Chapter 116. The Adversary Takes Shape: From Angra Mainyu to Satan, Lucifer and Iblis

Every chapter in Parts 12 to 17 relies on a small set of names: Satan, the Devil, Lucifer, Ahriman, daeva, jinn, Iblis, shaytan. They were not coined together. Each comes from a different language, scripture and century, and later writers have repeatedly merged them into one figure, “the Adversary.” This chapter follows that figure from the Iranian Angra Mainyu through the Hebrew ha-satan, the fallen Watchers and the demon Asmodaios, to the New Testament Devil and the Qur’anic Iblis. It sets out the scholarly argument for Zoroastrian influence on Jewish, Christian and Islamic demonology, and the opposing view that the Devil is essentially a Jewish development. It then turns to three non-mainstream readings, those of Mehran Keshe, Jakob Lorber and the modern Left-Hand Path, each given in its own words [Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels, #38612, Introduction].

1. Angra Mainyu and Ahriman: the Iranian Evil Spirit

James Hope Moulton’s Oxford lectures of 1912 already found the earliest evidence awkward. He notes that the Achaemenid inscriptions of Darius name Auramazda but say nothing of “Zarathushtra himself, Angra Mainyu, and the Amesha Spenta.” His explanation is philological. He accepts the “usual answer” that Zarathushtra’s doctrine is carried by “the frequent mention of ‘the Lie’ (drauga),” and then states plainly: “it is actually not true that Angra Mainyu was Zarathushtra’s name for the Evil Spirit. … The name for the Evil Spirit in the Gathas is nearly twenty times Druj, ‘the Lie'” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, “Before Zarathushtra”, p. 49]. Moulton also reports a dispute over terminology. Dr Casartelli kept the word “dualistic” for the Parsi system “on the ground that the Parsi Evil Spirit is independent, and can create,” while Moulton had rejected it “since it seemed to me inconsistent with an optimist outlook on the future” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011].

Maneckji Nusservanji Dhalla, a Parsi high priest writing as a theologian, describes the fully developed system. He reports the classical testimony that the Good Spirit ruled for three thousand years and “the Evil One for another three thousand years. At the expiration of six thousand years, they entered into a conflict which still goes on, and which will end in the final annihilation of the fiend,” and he adds that “Diogenes confirms this statement” [Dhalla, Zoroastrian Theology, #55113, ch. “Evil”]. In Plutarch’s version, as Dhalla gives it, Areimanios’s opposition “extended also to the physical world, for in opposition to the creation of good animals and plants by Oromazdes, he brought forth noxious creatures and poisonous plants”. This opposition lasts “up to the end of time, when he will be defeated and be made to disappear.” In the Pahlavi books Ahriman’s counter-creation becomes concrete: “his creation of biting and venomous creatures, such as the snake, scorpion, frog, lizard, and many others, in so great a number that the noxious creatures did not leave an empty space.” Dhalla also records that “the Magi held it a virtue to kill noxious creatures,” and that the tyrant Azhi Dahaka was “sent to this world by the arch-fiend as the apostle of destruction and death” [Dhalla, Zoroastrian Theology, #55113]. The Iranian Evil Spirit therefore has a timeline, a counter-creation, human agents, and a defeat already fixed in advance.

2. The Zoroastrian-influence thesis

Several authors in the library hold that this Iranian figure helped shape the Jewish, and through it the Christian and Islamic, Adversary. Werner Sundermann tests the idea on one name. The demon Asmodaios “makes his first appearance in one of the loveliest legends of the Old Testament as told in the Book of Tobit.” He later becomes Ashmedai of the Talmud, Solomon’s “unwilling helper in building the temple,” and “Asmedai” in Christian lore, down to the Malleus maleficarum. Sundermann considers the objections: the Jews may have read the name through their own verb šmd, “to destroy,” and the Aramaic fragments of Tobit call the creature simply šedā, “demon.” He still concludes: “Both the similarity of the names Aēšmō daēuuō and Asmodaios and the role they play as enemies of marital union lead me to conclude that the assumption of an Iranian origin of the Jewish demon Asmodaios is correct” [Sundermann, Zoroastrian Motifs in Non-Zoroastrian Traditions, #55067, “Zoroastrian Influence on Early Jewish Demonology: The Case of Asmodaios”].

