Satan is the adversary of the god of Abraham [AG]. Thus,
Satan is evil personified. Many followers of the Bible consider Satan to be a
real being, a spirit created by AG. Satan and the other spirits who followed
him rebelled against AG. They were allegedly cast out from Heaven by their
creator. Theologians might speculate as to why the almighty did not annihilate
the "fallen angels," as he is said to have done to his other
creations when they failed to be righteous (save Noah and his family, of course).
Satan was allowed to set up his own kingdom in Hell and to send out devils to
prowl the earth for converts. The demonic world seems to have been allowed to
exist for one purpose only: to tempt humans to turn away from AG. Why AG would
allow Satan to do this is explained in the Book of Job, where Satan is
described as an angel who works in cahoots with AG. When Job asks why AG let
Satan torment him the answer is blunt and final: Hath thou an arm like the
Lord? The story of Job is interpreted in many different ways by theologians but
my interpretation is that nobody knows why AG lets Satan live and torment us.
AG is AG and can do whatever he wants. Ours is not to question why, ours is but
to do and die.
Satan, being a spirit, is neither male nor female.
However, like his creator, Satan is usually referred to as a masculine being.
Many believe that Satan, or the Devil as he is often called, can
"possess" human beings. Possession is bodily invasion by the devil.
The Catholic Church still performs exorcisms on those considered to be
possessed. Jesus is said to have cast out demons, i.e., performed exorcisms,
and the Church considers itself to have been given this same power by Jesus.
Throughout the centuries, many pious religious people have erroneously considered
those with certain mental or physical illnesses to be possessed by Satan.
More frequent than outright possession, however, has been
the accusation of being in consort with the devil. Satan is believed to have
many powers, among them the power to manifest himself in human or animal form.
The consorting has been recorded as often being purely physical and mostly
sexual. For most of the history of Christianity there are reports of Satan
having sex with humans, either as an incubus (male devil) or succubus (female
devil). Witches and sorcerers were thought by many to be the offspring of such
unions. They are considered especially pernicious because they inherit some of
the devil's powers.
According to Carl Sagan, accounts of diabolical
intercourse are common cultural phenomena:
Parallels to
incubi include Arabian djinn [jinn], Greek satyrs, Hindu bhuts, Samoan hotua
poro, Celtic dusii... (Sagan 1995, 124).
However, as a child being instructed in the ways of Satan
by Dominican sisters, stories of nuns being raped by incubi in a priest's
clothing were assuredly not told. The Devil was there to tempt us to sin, pure
and simple. He was not there to have sex with us or engage in reproductive
experimentation or breed a race of witches and magi. To be sure, his main
temptations would be sexual. There was no doubt that He spent a lot of time
using girls to tempt boys into impure thoughts and deeds. He would invade our
minds continuously during adolescence, planting desires for sexual experiences
too evil to be mentioned much less performed. I suppose, to be fair, the girls
should have been taught to be wary of boys trying to get them to yield to
sexual temptation and that we would use every trick in the devil's arsenal to
get them to go "all the way." But the girls were taught that they
were the temptresses and were therefore the ones who needed to keep from
harming the boys with their female charms. We were taught to pray constantly,
implore the intercession of the saints and the holy mother of AG, that they
might give us protection against the snares of Satan. It must have occurred to
many observers that the fear of Satan seems very much like fear of our own
sexuality.
innocent angels
For all the instruction we were given on the Evil One, I
don't remember ever being taught about Pope Innocent VIII and his persecution
of witches and heretics. The Pope proclaimed that "evil angels," i.e., devils,
were having sex with many human men and women. He was not the first to have
made this claim. Others before him, such as Thomas Aquinas, had explored this
territory in great detail. Thomas reminds us that since the devil is not human,
he can't produce human seed. So, he must transform himself into a woman, seduce
a man, keep the seed, transform into a male, seduce a woman and transfer the
seed. Something of the devil is captured by the seed along the way, so the
offspring are not normal. Apparently it took Satan a long time to figure out that
if he wanted to control the world, the best way to do it would be to breed with
humans. Invading our bodies would be more efficient and effective than trying
to invade our minds. But the Pope and many other pious men had a plan to
exterminate the diabolical offspring: they would torture and burn them all!
They would fight fire with fire! The Devil would not outdo them. In fact, the
sadistic and monstrous behavior of the holy and pious inquisitors is almost
enough to make a skeptic believe in Satan. The inquisitors were nothing short
of diabolical.
