The History of the Devil

I like a documentary, The Devil's Advocate does. History of the Devil (2007) is really good, informative and concise. A cost-Welsh film in association with SBS in Australia is produced and distributed by visual siren, about 52 minutes long (presumably, eight minutes for the TV commercial breaks) and packs a fair amount of history in the dinkum time is running thin.

The same film is made entirely of still images usually sporadic, alternating with Talking Heads, religious scholars, theologians and ministers together. Directed by Greg Moodie and written and produced by Dave Flitton was Ni Eibhleann Ghriofa, Deirdre Learmont and Craig McGregor studied (Gaelic name if I ever heard!) is an amazing story and very open and offers a fantastic idea in evolution, how and why the mind and the devil over time from the dawn of civilization has been transformed into the new millennium.

Lucifer brooding

So despite its relatively low-fi approach, the richness and diversity of its imagery; the historical plaques, plates, engravings, illustrations, paintings, drawings, and the occasional staged re-enactment (some dude dressed up in rather bemusing demonic attire), keeps the documentary at a high level of beguilement.

Satan loses his bearings

So just what is exposed and discussed? I won’t go into great detail suffice to say the Persians have got a lot to answer for. Over the centuries the Devil has been used as an excuse for more inhumanity to humankind than any war. In fact if you look closely at the current war on terror, it resembles a witch-hunt, but more on that later. I wanted to get a bit more research on this documentary, but it’s not listed at imdb.com; pretty much a cottage production this one (curiously its exempt from ratings classification, which I presume means it's aimed for use in schools).

Mephistopheles takes flight

Functions from this and that. The fire of hell hell in Jerusalem, where a huge garbage dump in the Valley of Hinnom is often settled in and often for days, sometimes weeks were burned. The New Testament is the explanation of the animal, the number discovered 666 apparently a reference to the Roman emperor Nero (by the addition of certain facts and figures for official currency.)

At the time when Christianity was black in the heyday of the Diablo with the claws on the legs and huge dragon wings. The church uses the devil as a way to stay in power, basically a panic. Armageddon was when the big showdown would take between the devil and the Second Coming, and if they on the right side would feel the heat.

The Devil, Lucifer, Mephistopheles, Beelzebub, the Beast, the Dark One, the Prince of Darkness, Diablolus, Old Nick, Satan. He’s had many names. As it turns out the Satan is probably the oldest tag. It means “the accused”. He was a servant of God in Heaven, and wasn’t evil. It was the Persians, 3000 years ago, under Zoroaster's teachings that essentially reduced the deities down to two: good and evil.

The Greeks had Hades who ruled the underworld. Although he wasn’t particularly liked by the other Gods, and had a disgruntled disposition, he was not evil by nature. He was more of a God of justice, deciding whether the dead should be punished for bad deeds or patted on the back for good ones. Hades did however provide the Devil with his inherent moodiness and powers of damnation.

St. Mchael defeats Lucifer

Along the way The Devil and Hell’s

Pan gets panned

It was inevitable that witch-hunts would escalate as the Church sought to find scapegoats to illustrate the insidious evil doings of the Devil. Pan, the God of rejoicing and love-making (amongst other things) was bastardized and the Devil mutated into having horns and hairy goat’s legs and hooved feet. He’d become the great wicked seducer, and spawned incubi and succubi (male and female demons that raped innocent and pure of heart people as they slept).

During the Middle Ages, after 1000 years of Christian rule, the diabolical Inquisition was instated and over the next 300 years anywhere between 60,000 to 300,000 innocent people were accused of being witches or involved in witchcraft and killed (usually burned alive at the stake). The superstitious date of Friday the 13th stems from this period (from the year 1307). Necromancy was a dangerous past-time, and women were the most susceptible, apparently much more prone to temptation than men.

An incubus won't let the women sleep at night

One of the biggest selling manuscripts of the time (which apparently is still in print) was Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches). According to Wikipedia “the main purpose of the Malleus was to systematically refute arguments claiming that witchcraft did not exist, refute those who expressed skepticism about its reality, to prove that witches were more often women than men, and to educate magistrates on the procedures that could find them out and convict them.” Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

The Hammer of Witches

It was in this book that the practice of witches kissing the ass of the Devil as a sign of worship was conceived. “Kiss my ass” is a term that exists to this day as a form of contemptuous abuse to another person.

Let's burn some people!

Demonology was a book written by King James VI about the Devil and witchcraft. He fervently believed he was fighting a war. As a result witch-hunting intensified. A famous case was the mass executions in the township of Salem, America where 150 people were arrested and 19 were hanged or crushed to death. Years later the Jury apologized and rested the blame on the Devil. The event was made popular to modern audiences in the play The Crucible.

Tarot card

With Modernism came further change for Lucifer. He started to be painted in a favourable light; a kind of handsome devil, able to control wealth, power and sex. But it came with a price: your soul. The famous fable of Faust was born; the tragic tale of an ordinary man who conjures Satan and is promised the world in return for his soul. Faust indulges in all the opportunity and slides into decadence. Then the Devil comes a-knockin’ …

With Romanticism came a dark, anti-hero, a Byronic Devil who could be admired. The 20th Century turned the Devil toward commerce and advertising fare such as absinthe (a devilish concoction if ever there was one!) The Devil was considered “fun”, a mischievous imp. The ‘60s meant rebellion and in 1966 the Church of Satanism was formed by Anton Levey, holding weekend witch circles and promoting a strictly non-conformist approach to one’s lifestyle, but it was mostly a bunch of charlatans eager for 15 minutes of fame in front of cameras.

Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby

Roman Polanski’s surprise darling with critics and audiences, Rosemary’s Baby (1968), followed by William Freidkin’s monster king-hit The Exorcist (1973) showed that Hollywood was able to manipulate The Devil to very wealthy ends for creative and corporate types. Crazy as it sounds but being possessed was interpreted as fashionable.

The ‘80s produced conspiracy with the Satanic Panic; supposed child kidnappings and sacrifices which spread like hellfire across America. But authorities dismissed it as mostly the product of hysteria; it seems human nature lends itself to this kind of behaviour, especially in this exponentially-curved age of telecommunications.

Apparently in a recent survey 50% of Americans believe in the Devil. I’m sure the events of 9/11 didn’t do much to dispel that belief. The whole “us and them” concept was compounded and hammered over Americans’ heads; President Bush’s Axis of Evil being the centerpiece. In fact, the War on Terror crusade is uncannily like the witch-hunts of hundreds of years ago; arresting and detaining without real reason and the torture. Osama Bin Laden became the new face of Satan.

If only the history of the Devil was just a bad dream

Well, enough of the rant. The story of the devil is not fascinating because of the lengths and measures that the civilized world has an invention with the handling and the devil, a creation which has restored and Humanity-style dragon terrible atrocities against each other. Sure, Satan has no outlet interesting element in the literature and also been misused as a figure of poetic license, the sale, but does not seem to mankind can stir Ghost. The devil appears to remain in all its grotesque glory to this paragraph here.