George William Carter places the borrowing in its historical setting. In his account “the Babylonian exile represented a fundamental transformation in the political, social and religious life of the people,” and contact with the empires helped Judaism move toward universalism. On demonology he writes: “Satan is the head and ruler of the evil spirits. The beginning of all evil is ascribed to these evil angels. They bring only ruin and death to men. The parallel between Satan and Ahriman or Angro-Mainyu is obvious.” He then sets a limit: “the Jews conceived of Satan as a fallen creature. … The archdemon is far from being equal to Him” [Carter, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, #55114, “Satan”]. Michael Faust is more direct: Zoroastrianism is “dualistic because under [Ahura Mazda] are two equal and opposed forces: Spenta Mainyu … and Angra Mainyu,” and “Angra Mainyu is the prototype for the Judaeo-Christian Satan” [Faust, Kabbalah, Hermeticism and M-theory, #81417, “Zoroastrianism”]. Gustav Davidson’s dictionary takes the same line, calling Ahriman “a kind of ur-Satan (since Ahriman antedates by 1,000 years the Judaeo-Christian image of a prince regent of evil)” and the “prototype of the Christian Satan” [Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels, #38612, “Ahriman”].

These authors give the thesis a political side. Carter’s Satan takes shape in the decades of exile under Babylonian and then Persian rule, and Dhalla’s three-thousand-year scheme comes from the Pahlavi literature of the Sasanian and early Islamic period, when Zoroastrianism was the doctrine of an imperial church. On this reading, the cosmic dualism of “Good Religion” against “the Lie” served as the theology of a state that defined its enemies as servants of Ahriman. This is the interpretation of the influence authors, not a consensus [Carter, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, #55114; Dhalla, Zoroastrian Theology, #55113].

3. The counter-thesis: a Jewish or Egyptian Devil?

Denis de Rougemont opens La Part du Diable with a deliberately provocative sentence: “Mai întâi, Diavolul este o invenţie iudaică. Adică, Diavolul este iudeu, aşa cum automobilul este american sau cum Panzerdivisionul este german” (“First, the Devil is a Jewish invention; the Devil is Jewish the way the automobile is American or the Panzerdivision German”). The very next lines concede the Persian background: “the initial idea of the Devil was inspired in the Jews by the Orient and its dualist mysteries when Israel was captive in Babylon. But it was the rabbis who knew how to profit from the legend of Ormuzd and Ahriman and from those winged angels or demons whose model they found in Assyria” [de Rougemont, Partea Diavolului, #12312, opening chapter]. De Rougemont’s “invention” is therefore a claim about who developed the figure, not a denial that it was borrowed.

Lynn Picknett points to Egypt instead. “Traditionally,” she writes, “the Hebrew Shaitan – who acted as arch-tempter in the Book of Job – is seen as deriving from the ancient Egyptian god Set.” She observes that “Set combined the characteristics of both Yahweh and Lucifer, especially his association with lightning,” and that the pharaohs “descended into the earth as the serpent Sata, father of lightning,” which she connects with Jesus’ words “I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven” [Picknett, The Secret History of Lucifer, #64661, “Chapter One: Satan: An Unnatural History”]. Persian derivation, Jewish development and Egyptian roots therefore stand side by side in the library, each with its own philological or mythological evidence.

4. From prosecutor to rebel prince

The Hebrew Bible’s ha-satan is a title, “the adversary.” Carter lists the passages in which the satan “develops into a distinct personality”: 1 Kings 22, Zechariah 3:1-2, Job 1:6-12 and 2:1-7, and the shift from 2 Samuel 24:1, where God incites David, to 1 Chronicles 21:1, where Satan does [Carter, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, #55114, “Satan”]. Rosemary Ellen Guiley describes the figure shared by “all three religions”: “a disobedient angel, an adversary of God – a satan in Hebrew.” In Job he “smites Job with ‘loathsome sores’,” but Job “only curses the day of his birth, and not God” [Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Angels, #42228, “Satan”].

