with God's permission, while the Book of Enoch describes an entire class of angels called satans, distinct from Azazel and his band of rebels who introduced the arts of war to the world and fathered demonic offspring with human women. Later Rabbinic Judaism rejected the Enoch story's picture of evil as a second independent power in heaven, and after the apocalyptic period, the Hebrew Bible's remaining references to Satan came to be read as allegory.

  Centuries later, Enlightenment thinkers tried to write the Devil out of Christian consciousness altogether, dismissing him as an invention of medieval fantasy rather than a being scripture required anyone to believe in. Christian tradition, though, had already read the Devil back into older Hebrew text that never named him. Genesis 3 describes a serpent tempting Adam and Eve into eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, causing their expulsion from the Garden, and Isaiah 14:12-15 tells of a rising star thrown down from the heavens for trying to ascend among the gods, a passage Christian readers took as a description of a fallen angel. Ezekiel's account of a cherub in Eden, told to a king of Tyre, calls him the anointed cherub who covers and says he was perfect in his ways from the day he was created, until unrighteousness was found in him, a description later theologians read as the clearest Old Testament sketch of a being created good who turned evil on his own.

  The New Testament gives the Devil a far larger role. In the temptation of Christ, described in all three synoptic gospels, the Devil offers Jesus every kingdom on earth, implying the kingdoms already belong to him; the early Church Father Irenaeus disputed that claim, arguing that since the Devil had lied from the very beginning, he was lying about that too, and that every kingdom in fact belonged to God alone. John 13:2 states that the Devil entered Judas Iscariot before his betrayal, and the First Epistle of Peter warns that the adversary prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour. In the Book of Revelation, a dragon called the devil, or Satan, wages war against the archangel Michael and falls, a scene scholars link back to the Leviathan of the Old Testament.

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• 5. Christendom Debates an Enemy

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  Ephesians 6:12 tells early Christians that their struggle is not against flesh and blood but against the rulers, authorities, and spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms, a line that pushed them to see themselves as engaged in driving out demons. By the 4th century, most Christians assumed that the pagan gods worshipped by the Greeks were in fact demons, a view Justin Martyr had already argued in the 2nd century, and the philosopher Tatian went further still, holding that the Greek daimons themselves became the Christians' demons, led by a Zeus now equated with the Devil. In German folk tales that grew up over the following centuries, the trickster giants of pagan legend were simply swapped out for a devil, most famously in the story where a devil builds a bridge in exchange for the soul of whoever crosses first, only for the villagers to send a dog across and cheat him of his payment.

  Christian theologians, following the Greek philosopher Plato, split mind from matter to explain how a good God could allow evil to exist. Neoplatonic thinkers such as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and John of Damascus argued that evil was merely an absence of goodness, and cast the Devil as a fallen angel, created good and then made evil by choosing to move furthest from God. Augustine of Hippo wrote similar rebuttals of the dualism this privation theory was meant to answer.

  That dualism found its fiercest form in Manichaeism, founded in the third century AD by the prophet Mani in the Sasanian Empire, which held that a world of light and a world of darkness once existed as entirely separate principles before darkness assaulted and mingled with light. Centuries later, Catharism revived a similar dualism in the 12th century, probably drawing on 10th-century Bogomilism, and Catholic authorities responded at the Fourth Council of the Lateran in 1215 by declaring officially that God created the Devil good, and that the Devil turned evil by his own will.

  The theologian Origen offered his own account of how the Devil fell so far: God, in his telling, created rational creatures first and the material world second, and it was the evil choices of those rational creatures, divided into angels and humans and each given free will, that produced the material world in the first place. Because of this, Origen held, the Devil counts as the being most remote from God's presence, and anyone who follows the Devil's will only follows him further from it. Dante Alighieri dramatized a similar picture in his Inferno, placing the Devil at the very bottom of Hell, fixed at the center of the material and sinful world toward which all sinfulness is drawn.

  From the 1400s onward, some Christians imagined the Devil as an ever more powerful, active force. Martin Luther insisted the Devil was not merely an absence of good but a real, personal being with a presumptuous will against God, and he catalogued hosts of greater devils, who incite sins like unbelief and heresy, and lesser ones, who push people toward greed and fornication, counting among them Asmodeus, a figure drawn from the Book of Tobit. Others went the opposite direction: the Anabaptist David Joris argued around 1540 that the Devil was only an allegory, a view that found a small but lasting following in the Netherlands, and the 20th-century theologian Rudolf Bultmann later taught that an authentic modern Christian faith required rejecting belief in a literal devil altogether.

  Baruch Spinoza pushed back against the entire premise. In an unpublished manuscript, he reasoned that since the Devil would have to be the exact opposite of God, and God is the fullest possible being, the Devil would amount to nothing at all, and therefore cannot exist. Immanuel Kant later used the Devil as a philosophical stand-in for pure, unselfish evil, someone who does wrong not for personal gain but purely because it is wrong, and argued that no human being could ever truly meet that standard because humans always act toward some perceived good, however twisted.

