Satan, in the three major Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the prince of evil spirits and adversary of God. Satan is traditionally understood as an angel (or sometimes a jinnī in Islam) who rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven with other “fallen” angels before the creation of humankind. Ezekiel 28:14–18 and Isaiah 14:12–17 are the key Scripture passages that support this understanding, and, in the New Testament, in Luke 10:18 Jesus states that he saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. In all three major Abrahamic religions, Satan is identified as the entity (a serpent in the Genesis account) that tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and was thus the catalyst for the fall of humankind. (For further discussion of Satan in Islam, see Iblīs. For further discussion of Satan in Jewish folklore, see Samael.)
From the three-headed man-eater of Dante’s Inferno to the Mephistopheles of German folklore, clad and caped in red in a Goethe-penned stage production, depictions of Satan have mutated into a fearsome multitude of pitchfork-wielding, fire-summoning and otherwise malevolent creatures. But how did a somewhat minor character from the Old Testament evolve into a versatile shorthand for all manner of human evil? Featuring a parade of the many meme-ified devils that have come to permeate the public imagination, this crafty animation from TED-Ed provides a brief history of how some of Satan’s most infamous forms came to be.
Satan, in the three major Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), the prince of evil spirits and adversary of God. Satan is traditionally understood as an angel (or sometimes a jinnī in Islam) who rebelled against God and was cast out of heaven with other “fallen” angels before the creation of humankind. Ezekiel 28:14–18 and Isaiah 14:12–17 are the key Scripture passages that support this understanding, and, in the New Testament, in Luke 10:18 Jesus states that he saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. In all three major Abrahamic religions, Satan is identified as the entity (a serpent in the Genesis account) that tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden and was thus the catalyst for the fall of humankind. (For further discussion of Satan in Islam, see Iblīs. For further discussion of Satan in Jewish folklore, see Samael.)
From the three-headed man-eater of Dante’s Inferno to the Mephistopheles of German folklore, clad and caped in red in a Goethe-penned stage production, depictions of Satan have mutated into a fearsome multitude of pitchfork-wielding, fire-summoning and otherwise malevolent creatures. But how did a somewhat minor character from the Old Testament evolve into a versatile shorthand for all manner of human evil? Featuring a parade of the many meme-ified devils that have come to permeate the public imagination, this crafty animation from TED-Ed provides a brief history of how some of Satan’s most infamous forms came to be.