The rebel prince appears in the intertestamental literature. Davidson notes that in 1 Enoch Azazel is “one of the chiefs of the 200 fallen angels,” who “taught men to fashion swords and shields.” Revelation then names “the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan,” bound for a thousand years (Rev. 20:1-2, following the fall of the dragon in Rev. 12) [Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels, #38612, “Azazel”; “Apollion”]. Davidson quotes Bernard Bamberger’s warning that “the classic expositions of the Jewish faith have implicitly or explicitly rejected the belief in rebel angels and in a Devil who is God’s enemy,” which places the “transformation of ha-satan in the Old Testament into Satan in the New” mainly on the Christian side [Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels, #38612, Introduction]. Picknett adds that God’s opposite becomes “a Satan, an ‘obstructor’ of his will – which becomes, in New Testament Greek, diabolos, the Devil” [Picknett, The Secret History of Lucifer, #64661, Chapter One].

5. Lucifer, the light-bearer

“Lucifer” is the Latin rendering of the “day-star, son of the morning” (Helel ben Shahar) of Isaiah 14:12, a taunt against the king of Babylon. Picknett quotes the verse and explains that the name means “‘Light-bringer’, and therefore by extension is associated with the radiant Morning Star,” the planet Venus [Picknett, The Secret History of Lucifer, #64661, “Do What Thou Wilt”]. Guiley records that Augustine, joining Isaiah 14:12 to Ezekiel’s “Thou hast been in Eden,” read both as the fall of the Devil [Guiley, The Encyclopedia of Angels, #42228, “Lucifer”]. Davidson says that in Isaiah Satan is “Lucifer (or, rather, mistakenly identified as Lucifer)” [Davidson, A Dictionary of Angels, #38612, Introduction]. The occultist Eliphas Levi, quoted in Picknett’s introduction, rejected the identification outright: “What is more absurd and more impious than to attribute the name of Lucifer to the devil, that is, to personified evil?” [Picknett, The Secret History of Lucifer, #64661, Introduction]. The separation of a light-bringing Lucifer from Satan returns in the Promethean and Steinerian readings of Chapters 118 and following.

6. Iblis and the shaytan

The Qur’an tells the story through a refusal. Guiley and Imbrogno quote Sura 15: “So, the angels prostrated themselves, all of them together. Except Iblis (Satan), he refused to be among the prostrators. … Iblis said: I am not the one to prostrate myself to a human being, whom you created from sounding clay of altered black smooth mud” (15:30-33). In their summary, God “cursed Iblis and all the djinn who followed him,” then “relented and gave him and all the disobedient djinn until Judgment Day,” and Iblis “obtained permission from God to ‘prove’ that humankind was unworthy of His love.” Iblis claimed “that the djinn, made of smokeless fire, were superior to humans, made of mere clay” [Guiley & Imbrogno, The Vengeful Djinn, #72540, “Dealing with the Djinn”]. Iblis is thus placed among the jinn, a third order of creation, rather than among the angels.

Rumi turns the story inward. In Book One of the Masnavi, Adam “felt self-important and proud of himself, / And he smiled at the actions of cursed Iblis,” and God rebukes him: “If I were to blab the faults of the unfortunate, / I should … convert a hundred fresh Iblises into Mosalmans” [Rumi, Masnavi i Ma’navi, #45921, Book One, “God’s rebuke to Adam for scorning Iblis”]. A. Helwa gives a devotional reading: “The Shaytan has no power, except for what Allah allows him to have (38:82-83). Even though the Shaytan is considered a ‘clear enemy to man’ (17:53), his creation still has a holy purpose”. Like the hole in a leaking boat, he “shows us where our hearts are not in alignment” [Helwa, Secrets of Divine Love, #65220, “Chapter 12—The Mysteries of Heaven and Hell”].

