Satan

In Hebrew, satan is a common noun meaning adversary, the one who stands in the way, and the Bible uses it first of people: of political enemies and of a king's rivals. The first time it designates a heavenly being, the result is disconcerting. In the book of Numbers, when Balaam is on his way to curse Israel, the one who blocks his path as a satan is the angel of the Lord. There the adversary is an envoy of God doing his job.

In the book of Job the word carries the article: ha-satan, the adversary, and that is enough to know it is not yet a proper name but a post. He is a member of the divine council, he presents himself with the other sons of God, and his function is that of prosecutor: he argues that Job's piety is self-interested and asks permission to test it. He asks, and it is granted. In Zechariah he does the same before the high priest Joshua, and there too he is rebuked, not expelled.

The moment when the office becomes a person can be pointed at, because the Bible tells the same episode twice. The second book of Samuel says that the anger of the Lord was kindled against Israel and incited David to take the census. The first book of Chronicles, written centuries later, tells the same thing and changes the subject: Satan stood up against Israel and incited David. No article. Between one book and the other, the adversary has stopped being a function of the heavenly council and has become someone.

The rest is done by the literature of the Second Temple, which fuses him with Belial, with Mastema and with the chiefs of the Watchers, and gives him what he lacked: a host, a kingdom and a date of falling.

No biblical text describes Satan. Neither the Old Testament nor the gospels say a word about his appearance: in the temptation in the desert he speaks, and he is not painted. Everything the reader recognises today was manufactured afterwards, and it can be dated.

First comes the dragon. The twelfth chapter of Revelation presents a great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, and identifies it with the ancient serpent, the devil and Satan; from there comes the winged, prehensile-tailed monster of medieval art that devours the damned on Romanesque tympanums. Then comes the pagan loan: the goat horns, the cloven hooves and the hairy legs come from satyrs and from Pan, and served Christian artists to mark bestiality and lust. The pitchfork is later still and is not even his: it was lent to him by the iconography of the Greco-Roman underworld.

The handsome devil, by contrast, is modern. The fallen angel of tragic beauty and broken wings is born with Milton's Paradise Lost in the seventeenth century, and his definitive image is fixed by Gustave Doré illustrating it, already in the nineteenth. Kabbalah crosses him with Samael, and the French occultism of that same century supplies the inverted pentagram and the goat's head that are his signature today. None of this is ancient, and saying so takes nothing from him: it dates him.

The third chapter of Genesis does not say the serpent is Satan. It says he was the most cunning of all the beasts of the field that the Lord God had made: an animal, not an angel. And the punishment he receives is an animal's, to crawl on his belly and eat dust all the days of his life, which makes no sense if the condemned is a spirit.

The identification is later and has authors. The book of Wisdom, written in Greek around the first century before our era, says that through the devil's envy death entered the world, and that phrase is the first seam. The second and decisive one is given by Revelation, which lists four names as if they were one: the great dragon, the ancient serpent, who is called the devil and Satan. With that verse, the reptile of Eden, the prosecutor of Job, the dragon of the vision and the tempter of the gospels are welded into a single character, and so it has remained.

The apple, for its part, is nowhere: Genesis says fruit, and no more. The apple arrives with the Latin of the Vulgate and with a pun, because malum means both apple and evil. A tree of the knowledge of good and evil became, by homonymy, an apple tree.

In the gospels Satan is already a character with a name and a plan. He tempts Jesus in the desert offering him the kingdoms of the world, he is called the prince of this world and the father of lies, and he enters into Judas. Paul calls him the god of this age. It is here, and not in the Old Testament, that the enemy the culture recognises is born: the prosecutor who used to ask permission has become a rival.

Late demonology placed him at the top of a bureaucracy. The grimoires and the infernal dictionaries, above all Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire infernal of 1818, give him a court of princes with portfolios: Beelzebub, Asmodeus, Mammon. A point everyone gets wrong deserves stating: Satan is not among the seventy-two spirits of the Ars Goetia, which is a catalogue of something else. And in several of those hierarchies Lucifer and Satan appear as two distinct entities, with the former above.

In Islam the role is taken by Iblis, the one who refused to bow before Adam, also called Shaytan; the Qur'an treats him as a jinn and not as a fallen angel, and that difference is real and not a nuance. And in the twentieth century Anton LaVey turns the character completely round: in his Church of Satan he is not a literal entity but a symbol of self-assertion against authority. From the prosecutor who asked God's permission to the emblem of individualism there are three thousand years and a remarkable number of translations.