An Abridged History of the Devil and his Relatives

 ~  In the Land of the Blind, the Man with One Eye is Burning in Hell.  ~

                Satan’s an interesting dude.  I guess evil is always more interesting than good.  I click on all news links about Dick Cheney, but never Mother Teresa.  Satan doesn't really make an appearance in the Old Testament, but he’s a major player in The New.  He doesn't get the screen time of, say a Herod or a Judas, but he’s always right there underneath it all.  He’s like The Great Pumpkin on “Peanuts”.  He gets talked about a lot, even when he doesn't show his face.

            Making the serpent in the Garden of Eden into Satan in slimy legless form is a New Testament addition to the Old, and isn't included in all of the touring company shows.  God was just pissed off at a snake, a talking snake, a talking snake with a plan, a talking snake with a plan to make people wear clothes, a talking snake with a plan to make people wear clothes and feel ashamed of their bodies (If there was anything in Genesis about the snake dropping by the mall and THEN making people feel ashamed of their bodies, I’d understand it.)  If there were no snakes, we’d all be nude and cool with it.  If there were no snakes, there would be no anorexia, no liposuction, and no Clairol.  That would mean that there wouldn't be Crocs (which would be a goodly improvement), but there also wouldn't be eye make-up (which may be evil, but IS hot, so who cares?). 

            I get it that snakes are evil.  If it were my book, I might make it a giraffe instead of a snake, but only because I like the idea of an evil giraffe bending his neck down to whisper fruity  temptation into a naked girl’s ear.         

            The idea of evil in our deities isn't new.  Some of the Greek Olympians were pretty evil, maybe most of them.  Zeus turned into swans, bulls, and random people in order to have plenty of rape sex with lots of girls and boys.  Hera was always jealous and trying to screw up her husband’s (also her brother) plans.  They were like The Honeymooners, always bickering but with magic.  BUT, the ancients saw the gods as imperfect reflections of humanity.  That’s a part of why their myths are so damn good.  They looked at their human heroes with more of an air of divinity, in the religions of the book sense, than they did their gods.  Even Hades (or Pluto if you prefer the Roman version and aren't still pissed about Pluto, the planet’s, demotion) isn't totally evil.  Yeah, he runs the underworld, but it’s everybody’s underworld, not the Dantesque version with the irony and the eternal torment. 

            For centuries, Satan was just this totally evil guy ruling hell.  We knew that he was a bad guy.  We read about his tempting Jesus in the desert, but Luke doesn't really give a physical description of the dark one.  It doesn't say anything about the devil being an impish red guy with a tail and horns.  After forty days, there’s some foreshadowing.  “When the devil had finished all that tempting, he left him until an opportune time.” (Luke 4:13, New International Version). 

            Was that opportune time The Renaissance?  Looking back, it seems like the devil got his due in The Renaissance.  He got his fifteen minutes.  A lot of painters put Satan in their work.  But, we got a lot of everything in The Renaissance. 

            I like to think that his “opportune time” was more recent, in the twentieth century, when he was basically given corporate branding (itself a moderately evil concept).  It was in the last century when Satan got “his look”.  That’s when he became a big red guy with horns, a tail and cloven hooves.  Really only the hooves have anything to do with The Bible at all.  For centuries, the devil had no toys.  Eventually, he was given a pitchfork.  I get it that for most of our history, we've been an agrarian people, but Satan is supposed to be the embodiment of evil.  Why didn't the devil get a more completely evil accessory?  We could have given him a cat o' nine tails or a mace.  There were hundreds of instruments of torture to choose from.  We chose to give him a device used for moving hay.

            And, as if that weren't enough, in the mid-80’s, Satan was given his own musical genre, heavy metal.  It’s bad music.  It can barely be called music at all, so I guess that’s evil.  Bands of all metallic stripes sang odes to Satan.  For a while there, his tribute songs ranged from the glitzy, hair-spray-heavy glam rock to the pounding, primal screaming of death metal.  Even “holier” musical genres talked about Satan.  In my life, I must have heard at least ten country songs with references to the devil.  Sometimes they even mention his relatives.  “The devil’s daughter” is a common country lyrical staple.  They rarely mention the devil’s nephew, the devil’s second cousin or the devil’s conjoined twin, but his daughter gets radio play across the dial. 

            Lately, Satan’s dropped off the radar.  If you watch the news, you know that he’s still around.  In fact, he looks pretty busy these days: spilling oil in the Gulf of Mexico, coordinating drone strikes, tanking the world economy, then, instead of feeling rightly ashamed, stealing more of our money, judging network TV song and dance contests, and explaining to women the differences between “legitimate rape” and “bad rape.”  Satan’s still around, but he’s ditched the pitchfork for a pinstriped suit and a twentieth floor Wall Street office.  The devil’s so busy these days that he needs a hell of a lot of daughters to pull off all that evil.    

               <<Illustration courtesy of www.godandscience.org>>