Word: satanic
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...orange emblem showing black pitchforks. Downstairs, the party is gathered solemnly before a black -draped altar. Facing them, on the wall, is a chartreuse goat-image superimposed on a purple pentagram. "To night there is one among us elected to the priesthood of Mendes," intones one of the men. "Satan, thou hast seen fit to charge Warlock Shai with thy priesthood on earth ... the deification of the human race." Reciting an ordination rite first in Latin and then in English, the speaker taps a second man on each shoulder with a sword. Someone pours flash powder on the sterno altar...
...popular imagination?the horned, winged creature with claws?dates at least as far back as ancient Mesopotamia, where it was the image of Pazuzu, the malaria-bearing demon of the southwest wind, the "king of the evil spirits of the air." In the Old Testament the Devil was satan, the Hebrew word for adversary, as in the Book of Job. Throughout the Old Testament, he remains clearly subject to the wrath and will of Yahweh. But the New Testament began to give the Devil stature, especially with Jesus' temptation in the desert, when the Devil offered him all the kingdoms...
...time the early church fathers were compiling a theology of the Devil, the mystery religion of Gnosticism was on the scene, proclaiming that the world and all material things in it were irredeemably evil. Taking up the Gnostics' bias, the fathers often wrote as if Satan really were the ruler of the world, or at least its viceroy...
Corrupt Priest. Some of the confessions must have been sheer defiance: faced with a ruling establishment that was sanctified by the church, a resentful peasantry followed the only image of rebellion they knew?Satan. The satanic messiah became especially appealing in times of despair, such as the era of the plague known as the Black Death. Real or imagined, the pact with the Devil may have been the last bad hope for safety in a world fallen out of joint. Thousands died in the persecution, many of them probably guilty
Despite such malevolent connections, Satan remained a temptingly attractive figure. Milton made him such a hero that next to him Christ looked almost pallid. Faust's fiendish friend, Mephistopheles, is one of literature's great protagonists. It is no new thing for the Rolling Stones to conjure up Sympathy for the Devil. He had it long ago, even from so famous a church father as Origen, who speculated that Satan and his fallen angels would be saved at the end of time...