Word: satanic
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...Christian view of Satan is no less fanciful. In Dante's Divine Comedy he is meticulously described as a giant with three heads (colored red, yellow and black respectively). In the hands of Milton and Goethe, he became successively a tragic hero and a debonair, reasonable-seeming man of the world. At 20th century masquerade parties and in subway headache ads, the Devil generally wears a red union suit and wields a large pitchfork...
Holes in a Sponge. This popularization has only made his real nature more obscure. Satan, as his current biographers believe, is literally "a fallen angel," a pure spirit without a body who tempts man to sin. He is not the principle of Evil, since Evil is itself a negative quality, i.e., merely the lack of Good in God's imperfect creatures. As French Historian Henri-Irénée Marrou explains it, it is like the holes in a sponge. "Evil," he continues, "is something that need not have existed ... It reveals in all its depth and ambivalence...
...modern times, Catholics and Protestants generally kept up a lively acquaintance with the Devil. The 16th century Catechism of St. Peter Canisius mentions the Devil more often than it mentions Christ. Martin Luther thought of Satan as a very personal antagonist-one real enough to hurl an inkpot at, as legend...
...authors of Satan see no reason to doubt the historical evidences of the Devil's existence-from witchcraft to the temptations of the saints. Writes the late Father Herbert Thurston, S.J., in his essay: "That such a thing as witchcraft exists or has existed in the world no Christian can deny who believes his Bible to be the inspired Word of God. It is impossible to suppose that the story of the witch of Endor [7 Kings 28: 7-25], of Simon Magus* [Acts 8: 9-24] ... are to be understood merely as allegories...
...existence of demonic possession, the authors readily concede that many people reportedly "possessed by the Devil" probably belong in the psychiatrist's consulting room, not the chapel. The frantic witch burnings of the 16th century, furthermore, in which Protestants and Catholics participated with equal zest, are explained in Satan largely as the products of their times. This heyday of witch burnings, black Masses (i.e., profane renderings of the Catholic Mass) and Devil worship, writes Belgian Scholar Emile Brouette, represented "the dawn of the false empire of Satan in a Europe gripped by religious and moral crisis and a prey...