Satan

• 1. Introduction

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  Satan goes by many names. In Hebrew he is ha-satan, "the accuser". In Arabic, Iblis or Shaitan. In Latin, Diabolus, the slanderer. In Christian art since the ninth century, he carries a pitchfork and walks on cloven hooves. In medieval mystery plays, he frolicked, fell, and farted in the background as comic relief. In John Milton's Paradise Lost, he is a tragic antihero of towering ambition. Across more than two thousand years of Abrahamic religion, this single figure has accumulated more contradictory identities than almost any other being in human culture.

  The questions that the story of Satan raises are genuinely strange. How did a subordinate court official in the Hebrew Bible, a heavenly prosecutor who carries out God's own instructions, become the supreme embodiment of evil in the Western imagination? Why does a 2013 YouGov poll show that fifty-seven percent of Americans believe in a literal Devil, while only eighteen percent of people in Britain share that belief? And why do some traditions, including certain strands of Sufi mysticism and LaVeyan Satanism, regard Satan not as an enemy to be feared but as a figure worthy of respect or even reverence? The answers stretch from the courtrooms of ancient Jerusalem to the witchcraft trials of seventeenth-century Europe, from the operas of nineteenth-century Paris to the blues clubs of the early twentieth-century American South.

• 2. The Heavenly Prosecutor

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  The Hebrew term ha-satan first appears as a title, not a name. It means "the accuser" or "the adversary", and it derives from a verb meaning to obstruct or oppose. In the earlier books of the Hebrew Bible, the word satan is used simply to describe human adversaries. It is only in the later books, particularly Job and Zechariah, that it attaches to a supernatural figure.

  In the Book of Job, the satan appears alongside the "sons of God" in the heavenly court. Yahweh singles out Job as a righteous man. The satan challenges this, urging Yahweh to let him test Job by destroying his servants and his flocks. Yahweh agrees. Job endures his losses without condemning God. The satan then insists that further testing is necessary, and Yahweh gives permission again. Job holds fast. The implication of the text is that the satan is shamed by this outcome. What is striking here is that the satan is not acting against God. He is working within God's authority, as a kind of prosecuting counsel whose task is to find the weaknesses in those who claim to be righteous.

  The Book of Zechariah adds a courtroom scene dated to the middle of February of 519 BC. An angel shows the prophet a vision of Joshua the High Priest, dressed in filthy rags representing the sins of Judah, standing before Yahweh as judge and the satan as prosecutor. Yahweh rebukes the satan and orders that Joshua be clothed in clean garments, representing forgiveness. The satan here is not vindicated, but he is carrying out a legitimate judicial function. He tests, he accuses, and God decides.

  The word ha-satan, with the definite article, appears exactly seventeen times in the Masoretic Text, restricted to two books: fourteen times in Job and three times in Zechariah. This narrow distribution matters. It means that the fearsome figure who would later dominate Christian and Islamic theology barely registers in the oldest layers of the Hebrew tradition, appearing only in two late poetic and prophetic texts as a subordinate official of the divine court.

• 3. A Figure Transformed

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  The shift from heavenly prosecutor to prince of evil did not happen inside the Hebrew Bible. It happened during the centuries between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, a period scholars call the Second Temple period, when Jewish communities lived under the Achaemenid Empire and came into sustained contact with Zoroastrianism.

  Zoroastrianism posited a cosmic struggle between a supreme good deity and Angra Mainyu, the spirit of evil, darkness, and ignorance. That dualistic framework offered Jewish thinkers a new way to think about the adversary figure they knew from Job and Zechariah. The satan began to absorb qualities from Angra Mainyu and to take on independent, malevolent existence.

  The Book of Enoch, which the Dead Sea Scrolls revealed to have been nearly as popular as the Torah, describes two hundred angels known as the Watchers, assigned to supervise the earth. Instead, they abandon their duties, take human women, and produce corrupt offspring. Their leader is Semjaza. Another Watcher, Azazel, spreads sin and corruption among humanity. These Watchers are eventually imprisoned in isolated caves, awaiting judgement at the end of time.

  The Book of Jubilees, written around 150 BC, retells that story but introduces a new figure called Mastema, the Chief of Spirits. Before all the demon offspring of the Watchers can be sealed away, Mastema petitions Yahweh to let him keep some of them as workers, to tempt humans into sin so that he may then punish them. Yahweh agrees. The same text says Mastema induced Yahweh to test Abraham by ordering the sacrifice of Isaac. In the Second Book of Enoch, a Watcher called Satanael is described as a prince cast out of heaven, an evil spirit who knew the difference between what was righteous and what was sinful. From a court official, the adversary had become an architect of human corruption with his own staff of demonic workers.

