Snaking into our consciousness: Scales of evil and the origins of the Devil
Before Christianity there was Judaism, and the Jewish religion is where the Christian concept of the Devil, at least for western civilisation, comes, but that was based on writings by one of the most ancient peoples known to us, the Babylonians. They existed almost two thousand years before the birth of Christ, and even they were a fledgling compared to their forebears, the Sumerians, who flourished around about 3,500 BC. But while the Sumerians had their gods of course, and dark ones too - one who ruled the underworld, as in most mythologies - they don’t seem to have had an actual evil one, a concept, if you will, of what we came to know as the Devil. The area of Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq and Syria) provided the backdrop for both civilisations, and the Babylonians gave us the legend of Tiamat, the huge female dragon who fought against Ba’al at the creation of the world. Interestingly, if we take this as being the first real example of the Devil, then originally Satan was female.
Tiamat was taken by the Jewish scholars and transformed into Leviathan, whom we read of in the Bible:
'In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish Leviathan, the piercing serpent, even Leviathan, the crooked serpent; and he shall slay the Dragon that is in the sea' (Isaiah 27:1) A point to note here is, as discussed by me in other journals, the original dragon seems to have been a serpent, leading inevitably to the slithery one’s gatecrashing the first ever Garden Party, which ended with all guests being booted out.
But from the writings of the Babylonians as transcribed and adapted by the Hebrew rabbis, already Tiamat/Leviathan is a symbol of evil. Also a creature of great power. Well, it would have to be, wouldn’t it? An evil bug or stick insect or whelk wouldn’t exactly pose any threat to humanity. But God makes no bones about it in the Book of Job, found in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, when he says
"Behold, the hope of him is in vain; shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?" (Job 41: 1- 44)
By the time we get to Jewish writings, like the Book of Enoch, the serpent has become a dragon, possibly to differentiate it from the serpent in the Garden of Eden, and has been joined by Behemoth, a land monster, both of which are fated to be killed and “served up to the righteous” at Judgement Day. Here’s what God has to say about his other chaos creation, again in the Book of Job:
Behold, Behemoth, which I made as I made you; he eats grass like an ox.
Behold, his strength in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly.
He makes his tail stiff like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are knit together.
His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron.
He is the first of the works of God; let him who made him bring near his sword!
For the mountains yield food for him where all the wild beasts play.
Under the lotus plants he lies, in the shelter of the reeds and in the marsh.
For his shade the lotus trees cover him; the willows of the brook surround him.
Behold, if the river is turbulent he is not frightened; he is confident though Jordan rushes against his mouth.
Can one take him by his eyes, or pierce his nose with a snare?
(Job, 40: 15-24)
But of course, when you’re dealing with something as ancient, intricate and complex as the origins of the Devil - one might say, the very origins of evil itself - that’s only half the story. For the other half, we have to look east, to the ancient kingdom of Persia, modern day Iran, and its greatest religious leader, who founded a whole system of belief based on the concepts of good and evil in a way nobody else had considered up to then.
Zoroaster (anywhere from 1700 BC to 550 BC)
As you can work out from the above, nobody has any real idea when he lived, or indeed exactly where, though it’s believed he resided on the Iranian Plateau. What is agreed is that he was a prophet, and like most of them, a rebel who challenged established belief in his native land and went against the accepted order, having had an epiphany when he met the god Vohu Manah, a “shining Being” he encountered near a river. Vohu Manah taught him about Ahura Mazda, the creator god of the Persians, and his opposite number, Angra Mainyu, explaining to him the concept of good and bad, or good and evil, or light and dark, or whatever you’re having yourself. He defined them as Asha (order) and Druj (deception). You may be surprised to find (I certainly was) that many of the principle precepts of what is now Christianity, Judaism and Islam - the Abrahamic Religions, as they are known - began with Zoroaster: concepts of good and evil, as I’ve already mentioned, but also Heaven and Hell as places, the resurrection of the body, Judgement Day and the promise of eternal life after death all came from the religion he would establish, which would become the accepted religion of Persia, and would be known as Zoroastrianism.
