The Evolution of Satan's Concept

Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Beast, Satan. Hail Satan. Hail Satan. When you say Satan to me, I think God. He has been called many names. He has taken many strange and different forms. The idea of God's evil enemy has been around for thousands of years. And it's still as powerful as ever. Evil is real. And it must be opposed. But where did Satan's story begin? Where did he come from? And how did he become the Prince of Darkness? More than 3,000 years ago, in the deserts and pasture lands of the Middle East, unknown hands wrote the earliest chapters of the Hebrew Bible. If the devil had a birthplace, surely it was here, somewhere in the book known to Christians as the Old Testament. In the oldest books of the Bible, a character called Satan does appear, but he's nothing like the Satan we imagine. When we read the Old Testament, we find that from time to time there is this strange dark figure who pops up called the Satan. The Satan. The word the Satan is actually a title. The word means the accuser. And to begin with, it seems that the Satan is one of the angels or attendants in the heavenly court. One of God's. servants who, in a sense, had to do some of the dirty work. This Satan has no power of his own. He does only what God tells him. Nor is he a horrible creature with horns and a tail. There's no kind of prince of darkness, somebody who's standing opposite to God. Throughout most of the text, there's no concept at all of an evil force. One of Satan's earliest appearances is as an angel in the book of... of Job. In one of the best known stories in the Bible, Satan argues that Job, one of God's most loyal servants, is only pious because he has a good life. God agrees that Satan can test Job by inflicting on him all kinds of diseases and calamities. In the end, in spite of dreadful sufferings, Job continues to worship God, and Satan loses the argument. The Satan who makes Job's life a misery isn't a demon or even a bad angel, and he doesn't live in hell. There wasn't any kind of concept of a hell like we have, you know, a place of fiery torment and torture. In fact, to the ancient Israelites, what happened when you died was really very little. You went to a place called Sheol, and this was just a sort of dark, shadowy place, a sort of underworld, where everybody who died went, irrespective of whether you were good or bad. So where is the Satan we know? Where's the fiend who's eternally at war with the forces of good? The monster who rules over the flames of hell and punishes sinners? Where is the fallen angel with his legions of demon helpers, tempting humans to do evil things so that he can win their souls? If the traditional devil doesn't come from the Jewish Old Testament, where does he come from? Since human history began, people all over the world have believed in demons and evil spirits. A few share some traits with our devil, like horns or a beard, but none are as powerful as Satan. So where did people first get the idea of an ultimate evil being? Three and a half thousand years ago, in ancient Persia, where Syria, Iraq and Iran are now, there were many gods, good and evil, until one man, a religious teacher called Zoroaster, reduced the whole complicated cast of characters to two. Ahura Mazda is a revolutionary primarily because he in one sense personifies these ethical categories into a good god, Ahura Mazda, and a bad god, Ahriman. And this is an extremely potent idea and one which forms the basis for later conceptions of dualistic thought. In other words, separation between good and evil. The good god is the all-knowing Ahura Mazda. The god of light and order. The evil god is Ahriman, god of chaos, darkness and lies. In Zoroaster's teachings, the universe is a battlefield between the gods of good and evil, and every person on earth must take sides. After death, good people are rewarded in heaven. while sinners are punished in a dark and gloomy hell. It is one of those ultimate, rather attractive kinds of dualism, that this life is a struggle between good and evil, therefore choose good. Between light and darkness, therefore choose light. Under the powerful Persian emperor Darius the Great, the teachings of Zoroaster become the official religion of the Persian Empire. An empire which includes the lands of Israel. The new Persian ideas about good and evil soon find their way into the Jewish scriptures. So we get a clear demarcation of what we would call Jewish ideas, and we can spot the Zoroastrian ideas in the Old Testament. They are there, notions of heaven and hell. The beginning of actually seeing the devil personified as the fierce opponent of God. As the Persian Empire in turn is defeated by Alexander the Great, Greek culture comes to ancient Israel. The Greeks introduce a huge cast of gods and goddesses, including one who will shape our image of Satan for centuries. Hades has a black face or black beard. He sits on a throne. Often made of ebony, and he wields a two-pronged fork. Not for prodding sinners, but for blasting things to bits. To the classical Greeks, the underworld was ruled by Hades, who was the god of the dead. He was one of the Olympian gods, but he seems to have spent most of his time in this dark, shadowy underworld, which is also called Hades. Now he wasn't a very nice character. He seems to have been very morbid and morose and nobody really liked him. None of the gods liked him and certainly no humans liked him. Hades wasn't very likable, but he wasn't evil either. In fact, the ancient Greeks see Hades as a god of justice. They believe that when people die, they go to Hades, and he decides whether they go to a place of happiness or a place of misery. As ruler of the world underground, Hades is also the god of wealth and abundance. In a dim memory of Hades, people have believed for centuries that the devil can make you rich. As well as the brooding character of Hades, the Greeks give the world another familiar ingredient of the devil's story. In a famous myth, Zeus, the greatest of the gods, defeats the winged serpent Typhon and throws him down to Tartarus, the lowest region of the underworld. Over the following centuries, the myth grows into the story of how the angel Satan rebels against God and is thrown out of heaven with all his followers. Satan's allies, the fallen angels, become his legion of demons. When we think of hell, we think of fire, lava, and sinners being horribly tortured. But where did this picture come from? The underworld of Hades doesn't have fire, but ancient Jerusalem does. When we read the Gospels, we come upon Jesus warning people that there is this dangerous fate that might await them, and it's called Gehenna, which was the old smoldering rubbish heap in ancient Jerusalem. And because of the stink of the place and because there was so much in the way of rubbish, periodically it was set fire to and the fires there would burn for several days, if not weeks. Gehenna was the place where the Jerusalem authorities burned the bodies of executed criminals. Over time, the place came to stand for something supernatural, a spiritual fate that would await the wicked at the end of time. Gehenna was the inspiration for the terrors of hell. By the time the Christian Gospels are written, towards the end of the first century AD, Satan has grown into a powerful figure. By now, Jewish lands are ruled by the mighty Roman Empire. It was a time when the Romans were hated bitterly. To many Jews and Christians persecuted by Rome, Satan is the evil force behind Caesar's throne. In the New Testament book of Revelation, the writer gives Satan one of his most mysterious names, the Beast, 666. The Beast could refer to the Roman emperor himself. The author of Revelation says that the beast has a human number and it's 666. Now this is traditionally being seen as a reference to the emperor Nero. And that's because if you take Nero Caesar in Aramaic and count up the numerical values of those letters, it comes to 666. The book of Revelation says that the devil was sent down by God into the abyss, where he will be locked up for a thousand years. When he gets out, the end of the world will come. An apocalyptic battle will take place as good and evil fight it out to the end. Satan will be let loose and will put up a final attempt to rule the world. This is kind of the dragon of chaos back again. This is evil opposed to God. drawing on very very ancient cosmological speculation not so much from judaism itself but from the surrounding areas particularly the persians so what does the devil look like at the dawn of the christian era often he's got black skin and hair like hades ruler of the underworld his wings echo the story that he was once an angel Although they look more like the wings of a dragon. For thousands of years, the dragon was the symbol of an evil force. And it's from the dragon that Satan inherits his taloned feet. When Satan isn't being a dragon, he's a snake. The serpent, said to have tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, has long been believed to represent the devil. Although the scriptures don't actually say so. In fact, Christian leaders disagree, sometimes