• 4. Satan in the New Testament

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  Three Synoptic Gospels describe the same confrontation: Satan takes Jesus into the desert and offers him bread from stone, spectacle at the Temple pinnacle, and dominion over all the kingdoms of the earth. Each time Jesus refuses. What the Gospels record without dispute is that Satan claims to own those kingdoms. The Gospel authors apparently accepted that claim as true.

  Satan in the New Testament is no longer a prosecutor. He is an active agent of illness, identified in the Synoptic Gospels as the cause of fever, leprosy, and arthritis. The Epistle to the Hebrews calls him "him who holds the power of death". In the Gospel of John, Satan is "a man-killer from the beginning" and "a liar and the father of lying". John also states that Satan entered Judas Iscariot and that the Devil inspired Judas to betray Jesus.

  The Book of Revelation brings Satan into full apocalyptic scale. John of Patmos describes a Great Red Dragon with seven heads, ten horns, and seven crowns, whose tail knocks a third of the stars from the sky. The Dragon is identified in the text as "that ancient serpent who is called Devil and Satan, the one deceiving the whole inhabited World". A war breaks out in Heaven. Michael the Archangel and his angels defeat the Dragon. The Dragon and his angels are cast down to earth. Later, Satan is bound in chains and hurled into the Abyss for one thousand years. He is briefly released, gathers the forces of Gog and Magog, is defeated by fire from Heaven, and is cast into the lake of fire.

  The patristic theologian Origen of Alexandria, who lived from around 184 to around 253 AD, was the first to fully develop the ransom theory of atonement. That theory held that Satan had gained power over humanity through Adam and Eve's sin, and that Christ's death on the cross served as a ransom paid to Satan in exchange for humanity's freedom. The twist, in Origen's telling, was that Satan was tricked, because Christ was not merely human but the incarnate God, and Satan lacked the power to hold him. Gregory of Nyssa and Rufinus of Aquileia later expanded this framework. It remained influential in the Eastern Orthodox Church long after Anselm of Canterbury criticized and effectively ended its dominance in western Europe in the eleventh century.

• 5. Medieval Comedy and Modern Fear

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  Jeffrey Burton Russell describes the medieval conception of Satan as "more pathetic and repulsive than terrifying". In late medieval mystery plays, Satan appeared as a recurring comic stock character who frolicked, fell, and farted in the background. He was a nuisance, not a nemesis.

  The Golden Legend, compiled around 1260 by the Dominican Friar Jacobus de Voragine, collected stories of saints constantly outwitting Satan through cleverness and divine grace. It was the most popular book of the High and Late Middle Ages; more manuscripts of it survive from the period than of any other book, including the Bible itself. Satan in those pages, as Henry Ansgar Kelly observed, "comes across as the opposite of fearsome".

  That changed dramatically during the early modern period. In the late fifteenth century, witchcraft panics erupted in France and Germany. The German Inquisitors Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger published Malleus Maleficarum in 1487, arguing that all sorcery was rooted in Satan's work. By the 1430s the Catholic Church had already begun to regard witchcraft as part of a vast conspiracy led by Satan himself, and the Malleus made that framework systematic. Brian Levack estimates that around 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft across the entire span of the hysteria.

  Martin Luther, during the Protestant Reformation, advised Christians not to argue with Satan but to seek out pleasant company, and especially recommended music, since the Devil "cannot endure gaiety". John Calvin cited a maxim from Augustine that man is like a horse, with either God or the devil as rider. The early English settlers of North America, especially the Puritans of New England, believed Satan "visibly and palpably" reigned in the New World. Cotton Mather wrote that devils swarmed around Puritan settlements "like the frogs of Egypt".

  Enlightenment thinkers pushed back hard. Voltaire labeled Milton's Paradise Lost a "disgusting fantasy" and declared that belief in Hell and Satan were lies propagated by the Catholic Church. By the eighteenth century, trials for witchcraft had ceased in most western countries, with the notable exceptions of Poland and Hungary, where they continued into that era. A 2013 YouGov poll found that fifty-seven percent of Americans still believe in a literal Devil, compared to just eighteen percent of people in Britain.