In a scenario we now recognise as very familiar, Angra Mainyu (possibly, though I can’t confirm, where the word anger comes from?) fights the creator god Ahura Mazda, is cast down out of Heaven with his attendant daevas (demons, but surely one origin of the word devil?) into Hell, where he rules and tries to upset the plans of his enemy. From his base in Hell, Angra Mainyu - also known as Ahriman, one of the many names that would be attributed to the Devil - can go forth into the world of men and seek to corrupt them, and the idea is born of an eternal and endless battle for the soul of humanity played out by these two opposing forces of good and evil. Being seen as good, Ahura Mazda or Ormazd as he is sometimes known is the essence of purity and truth, while Angra Mainyu or Ahriman is the personification of untruth, filth and death, possibly giving rise to our epithet for our Devil, Satan, the Father of Lies. This whole concept of two separate forces though goes against ancient belief.
The Egyptians and other civilisations believed that everything came from the supreme creator god, and so both good and evil were part of him and were gifts from him. Though there are conflicts among the Egyptian gods, none are seen primarily or solely as evil. Even Set, who attacked and killed Osiris, was seen as a powerful creator god, though later, as other influences joined the mythos he was indeed reimagined as an evil, dark, hostile being, the very personification of darkness and evil. As Egyptian pharaohs very often took Jewish slaves, many of whom may have been involved in building structures such as the Sphinx and the Pyramids, the influence of their legends may have leaked into the teachings of later Hebrew texts, and helped to create this evil being who would be known as Satan.
Hinduism, though its pantheon includes gods of darkness and destruction - notably Kali and Shiva - does not hold one particular god or goddess as being evil, as each god is a mirror image of the other, with good and evil to be seen in both. Kail, the destroyer, is the obverse of the mother god who nourishes all things. The Jews seem, from what I can see, to have been the first major race to have postulated, created or decided to follow the principle of there being only one god, a supreme being who did not have other gods under his control; no wife, no sister, no brother. Yahweh says
'I form the Light and create darkness. I make peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things.' (Isaiah, 45:7) however later doubts began to grow. How could Yahweh be God, the great and good, and yet be associated with evil? Surely there was a way to separate the evil from the good?
Jews came under the influence of the Persians during the Babylonian Exile around 600 BC, when King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon forced them into slavery as punishment for the refusal of the King of Judah, Jehoiakim, to pay tribute. First he took nobles captive as well as the slain king’s son Jeconiah, who had succeeded him, back to Babylon, but when Judah again rose against him, this time under the new king’s uncle Zedekiah, Nebuchadnezzar returned and this time burned the city, captured Zedekiah and his sons, had the boys executed in front of their father, who was then blinded and taken prisoner along with “many others” in about 587 BC. The Babylonian Chronicles relates the story:
In the seventh year, in the month of Kislev, the king of Akkad mustered his troops, marched to the Hatti-land, and encamped against the City of Judah and on the ninth day of the month of Adar he seized the city and captured the king. He appointed there a king of his own choice and taking heavy tribute brought it back to Babylon.
It was probably around this period that the ideas of Zoroastrianism discussed above made their way into Jewish belief as a handy way to, as it were, account for God’s having created evil. Now it was not he who brought evil, but his Adversary, his Enemy, whom Hebrew texts would soon name as Satan, the Accuser or Adversary. Now God had an antagonist against whom he struggled on behalf of man, and the whole Fall of Satan story was copied-and-pasted into the early Jewish texts, amended, of course, as they saw fit. In terms of the Abrahamic religions at any rate, Satan had been born. The Devil had arrived.
So Satan became the enemy, both of God and man, the one who tempted, the one who tried to corrupt, the one who was against all God’s works and wished to destroy them, including what was seen as his greatest creation, man. Believers no longer had to struggle to understand the worrying duality of God, in whom originally good and evil had resided equally. Now, the evil had been surgically, or theologically excised from the bright flesh of God, and he was pure and good, the evil being essentially formed into a mass and fashioned into what we know now as the Devil. While Kabbalah, a school of thought in Jewish mysticism, held to the notion that God was good
and evil, and from his right hand proceeded all that was good while from his left came death and destruction, and that his left hand separated itself and became evil, the accepted origin of evil codified itself in the story of the Great Fall, which romanticised the idea of Satan and gave much fodder to writers such as Milton, Virgil and Dante.