violently, about what the devil is like. But one thing they do agree on, he is busy working with and through their enemies. Four centuries after Christ, a Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, converts to Christianity. Within a generation. The once persecuted religion is the official creed of the mightiest empire on earth. Christian bishops now have real power, backed up by the state, and they use Satan to help them keep it. Again and again, church leaders claim that those who disagree with them, especially other Christian groups, are working for the devil. As Constantine made it the state religion and the state church and an established religion, what Constantine and his immediate successors found hardest to put up with was heresy. Catholic theologians would have said that because heretics didn't believe the correct Catholic faith, they must be worshipping the evil one instead, God's enemy. The logic. is relentless. It's us and them. If you're not with the church and the empire, you're with Satan. It's a short step for the church to demand that heretics be put to death. The first executions come 450 years after Christ. Over the following centuries, the numbers of people killed for supposedly working for Satan grows to many tens, possibly hundreds of thousands. Under the protection of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion grows quickly, but the bishops worry that the pagan gods are far too popular. Thousands of Romans still pray to the winged goddess Fortuna, the bringer of luck. But the most popular pagan god of all is Pan. Christian leaders see him as a serious threat who must be discredited. Let's think of the case of Pan in Arcadia. And he becomes a sort of demon, whereas he was actually a very benign god of music and happiness and lovemaking and altogether to be admired, but becomes a goat-legged demon, a satire. in the later Christianized versions of it. Satan now adopts Pan's best-known features. He becomes an ugly, leering beast with horns on his head. His body is hairy, and he has Pan's cloven hooves, although sometimes he keeps the taloned feet of the ancient dragon. So outlandish has he become. that he often has a second face on his belly. One of the greatest thinkers of the early Christian church is Saint Augustine. Augustine is keen to show that the old nature gods are dangerous demons. According to Augustine, male demons called incubi appear to women at night and seduce them. Even more disturbing for Augustine, saintly men could be visited in their beds by female demons called succubi, and forced to do sinful things against their will. When, during the long dark hours, their frustrated minds produced all sorts of sexual visions and erotic pictures, they had to expel these from their minds. How on earth could this have come into my... My pious, celibate mind, it isn't me. This is an entity. This is something downright evil. By the Middle Ages, after a thousand years of Christian teaching, the church has persuaded its followers that the devil and his demons are real and that Satan is a powerful enemy. The problem is that some Christians take the idea a lot further than the bishops want. Some branches of Christianity did see the world itself as created not so much by Satan but by a lesser evil god and so for them of course everything to do with with the world with matter with human flesh was seen in negative terms. We do find the emergence of something called Gnosticism. Gnostic Christians carried with them this very clear notion of a good God and a bad God. There's the good God who created everything spiritual, and there's the evil God who created everything physical, which means that everything that you can see or touch or sense with any of the five senses is actually coming from the evil God. One group which is taking enthusiastically to the Gnostic idea of good and evil is the Cathars of southern France. To the Cathars, all material possessions are evil and belong to the devil. For a church now wealthy and powerful, this is an uncomfortable, even dangerous teaching. The common people loved and admired them, called them les bonhommes, because they were healers. When the Cathars went around doing good, as they most certainly did, feeding the poor and healing the sick, so... They were teaching people to avoid marriage, to avoid procreation, because all you will do, if you have a family, is to bring that new child into this decadent, evil, physical world where we should all be concentrating on spirituality. If you were a Catholic, then you were actually in league with Satan. To question the church was to question God. Pope Innocent III announced a crusade against the Cathars. He tried to convert them. Back to Catholicism, that hadn't worked. The only thing he could do now is kill them. The crusade against the Cathars, launched in 1209, turns into a brutal 45-year war. At least 100,000 people die, partly for saying that Satan is even more powerful than the church says he is. The crusade against the Cathars is against fellow Christians, but for almost two centuries, the crusades are mostly about fighting Islam for control of the Middle East. In medieval Europe, Islam is seen as a heresy, the work of the devil. Muslims, too, are quick to claim their enemies are in league with the evil one. In the Quran, Muslims are instructed to fight against non-Muslims. because they are friends of Satan. Both sides, inheriting the ancient beliefs of the Persians, see the world as divided into good and evil, justifying all the horrors of war and conquest. The Crusades leave a sinister legacy. In the middle of the campaign, Pope Gregory IX founds the Inquisition, controlled by the Dominican Order of Friars. The Inquisition's job is to find heretics and hand them over to local princes for punishment. The Inquisition gave people plenty to be frightened of, it gave them the fires of hell to be frightened of, and it gave them, in a more immediate sense, the Inquisition itself. They had the right to arrest that person without telling them who'd accused them, or indeed what they were accused of. The accused are guilty until found innocent. and can be held for as long as the authorities want. Anyone who questions the Inquisition is immediately suspected of being in league with the devil. In the fight against Satan and the powers of evil, medieval rulers believed that, as in any war, information is vital. Up till now, the Church has not officially allowed Christians to be tortured. Although torturing Jews and Muslims is acceptable. But in May 1252, Pope Innocent IV rules that Christians suspected of heresy can be tortured until they confess they are working for the devil and inform on co-conspirators. Once you've set up a debate that defines somebody as a Satanist, as a servant of Satan, then you have put them in a position where you can do what you want to them. Because you are justified by working for the forces of good. Generally, once somebody had been accused of heresy, there was no way they could clear themselves. No matter what they said, because they were a heretic, therefore in league with the devil, therefore anything they said would like to be a lie. But the torturers can't do whatever they please. They are supposed to follow strict guidelines. In theory, and according to Pope Innocent IV in the middle of the 30th century. Torture should be limited. It should not draw blood. It should not lead to serious permanent damage to the person who's being tortured. In practice, these regulations are not always followed. But there's also something which the psychologists would refer to as a rationalization process, that it could all be very well for them to say, oh yes, we are trying to save your immortal soul, we're trying to keep you out of hell. We're trying to prevent the devil from getting you. And what they really mean is we'd rather fancy your farm. All over Europe, the new powers, supposed to be used against Satan, are used by the unscrupulous to seize wealth or to do down their enemies. In 1307, King Philip the Fair of France brings witchcraft charges against the leaders of the Knights Templar, the fabulously wealthy order of crusaders. Philip accuses the Templars of worshipping a pagan idol called Baphomet, a supposedly satanic figure. The Templars have been involved in the Middle East in negotiations with Muslims, and some people in Western Europe thought they had a league with the Muslims, and because the Muslims, everybody knew, in inverted commas, were involved in magic, there is therefore a hint that perhaps the Templars were involved in magic too. They were attacked and largely destroyed on Friday the 13th of October in 1307. Sealed orders given by Philip LaBelle to his seneschals to attack every Templar stronghold simultaneously. Ever since the purge of the Templars, Friday the 13th has been seen as an unlucky day, somehow connected with satanic forces. In 1320... the war against Satan is wound up another notch. Pope John XXII orders the Inquisition to target any kind of witchcraft, sorcery or necromancy. A big worry is that unscrupulous priests who know how to drive out devils with the rites of exorcism might instead use exorcism to invite the