(West Asian mythology)
Belief in malevolent beings which haunt the air and the secret places of the earth stemmed from early man's instinctive fear of the unknown, the strange and frightening. In West Asia this common superstition expressed itself potently in a variety of ways: the Egyptians struggled against Am-mut, the ‘eater of the dead’, and the serpent Apophis daily threatened the sun god Re; the Babylonians attributed sickness and misfortune to demonic attack, while at night men were endangered by Lilitu, a beautiful, winged succubus; the Hebrews had to cope with a host of fallen angels under the crafty leadership of Satan and Beelzebub; the Arabs fought off the assaults of countless djinn, ‘hidden ones’, inhabitants of the world before man; the Persians, the hardest pressed of all peoples, faced in the dreadful creations of Ahriman nothing less than absolute evil. It was the impact of Persian dualism on the Hebrews, after the Babylonian Exile, that led to the crystallization of the Devil in the form we recognize today.
In the Old Testament the word Satan originally meant ‘adversary’, the supernatural being that Yahweh allowed to test Job, ‘a perfect and an upright man’. But the idea of a spirit of evil was developed in apocryphal literature, especially the Book of Enoch, written down after 200 BC. The fall of Satan was explained in terms of envy; he was jealous of Adam and refused as ‘a son of god’ to pay him reverence and homage. Michael said he should worship ‘the image of God’ or face the wrath of Yahweh, but Satan and his followers refused. They were flung out of heaven, down to earth, and from that moment started the enmity between Satan and mankind. Other angels, however, fell earthward because of the sensual charms of the daughters of men. Thus did Shemhazai and Azazel, who fathered ‘the wicked demon Asmodaeus’, the Zoroastrian Aeshma. On the Day of Atonement the priests had to sacrifice a second ram. One scapegoat was for the sins of Israel, the other for Azazel. From the union of angels and women sprang the titans mentioned in Genesis, the giants who were drowned along with the ‘corrupt’ descendants of Adam in the flood.
Christianity inherited this demonology, to which was added the belief that the pagan deities were devils. St Paul was firm on this theological issue. ‘Ye cannot drink of the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils.’ Beelzebub, or Baalzebub, ‘lord of the flies’, was a distortion of a Canaanite god's name probably meaning ‘lord of the house’. The idea also grew up that each soul had assigned to it a good and an evil angel. But in the apocalypse of Revelation the faithful knew of the final defeat of Satan, clearly identified as the ‘dragon’ of Genesis. According to the evangelist St Peter, Jesus Christ, having died, even ‘went and preached to the spirits in prison’. A graphic account of his descent into hell occurs in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, which dates from the fourth century.
The Gnostic ascetic Saturninus, a contemporary of Simon Magus, wrote: ‘Marriage and generation are of Satan.’ Because the world was under his evil sway, abstinence was the only way for the ‘spark of life’ to escape. In Gnostic mythology the Devil was in league with the female principle, who ‘is without foreknowledge, wrathful, double-minded, double-bodied, a virgin above and a viper below’.
