
                 The Truth about the Satan and his Origin.

   Man tends to worship that which he fears, to pledge his allegiance to
forces beyond his control, to placate the gods whatever he concevies them
to be. When new gods appear, man dethrones his old gods without having to
deny thier power, by simply making demons of them.
   One of Indias' greatest gods is "the goddess of a hundred names", which
represents nature in both its creative and destructive guises. To Buddhist
of Tibet this same goddess is a devilish demon called mKha's Groma.
   In Egypt Set was dethroned when the worship of Osiris dominated Egyptain
culture, as time passed Set was increasingly linked with discord, disease,
evil and violence, until finally he was known only as the god of night and
darkness.
   Herne the Hunter, whose appearance was strikingly similar to that of the
horned god of hunting, was a vicious woodland demon of England. The daevas,
gods of India and Iran, were the devils of the Zoroastrian system.
   The early Christians rebelled against the horned god of hunting, long
worshiped by the pagan or primitive folk of the countryside, and neither
found it nessary to deny the former god, but only had to point out the evil
inherent in its nature to find converts from amoung the ranks of the older
order.
   Early Christians found the wildness and sexuality of many of the older
gods made them suitable representivites for christian Demonology. Baal, the
two-horned nature god of the Phoenicians and Syrians, conqured death, chaos
and drought. But by biblical times he become the greatest rival of the Lord
God of Israel. Pan, Dionysus, Isis, Lucifer, Belial, Beelzebub, Apollo and
the satyrs all came to represent the powers of evil.
   William Woods in "A History of the Devil" points out that refrences in
the Old Testament and Talmud go no further than casting him as "a divinity
belonging to some other tribe". Lucifer is called "the son of the morning"
by the prophet Isaiah and in II Kings Baal is refered to as "an oracular
deity of the Ekronites." Only in the New Testament is he called "prince of
the demons." In the temptations of Job, Satan appears not as a devil but as
an adversary of God and is in fact introduced as "one of the sons of God."
In the early days Satan had been a spirit but by the Fifth Century, he had
become weighty, and of course visible.
   God became the guiding light of the establishment, and thus if only by
implacation, the devil (became) the leader of thoese who opposed them. In
thoese early days there were many who opposed the powers of the established
order. There were thoes who refused to give up the old religion, for the
old gods suited the humble folk far better than the new, whise, agents were
sever taskmasters who brought bloodshed and terror.
   Thus it was in the fight to stamp out the old religion that the devil
was concived by the so called desert fauthers who piced together from thier
recolections of gods (such as the cloven-footed Pan) the visulation of the
Devil as the grotesque man.
   Woods writes, "our devil is almost entirely an invention of Hebrew moral
law and the Christian church."
   And so it was that the devil was legalized by the Council of Toledo in
A.D. 447 and Staan beacme as Woods States, "an efficient cat-o-nine-talis
with which to whip people into line.
   Women who knew the old legends and magic traditions were turned into
witches. Traditional gatherings like the druids festival, the bacchanals,
the Diana feasts, became the witches Sabbath. The broom, acient symbol of
the sacred hearth, became the evil tool of the witch's flight.
   Wherver the voice of freedom was heard or an original idea was expressed
the athorities deceted the activities of Satan. The theroy of witchcraft
was initiated by the papacy to warm the fires of puratory and fill the
pockets of the cleargy, who burned witches and confiscated thire property
for the church.
   The devils that Christ had seen simply as spirits who possessed and
overcame the rational man were now the servants of the one devil who, was
unbearably ugly, appearing in this world as an imp, a gargoyle, or a goat
with a human face.
   The devil, now accepted as the evil archenemy of God, was no longer
remembered in the establishment circles as the horned god of hunting, the
divine goat of Arcadia, the dusii of the celts or Dionysus. His godly
heritage had been successfully abolished, his wicked place in the world
determend and truly, Lucifer had been cast from heaven.
   Man makes his divinities, good or evil, in his own image, the result
depending on the stage of his personal development and that of the age in
which he lives.

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