devil in. Formulas, Latin formulas and rituals which can be used... to command the demon. Now, once you've got a Latin formula that has power to command a demon, I could use that to command a demon to do my washing up, you know? I could use that power to command a demon to get this woman I fancy into bed. The necromancers are interested in using the formulae of exorcism to command demons to do other things that they are interested in. You know, a demon could make me rich. A demon could find some hidden treasure for me. Fear that necromancers and witches are all around, conjuring up demons and making pacts with the devil, sweeps across Europe. One of the first cases investigated by the Inquisition is in the Irish city of Kilkenny. In 1324, in a dispute over inheritance, one of the richest women in the town, Dame Alice Cattela, is accused of witchcraft. heresy and of having a demon lover called robin alice taylor a landowner in kilkenny who had several husbands so had stepchildren brought a charge against her that she poisoned her previous husbands in order to obtain the land and she poisoned or killed them otherwise through witchcraft alice manages to escape to england her unfortunate servant Petronella is tortured and burned at the stake. The campaign against necromancers, sorcerers and witches lasts 300 years and kills between 60,000 and 300,000 people. The vast majority of the victims are women. Women were thought of as being more prone to the devil, more likely to sin. more likely to be led astray. They were also thought to be less intellectual than men. Women were seen as closer to animals and part of this was that they were more susceptible to temptation, that they were more easily seduced by material gratification. As the Inquisition goes about its grisly business, rounding up suspects and interrogating them, many clerics and lay people worry that it's all guesswork. Perhaps they're missing even more witches than they're finding. But how can you tell who is one of Satan's helpers? What you need is a standard test. In 1486, two German Dominican monks publish a textbook for inquisitors called Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches. The book contains a clever catch-22. Not only is witchcraft heresy, not believing in witches is heresy as well. The Malleus Maleficarum was the manual, the how to get rid of all these demonic fleas that had infested a human being. It was a book of what witches were, what witches did. Malleus Maleficarum tells the Inquisitor everything he needs to know. Witches have the mark of Satan on their bodies. A birthmark or a wart. They can fly by rubbing magical herbs on their skin. And they gather at Satan-worshipping ceremonies called Sabbaths. At these, they celebrate a twisted version of the Christian mass, kissing the devil's rear end in a blasphemous act of homage. Certainly there was a fear at that time, which was why Malleus Maleficarum... Sold so many copies and ran through so many editions and is still in print. 30 years after Malleus Maleficarum was written, Martin Luther leaves the Protestant Reformation, splitting the Christian Church in two. Each faction, Protestant and Catholic, claims the other is in league with the evil one. Both sides use Malleus Maleficarum to find Satanists, and not just in order to destroy them. Witch hunting is a kind of scientific quest. The idea is, if you can understand witches and the devil, you can fight them. The whole business of witch hunting is almost a sort of intellectual research project. I need to gather a bit more data about, you know, what demons do. So I'm going to interrogate a few more witches to get a bit more data, and then I'm going to write it up in my book. The cutting edge of scientific inquiry. Right across Europe, hysteria about Satan sweeps Protestant and Catholic countries alike. In Scotland, James VI, one of the best educated kings in Europe, is so caught up in the craze, he writes a book about the devil and witchcraft. Called Demonology, James' book sets out to prove that Satan-worshipping witches are everywhere. and that they are the gravest threat to the security of the state. He surrounded himself with advisers, and mainly religious advisers, who would protect him from the demons that he feared so much. He saw it everywhere. Well, James was certainly quite militant about this. He thought he was fighting a war. Even as James leads the fight against the devil and the forces of evil, the devil is helping James to keep his crown. James can always point to the figure of Satan and say, if it weren't for me, look who would be ruling in my place. Although this is quite frightening, it's also in a way quite gratifying for James. One of the witches who was interrogated was asked, why is the devil attacking our king? And the witch who was confessing allegedly answered, this was what was recorded anyway in her confession, the devil is doing this because King James is the greatest enemy that the devil has in the world. When the new world of the Americas is colonized by Europeans, the devil travels with them. The Puritan colonists who arrived from England in the late 1600s are strong believers in the power of Satan. They're convinced that everyone who isn't a Puritan is controlled by the devil. and that women are especially susceptible to Satan's powers. They had established what might be called Puritan communities and were looking to build a great example for the rest of Christendom. If you were enjoying yourself, or if a group of you were singing or dancing or having a drink, then those who were opposed to that kind of fun were quite certain that Satan was filling the glasses for you. In 1688 in Boston, an Irish laundry woman called Mary Glover is accused of bewitching the children of one of her customers. Proof of her pact with the devil includes several rag dolls found in her house. Mary Glover was Irish and a servant. Her first language was Gaelic and one of the tests to prove that you weren't a witch was to speak the Lord's Prayer. The linguistic difficulties meant that she couldn't speak the Lord's Prayer without, as they saw it, blaspheming. She was hanged as a witch in 1688. Three years after Mary Glover is hanged, less than 20 miles away at Salem, Massachusetts, the testimony of three young girls leads to a mass execution. Some of the children were said to be possessed by spirits sent from the witches. And so when they were standing witness, they were effectively, they were performing being possessed. In the Salem witch hunt, 150 people are arrested, 19 men and women are hung or... Crushed to death, 17 others die in prison. In an ironic twist to the story, the Salem jury later apologized, blaming the devil for their mistake. By the 1700s, the witch craze in America and Europe is almost over. A new... more scientific view of the world is gaining ground. Modernism, as the project that we get from the 18th century Enlightenment, actually banished religion, superstition and all of that and just said that that belongs to the dark ages. We are now in the modern world, we believe in facts, we believe in science, and if you want to be religious, that's a private option which you can go and practice somewhere else. Although the witch hunts have ended, And the educated classes of Europe and America even start to question whether the devil exists. In the folk tales of ordinary people, Satan lives on. But he's very different from the formidable and terrifying devil of the witch finders. One of my own favorites is that of Dunstan, who was a very powerful blacksmith. The devil arrives and asks to have his shoes replaced. And he simply gets hold of his nose with two red hot tongs and throws him out. And that is a very, very different devil. That's a devil that you can put in his place. By now, the devil has shared some of his ugliness and crude habits. In fact, he's often a member of the decadent aristocracy. He's a handsome gentleman dressed in fine clothes and mixing in fashionable company. Like Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, and the Satan of the ancient Gnostic heresies, this Satan controls the material world of wealth, power, and sex. He can give all these things to you if you promise him your soul. The most famous of all devil folktales is the story of Faust, the devil in the form of the clever, and devious Mephistopheles offers to grant Faust all his wishes, but there's a price. One of the things that many necromancers or people using necromantic spells are interested in is how to get women into bed. Faust is very interested in that, and he gets all kinds of women, including Helen of Troy. Faust's bargain with the devil ends in disaster for Faust. Mephistopheles calls in his debt, and Faust... dies horribly. The devil takes him away to spend eternity in hell. As the power of religion fades, and the age of popes and kings gives way to the age of revolution and democracy, a new devil arrives on the scene. This devil... is utterly different from the treacherous fiend of Christian tradition. He is a tragic and lonely figure, a hero battling against tyrannical authority in the shape of a cruel and overbearing god. Satan is now a brave and handsome rebel. And