Belzebuth for Dummies

The greatest trick of Yahweh

Ever since I started expressing my skepticism about the secret world government of the Satan-Worshipping Pedophiles, I have been told that “the greatest trick of the Devil is to convince you that he doesn’t exist” (an approximate quote from French poet Baudelaire). A marvel of non-falsifiability! If I don’t believe in the devil, that proves I’m a victim of his trickery? The Romans, who were unaware of the existence of this rebellious archangel—they thought Lucifer was the planet Venus!—were therefore under his sway. And what of the Chinese who, instead of the cosmic struggle between God and the Devil, preferred the eternal dialectic of Heaven and Earth. Poor naive people!

For my part, seeing the damage done by the conspiracy theory of the SWP (Satan-worshipping pedophiles), I’m tempted to say that the devil’s greatest trick is to make people believe he exists. The more you believe in it, the more you feed this evil egregor. That’s how exorcism works, at least in Hollywood. (And don’t get me wrong: I believe in demons, the Greek way.)

We, inhabitants of Christendom, are constantly creating the devil, from one witch-hunt to another satanic panic. So I’m not going to try and prove that Satan doesn’t exist, but rather explain what he’s made of. How did Satan come into our world? This is the first thing we need to understand if we are to free ourselves from his clutches.

The biblical Satan

Our Christian concept of Satan has three main sources: the Satan of the Old Testament, the demonization of pagan gods, and the myth of fallen angels combined with the Serpent of Genesis 3.

The first component is not the most important: the Satan of the Old Testament has no ontological substance. The idea of a cosmic struggle between God and Satan is foreign to Hebrew thought. God is the source of both good and evil: “I make light and I create darkness. I create good and I create evil. I, Yahweh, do it all” (Isaiah 45:7). In Genesis, it is Yahweh who, after creating mankind, has second thoughts and exterminates nearly all specimens in the Flood. All the afflictions that befell mankind — war, famine, plague, water or fire from heaven — have their source in Yahweh’s capricious will. It is also Yahweh who, according to Zechariah 14:12, will punish all Israel’s enemies, causing “their flesh to rot while they stand on their feet.”

However, a duplicate appears in some of the later books: Yahweh now has an angelic assistant on earth. In 2Samuel 24, Yahweh sends the plague on his people, but in the same episode retold a few centuries later in 1Chronicles 21, we read successively that “Yahweh unleashed an epidemic on Israel”, that “the angel of Yahweh wreaks havoc throughout the territory of Israel”, and that “Satan took his stand against Israel”. In the Book of Job, “Satan” is a “son of God”, i.e. an angel, whom God allows to put Job to the test. Rather like the Columbus-Moxica pair in Ridley Scott’s 1492, the hero’s respectability is preserved by assigning the evil part to a subordinate.

Yet when Satan appears at the beginning of the Gospel story of Christ’s temptation in the desert (Matthew 4:8-10), it is only as a temptator. And even when Luke 22:3 says that “Satan entered Judas”, we can consider that Satan is the instrument of divine Providence, since it was preordained that Judas betrays Jesus. This scriptural Satan was to be integrated into Christian demonology, but it is clearly not the main source of the folklore of Satan and his devils.

At this point, let’s retain that the Satan of the Old Testament is not really God’s enemy, but rather his alter-ego. Yahweh does have enemies, but they are not Satan; they are all the gods of all the peoples other than his own. We must turn to these in order to grasp the underpinnings of the Christian mythology of evil.

Paganism as Satanism

“You shall have no other gods besides me” is Yahweh’s first commandment (Exodus 20:3, Deuteronomy 5:7). He is the jealous god, or more properly, the sociopathic god, since he can’t bear the proximity of any other of his kind, and will destroy their homes when he can. It was because of their contempt for the gods that the Jews were reputed to be a “race hated by the gods” in return (Tacitus, Histories V, 3). To pay homage to a Gentile god, if only by eating at a Gentile’s house, is tantamount to adultery or prostitution. And there is a lot of overlapping in the Torah between exogamy and apostasy: “The people gave themselves over to prostitution with Moabite women. These invited them to the sacrifices of their gods, and the people ate and bowed down before their gods” (Numbers 25:1-2). Moses/Yahweh orders the impalement of the chiefs of the guilty tribes.

There is only one true god (the god of Israel), and he has only one temple: so even the priests of Yahweh officiating at the sanctuary of Bethel, north of Jerusalem, had to be “slain on the altars” by Josiah (2Kings 23). But such things happened mostly to the priests of other gods.

Two deities in particular are targeted: Ashera, the great goddess worshipped under many names throughout the Middle East, whom rebellious Israelites called the Queen of Heaven (Jeremiah 44); and Baal, the Canaanite god whose 450 priests the prophet Elijah slaughtered (1Kings 18). King Jehu fulfilled the same holy deed when he invited all the priests of Baal for “a great sacrifice to Baal” and, by way of sacrifice, butchered them all. Thus, the story concludes, “Jehu rid Israel of Baal” (2Kings 10). In other words, Yahweh became the only god by eradicating physically all other cults. This is the true essence of Hebrew monotheism: theoclastic fury.

