A History of the Devil

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Summary: A passage in religion through time around the world
Review: As I read through this book I had a joyful travel in religion through time around the world... This book really helps people who are interested in the roots of religion. Many questions arise in your mind.

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Summary: In search of the roots of "absolute evil"
Review: Gerald Mesadie, the author of "Moses", a biographical novel focused on the life of the Biblical prophet, dives in the depths of ancient sacred texts to chase the Devil: The symbolic "deity" for the "absolute evil". His quest to find the "date of birth" and "birth place" of devil begins in Pacific, then his route follows the Vedas in India; swifting towards the East, he directs his attention to Ancient China and Japan; then finally finds the first "fingerprints" of the Devil in Zoroastrian sacred texts in ancient Persia: The duality of "absolute light" (Ahura Mazda) and "absolute darkness" (Ahriman) appears as the first roots of our mythical devil. Messadie then goes on with his quest in the so-called "Cradle of Civilization", Mesopotamia; in Celtic lands; ancient Egypt; Meso-America; then back to the Middle East. The books exciting path along this quest, as well as Messadie's excellent style, takes the reader on a marvellous "Grand Tour" around ancient religions, sacred cults and divine books. Forget the Devil; Messadie presents an excellent panorama on the roots of all religions. A "must-read" for every ancient history fan.

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Summary: A Book of History
Review: I found it to be well written, though a bit dry but acceptably sarcastic in places. If you're looking for a book to strengthen your religious faith, you shouldn't be reading a history of the Devil. This is a non-religious book - that is, written from the point of someone not confined to any ideology or noticeable religious bent. It's a book from the view point that the Devil is a character of human creation and the timeline that this character's changes and developments follow. And as to that it covers the territory well.
If you believe the same way you'll enjoy this book immensely. If you're strong in a belief of an organized religion, you'll be offended once again.

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Summary: The Anthropomorphication of Religion
Review: I received this book for Christmas by my ex-wife two years ago. Since then, I have tried to read the ... thing 3 times. The book is so poorly written that I give up in disgust. I have two specific issues. First, as a serious work of history, I am reminded of Fawn Brodie's awful works on Jefferson and Smith. Not only is history reflected in a polemic manner, the history is interpreted in a questionable manner. The author does get his facts correct, but all he has are facts. He then interprets them in terms of a specific preconceived concept that Christianity/Judaism then stole its beliefs from any number of sources. The most extreme example of this is his portrayal of Zoraster as the precursor of Christ. (These ideas go back a hundreds of years. Yet he portrays them as uniquely his.) Does he give any supporting evidence for this other than sheer coincidence? No. It is this concept of fitting his 'history' of the devil into a preconceived concept I find most annoying. The work would have been a better "History" if the author would have approached the work as did Jackson and Ragozin, "It is impossible at present to decide definitely the point at issue; one must await fresh discoveries and identifications in the East, to give us more exact knowledge. Perhaps a common influence was at the root of both Jewish and Persian ideas". The second issue is the work is full of common logical fallacies. The book has several logical problems with it. First, because Zoraster was tempted by demons in a desert 600 years before Jesus the Christ 'claimed' to be so tempted, the two are somehow linked. This is post hoc ergo propter hoc, or coincidental correlation. This post hoc fallacy is used throughout the book. Isn't this an also an example of false analogy. There are significant differences between Zoraster's mythic birth and Christ's (your decision if it is mythic). Thus suggesting that Zoraster was a prototype of Christ is an illogical conclusion. The entire book is an example of non-support.

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Summary: Review of the Reviews and of the book
Review: I've read the book; and subsequently have read the earlier reviews on Amazon.
This is the best book on comparative religions I've read (over 3/4s of a century). Having been educated by the same robed priests as the author, and having subscribed (without the benefit of exposure to a classical world as he has) to a structured religion for more years than he, I found much empathy with M. Messadie's book. Having read extensively in other "religions", I believe that this is, on an objective exploratory and historical outline basis, the best of the bunch.
The reviews that take exception to the fact that Messadie doesn't speak to horror movies, or satanic cults at length may have been misled by the title of the book, but have little substantial critique to contribute. His comparison of Christ to Zoroaster is another example of the extension of myths that can be read well back into primitive cultures. That is his point...not to suggest that one is the avatar of the other.
The central issue is Good and Evil...and the fact that structured religion can't exist without positing good and bad before proceeding to preach how to behave. Good and bad doesn't appear to have existed (excepting in the sense of man-defined acceptable behavior) until it was introduced into the middle east about 700 BC. Messadie has done a superb job making one think about this fundamental concept.

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Summary: Not about the devil . . .
Review: Of all places he could have chosen, Messadie decides to start his search for the devil in the islands of the Pacific. Of course, he does not find the devil there, so he wanders on to China, India, and Africa; he studies several Native American religions and he looks at the Celts, the Egyptians, and the Romans, but the devil continues to eludes him. Finally, Messadie locates the devil, right at the heart of Christianity (isn't he always in the last place you look?), but at that point, it's too late. The author's endurance has run out. While he does an admirable job exposing the hypocrisies of Christianity, when he gets face-to-face with the devil, Messadie just turns and runs screaming. He offhandedly dismisses occult practices such as astrology, tarot, Wicca, and witchcraft. He associates LaVey Satanism with a "cathouse mentality" and literally relegates Aleister Crowley to a footnote. He passes over horror literature, and doesn't even mention the popular depictions of the devil in horror films. One would think that a philosopher would understand the devil's influence on aesthetics, but Messadie is too much above discussing any such "nonsense." Of modern Satanic cults, he simply says: "I had collected documents about these sects, but they reflected things so impenetrable, mean-spirited, and hopelessly naive that I tossed the material out with the trash." Now I am willing to accept that the devil's relationship to the occult is rooted in fictions and the ravings of madmen, but Messadie asks us to accept this conclusion without presenting any evidence. This book is filled with so many incidental facts about the world's religions that it might make a good coursebook for an intro to theology, but it is truly disappointing in its treatment of the devil's history, and for the most part simply avoids it altogether.