so you get the kind of romantic view of Satan as not really... a villain or an evil person at all, but the opposite of that. Satan is a good guy who's challenging the boss. In the age of romanticism, we find the poets, particularly like Byron, creating a Byronic hero who is somehow dark and sinister and has a past. And so, far from being something to shun and something to fear, the devil is admired. With the 20th century, the devil's fortunes take a turn for the worse. No longer feared or admired, he becomes a figure of fun. He even joins the world of commerce, helping to sell products from wine to chocolates and beer. In the age of marketing and the consumer society, Satan can bring the lure of the forbidden to a tired brand. It's a long way from an apocalyptic war between good and evil. It has been a whore. hallmark of the 20th century for the devil to be treated as a figure of fun we find the devil is neither better nor worse than the people he's dealing with and he's just a man among men satan seems to have been cut down to size the prince of darkness has become a mischievous imp but in a surprising twist a different satan The glamorous rebel so admired by the revolutionaries of the 19th century makes a startling comeback in the 1960s. There was a strong sense of rebellion against everything that anointed the Western political power structure. And it was Christian, it was capitalist, it was warmongering. And so the counterculture started... exploring anything that was counter to that. In 1966, occult showman Anton LaVey founds the Church of Satan in San Francisco. Part religion, part money-making racket, the Church of Satan attracts lurid headlines, mostly encouraged by the publicity-seeking LaVey himself. We believe in greed, we believe in selfishness, we believe in all of the lustful... thoughts that motivate man because this is man's natural feeling. He called himself Anton Sander LeVay of Romanian descent, but the truth of the matter is he was Howard Stanton Levy, who was born in Cook County, Illinois in 1930. He held these weekend lectures and witch circles in his house, and people would come in and pay their $2 a head. Well, finally, he had this... Friend, it was a publicist who said, you know, I have an idea. Why don't you turn this thing into a church? You could make a bundle of money. And of course, that's what he did. He has been called everything from a carny to a manipulator to a brilliant philosopher. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. There were doctors, lawyers, college students, factory workers, farmers, you name it. They came from all levels of society. In spite of the invented rituals, mostly staged for the cameras, neither LaVey nor his followers believe in a real devil. What LaVey admires is Satan the rebel, the nonconformist, provoking the establishment. Predictably, America is fascinated and outraged. In 1967, the 60s fascination with the occult, spearheaded by LaVey's Church of Satan, gets a powerful boost from Hollywood. The film Rosemary's Baby, a dark tale of devil worshippers in Manhattan, is a massive and unexpected hit. In Roman Polanski's masterpiece... The heroine's innocuous neighbors are part of a satanic conspiracy to help the Prince of Darkness father a child who will rule the world. In Rosemary's Baby, Satan triumphs in the end. But the Christian backlash to the story comes in the 1973 blockbuster The Exorcist. This time, the devil, who has possessed a young girl, is defeated by the forces of good in the shape of two priests. The old belief that women are especially susceptible to satanic influence is revived two centuries after the Salem Witch Triad. We would be seriously in error if we were to underestimate the power of Hollywood. I think the biggest impact was probably around the time of The Exorcist. I know many people I've talked to about the movie, especially those raised in a Christian household. who are very frightened by it, very upset. It's the war between good and evil, but evil is in a whole new dimension, and it's very personal. It made being possessed almost fashionable. The numbers of people who were seen to be possessed just took off. I've been invited to exercise people who were convinced they had a demon, and you will get people who put them through it. And it can be very violent and very dramatic and very expressive, but it can really flip someone into serious, serious ill health. Hollywood's discovery that fortunes can be made with stories of possession Devil worship stokes the fires of a paranoia that has lain dormant since the days of the witch trials. In the 1980s, stories about a vast conspiracy of organized Satanists sweep the media. Known as the Satanic Panic, Christian groups allege mass satanic abuse of children and tens of thousands of kidnappings. Part of the Satanic Panic started with... Accusations of satanic ritual abuse. Groups of people who declared themselves as Satanists were believed to be taking people and children and damaging them. There were all kinds of dark suggestions about children disappearing and about child sacrifice and ritual murder. Although hundreds of people are arrested and imprisoned, when the FBI finally launches a full-scale investigation in the United States, It concludes that the satanic abuse allegations are all groundless. One of the horrifying things about human nature is that it lends itself to hysteria. You get it in all periods of history. I think you get it much more virulently nowadays because one of the most potent instruments for spreading hysteria is the modern telecommunications industry. If members of satanic religions mostly don't believe in a supernatural devil and don't pray to Satan, what does the devil represent? Some Satanists claim the devil stands for a spirit of change. A lot of people are frightened by the term Satanism. A lot of people automatically think that Satanists are bad people. They should be no more scared of a Satanist than they should be scared of anyone else they meet. You know what Satanism means to me is... Opposition and balance. Alternative thought, playing the devil's advocate. There is no good and evil. I mean, to a mouse, a cat is this horrible, evil thing with fangs. But to the pet owner, the cat is heavenly. We create our own reality. That's the whole idea behind Satanism. In the United States, Surveys show that almost half of Americans believe the devil is real. Even non-religious people instinctively divide the world into good and evil, the opposing principles taught by Zoroaster to the ancient Persians. If anything, recent events have made that belief even stronger. In September 2001, The massive terrorist attacks on the United States, which destroyed the World Trade Center, shocked America to its core. To many, it seemed as if sinister forces had gone on the offensive. It was easy to believe that this was a showdown between the forces of good and evil. To the U.S. government, and a large section of American opinion, the attacks were about much more than politics. We've come to know truths that we will never question. Evil is real, and it must be opposed. You're either with us, or you're against us. And if you're against us, by and large, you're going to be working hand-in-hand with Satan. It was Reagan that talked about the evil empire. Bush talks about the axis of evil. It's classic, ancient, dualistic thinking. In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, President Bush gave the job of catching Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for the atrocity, to Lieutenant General William G. Boykin. But according to Boykin, America's real foe isn't bin Laden. In the general's words, the enemy of the U.S. is a guy called Satan. Since 2001, The draconian measures taken by the US and other governments in the war on terror are uncannily like those of the war on Satan of 400 years ago. Imprisonment without trial, secret hearings, anonymous tip-offs and torture. We are seeing a similar willingness to justify mistreatment, to justify the removal of rights, the justifiable use of torture. against the perceived enemy in the war against terrorism. If you're fighting a war against evil, what begins to happen, I think, is that you end up by turning into the evil that you're fighting. Controversially, President Bush called the invasion of Iraq a crusade. The similarities with the historic crusades against heretics are striking. They include a belief on the battlefield that the enemy are not just military opponents, but agents of pure evil. In November 2004, as US forces launch a massive attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, a senior marine officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gareth Brandl, makes clear who he thinks the enemy is. The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan. He's in blue. We're going to destroy him. It's embroidery, it's myth-making, it's poetry. It can be good fun, except that it has produced great evils. A human invention, but one that's rebounded on us because it's given us permission to do terrible things to each other. Which is why I think that we should close hell down and finally banish the devil and get rid of him. Thank you.

