The Christian devil

This is an astonishing topic which deserves some enlightenment. Have you ever wondered where the devil comes from and why he looks a little bit strange with hooves and horns, etc.? Do you know why he is the bad guy? Why witches have sex with the devil? And why he is from hell?

Indeed the whole story is a nice anecdote from history (besides the sad and evil parts).

Let´s go back in history to the beginning of the Christian movement. Imagine that you are a Christian missionary. The world is pure horror for you as no one knows about Jesus and everyone is happy with the old religions. This is a real problem and as you are a missionary you have to bring people on the right track. So certainly the old religions are evil stuff and only Jesus is good.

Now what can you do?

You must condemn the old belief, the old gods and the religious practices. You proclaim that they are evil and that there is only one good way, – to follow Jesus and his teachings.

But there are problems to convince people that they have been wrong the whole time that they do only evil things. So you integrate a few old things into the new religion like the image of the father who was formerly known as Zeus or Jupiter and is now God in heaven. Further on you can replace old gods by new Christian saints with same functions and you can replace the old temples with churches in the same location. Old holy days are transformed into new Christian days of celebration and so on.

But you have still the problem with the worshipping of nature and the gods of nature. People still have a deep connection to nature and they enjoy celebrating orgies with lots of vine and wild sexual activities. It has a long tradition to celebrate life and fertility in this way.

In your eyes such a wild behavior is really bad. Alcohol is bad and too much sex is also bad. The cause of these orgies are these gods of nature, these Fauns, Pans, Satyrs, etc. which are well-known for their unrestrained activities, for having sex with women, for drinking and having fun.

So what can you do? You give them a new identity and call them devils. And after thousands of years we still think of a devil looking like a Satyr or Pan or Faunus with horns and hooves, human-goat like appearance and bad behavior.

But this is not the end. From the view of an initiate these beings or spirits of nature do really exist and they still exist and they have this animalistic nature with desires, lust, etc. In former times people had this strong connection to nature and to the spirits of nature and they celebrated certain mysteries with them. From these times there still exist women who work with them, who celebrate with them and who also have sex with them. Such women were called healer, wise women but also witches. And here is also the cause for the idea that a witch has sex with the devil. So indeed a witch has not sex with a devil but maybe with a Satyr, an astral being of nature, maybe for the reason of initiation or for celebrating a mystery or for fun. That´s not my business. For more details you should ask a witch directly.

The next point is the unhealthy mixture of terms and names, etc. So why do Christians believe that the devils live in hell and that bad guys will go there after death? The original term hell was used as a term for heaven, the next world. Hell means light, so it means a light world like we imagine heaven. Christians put it in the idea of an underworld of fire for all the lost souls. This certainly fits with the general method of turning the formerly good into evil to replace the old religion by the new one. And in conclusion the new “devil” does not live in nature but lives in “hell”.

Then they also mixed up Satan with the “devil”. In the Jewish tradition Satan has the function of being the examiner, the tempter to check if people are honest followers of God. This is something completely different to the original Satyr and to the new “devil”.

In fact we have spirits of nature which have their function, which can be good or bad or dualistic. Then we have higher spirits in the administration of creation which have positive or negative functions. And we have the human beings with good and bad behavior.

But the Christian idea of a devil is a mixture of different historical and traditional ideas. A Christian devil can be everything and anything just as it fits certain needs.

In fact the devil has served two main functions:

“If you do not follow our morals, the devil is waiting for you!”

And second:

“If you do not follow the church, the devil is waiting for you!”

Quite simple and effective. The threatening with punishment in the most horrible form is a great tool to make people follow you. Promising heaven is not enough and not really effective.

I personally perceive these things more from a psychological point of view and think that it is amazing how people act to reach their aims. The Christian movement could have taken a more positive approach in the beginning, also later but unfortunately people prefer in general the destructive way to bring something new into the world and to stabilize power.

In the end all depends on us to clean, heal, refine and enlighten our world and all of its aspects.