- The Devil is the name given to a supernatural entity, who, in most Western religions, is the central embodiment of evil. This entity is commonly referred to by a
variety of other names, including Satan, Asmodai, Beelzebub, Lucifer and/or Mephistopheles.
In classic demonology, however, each of these alternate names refers to a specific
supernatural entity, and there is significant disagreement as to whether any of these specific
entities is actually evil.
Devil - The original names. Originally, only the epithet of "the satan" or "the adversary" was
used to denote the character in the Hebrew deity's court that later became known as "the
Devil". The article was lost and this title became a proper name: Satan. There is no
unambiguous basis for the Devil in the Torah, the Prophets, or the Writings. Zechariah
3:1--"And he showed me Joshua the high priest standing before the angel of the Lord, and
ha-satan standing at his right hand to resist him."
Revelation 12:9: "This great dragon — the ancient serpent called the Devil, or
Satan, the one deceiving the whole world — was
thrown down to the earth with all his angels."
Gnostics In various Gnostic sects, the serpent of Eden was praised as the giver of knowledge, sometimes with
references to Lucifer, “the light-bringer,” being created by the goddess Sophia. The serpent is presented as an antinomian figure rebelling against the tyranny of the Archons; in the Nag Hammadi texts, he is even called "the Beast". However, this being is never explicitly referred to as Satan. Like their Cathar ideological descendants, they used the terms "devil" and "demon" to refer to the Judeo-
Christian God, whom they called Yaldabaoth.
When the Bible was translated into Vulgate Latin, the name Lucifer appeared as a translation of "Morning Star", or the planet Venus, in Isaiah 14:12. Isaiah 14:1-23 is a passage largely concerned with the plight of Babylon, and its king is referred to as "morning star, son of the
dawn". This is because the Babylonian king was
considered to be of godly status and of symbolic
divine parentage (Bel and Ishtar, associated with the planet Venus). While this information is
available to scholars today via translated Babylonian cuneiform text taken from clay tablets, it was not as readily available at the time of the Latin translation of the Bible. Thus, early Christian tradition interpreted the passage as a
reference to the moment Satan was thrown from Heaven. Lucifer became another name for Satan and has remained so due to Christian dogma and popular tradition. The Hebrew Bible word for the Devil, which was later translated to "Lucifer" in English, is הילל (transliterated HYLL). Though this word, Heilel, has come to be translated as "morning-star" from the Septuagint's translation
of the Scriptures, the letter ה in Hebrew often indicates singularity, much as the English "the,"
in which case the translation would be ה "the" ילל "yell," or "the wailing yell." Later, for unknown
reasons, Christian demonologists appeared to designate "Satan", "Lucifer", and "Beelzebub" as
different entities, each with a different rank in the
demonic hierarchy. One hypothesis is that this
might have been an attempt to establish a
demonic trinity with the same person, akin to the
Christian Trinity of Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, but most demonologists do not carry this view. There are some[who?] who erroneously claim that the word 'devil' is from 'd'evil' -'of evil.' Some also believe that because the word 'evil' itself is 'live' spelt backward, the word originated through the nature of evil being "against living things," or the antithesis of life itself. Both claims are false, as the words are etymologically derived from pre-existing languages. Evil is in fact descended from the Old English yfel (Kentish evel) meaning "bad, vicious," and descended from the Proto- Germanic *ubilaz, with the Old Saxon ubil and Gothic ubils as cognates. "Lived" is the adjective combining form of live itself descended from the O.E. lifian (Anglian) or libban (W.Saxon) meaning "to be alive," both forms being from P.Gmc. stem *libæ, itself from PIE base *leip- meaning "to remain, continue", cognates of live include the Old Norse lifa, Old Frisian libba and German leben all meaning "to live".
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