Lucifer, Beelzebub, the Beast, Satan. Hail Satan. Hail Satan.

When you say Satan to me, I think God. He has been called many names. He has taken many strange and different forms.

The idea of God's evil enemy has been around for thousands of years. And it's still as powerful as ever. Evil is real. And it must be opposed.

But where did Satan's story begin? Where did he come from? And how did he become the Prince of Darkness? More than 3,000 years ago, in the deserts and pasture lands of the Middle East, unknown hands wrote the earliest chapters of the Hebrew Bible. If the devil had a birthplace, surely it was here, somewhere in the book known to Christians as the Old Testament.

In the oldest books of the Bible, a character called Satan does appear, but he's nothing like the Satan we imagine. When we read the Old Testament, we find that from time to time there is this strange dark figure who pops up called the Satan. The Satan.

The word the Satan is actually a title. The word means the accuser. And to begin with, it seems that the Satan is one of the angels or attendants in the heavenly court. One of God's.

servants who, in a sense, had to do some of the dirty work. This Satan has no power of his own. He does only what God tells him.

Nor is he a horrible creature with horns and a tail. There's no kind of prince of darkness, somebody who's standing opposite to God. Throughout most of the text, there's no concept at all of an evil force. One of Satan's earliest appearances is as an angel in the book of...

of Job. In one of the best known stories in the Bible, Satan argues that Job, one of God's most loyal servants, is only pious because he has a good life. God agrees that Satan can test Job by inflicting on him all kinds of diseases and calamities. In the end, in spite of dreadful sufferings, Job continues to worship God, and Satan loses the argument. The Satan who makes Job's life a misery isn't a demon or even a bad angel, and he doesn't live in hell.

There wasn't any kind of concept of a hell like we have, you know, a place of fiery torment and torture. In fact, to the ancient Israelites, what happened when you died was really very little. You went to a place called Sheol, and this was just a sort of dark, shadowy place, a sort of underworld, where everybody who died went, irrespective of whether you were good or bad.

So where is the Satan we know? Where's the fiend who's eternally at war with the forces of good? The monster who rules over the flames of hell and punishes sinners? Where is the fallen angel with his legions of demon helpers, tempting humans to do evil things so that he can win their souls?

If the traditional devil doesn't come from the Jewish Old Testament, where does he come from? Since human history began, people all over the world have believed in demons and evil spirits. A few share some traits with our devil, like horns or a beard, but none are as powerful as Satan. So where did people first get the idea of an ultimate evil being? Three and a half thousand years ago, in ancient Persia, where Syria, Iraq and Iran are now, there were many gods, good and evil, until one man, a religious teacher called Zoroaster, reduced the whole complicated cast of characters to two.

Ahura Mazda is a revolutionary primarily because he in one sense personifies these ethical categories into a good god, Ahura Mazda, and a bad god, Ahriman. And this is an extremely potent idea and one which forms the basis for later conceptions of dualistic thought. In other words, separation between good and evil. The good god is the all-knowing Ahura Mazda. The god of light and order.

The evil god is Ahriman, god of chaos, darkness and lies. In Zoroaster's teachings, the universe is a battlefield between the gods of good and evil, and every person on earth must take sides. After death, good people are rewarded in heaven. while sinners are punished in a dark and gloomy hell. It is one of those ultimate, rather attractive kinds of dualism, that this life is a struggle between good and evil, therefore choose good.

Between light and darkness, therefore choose light. Under the powerful Persian emperor Darius the Great, the teachings of Zoroaster become the official religion of the Persian Empire. An empire which includes the lands of Israel.

The new Persian ideas about good and evil soon find their way into the Jewish scriptures. So we get a clear demarcation of what we would call Jewish ideas, and we can spot the Zoroastrian ideas in the Old Testament. They are there, notions of heaven and hell. The beginning of actually seeing the devil personified as the fierce opponent of God. As the Persian Empire in turn is defeated by Alexander the Great, Greek culture comes to ancient Israel.

The Greeks introduce a huge cast of gods and goddesses, including one who will shape our image of Satan for centuries. Hades has a black face or black beard. He sits on a throne.

Often made of ebony, and he wields a two-pronged fork. Not for prodding sinners, but for blasting things to bits. To the classical Greeks, the underworld was ruled by Hades, who was the god of the dead. He was one of the Olympian gods, but he seems to have spent most of his time in this dark, shadowy underworld, which is also called Hades. Now he wasn't a very nice character.

He seems to have been very morbid and morose and nobody really liked him. None of the gods liked him and certainly no humans liked him. Hades wasn't very likable, but he wasn't evil either.

In fact, the ancient Greeks see Hades as a god of justice. They believe that when people die, they go to Hades, and he decides whether they go to a place of happiness or a place of misery. As ruler of the world underground, Hades is also the god of wealth and abundance. In a dim memory of Hades, people have believed for centuries that the devil can make you rich. As well as the brooding character of Hades, the Greeks give the world another familiar ingredient of the devil's story.

In a famous myth, Zeus, the greatest of the gods, defeats the winged serpent Typhon and throws him down to Tartarus, the lowest region of the underworld. Over the following centuries, the myth grows into the story of how the angel Satan rebels against God and is thrown out of heaven with all his followers. Satan's allies, the fallen angels, become his legion of demons. When we think of hell, we think of fire, lava, and sinners being horribly tortured. But where did this picture come from?

The underworld of Hades doesn't have fire, but ancient Jerusalem does. When we read the Gospels, we come upon Jesus warning people that there is this dangerous fate that might await them, and it's called Gehenna, which was the old smoldering rubbish heap in ancient Jerusalem. And because of the stink of the place and because there was so much in the way of rubbish, periodically it was set fire to and the fires there would burn for several days, if not weeks. Gehenna was the place where the Jerusalem authorities burned the bodies of executed criminals. Over time, the place came to stand for something supernatural, a spiritual fate that would await the wicked at the end of time.

Gehenna was the inspiration for the terrors of hell. By the time the Christian Gospels are written, towards the end of the first century AD, Satan has grown into a powerful figure. By now, Jewish lands are ruled by the mighty Roman Empire.

It was a time when the Romans were hated bitterly. To many Jews and Christians persecuted by Rome, Satan is the evil force behind Caesar's throne. In the New Testament book of Revelation, the writer gives Satan one of his most mysterious names, the Beast, 666. The Beast could refer to the Roman emperor himself. The author of Revelation says that the beast has a human number and it's 666. Now this is traditionally being seen as a reference to the emperor Nero.

And that's because if you take Nero Caesar in Aramaic and count up the numerical values of those letters, it comes to 666. The book of Revelation says that the devil was sent down by God into the abyss, where he will be locked up for a thousand years. When he gets out, the end of the world will come. An apocalyptic battle will take place as good and evil fight it out to the end. Satan will be let loose and will put up a final attempt to rule the world. This is kind of the dragon of chaos back again.

This is evil opposed to God. drawing on very very ancient cosmological speculation not so much from judaism itself but from the surrounding areas particularly the persians so what does the devil look like at the dawn of the christian era often he's got black skin and hair like hades ruler of the underworld his wings echo the story that he was once an angel Although they look more like the wings of a dragon. For thousands of years, the dragon was the symbol of an evil force. And it's from the dragon that Satan inherits his taloned feet. When Satan isn't being a dragon, he's a snake.

The serpent, said to have tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, has long been believed to represent the devil. Although the scriptures don't actually say so. In fact, Christian leaders disagree, sometimes violently, about what the devil is like.

But one thing they do agree on, he is busy working with and through their enemies. Four centuries after Christ, a Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, converts to Christianity. Within a generation.