One of the more interesting aspects of Satanology is the
recurring theme of humans making a pact with the devil. The Faust legend is the
best-known of these: in exchange for one's soul, Satan will bestow one with
wealth or power for a specified time. In most versions of the story, Faust
tricks the devil and avoids payment. In the original, the devil mutilates and
kills Faust at the end of the contract. His brains are splattered on the walls
of his room, his eyes and teeth lie on the floor and his corpse rests outside
on a dunghill (Smith, 269).
Today, there are still those who believe Satan is a real
being, but we hear few stories of incubi and succubi any more. The closest
thing we have to such stories are alien abduction accounts and star children.
Fortunately, for today's alien abduction victims with similar tales of sexual
experimentation--the devil being replaced with aliens from outer space--there
is no equivalent to the medieval Church to persecute, torture, or exterminate
them.
It is interesting, though, that most of these murderers
and torturers feel some need to at least appear as if they are doing good while
they commit their horrors. What drives the terrorist or ethnic cleanser today
to their abominations, or the witch hunters to their destruction of families,
seems to be the same forces that drove the pious enforcers of the Inquisitions.
Their behavior is almost enough to make a skeptic think that maybe Satan does
exist--in the souls of these good people fighting for their noble causes.
From a philosophical perspective, the universal belief in
evil demons is based on the need for an explanation of the enormous quantity of
moral and physical evil pervading human existence for our entire history. I suppose,
too, that devils in some way serve to excuse our own evil actions and mitigate
our sense of responsibility for the harm we do. Psychologically, demons may
well be a projection of ourselves, the worst part of our nature or the most
feared part of our own nature. From a literary perspective, demons must exist.
If they didn't, we'd have to invent them. They seem essential to so much of our
storytelling--more essential, perhaps, than their goodly counterparts.
the waning of Satan's power
As the power of the Christian Church has waned, so too
has the power of Satan. It is no accident that Satan reached the peak of his
career at the same time the Church did, during the thirteenth century. During
the Middle Ages, the Devil was said to have built Hadrian's wall between
Scotland and England, moved huge stones to construct megalithic stone circles
and dolmens, built bridges such as that at Saint-Cloud and the Pont de Valentre
at Cahors, for the price of the soul of the first one who crossed the bridge,
etc. Satan could perform magic, but it must be remembered that the Christian
religion is basically a religion of magic, of sacraments which protect one from
Satan and which change bread and wine into Christ, of miracles which contravene
the natural order for good or ill, of resurrection from the dead and of the
promise of eternal life. Satan represents the obverse of that order: black
magic, pacts with the devil, wonders done contravening the natural order, the
promise of eternal youth and wondrous powers. The Satanic Order was the
creation of the Church, necessary to establish its own power over the world.
Heretics, witches and sorcerers were a threat to the world dominion of the
Church. They had to be eradicated. As the enemies of the Church grew more
numerous and more powerful, so did the reign of terror grow and so did the
power of the Church get established more and more firmly.
As the power of Christianity waned as the dominant social
and political force in western culture, so too did the power of Satan. By the
eighteenth century, in Europe at least, witch and heretic burnings had all but
ceased. Today, most of us in the Christian world would consider it primitive
and barbaric to suggest that anyone be hounded or killed for communing with
Satan. Even those who are allegedly doing evil in the name of Satan are usually
pursued for the evil they do, not for their alleged association with the devil.
It is likely that most police officers, if they had to deal with crimes
committed by Satan worshippers, would view the criminals as deluded rather than
as really communing with otherworldly beings.
If the rise of modern science had anything to do with the
fall of the Christian Church from its position of supreme influence in western
culture, then modern science can take partial credit for the exorcism of Satan
from western consciousness. Of course, the Devil is not dead yet but he gets
his power from AG, and as AG's power wanes so does Satan's. Someday, perhaps,
both AG and Satan will become impotent strangers to the human imagination. But
don't count on it. Many theists today believe that the evils of today's world,
and they are many as we all know, are due to the rise of Satan and the decrease
of religious influence. If they had their way, we would all be praying more and
working against the snares of the devil. I, however, think we have more to fear
from these pious people than we do from the Devil or his admirers. Some might
even go so far as to identify these pious advocates of constitutional
amendments for prayer in schools as devils in disguise. I don't think so,
though when you have AG's children murdering people at abortion clinics, there
really doesn't seem to be much need for Satan. In fact, if Satan and his crew
returned to earth they'd find that all the good jobs for devils have been taken
by the pious of the Earth.
