When I hit 666 followers I promised a thread about the Devil.
That was kind of stupid, turns out it's a mess to research.
But well, Satan must have his due.
FUN FACTS ABOUT THE DEVIL (in Christianity)

(fair warning: I really don't have much knowledge about religions. So I researched this but I'M EVEN LESS RELIABLE THAN USUAL. But well, if I wrote bullshit, I'll blame the devil for whispering it into my ear.
CW: I make a lot of fun of religions)

- I'll start from the actual word, "devil". Etymology is complex, but my favourite rendition is "The One Who Divides". I don't think I could come up with a better name for a personification of evil.
pic: behold, the Prince of Darkness, the Adversary

- The fact that the rebel angel Lucifer, the old testament devil and the demon who tempted Jesus were one and the same became accepted only in the early middle ages. Basically, the Devil is a fan theory. WHAT IF THOSE CHARACTERS ARE THE SAME OMG

- The demonic deal is a very ancient fictional trope. According to a lovely study, "the smith and the devil" is one of the world's oldest stories, dating to the bronze age..
Before Google, "need technical knowledge? Ask a demon!" seemed to be very convincing and cross-cultural.

- The Devil is never described in the Bible (unless you take the rather lisergic stuff in Revelations). The horns-and-hooves look might come from the pagan god Pan. Several mesopotamiam gods, "demoted" to demons, might have contributed too.

- Capital D Devil fits awkwardly in christian theology, which is strictly monotheistic - God can have no true adversary, or God wouldn't be all-powerful.
The workaround is that God allows the devil to go around deviling.
Why? Idk, for the devulz I guess.

(Of course, there *are* theological answers. There are theological answers for everything. But I think it's mostly that people really like the concept of a devil, and so it had to be hammered in someway)

- My favourite part of the Bible is the Book of Job, where the devil *bets against God*, and God kills a bunch of people to win the bet. THEN He makes a long ranty boast which makes him sound like a supervillain.

- Early christians liked demons in their stories, usually busy tempting\\possessing people, who would save themselves by invoking god - thus showing that they had the biggest god in town.
It was probably a reaction to the practice of spirit-summoning, popular at the time.

But the message wasn't "don't summon demons! They're bad!" as much as "Why summon costly, inefficient demons when Jesus works SO MUCH BETTER? Hear the experiences of demon-users who switched to JESUS and were never so happy!"

- Eastern romans depicted demons in the same way of angels.
Probably the first "official" depiction of Satan in Christianity is this stilish guy with a blue tunic and a halo!

- The idea of an evil divinity, however, is ancient: both Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism (the coolest rival to early christianism) were dualistic - they described a word where good and evil are opposite cosmic forces.
They might have informed our idea of satan.

- In the high middle ages the Devil wasn't a dangerous cosmic force. It was more like a mischievous imp.
In the medieval mega-best-seller Leggenda Aurea, basically life of saints, the devil is dimwitted and ridicolous, easily outsmarted by saints.
Behold the Lord of Darkness!

- In Dante's Divina Commedia, we see hell, and the Devil is a huge monster, cast down by god. But it's being punished with the sinners, it doesn't in any way rule hell!
It became the standard depiction for the late middle ages.

(A similar description is in the Canterbury tales - with the colorfoul addition that 20 000 sinful priests reside in the devil's anus)

- About that 666 thing. It was probably a numerological reference to emperor Nero!
His name, in greek numerology, converts to the number 666. So the whole number of the beast boils down to OMG THE GOVERNMENT IS SO BAD THESE DAYS

- The witch craze in the 1500s - according to which the witches were a cult of satanic worshippers - helped shape our current idea of the devil as a vast evil force with meddles with the world.

- With the Enlightment, the Devil came to be considered one more piece of irrational bullshit religion saddled us with. Witch trials declined in 1700s.
Still, the idea of the devil as a powerful, corrupting entity was part of europeans' collective imagination. It still is.

- Of course, this newer and cooler Devil also got his supporters. Probably did since Paradise Lost (come on, we all know whose side Milton was on).
Beyond the actual Church of Satan, the Devil gets a lot of artistic coverage, let's be honest.

- You probably know (it made the rounds of the internets) of the guy who was commissioned a Lucifer statue by a church, which was refused because it was too sexy.
Then the sculptor's brother made a different one - even sexier.

- I have no clue how that happened, but in the 70s, in conservative Italy, there was a music TV show on public television WITH THE DEVIL AS A SHOWMAN.
AND EVERYTHING ELSE DEVIL-AND-WITCHCRAFT THEMED, WITH LOTS OF NUDITY. It lasted 6 glorious episodes.

- You'll be happy to know the Devil gets more popular every day! See google trends for "devil", "satan" and "lucifer". Invest in Satan! An ever-growing business!

- I love that people seem fascinated by the devil, to the point it became a major part of a religion - christianity - where it doesn't quite fit. Maybe we like the idea of evil being a person, something specific you can fight.

Bonus: my favourite devil-related quote. It's from Umberto Eco's "The Name of the Rose".

“The devil is not the prince of matter; the devil is the arrogance of spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt.
The devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns from whence he came.”

I link the amazing paper dating stories with philogenetic techniques. This method dates "the smith and the devil" to the bronze age with 50% confidence! https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsos.150645

Oh, and if you enjoyed this, I usually make history threads, but Satan is always with me: https://twitter.com/MalvagioMarco/status/1323041047388311558