The once persecuted religion is the official creed of the mightiest empire on earth. Christian bishops now have real power, backed up by the state, and they use Satan to help them keep it. Again and again, church leaders claim that those who disagree with them, especially other Christian groups, are working for the devil.

As Constantine made it the state religion and the state church and an established religion, what Constantine and his immediate successors found hardest to put up with was heresy. Catholic theologians would have said that because heretics didn't believe the correct Catholic faith, they must be worshipping the evil one instead, God's enemy. The logic. is relentless. It's us and them.

If you're not with the church and the empire, you're with Satan. It's a short step for the church to demand that heretics be put to death. The first executions come 450 years after Christ.

Over the following centuries, the numbers of people killed for supposedly working for Satan grows to many tens, possibly hundreds of thousands. Under the protection of the Roman Empire, the Christian religion grows quickly, but the bishops worry that the pagan gods are far too popular. Thousands of Romans still pray to the winged goddess Fortuna, the bringer of luck.

But the most popular pagan god of all is Pan. Christian leaders see him as a serious threat who must be discredited. Let's think of the case of Pan in Arcadia. And he becomes a sort of demon, whereas he was actually a very benign god of music and happiness and lovemaking and altogether to be admired, but becomes a goat-legged demon, a satire.

in the later Christianized versions of it. Satan now adopts Pan's best-known features. He becomes an ugly, leering beast with horns on his head.

His body is hairy, and he has Pan's cloven hooves, although sometimes he keeps the taloned feet of the ancient dragon. So outlandish has he become. that he often has a second face on his belly.

One of the greatest thinkers of the early Christian church is Saint Augustine. Augustine is keen to show that the old nature gods are dangerous demons. According to Augustine, male demons called incubi appear to women at night and seduce them.

Even more disturbing for Augustine, saintly men could be visited in their beds by female demons called succubi, and forced to do sinful things against their will. When, during the long dark hours, their frustrated minds produced all sorts of sexual visions and erotic pictures, they had to expel these from their minds. How on earth could this have come into my... My pious, celibate mind, it isn't me.

This is an entity. This is something downright evil. By the Middle Ages, after a thousand years of Christian teaching, the church has persuaded its followers that the devil and his demons are real and that Satan is a powerful enemy.

The problem is that some Christians take the idea a lot further than the bishops want. Some branches of Christianity did see the world itself as created not so much by Satan but by a lesser evil god and so for them of course everything to do with with the world with matter with human flesh was seen in negative terms. We do find the emergence of something called Gnosticism.

Gnostic Christians carried with them this very clear notion of a good God and a bad God. There's the good God who created everything spiritual, and there's the evil God who created everything physical, which means that everything that you can see or touch or sense with any of the five senses is actually coming from the evil God. One group which is taking enthusiastically to the Gnostic idea of good and evil is the Cathars of southern France.

To the Cathars, all material possessions are evil and belong to the devil. For a church now wealthy and powerful, this is an uncomfortable, even dangerous teaching. The common people loved and admired them, called them les bonhommes, because they were healers. When the Cathars went around doing good, as they most certainly did, feeding the poor and healing the sick, so... They were teaching people to avoid marriage, to avoid procreation, because all you will do, if you have a family, is to bring that new child into this decadent, evil, physical world where we should all be concentrating on spirituality.

If you were a Catholic, then you were actually in league with Satan. To question the church was to question God. Pope Innocent III announced a crusade against the Cathars. He tried to convert them. Back to Catholicism, that hadn't worked.

The only thing he could do now is kill them. The crusade against the Cathars, launched in 1209, turns into a brutal 45-year war. At least 100,000 people die, partly for saying that Satan is even more powerful than the church says he is. The crusade against the Cathars is against fellow Christians, but for almost two centuries, the crusades are mostly about fighting Islam for control of the Middle East.

In medieval Europe, Islam is seen as a heresy, the work of the devil. Muslims, too, are quick to claim their enemies are in league with the evil one. In the Quran, Muslims are instructed to fight against non-Muslims.

because they are friends of Satan. Both sides, inheriting the ancient beliefs of the Persians, see the world as divided into good and evil, justifying all the horrors of war and conquest. The Crusades leave a sinister legacy.

In the middle of the campaign, Pope Gregory IX founds the Inquisition, controlled by the Dominican Order of Friars. The Inquisition's job is to find heretics and hand them over to local princes for punishment. The Inquisition gave people plenty to be frightened of, it gave them the fires of hell to be frightened of, and it gave them, in a more immediate sense, the Inquisition itself. They had the right to arrest that person without telling them who'd accused them, or indeed what they were accused of.

The accused are guilty until found innocent. and can be held for as long as the authorities want. Anyone who questions the Inquisition is immediately suspected of being in league with the devil.

In the fight against Satan and the powers of evil, medieval rulers believed that, as in any war, information is vital. Up till now, the Church has not officially allowed Christians to be tortured. Although torturing Jews and Muslims is acceptable. But in May 1252, Pope Innocent IV rules that Christians suspected of heresy can be tortured until they confess they are working for the devil and inform on co-conspirators.

Once you've set up a debate that defines somebody as a Satanist, as a servant of Satan, then you have put them in a position where you can do what you want to them. Because you are justified by working for the forces of good. Generally, once somebody had been accused of heresy, there was no way they could clear themselves.

No matter what they said, because they were a heretic, therefore in league with the devil, therefore anything they said would like to be a lie. But the torturers can't do whatever they please. They are supposed to follow strict guidelines.

In theory, and according to Pope Innocent IV in the middle of the 30th century. Torture should be limited. It should not draw blood.

It should not lead to serious permanent damage to the person who's being tortured. In practice, these regulations are not always followed. But there's also something which the psychologists would refer to as a rationalization process, that it could all be very well for them to say, oh yes, we are trying to save your immortal soul, we're trying to keep you out of hell.

We're trying to prevent the devil from getting you. And what they really mean is we'd rather fancy your farm. All over Europe, the new powers, supposed to be used against Satan, are used by the unscrupulous to seize wealth or to do down their enemies. In 1307, King Philip the Fair of France brings witchcraft charges against the leaders of the Knights Templar, the fabulously wealthy order of crusaders.

Philip accuses the Templars of worshipping a pagan idol called Baphomet, a supposedly satanic figure. The Templars have been involved in the Middle East in negotiations with Muslims, and some people in Western Europe thought they had a league with the Muslims, and because the Muslims, everybody knew, in inverted commas, were involved in magic, there is therefore a hint that perhaps the Templars were involved in magic too. They were attacked and largely destroyed on Friday the 13th of October in 1307. Sealed orders given by Philip LaBelle to his seneschals to attack every Templar stronghold simultaneously. Ever since the purge of the Templars, Friday the 13th has been seen as an unlucky day, somehow connected with satanic forces. In 1320...

the war against Satan is wound up another notch. Pope John XXII orders the Inquisition to target any kind of witchcraft, sorcery or necromancy. A big worry is that unscrupulous priests who know how to drive out devils with the rites of exorcism might instead use exorcism to invite the devil in. Formulas, Latin formulas and rituals which can be used... to command the demon.

