The Devil Made Me Do It.

I was going to post this at the TRS Spookapalooza, but their server is down. So I'll blog it here, seeing as it's Halloween.

I have a slightly controversial topic for you: Who the devil is the devil?

Ah, easy! I hear you cry.

Not so.

When I ask people who the devil is, they tend to give me names. Satan. Lucifer. Beelzebub. Old Nick. And so forth. To name but a few.

Err… No.

The Devil is never actually named anywhere. It is implied that it is Satan, but no one ever calls him Satan, the devil.

Nor is his name Satan. That word is Hebrew for "The Adversary"  ("Devil" means the same thing, actually)– and that could be anyone and anything.

Lucifer is not the devil, nor is he the same entity as Satan. He's a fallen angel who was mistaken for the Prince of Darkness — but he's not the devil.

(He is, however, one of the four Crown Princes of Hell.)

Beelzebub is actually a Syrian God, also known as Lord of the Flies. He's not the same entity as Satan either. Nor is he Lucifer. Totally different animal.

So who is he, really?

I write about angels and demons. So I needed to know who the main players (and their bosses) are. Naturally that led to finding out what I could about the devil.

I thought I knew who he was, but it turned out I was wrong.

I thought Lucifer and Satan were one and the same. I was wrong.

I thought the devil was a major player in the bible. I was wrong.

In fact, everything I thought I knew was wrong.

The devil is actually a minor character in the bible. He hardly appears in there at all. The same goes for the Old Testament. There's a little more, but hardly enough to warrant more than a footnote.

The New Testament is where the trouble really starts. He's starting to take shape, but he's still not the all-consuming evil villain we know today. Far from it.

In the Book of Job, he's a kind of prosecuting angel — sent by God to try Job. Yes, he is tormenting Job, because God told him to. So…err…hello? What's going on here?

He fills the role of prosecutor more than once, and each time at the behest of God. It kind of makes you go "Huh?"

Then, suddenly, there is a gap in the scriptures.

Along comes Zoroastrianism, a Persian religion around 600 BC. It has distinct sources for good and evil and influenced a lot of the other religions around at the time — including Christianity. The Christians needed a reason for all this evil stuff happening — and the devil in it's more modern form as the adversary of God came into being. "The Devil made me do it" was a rather convenient excuse. An Alibi, if you must.

There were still no descriptions at that time. You had dragons and a leopard with the paws of a bear, and the head of a lion…but the goat legs, horned head and all the rest of it came later. Much, much later.

In fact, it took almost a thousand years before it became what we know as the Devil today.

And the church borrowed from everywhere. The horns? Yeah, the Horned One, the Green Man of pagan religions — that's where the devil's horns came from. The goat legs? Pan, from Greek Mythology. Everything about him is borrowed from other places. The more the congregation "sinned" the worse the image and deeds of the devil became.

Then the reformation happened, and the witch trials are about the height of the Devil's influence over belief.

When the witch trials didn't really work out…his "fame" waned along with the rabid prosecution of witches. He slipped into almost obscurity for a long while, resurrected here and there, but never again as potent as he was around the 16th/17th century.

So who is he? Did God create him? Which would mean God created Evil, and the church won't have that. But if God didn't create him, then who did? (Believe me, I've asked. I never did get a response — because they don't have one.)

What's more, if Satan was an angel and cast out because of pride — can he be redeemed?

It stands to reason that if we can be redeemed, sometimes despite the most heinous crimes, he should be able to redeem himself too.

But no. I asked that question and got "Absolutely not." When I said well, if we sin, we can earn redemption. I was told it's because "There is inherent Good in every human being."

But…if Satan was an angel, there had to be good in him too. So that argument doesn't wash.

I don't think we'll ever know. Personally, I think they simply needed a scapegoat and picked some poor sod to be it. Satan picked the mother of all short straws.

And of course…if you look into the devil's backstory, you'll inevitably run across the first ever "Girl Power" act in the history of mankind: Lilith.

She took one look at Adam and went "You want me to do what with that? You're kidding, right?" and walked away. That girl burned the bra before it was ever invented.

I'm sure the devil made her do it…

What do you think?