Customer Reviews

A History of the Devil

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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.

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.

Gerald Messadie traces the devil to Persian Zoroastrianism in the first millennium B.C. In founding the first true monotheism, Zoroaster was motivated by a hatred of the aristocracy and in particular bloody sacrifices. He seems to have borrowed his theology from Mazdaism, which originally taught that there were two spirits, Ahura Mazda, the "Wise God" and Ahriman, the spirit of evil, who would become our devil.

We see the Christian devil developing when the Jews return from the Babylonian Captivity, where they were influenced by Zoroastrianism. Prior to this Judaism had no hell nor a real devil. Messadie examines the Old Testament and determines that the snake in the Garden of Eden was "just a snake" and that Job's tormenter was Yahweh's collaborator. Only with the coming of the Essenes, who revolted against Hellenism, did our conception of the devil appear. We also learn that Jesus was at one time an Essene, as was John the Baptist, since the Jews did not perform baptism.

Some of this is awfully familiar. For instance, Zoroaster foretold a great war at the end of time when Heaven would send down a Savior, Mithra, who would destroy the forces of evil by fire and sword. Zoroastrianism also includes a Last Judgment, which will condemn the bad to hell, while the good will live in Paradise for all eternity.

Zoroastrianism also had a great deal to do with consolidation of the power of the clergy. The religion was based on a transcendent definition of Good and Evil whose human adjudicator would be the clergy. Zoroastrianism also tried to lay down not only religious law but also civil law. Any breach in religious law would be punished by secular authorities. Thus, it was politics that gave birth to the Devil and "the Devil is indeed a political invention." We would see this again with the Devine Right of kings.

Messadie works hard at proving that some cultures managed to get along fine without a devil. Native Americans, The Celts, pre-Christian and Arabic Africans, and Greeks and Romans managed without a devil. In Greece religion reflected its democratic culture; the individual had direct contact with his Gods. Greeks knew where Hercules lived. The Romans had utilitarian gods. Messadie says, "From the very beginning, the Roman gods were consuls, prefects and functionaries--in a word, state employees." In Rome "superstitio" was a crime. The Africans and the Native Americans' religions were animistic. Every one of God's creatures contained "a portion of his breath."

One of the last chapters deals with Islam. According to Messadie, Islam is very much misunderstood in the West. Messadie was raised in Egypt, so he's a little easier on Islam than other scholars might be, but he doesn't mention the angel Gabriel dictating the Koran to Muhammad. Instead he emphasizes the political nature of Islam's inception. According to Messadie, Muhammad was a student of power most influenced by the Byzantiums. He studied the structure of their empire and determined that religion and the state must work hand in hand.
He also studied the Bible. The Koran and the Bible are not much different, except for Muhammad's rejection of the trinity and Jesus as a corporal God. He emphasizes that the cause of Evil is individuality. "Whoever does not abdicate his individuality to Allah is `arrogant' and thus Satan's tool."

I could go on indefinitely. Let it suffice to say that this is one of the most enlightening books I have read in ages. Messadie's summation is irate if nothing else. He blames the Holocaust, not on the devil, but on human stupidity. He ends by saying, "My conviction is that it is profoundly Satanic to believe in the Devil. We live under the sign of a nonexistent deity cobbled together twenty-six centuries ago by power-hungry Iranian priests."

I've had this book in my library for years, and while I've written numerous reviews, I never intended to write one for this. Why? Because I read it long before I started writing reviews. Simple enough.

So why am I writing a review now? Because of the review that Olson wrote.

This book covered the nature of evil, and the nature of good vs. evil, throughout time. Yet Olson says, "While I don't agree with his thesis, I must give the author three stars just for writing a book on a subject so few have ever tackled". I won't quote the rest of his review - read it for yourself.

I am amazed at anyone who didn't understand that this book was meant to be a study of the growth of the thought of evil.

Hades wasn't an evil place; it was a place that dead souls went. He wasn't evil. He was a keeper of a place. The thought of evil developed over time, and it developed with the assistance of a myriad of cultures. That's the "thesis" of this, the strength, and the relevance of this book.

I considered giving this review one star, but have given it two for the simple reality that Messadie attempted to work on a field given too little attention. For that, I acknowledge his contribution. Yet, I certainly hope this is far from the final say on the topic.

The book is somewhat sarcastic, with overtones of political agendas mixed with theological history--not exactly conducive to genuine history. The translation is--at times--downright horrific, and all other times, mediocre. This is the first attempt at academic scholarship I've seen in a long time in English that makes frequent use of contractions.

As for his actual scholarship, I find it highly lacking. His attempts to encapsulate world history's entire understanding of demons, the Devil and evil--or lack thereof--within a mere chapter per civilization seem to deviate from a clear path. At times, I am left wondering what his actual thesis is anyway, whether he seeks to actually lay out an honest history of the development of Satan, or attack fundamentalists by attempting to show their limited support in the context of world history.

Beyond this structural issue, his scholarship is, as I have already noted, melded with sarcasm, dismissal, and dramatic misunderstandings of nearly every religion he touches upon. Simple sarcastic quips like commenting on the ugliness of Byzantine iconography--without even a hint of understanding what they actually seek to portray--add nothing to his scholarship, and, in fact, detract from his credibility. As I am not an expert on much of the chapters he has done, I cannot comment freely. However, in the fields of Zoroastrianism--which I have read widely upon--I must say his citations are old, outdated, and often questionable. I do not seek to gleam my entire understanding of such a pivotal faith from the Encyclopedia Britannica, as Messadie seems to do occasionally, without even a single citation of Mary Boyce's widely acclaimed works.

All in all, I again affirm that his attempt was valiant and I do hope that others in the fields of history and theology attempt to put together a work to this effect. Yet, for Messadie, the holes in his argument, his lack of logical flow and structure, his outdated and often sparse citations, his dismissive and sarcastic tone, and the actual poor translation of this book make it a rather lowly reading.

"A History of the Devil" was highly disappointing. The author made many serious factual errors, including stating that Snorri Sturlusun was Irish. His treatment of the devil in modern times was fleeting at best, lacking a critical look at Satanic cult scares, Satanism or even the devil in popular culture. Furthermore, it seems that many typographical errors resulted from the translation to English.

Anyone interested in learning about the history of religious concepts would do well to look elsewhere.

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".

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.

Taking a slam at Anton LaVey on pg 318, the author seems to not even know what books the man has written. He attributes "The Sorcerer's Handbook" to LaVey, a book he's never written.

"A History of the Devil" deserves more than the alloted five stars. It is more than I thought it would be. I've read the Bible, cover to cover, and several other research books covering history and contents of ancient writings. I do feel that it was helpful to have read these others first. I wouldn't have anyway of knowing if it would really be necessary. I enjoy history and these pages are packed with information. Well written.