Now, once you've got a Latin formula that has power to command a demon, I could use that to command a demon to do my washing up, you know? I could use that power to command a demon to get this woman I fancy into bed. The necromancers are interested in using the formulae of exorcism to command demons to do other things that they are interested in. You know, a demon could make me rich. A demon could find some hidden treasure for me.

Fear that necromancers and witches are all around, conjuring up demons and making pacts with the devil, sweeps across Europe. One of the first cases investigated by the Inquisition is in the Irish city of Kilkenny. In 1324, in a dispute over inheritance, one of the richest women in the town, Dame Alice Cattela, is accused of witchcraft. heresy and of having a demon lover called robin alice taylor a landowner in kilkenny who had several husbands so had stepchildren brought a charge against her that she poisoned her previous husbands in order to obtain the land and she poisoned or killed them otherwise through witchcraft alice manages to escape to england her unfortunate servant Petronella is tortured and burned at the stake. The campaign against necromancers, sorcerers and witches lasts 300 years and kills between 60,000 and 300,000 people.

The vast majority of the victims are women. Women were thought of as being more prone to the devil, more likely to sin. more likely to be led astray. They were also thought to be less intellectual than men. Women were seen as closer to animals and part of this was that they were more susceptible to temptation, that they were more easily seduced by material gratification.

As the Inquisition goes about its grisly business, rounding up suspects and interrogating them, many clerics and lay people worry that it's all guesswork. Perhaps they're missing even more witches than they're finding. But how can you tell who is one of Satan's helpers?

What you need is a standard test. In 1486, two German Dominican monks publish a textbook for inquisitors called Malleus Maleficarum, The Hammer of Witches. The book contains a clever catch-22.

Not only is witchcraft heresy, not believing in witches is heresy as well. The Malleus Maleficarum was the manual, the how to get rid of all these demonic fleas that had infested a human being. It was a book of what witches were, what witches did.

Malleus Maleficarum tells the Inquisitor everything he needs to know. Witches have the mark of Satan on their bodies. A birthmark or a wart. They can fly by rubbing magical herbs on their skin.

And they gather at Satan-worshipping ceremonies called Sabbaths. At these, they celebrate a twisted version of the Christian mass, kissing the devil's rear end in a blasphemous act of homage. Certainly there was a fear at that time, which was why Malleus Maleficarum... Sold so many copies and ran through so many editions and is still in print. 30 years after Malleus Maleficarum was written, Martin Luther leaves the Protestant Reformation, splitting the Christian Church in two.

Each faction, Protestant and Catholic, claims the other is in league with the evil one. Both sides use Malleus Maleficarum to find Satanists, and not just in order to destroy them. Witch hunting is a kind of scientific quest.

The idea is, if you can understand witches and the devil, you can fight them. The whole business of witch hunting is almost a sort of intellectual research project. I need to gather a bit more data about, you know, what demons do.

So I'm going to interrogate a few more witches to get a bit more data, and then I'm going to write it up in my book. The cutting edge of scientific inquiry. Right across Europe, hysteria about Satan sweeps Protestant and Catholic countries alike.

In Scotland, James VI, one of the best educated kings in Europe, is so caught up in the craze, he writes a book about the devil and witchcraft. Called Demonology, James' book sets out to prove that Satan-worshipping witches are everywhere. and that they are the gravest threat to the security of the state. He surrounded himself with advisers, and mainly religious advisers, who would protect him from the demons that he feared so much. He saw it everywhere.

Well, James was certainly quite militant about this. He thought he was fighting a war. Even as James leads the fight against the devil and the forces of evil, the devil is helping James to keep his crown.

James can always point to the figure of Satan and say, if it weren't for me, look who would be ruling in my place. Although this is quite frightening, it's also in a way quite gratifying for James. One of the witches who was interrogated was asked, why is the devil attacking our king? And the witch who was confessing allegedly answered, this was what was recorded anyway in her confession, the devil is doing this because King James is the greatest enemy that the devil has in the world.

When the new world of the Americas is colonized by Europeans, the devil travels with them. The Puritan colonists who arrived from England in the late 1600s are strong believers in the power of Satan. They're convinced that everyone who isn't a Puritan is controlled by the devil.

and that women are especially susceptible to Satan's powers. They had established what might be called Puritan communities and were looking to build a great example for the rest of Christendom. If you were enjoying yourself, or if a group of you were singing or dancing or having a drink, then those who were opposed to that kind of fun were quite certain that Satan was filling the glasses for you.

In 1688 in Boston, an Irish laundry woman called Mary Glover is accused of bewitching the children of one of her customers. Proof of her pact with the devil includes several rag dolls found in her house. Mary Glover was Irish and a servant.

Her first language was Gaelic and one of the tests to prove that you weren't a witch was to speak the Lord's Prayer. The linguistic difficulties meant that she couldn't speak the Lord's Prayer without, as they saw it, blaspheming. She was hanged as a witch in 1688. Three years after Mary Glover is hanged, less than 20 miles away at Salem, Massachusetts, the testimony of three young girls leads to a mass execution.

Some of the children were said to be possessed by spirits sent from the witches. And so when they were standing witness, they were effectively, they were performing being possessed. In the Salem witch hunt, 150 people are arrested, 19 men and women are hung or... Crushed to death, 17 others die in prison. In an ironic twist to the story, the Salem jury later apologized, blaming the devil for their mistake.

By the 1700s, the witch craze in America and Europe is almost over. A new... more scientific view of the world is gaining ground. Modernism, as the project that we get from the 18th century Enlightenment, actually banished religion, superstition and all of that and just said that that belongs to the dark ages. We are now in the modern world, we believe in facts, we believe in science, and if you want to be religious, that's a private option which you can go and practice somewhere else.

Although the witch hunts have ended, And the educated classes of Europe and America even start to question whether the devil exists. In the folk tales of ordinary people, Satan lives on. But he's very different from the formidable and terrifying devil of the witch finders.

One of my own favorites is that of Dunstan, who was a very powerful blacksmith. The devil arrives and asks to have his shoes replaced. And he simply gets hold of his nose with two red hot tongs and throws him out. And that is a very, very different devil. That's a devil that you can put in his place.

By now, the devil has shared some of his ugliness and crude habits. In fact, he's often a member of the decadent aristocracy. He's a handsome gentleman dressed in fine clothes and mixing in fashionable company.

Like Hades, the Greek god of the underworld, and the Satan of the ancient Gnostic heresies, this Satan controls the material world of wealth, power, and sex. He can give all these things to you if you promise him your soul. The most famous of all devil folktales is the story of Faust, the devil in the form of the clever, and devious Mephistopheles offers to grant Faust all his wishes, but there's a price. One of the things that many necromancers or people using necromantic spells are interested in is how to get women into bed. Faust is very interested in that, and he gets all kinds of women, including Helen of Troy.

Faust's bargain with the devil ends in disaster for Faust. Mephistopheles calls in his debt, and Faust... dies horribly. The devil takes him away to spend eternity in hell. As the power of religion fades, and the age of popes and kings gives way to the age of revolution and democracy, a new devil arrives on the scene.

This devil... is utterly different from the treacherous fiend of Christian tradition. He is a tragic and lonely figure, a hero battling against tyrannical authority in the shape of a cruel and overbearing god.

Satan is now a brave and handsome rebel. And so you get the kind of romantic view of Satan as not really... a villain or an evil person at all, but the opposite of that.

