Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

xii
Introduction
as representatives of pure evil, our culture has also
invested the Devil with many positive and attractive
traits. A prime example of this is sex: Because
of the Church’s traditional aversion to sexuality,
the diabolical has come to be associated with sex
and sensuality. Satan has also been portrayed as a
proud, clever, creative nonconformist willing to
question the status quo. In the modern world, all
of these characteristics are regarded as positive
traits, at least theoretically.
Almost all contemporary images of the Devil
derive directly or indirectly from the Christian
tradition. Christian diabolism in turn has dual
roots in Judaism and Zoroastrianism. The Jewish
Satan was never as sinister as his Christian counterpart.
Initially, in fact, satan was not a being at
all, but, rather, an accusatory or adversarial role
assigned by God. Specifically, the earliest satans
were angels, sent by God for the purpose of
obstructing or blocking the acts of human beings.
This is clearly represented in the Book of Job,
where Satan is portrayed as a member of God’s
heavenly court—a kind of celestial prosecuting
attorney.
Satan’s transformation into a true bad guy did
not really begin until after the Persians defeated
the Babylonians and returned the Jews to Palestine
from Babylonia. Seeking to make them allies, the
Persians even gave the repatriated Jews money to
rebuild the Temple. The Persians were Zoroastrians,
a religion built around the notion of an
ongoing, more or less evenly matched struggle
between Ahura Mazda (in later Zoroastrianism,
Uhrmazd), the god of light and the upper world,
and Angra Mainyu (later Ahriman), the god of
darkness and the lower world. Partially because of
a friendly link with the Persians, Judaism took in
influences from Zoroastrianism. Thus Satan, the
closest thing the Jews had to an evil spirit, was
reconceived in the mold of Angra Mainyu as
God’s enemy. This portrait of an evil divinity
locked in a cosmic war against God was later
bequeathed to Christianity.
Early Christianity arose as a Jewish sect during
the apocalyptic period. The first Christians
strongly believed in the imminent second coming
of Christ (within their lifetimes), which would be
accompanied by the resurrection of the dead, a
Final Judgment, the defeat of Satan, and the end of
this world. With these apocalyptic additions, the
Christian Devil remained essentially unchanged
for centuries.
These understandings were, however, gradually
amplified by an emergent folklore about Satan
and his minions. This diabolical folklore eventually
came to be regarded with the utmost seriousness
by the Church, so that, by the late medieval
period, authorities were executing numerous
people—hundreds of thousands of people, especially
women—on the charge of being witches.
The central item in this folklore was the idea that
witches gathered together in the middle of the
night for nefarious purposes. The churchmen of
the Middle Ages believed that witches, who were
usually women, slipped out of their homes at
night and gathered together at prearranged spots
in forests, mountains, caves, or some other remote
area, often by flying, to diabolical celebrations.
Satan himself presided over the assembly while
seated on a throne. Participants divested themselves
of their clothing and copulated with
demons. The core of the meeting often involved
the sacrifice of a human being. Babies were usually
cooked and eaten. New witches signed a pact,
renounced Christianity, trampled on a cross, and
received a mark on their bodies from Satan’s claw.
Although they are associated with the Middle
Ages in most people’s minds, the deadliest witchhunts
were conducted in the twilight of the
medieval world. It has been suggested that witchhunting
was, in fact, a displaced reaction to the
breakup of medievalism and the emergence of the
modern world. Whatever the factors at work in
this phenomenon, the witch-hunts came to represent
the worst aspects of Christianity—an important
component of a new image of the Church as
a corrupt, evil institution that repressed and
executed innocent people. If, then, Christianity
was bad, perhaps the Devil was not so bad—or
even good.
In the postmedieval world, particularly in
Romantic literary circles, poets like William Blake
often used infernal imagery to represent aspects of
the human being such as sensuality—components
of the human condition the Christian tradition
labeled evil. This tendency to invert traditional