Sympathy for the Devil

Throughout our the relative short history of civilisation, one entity has continued to fixate and tantalise us with its vivid imagery, surreal morality and indeed alluring charm. This manifestation is known by many names, some of them artificial, some corrupted from other older names and some merely a word in an ancient tongue. This entity is of course The Devil!

No matter how much we would like to consider our life's to be so compact that we no longer need to believe in such things as demons, fairies, even gods, the imagery of The Devil still manages to captivate our imagination and awe, whether in sympathy or in condemnation.

However, this essay is not a mere rant about how good or bad the Devil is, simply because I do not believe in such a thing as a Devil, ( well in the Christian sense anyway! ). I would like discuss a little bit about the possible origins, both historically and psychologically, of the idea of a Devil. Why does the image, and indeed the mere name, of Satan still infuse us with a sense of dread and awe?

If one wishes to trace the origins of the Devil, historically, it is to the Middle East that our attention must turn. Pazazu, a Mesopotamian night demon, the nocturnal personification of the south-west wind, certainly has parts of the classic imagery of the Devil, the bestial visage, the claws and wings of some great bird of prey. In truth, he resembles the Shamanic attire of some ancient wizard or priest. One of the links between Magick/Shamanism/Witchcraft and the Devil does indeed stem from Mesopotamia. In the religion of the ancient Sumerians, every woeful incident could be blamed on some demon or other and thus deter any sense of guilt on that individual.

The rites for exorcising such notions of guilt were very complex and were also the basis of what we now think of as magick. A certain ritual was cast, the nature of which depended on the type of incident/demon, for example, a lover has lost interest with a partner so therefore some malevolent sexual demon would be named as the root of the problem. The wizard would perform a ceremony of appeasement to get rid of the demonic influence.This ideology was later passed onto the later Semites and indeed to the relatively new people called the Hebrews.

However, the Mesopotamians were polytheistic, meaning that they had many gods, and to counter, or indeed to compliment them, there must also be many demons. The idea of one main demon was an idea initially utilised by their northern neighbours in Persia, the Zoroastrians. The founder of this religion was called Zarathrusta ( as in the book by Nietzsce ) yet he is more commonly known in the Greek version of Zoroaster. He was born around 628bc and lived as a priest in what is now Iran. This area at the time of his life was the seat of a great empire, Persia and its religion was more-or-less similar to the polytheistic philosophies of their Sumerian cousins. Yet Zoroaster turned away from the many-god belief and instead concentrated on the main deity, Ahura Mazda/Ormazd ( Wise God ), a stellar being said to govern the cosmos somewhere in a palace beyond the stars, a prototype of the Hebrew IHVH and Christian/Islamic God/Allah.

Now, the Persian empire was perhaps one of the strongest of its time, stretching from Libya to India and was typical of imperial states with a mighty and ordered military force. However, the idea of a benevolent god living far away in the stars seemed to fit quite well with the faith of both kings and priests, yet the military needed some form of deity to acknowledge as a guide in their efforts to maintain order within the empire. To suit these demands, the cult of Mithra was revived, he was portrayed as the Son of Ormazd as was often illustrated as a handsome youth in the uniform of s soldier battling with a raging bull. The symbolism of the bull is unimportant at this moment in time but the idea of animal figures as demons is of high interest to the question of the origins of the imagery of the Devil, however, returning to the Persian empire, we have two main deities, Father and Son, yet we still have a large empire comprised of many divergent and individual races and religions. How in this perfect theological state can foreign gods be explained?

The answer to this is Ahriman, a name that actually means 'friend' and he was, much like the later Hebrew Shaitan ( adversary ) indeed a friend of Ormazd and Mithra, in fact, he was said to be the maintainer of the bonds in Persian society. However, later on in the theology of the empire, he began to be much more like the Satan we have become more use to, or at least to the much later Faustian Mephistopheles, a tempter of men, to see if they were fit to enter the kingdom of Heaven. Nevertheless, even as the tempter, Ahriman was still under the charge of Ormazd and as such still 'worked for him' in a matter of speaking.

The theory behind foreign gods was that they were merely the machinations of Ahriman, in an attempt to test mans loyalty to the true God, if they felt tempted to worship a foreign god, they would loose their right to Heaven, yet if they remained loyal to Ormazd, their place amongst the blessed was assured.

The concept of foreign gods, or indeed foreign beliefs, being the works of the Devil is very much part of the make-up that makes the image of Satan so interesting. More of this will be discussed in part two of this essay. If you wish to read part two please click the star.