Satan is a good guy who's challenging the boss. In the age of romanticism, we find the poets, particularly like Byron, creating a Byronic hero who is somehow dark and sinister and has a past. And so, far from being something to shun and something to fear, the devil is admired.

With the 20th century, the devil's fortunes take a turn for the worse. No longer feared or admired, he becomes a figure of fun. He even joins the world of commerce, helping to sell products from wine to chocolates and beer. In the age of marketing and the consumer society, Satan can bring the lure of the forbidden to a tired brand.

It's a long way from an apocalyptic war between good and evil. It has been a whore. hallmark of the 20th century for the devil to be treated as a figure of fun we find the devil is neither better nor worse than the people he's dealing with and he's just a man among men satan seems to have been cut down to size the prince of darkness has become a mischievous imp but in a surprising twist a different satan The glamorous rebel so admired by the revolutionaries of the 19th century makes a startling comeback in the 1960s. There was a strong sense of rebellion against everything that anointed the Western political power structure. And it was Christian, it was capitalist, it was warmongering.

And so the counterculture started... exploring anything that was counter to that. In 1966, occult showman Anton LaVey founds the Church of Satan in San Francisco.

Part religion, part money-making racket, the Church of Satan attracts lurid headlines, mostly encouraged by the publicity-seeking LaVey himself. We believe in greed, we believe in selfishness, we believe in all of the lustful... thoughts that motivate man because this is man's natural feeling. He called himself Anton Sander LeVay of Romanian descent, but the truth of the matter is he was Howard Stanton Levy, who was born in Cook County, Illinois in 1930. He held these weekend lectures and witch circles in his house, and people would come in and pay their $2 a head. Well, finally, he had this...

Friend, it was a publicist who said, you know, I have an idea. Why don't you turn this thing into a church? You could make a bundle of money.

And of course, that's what he did. He has been called everything from a carny to a manipulator to a brilliant philosopher. The truth lies somewhere in the middle. There were doctors, lawyers, college students, factory workers, farmers, you name it.

They came from all levels of society. In spite of the invented rituals, mostly staged for the cameras, neither LaVey nor his followers believe in a real devil. What LaVey admires is Satan the rebel, the nonconformist, provoking the establishment.

Predictably, America is fascinated and outraged. In 1967, the 60s fascination with the occult, spearheaded by LaVey's Church of Satan, gets a powerful boost from Hollywood. The film Rosemary's Baby, a dark tale of devil worshippers in Manhattan, is a massive and unexpected hit.

In Roman Polanski's masterpiece... The heroine's innocuous neighbors are part of a satanic conspiracy to help the Prince of Darkness father a child who will rule the world. In Rosemary's Baby, Satan triumphs in the end. But the Christian backlash to the story comes in the 1973 blockbuster The Exorcist. This time, the devil, who has possessed a young girl, is defeated by the forces of good in the shape of two priests.

The old belief that women are especially susceptible to satanic influence is revived two centuries after the Salem Witch Triad. We would be seriously in error if we were to underestimate the power of Hollywood. I think the biggest impact was probably around the time of The Exorcist. I know many people I've talked to about the movie, especially those raised in a Christian household. who are very frightened by it, very upset.

It's the war between good and evil, but evil is in a whole new dimension, and it's very personal. It made being possessed almost fashionable. The numbers of people who were seen to be possessed just took off.

I've been invited to exercise people who were convinced they had a demon, and you will get people who put them through it. And it can be very violent and very dramatic and very expressive, but it can really flip someone into serious, serious ill health. Hollywood's discovery that fortunes can be made with stories of possession Devil worship stokes the fires of a paranoia that has lain dormant since the days of the witch trials. In the 1980s, stories about a vast conspiracy of organized Satanists sweep the media. Known as the Satanic Panic, Christian groups allege mass satanic abuse of children and tens of thousands of kidnappings.

Part of the Satanic Panic started with... Accusations of satanic ritual abuse. Groups of people who declared themselves as Satanists were believed to be taking people and children and damaging them.

There were all kinds of dark suggestions about children disappearing and about child sacrifice and ritual murder. Although hundreds of people are arrested and imprisoned, when the FBI finally launches a full-scale investigation in the United States, It concludes that the satanic abuse allegations are all groundless. One of the horrifying things about human nature is that it lends itself to hysteria. You get it in all periods of history.

I think you get it much more virulently nowadays because one of the most potent instruments for spreading hysteria is the modern telecommunications industry. If members of satanic religions mostly don't believe in a supernatural devil and don't pray to Satan, what does the devil represent? Some Satanists claim the devil stands for a spirit of change.

A lot of people are frightened by the term Satanism. A lot of people automatically think that Satanists are bad people. They should be no more scared of a Satanist than they should be scared of anyone else they meet.

You know what Satanism means to me is... Opposition and balance. Alternative thought, playing the devil's advocate.

There is no good and evil. I mean, to a mouse, a cat is this horrible, evil thing with fangs. But to the pet owner, the cat is heavenly. We create our own reality. That's the whole idea behind Satanism.

In the United States, Surveys show that almost half of Americans believe the devil is real. Even non-religious people instinctively divide the world into good and evil, the opposing principles taught by Zoroaster to the ancient Persians. If anything, recent events have made that belief even stronger. In September 2001, The massive terrorist attacks on the United States, which destroyed the World Trade Center, shocked America to its core. To many, it seemed as if sinister forces had gone on the offensive.

It was easy to believe that this was a showdown between the forces of good and evil. To the U.S. government, and a large section of American opinion, the attacks were about much more than politics. We've come to know truths that we will never question.

Evil is real, and it must be opposed. You're either with us, or you're against us. And if you're against us, by and large, you're going to be working hand-in-hand with Satan. It was Reagan that talked about the evil empire. Bush talks about the axis of evil.

It's classic, ancient, dualistic thinking. In the wake of the 9-11 attacks, President Bush gave the job of catching Osama bin Laden, the man responsible for the atrocity, to Lieutenant General William G. Boykin. But according to Boykin, America's real foe isn't bin Laden. In the general's words, the enemy of the U.S. is a guy called Satan.

Since 2001, The draconian measures taken by the US and other governments in the war on terror are uncannily like those of the war on Satan of 400 years ago. Imprisonment without trial, secret hearings, anonymous tip-offs and torture. We are seeing a similar willingness to justify mistreatment, to justify the removal of rights, the justifiable use of torture.

against the perceived enemy in the war against terrorism. If you're fighting a war against evil, what begins to happen, I think, is that you end up by turning into the evil that you're fighting. Controversially, President Bush called the invasion of Iraq a crusade. The similarities with the historic crusades against heretics are striking. They include a belief on the battlefield that the enemy are not just military opponents, but agents of pure evil.

In November 2004, as US forces launch a massive attack on the Iraqi city of Fallujah, a senior marine officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gareth Brandl, makes clear who he thinks the enemy is. The enemy has got a face. He's called Satan.

He's in blue. We're going to destroy him. It's embroidery, it's myth-making, it's poetry.

It can be good fun, except that it has produced great evils. A human invention, but one that's rebounded on us because it's given us permission to do terrible things to each other. Which is why I think that we should close hell down and finally banish the devil and get rid of him. Thank you.

Transcript for:The Evolution of Satan's Concept

Transcript for:
The Evolution of Satan's Concept