• 6. Islam and Iblis

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  In the Quran, the figure who refuses to bow before Adam is called Iblis, a name probably derived from the Greek word diabolos. Seven chapters in the Quran describe the event: God orders all angels and Iblis to bow before the newly created human. All the angels comply. Iblis refuses, claiming superiority because he was made of fire while Adam was made of clay. God expels him from Paradise and condemns him to Jahannam.

  Iblis, who thereafter became known as Al-Shaitan, then lured Adam and Eve into eating the forbidden fruit. His primary weapon against humanity is waswas, evil suggestions whispered into human minds. The Quran states that those who obey God's laws are immune to his temptations and that reciting the Quran serves as an antidote against him. Muslims encountering a sense of satanic incitement are advised to recite: "In the name of Allah, I seek refuge in you, from Satan the outcast."

  Muslim theologians debated at length whether Iblis was a fallen angel or a jinn. The Quran appears to describe him as both. Hasan of Basra, a Muslim theologian who lived in the seventh century AD, argued that Iblis was never an angel at all, describing him as "the origin of Jinn as Adam is of Mankind". The Muslim historian Al-Tabari, who died around 923 AD, offered a detailed origin story: Iblis began as an angel named Azazil or Al-Harith, created from the fires of simoom, sent to confront earthly jinn who were spreading corruption. Azazil defeated the jinn, but grew convinced of his own superiority, which led to his downfall.

  Certain strands of Sufi mysticism offered a strikingly different reading. Some Sufi masters argued that Iblis refused to bow to Adam because he was fully devoted to God alone and would bow to no other. For Ahmad Ghazali, Iblis was the paragon of lovers in self-sacrifice. His student, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, argued that if evil existed without the will of God, then God would be powerless, and powerlessness cannot be attributed to God. Rumi took a much more orthodox position, viewing Iblis as the embodiment of haughtiness and envy, and stating: "(Cunning) intelligence is from Iblis, and love from Adam."

• 7. In Art and Literature

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  Satan's appearance is never described in the Bible. The first possible depiction of Satan in Christian art may date from the sixth century, in a mosaic at the Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, which shows a blue-violet angel standing at Christ's left hand behind three goats. By the ninth century, Satan was shown with cloven hooves, hairy legs, a goat's tail, pointed ears, a beard, a flat nose, and a set of horns.

  Those features came from pagan sources. Satan's pitchfork was adapted from the trident of the Greek god Poseidon. His flame-like hair appears to originate from the Egyptian god Bes. His goat-legged form derives largely from Pan, the rustic Greek fertility deity. Early Christian writers such as Jerome had equated Greek satyrs and Roman fauns, who resembled Pan, with demons, providing the theological link. By the High Middle Ages, Satan appeared in paintings, sculptures, and on cathedral facades across Europe.

  The modern image of a well-dressed gentleman with small horns and a tail traces back to operatic portrayals of Mephistopheles: Hector Berlioz's La damnation de Faust from 1846, Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele from 1868, and Charles Gounod's Faust.

  In literature, Dante placed Satan at the absolute center of Hell, frozen mid-breast in ice, chewing on Brutus, Judas Iscariot, and Cassius. As Satan beats his wings, he creates the cold wind that keeps the ice frozen around him and all the sinners of the Ninth Circle. Geoffrey Chaucer gave Satan a role in The Canterbury Tales that is scatological and grotesque, his appearance drawn clearly from Dante.

  John Milton's Paradise Lost made Satan the protagonist. Milton portrayed him as a tragic figure destroyed by his own hubris, a complex character who rebels against what he perceives as tyranny despite knowing God is omnipotent. William Blake, who illustrated Milton, famously wrote that Milton "was a true poet and of the Devils party without knowing it." Blake went further in his own work, celebrating Satan in his 1780 book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as the ultimate rebel, the incarnation of human emotion, and the epitome of freedom from reason and orthodoxy. Blake interpreted Satan, based on his biblical role as accuser, as "a promulgator of moral laws".

  In music, the composer Giuseppe Tartini claimed that the Devil appeared to him in a dream and played the violin. Tartini wrote his Violin Sonata in G minor, known as "The Devil's Trill", as an imitation of what he heard, insisting the real version was far superior. In the early twentieth century, jazz and blues became known as the Devil's music. Blues musician Robert Johnson claimed to have sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his guitar abilities, a legend that echoed an earlier story told about Tommy Johnson. Mick Jagger assumed the role of Lucifer in the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" in 1968, the same year Black Sabbath began building a body of work centered on satanic imagery.