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• 6. Iblis and Submission

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  The Quran names Iblis as one of the jinn, ordered along with the angels to prostrate before the newly created Adam. Iblis refused out of pride, claiming superiority over Adam, and was condemned to Hell, though God granted his request to be allowed to lead humanity astray. That refusal marks pride and envy as signs of unbelief in Islamic thought, and it sets Iblis apart from the Christian Satan: there is no angelic revolt against God's throne in the Quran, only Iblis's private judgment that God's command was wrong.

  Sunni theologians insisted, against Manichaean-style dualism, that God alone originates both good and evil, so Iblis becomes an example of the disbeliever's fate rather than an independent source of wickedness. Abu Sufyan ibn Harb serves as the opposite example in this teaching, a man who lived in misery before he became a Muslim and was blessed afterward, mirroring Iblis's own reversal from a happy leader of the angels into a miserable outcast after his fall. Sufi writers took a different angle, treating both Iblis and Pharaoh as symbols for anyone who utters the word I about themselves, since only God has the right to that word; using it too freely counts as shirk, a claim to be like God.

  In popular Muslim belief, devils are described as hermaphrodite creatures born from hellfire, able to procreate without a mate, who harm people chiefly through whisperings, called waswās, that tempt a person toward sin or enter the heart, or qalb, directly. In extreme cases, folk belief holds that a soul altered this way can affect the body itself, matching its outward condition to its corrupted spiritual state. Centuries later, the militant figure Osama bin Laden invoked a starkly different, dualistic reading of infidelity to justify violence, a view classical scholars such as ibn Sina, Ghazali, and ibn Taimiyya had explicitly rejected.

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• 7. Other Traditions' Devils

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  Māra, the figure most often compared to the Devil in Buddhism, tried to seduce the Buddha away from enlightenment with a celestial army and a vision of beautiful maidens called accharā during the story of the Awakening. Unlike Satan, who rebels against and undermines a benevolent God, Māra represents the pull of ordinary conditioned existence itself, and even the higher beings in Buddhist cosmology are said to suffer under Māra's same conditions rather than standing above them.

  Gnostic sects such as the Sethians and the Marcionites went further still, arguing the material universe was created not by the true God but by an inferior demiurge, whom some texts, including the Apocryphon of John, named outright as Samael, borrowing a name for the Devil already used in Jewish writings. The 2nd-century Gnostic Apelles reportedly went so far as to call the Old Testament's inspiring spirit an evil angel rather than a god at all.

  In Mandaean mythology, the figure of Ruha fell from the World of Light to rule the World of Darkness, giving birth to a dragon-like king named Ur, also called Leviathan, alongside a lord named Krun who dwells at creation's lowest depths. Yazidism rejects this kind of dualism outright: adherents hold that evil does not exist as its own entity, and Yazidi custom forbids even speaking the word devil or referring to Hell.

  Balkan folklore preserved a creation story after the fall of the Ottoman Empire in which God, before making the world, meets a goose on the eternal ocean who calls itself Satanael and claims to be the god of gods; God sends the goose diving for mud to build the world, fashions his own angels from the right half of a flint rock, watches the goose fashion demons from the left half, then hurls the rebellious goose into the abyss, where it lingers, plotting another assault on heaven. A closely related story turns up among the Siberian Tatars and Altai Turks, where God and his first creation take the form of two ducks sent diving for earth; the second duck, identified with Erlik Khan, hides mud in his own mouth to build a rival world, chokes on it, and is banished to rule an underworld kingdom as punishment for claiming equality with God.

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• 8. A Symbol That Still Divides

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  Social anthropologists have described the Devil as a symbol standing in for whatever a group considers the other, reworked into imagery that is ugly, deformed, and disordered to sharpen the boundary between insiders and outsiders. That symbol resurfaces under a rotating cast of names, Satan, Māra, Angra Mainyu, Shaitan, and, in some modern readings, the mentally ill, each one reifying group identity by giving a face to whatever a community fears. Historian Elaine Pagels traced this pattern in early Christianity, noting that believers who identified with the disciples in the Gospels went on, for two thousand years, to identify their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with the forces of Satan.

  Polling captures how unevenly that belief has survived into the present. A 1982 survey found belief in the devil at roughly 60 percent in the United States, compared with 21 percent in the United Kingdom and just 17 percent in France, nearly three and a half times lower than the American figure. American belief has since drifted downward on its own, from 68 percent in 2001 to 70 percent in 2004 and 2007, then down to 61 percent in 2016 and 58 percent by 2023, a decline concentrated most among the young and the less religiously observant even as belief holds firmer among regular churchgoers and political conservatives.

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