7. Readings outside the mainstream

Keshe. In Knowledge Seekers Workshop 641 Mehran Keshe treats Satan as interior. The workshop summary reads “Lot about idea of Satan; Inner weakness – fears are our Satan – lack understanding,” and in the session Keshe says: “It’s because of our own weakness inside. Our fears are our Satan’s, they are fears. Lack of understanding becomes our own enemy.” He ties this to upbringing: “something you call it darkness, we call it Satan, whatever, yeah? Get your children or your grandchildren to walk with you in the dark. What they fear most” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 641, #378353, “The Nature of Satan, Ignorance, and the Limits of Academic Education”]. In KSW 208 he says of such constructs: “whatever you call it, we created that ourselves to not allow our beauty to manifest itself out of fear of our own weakness” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 208, #377851]. On jinn, Keshe says in KSW 598 that such entities “create a seed in your mind that you feed through your belief,” that “certain collective beliefs … get started and take a life of their own,” and that “these things lives on the weaknesses of a Man in dimension of physicality”. Of one such practice he says, “I don’t believe in it … that’s their problem, not mine” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 598, #378310]. In KSW 380 he makes them morally relative: “it’s bad for who, and good for who. … Jinn are the same thing, they can be doing that but they can do the opposite” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 380, #378092].

Lorber. In the Great Gospel of John as dictated to Jakob Lorber, a converted Pharisee asks “who is Satan, who are the devils, and where do they dwell?” (ch. 34). The answer (chs. 35–36) is that “this primordial Satan in person, together with the individualised primordial devils, existed nowhere else than in the judged matter of the world.” Satan stands for the union of devils “not only on this earth, but in all the worlds of the infinite space of Creation.” The Satan who tested Job “is in fact the judged spirit of his flesh, that is, his countless desires” [Lorber, Marea Evanghelie a lui Ioan, vol. 8, #15582, chs. 34-36, “Satana ca materia judecată”]. Keshe and Lorber both deny an external personal Devil. Keshe puts evil in fear and ignorance, Lorber in matter that has not yet evolved.

The Left-Hand Path. Michael W. Ford claims a genealogy for his own tradition: “One may refer to the name of Ahriman or Angra-Mainyu for a source of the Adversary on earth,” and “no matter what name the Adversary has been called by, from the ancient Persian cult of Yatukih sorcerers Ahriman or Angra Mainyu, his Bride Jahi or Az, to the Hebrew Samael and Lilith,” the essence is one. He draws Tiamat’s brood from the Enuma Elish into the same “primal Abyss,” and his Luciferian Witchcraft promises “the True Path of Ahriman and Lilith-Az” [Ford, The Abyss and Tabaet, #85558, “The Origins of the Adversary”]. This is the practitioners’ own reading. The book returns to it in the chapters on modern Luciferianism.

Key points

• Moulton holds that the Gathas call the Evil Spirit Druj, “the Lie,” almost twenty times, and that “Angra Mainyu” was not Zarathushtra’s own term. Dhalla describes the later millennial scheme and Ahriman’s counter-creation of venomous animals [#55011; #55113].
• Sundermann argues that the demon Asmodaios of Tobit comes from Aēšma-daēva. Carter sees an “obvious” parallel between Satan and Ahriman but stresses that the Jewish Satan is a fallen creature. Faust and Davidson call Ahriman the “prototype” or “ur-Satan” [#55067; #55114; #81417; #38612].
• De Rougemont’s “the Devil is a Jewish invention” itself grants a Babylonian-exile inspiration from Ormuzd and Ahriman. Picknett points instead to the Egyptian Set and the serpent Sata [#12312; #64661].
• Ha-satan, a prosecutor in God’s court, becomes the rebel prince by way of Enoch’s Watchers and Revelation’s “old serpent”; Bamberger, cited by Davidson, says classical Judaism rejected the rebel Devil [#55114; #38612].
• “Lucifer” comes from the Latin rendering of Isaiah 14:12. Davidson calls the equation with Satan a mistaken identification, and Eliphas Levi called it “absurd and impious” [#38612; #64661].
• The Qur’anic Iblis is a jinn of fire who refuses to bow to Adam, is reprieved until Judgment Day, and in Helwa’s reading acts only as God allows and for a divine purpose [#72540; #65220].
• Keshe treats Satan as human fear and ignorance and jinn as belief-fed entities, Lorber treats Satan as judged matter, and Ford claims Ahriman, Lilith and Tiamat as the Luciferian “Adversary” [#378353; #15582; #85558].