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Summary: Not about the devil . . .
Review: One of the most illuminating and scholarly books I have ever read! Messadie begins the history of the devil with the primitive religions and moves on to the more traditional religions such as Christianity and Islam. His means to disprove the devils existance is a historical one. He shows that the different religions from the most primitive to the ones we have now, simply borrowed the idea of the devil mostly from each other and used it as a means to gain political power. He argues that the idea of the devil took form during the time of zoroaster. The devil was invented by theocracies to gain and mantain politcal power. Although the book doesnt come out and say it, this is an excellent book on religious conspiracy theories. Im amazed that this book is not better known. A true classic of its kind. Although the book did not convince me to abandon religion, I treasure it because it could turn out to be true on further evidence. Also because I like looking at the skeptical side of things. If this book is true imagine all those who claimed to have seen hell or the devil: it would all be suggestion. I used to know a trappist monk who's mother had to be locked up, because she had an intense fear of hell. No one deserves hell more than those who made up the devil or jesus christ and put people through terrible suffering, fear and dissapointment if this book is true. I also recommend the Christ Conspiracy by Acharya S. Christianity before Christ by John Jackson and the biography of Satan by Kersey Graves to give a good in depth study of the origins of Christianity, Satan, and the Bible. This book is a jewel in the rough and deserves rereadings and close study.

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Summary: A Devil That Doesn't Exist
Review: This book is a cross-cultural examination of how different societies have attempted to explain evil. Messadie describes the traditional religions of India, China, ancient Greece and Rome, Africa and the pre-Colombian Americas as having a generally more unitary and tolerant theology. Meanwhile, Western religions, especially Christianity and Islam, are shown to be dualistic, believing that God and the Devil are waging an ongoing struggle for world domination and control of the human soul.

Messadie traces the origin of this mythical fallacy back to the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. It is here, through a God named Ahura Mazda and a Devil named Ahriman, that we find the most important theological foundation for the dualism that is to later soil Western religion.

Interestingly, Messadie makes a convincing case that in the Old Testament Satan is generally shown to be acting in accord with the wishes of God. For example, the suffering Satan causes Job, so that Job may be forced to demonstrate his faith, is done with God's blessing.

But it is in the New Testament that Satan is continually depicted as the enemy of God. This Christian obsession with defeating the Devil is shown to have tragic historical consequences. For example, Messadie writes about how church and state authorites conspired in the Middle Ages to imprison and murder various such "Devil inspired" heretics as the Cathars in order to maintain religious and and political control while also profiting from the property they confiscated from the victims. He even suggests that it was the Inquisition that served as the ultimate model for the Nazi and Stalinist legal systems.

Personally, I think that the Western religious belief in dualism is one of its primary theological errors. Messadie seems to share a similar viewpoint. In fact, this book is a well written and thoroughly researched effort to show how this irrational belief in something that doesn't exist - "the Devil" - has historically caused, and continues to cause, immense suffering and tragedy.

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Summary: The devil's in the details
Review: Where does the devil come from? Who were his ancestors? What is his history? Has he always existed? How did he become so powerful that contemporary humanity is always busy trying to pinpoint and classify and localize the agents of evil and their master? How does one write a history of something that does not exist?
The author seeks to provide the answers by writing a phenomenological history, decoding the models by which humanity constructs the devil for itself. The devil wields considerable influence because it is difficult for humanity to avoid making the devil "into a mental object upon which we might graft the vicissitudes of our folly." Messadie takes us on a worldwide journey into the ethnology of evil as seen by the whole of humanity over time: from the ambiguous demons of Oceania, India, China, and Japan, to Zoroastrianism as the seed carrying the true birth of the devil, to the appearance of sin in Mesopotamia. He takes us through the 35 centuries of the Celts who lived without the devil, and Greece, where democracy drove out the devil. On to Rome, where the devil was banned, to Egypt, where eternal damnation originated. Africa gave us religious ecology, the North American Indians worshipped the land and nature, and Central America left us the enigma of Quetzalcoatl. In Israel, we find the demons as the heavenly servants of the modern devil. In the early Christian church, we see the confusion of cause and effect, where the devil exists and no one knows why. Finally, the author takes us to Islam, where the devil becomes a state functionary and the basis for religious wars. This translation from the French edition is a scholarly look into the history of the devil that is heavily footnoted with historical references and cultural analysis. Messadie presents an unorthodox view of Satan. Baudelaire said that the biggest ruse of the devil is to make us believe that he doesn't exist. Messadie argues that the true evil lies in the fact that we believe in the devil at all: "It is profoundly Satanic to believe in the devil".