Baal means “lord” in Canaanite, and by extension “god”. The “baals” can therefore be translated as “the gods” (as when it says in Judges 2:11 that “the children of Israel did what was evil in the sight of Yahweh and served the baals”), while Baal in the singular designates God, sometimes also called Baal-Zebul, i.e. “lord of lords”, “chief of gods”, or “the supreme god”. By distortion, Baal-Zebul gave Belzebuth. That’s how the Canaanites’ God became the Christians’ Devil.

We don’t have the Canaanites’ version of that religious war; we don’t know what they thought of Yahweh. But it’s no stretch of the imagination to guess that they regarded Yahweh as an evil demon, like the Egyptians who claimed that the Jews were begotten by Set, the god of lies, discord and murder, the Egyptian equivalent of the Devil (Plutarch, Isis and Osiris xxxi).[1]

We’ve been told that Baal ordered human sacrifices. It’s possible, but in Numbers 31, it’s Yahweh who claims 32 young Midianite virgins as holocausts for himself. And according to biblical scholar Thomas Römer, when Israelites are said to sacrifice their own children to the god MLK (Moloch or Melek) in Yahweh’s temple and in his name (Leviticus 20:2-3; Jeremiah 7:30-31), we must know that mlk means “king” and was an epithet of Yahweh: the expression Yahweh melech is found in Psalms 10 and still in use in Jewish religious songs.[2] The distinction between Moloch and Yahweh is yet another late duplication, aimed at clearing Yahweh of his turpitudes. In any case, the notion that the Hebrews made humankind take a giant leap forward by renouncing human sacrifice (Isaac being the first spared victim), is Hasbara. Theophrastus wrote around 300 BC that, “the Syrians, or whom the Jews [Ioudaioi, meaning Judaeans] constitute a part, still now sacrifice live victims,” and that, “they were the first to institute sacrifices both of other living beings and of themselves.”[3]

Christianity has adopted the biblical dogma that the gods of all peoples but the Jews are demons, and that Baal-Zebul, whom the Canaanites took to be the supreme God, was in fact the prince of demons. In Mark’s Gospel, we read: “And the scribes who had come down from Jerusalem said [of Jesus], ‘He is possessed by Beelzebul’, and again, ‘It is through the prince of demons that he expels demons’” (Mark 3:22). In early Christianity, this prince of demons naturally merged with Satan, Christ’s tempter in Matthew 4:8-10, and Judas’ possessor in Luke 22:3.

Let’s ponder on this fact: Christianity has sold us the Hebrew point of view, demonizing all gods other than the god of Israel, and even all the ancient civilizations that Hebrews came into contact with: Egyptians, Babylonians and Canaanites. The god of the Jews is God, and every other god is the Devil. To become aware of this bias is to start a revisionist inquiry into world religious history. It ends with a deep questioning on our Christian heritage that has made us equate Satanism with Paganism. Even today, Catholic baptism is preceded by a formula of exorcism, because in the early days, a pagan convert first had to acknowledge that the gods he previously worshipped were Satan’s demons, and to extricate himself from their grip by the power of Christ and holy water.

Christianity’s uniqueness, from the point of view of non-Christians, was not its claim that one man was fathered by God with a mortal woman and then overcame death, but its fanatic intolerance of any other cults. Pagans were always happy to add one deity to their crowded pantheon. But Christians demanded that pagans not only accept the only God, but, this god being jealous, forfeit all gods to whom they had been loyal before, and denounce them as satanic demons: “What the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons and not to God” (1Corinthians 10:20). The Greek word daimon was itself demonized (daimones were lesser, but not necessarily evil gods in Greek culture: Socrates had his good daimon).

That our Devil is the product of the demonization of paganism is illustrated by the iconography with which we are familiar. Why is the Devil depicted with horns and goats’ feet? Because he has taken on the features of the god Pan, a country god from Arcadia, protector of shepherds and inventor of the flute.

The name Lucifer is another example: it’s a Latin word meaning “light-bearer”, which the Romans reserved for the planet (and goddess) Venus. In this case, however, the adoption of this name is linked to another source of Christian mythology: the story of the fall of angels. The name Lucifer appears in the Latin translation (known as the Vulgate) of verse 14:12 of the Book of Isaiah: “How you have fallen from heaven, bright star [Lucifer in Latin], son of the dawn! How you have been overthrown to the ground, tamer of the nations!” This passage refers to a Babylonian king, but the Church Fathers decided it applied to Satan, identified in the meantime with a rebellious archangel fallen from Heaven.

Let’s take a look at the origins of this theory of the fall of the archangel Lucifer, which has played and continues to play such an important role in Christian faith and folklore.