SATAN's ORIGINAL NATURE
Ask a modern Satanist what Satan represents and you will probably hear some combination of pride, individuality, sovereignty, carnality, indulgence, rebellion, and freedom from external authority.
There is nothing wrong with using Satan to represent those things. Symbols change. Religions change. Philosophies reinterpret older symbols to suit new ideas.
But those traits are not the original nature of Satan. They were attributed to Satan over centuries of theological, literary, philosophical, and eventually Satanic development. If we strip those layers away and return to the earliest texts, we find a very different figure.
The original Satan was not the proud rebel.
He was the Adversary.
The word Satan comes from the Hebrew śāṭān (שָׂטָן). At its most basic level, the word means an adversary or opponent. It could describe someone who stands against another person. It was not originally the proper name of an independent supernatural being called Satan.
When most people encounter the word Satan today, they immediately imagine a specific being. Depending upon their religious or philosophical background, that being might be the Devil, the ruler of Hell, the enemy of God, the serpent of Eden, the first rebel, the embodiment of evil, or the symbol of individual sovereignty. None of that is contained in the original word itself. A śāṭān is an adversary.
The clearest place to begin is Numbers 22:22, in the story of Balaam. Balaam sets out on his journey and the Angel of Yahweh positions himself in the road against him. The Hebrew describes the angel as standing there ləśāṭān lô (לְשָׂטָן לוֹ), as an adversary against him.
Think about the implications of that. The figure functioning as the śāṭān is not an enemy of God. He is the Angel of Yahweh.He is not rebelling against divine authority. He is exercising it. There are no horns, no kingdom of Hell, no declaration of independence from God, and no celebration of carnality or pride. The śāṭān is simply the force standing in Balaam's way because Balaam is proceeding against the divine Will.
The word describes a function, not membership in Team Satan.
The Book of Job gives us the figure that begins to look much more like what we would recognize as Satan. But even here, there is an important difference. The Hebrew refers to him as ha-śāṭān, literally the Adversary or the Accuser. The definite article ha is significant. We are still dealing with something that looks more like a title or office than the personal name of God's great cosmic enemy. Ha-Satan appears among the bene ha-elohim, the Sons of God, before Yahweh's court.
And what does he do?
He challenges Job.
Job is righteous, faithful, prosperous, and protected. Ha-Satan questions the sincerity of that faithfulness. Of course Job worships God, he argues in effect. Look at everything God has given him. Take those protections away and see what happens.
That is the adversarial function in action. Ha-Satan questions appearances. He challenges a claim. He accuses. He demands that Job's righteousness be tested. But there is something even more important.
Yahweh grants him permission to act and establishes the limits within which he may act. When the testing intensifies, those limits are again established by God. Whatever else we may think about the theology of Job, this is not Satan fighting a war against God. He is operating within the divine order. His adversarial function serves a purpose within that order.
We find something similar in Zechariah 3.
Joshua the High Priest stands before the Angel of Yahweh, and ha-śāṭān stands at his right hand to accuse him.
Again, the role is adversarial and prosecutorial. This begins to give us a fairly consistent picture. The early Satan opposes, challenges, accuses, and tests mankind. He is not yet the great champion of personal liberty. He is not preaching indulgence. He is not encouraging humanity to reject divine authority. He is not standing outside the divine order proclaiming his sovereignty. In some of our earliest material, he is part of that order. This is almost the reverse of the Satan familiar to modern Satanism.
One particularly interesting transition can be seen by comparing 2 Samuel 24 with 1 Chronicles 21. In Samuel, Yahweh's anger is kindled against Israel, and Yahweh incites David to conduct the census. Chronicles retells the event differently:
Satan stands against Israel and incites David to count Israel. An action attributed directly to Yahweh in the earlier account is attributed to Satan in the later retelling. By the time we reach this material, the concept is moving toward a more individualized supernatural adversary.
During the Second Temple period, Jewish ideas about hostile supernatural beings become considerably more developed. Figures such as Belial and Mastema appear in Jewish literature. Traditions concerning rebellious angels, the Watchers, demons, corruption, and cosmic opposition develop alongside one another. These traditions should not simply be collapsed into a single biography of Satan. They come from different texts and traditions. But they contributed to the religious environment in which the later Devil could emerge.
Christianity carried the development much further. Satan increasingly became identified with the Devil, the tempter, the leader of rebellious angels, and the great supernatural opponent of God and humanity.
Another major transformation occurred through literature. Christian theology had associated Satan with pride and rebellion long before John Milton. Milton did not invent the idea that Satan fell through pride. What Milton did was give that Satan an extraordinarily powerful personality.
In Paradise Lost (1667), Satan becomes proud, ambitious, defiant, eloquent, self-asserting, and unwilling to submit. This is recognizably closer to the Satan embraced by later Satanic thought. Milton's Satan possesses something the early ha-śāṭān does not: a powerful sense of himself as a rebel standing against divine authority. Milton was not writing Satanic propaganda. His Satan is ultimately a fallen and self-defeating figure within a Christian cosmology. But Milton made the Devil compelling.
That opened another door.
Later Romantic writers walked through that door and began reinterpreting the rebel.
The question gradually changed.
What if Satan's rebellion against divine authority was not simply evil?
What if the authority itself was tyrannical?
What if Satan could symbolize resistance to oppression?
William Blake famously suggested that Milton was “of the Devil's party without knowing it.” Percy Bysshe Shelley went further in his sympathetic reading of Milton's Satan.
The rebel could now become heroic. Satan increasingly became associated with liberty, resistance, intellectual independence, and revolt against illegitimate authority.
This is an enormous transformation from Numbers and Job.
The servant of the divine order had become the rebel against it.
And that transformation would eventually provide fertile ground for modern Satanism.
Anton LaVey made another major change. LaVey removed Satan from the supernatural drama altogether. In LaVeyan Satanism, Satan is not generally understood as a literal fallen angel commanding supernatural forces in a cosmic war against God. Satan becomes an explicit symbol. And what does that symbol represent?
Carnality - Indulgence - Pride - Self-interest - Individual sovereignty - Personal gratification.
Vengeance rather than passive submission.
Skepticism toward spiritual claims.
Human beings understood as animals rather than fallen spiritual creatures who must suppress their natural instincts.
LaVey took characteristics that traditional Christianity often treated as sinful, base, selfish, or spiritually dangerous and deliberately turned their values upside down. The Satanic virtue is found precisely where Christianity had located the vice.
That is one of LaVey's most important moves. His Satan therefore owes as much to modern individualism, materialism, literary Satan, and the rejection of Christian morality as he does to the Satan found in ancient scripture. Again, there is nothing inherently illegitimate about doing this. Religious symbols are constantly reinterpreted. But reinterpretation should not be confused with origin. The claim that Satan originally represented prideful individuality, carnality, indulgence, and personal sovereignty simply does not hold up historically. Those ideas belong to later Satanic development.
So What Is the Authentic Satan?
This depends upon what we mean by authentic. If someone means the Satan of modern Satanism, then Satan can certainly represent individuality, sovereignty, carnality, pride, rebellion, or whatever else a particular Satanic philosophy assigns to him.
If someone means the Christian Satan, we encounter the Devil, the tempter, the fallen enemy of God.
If someone means the Romantic Satan, we find the heroic rebel against tyranny.
If someone means Milton's Satan, we find the proud and magnificent rebel whose refusal to submit ultimately contributes to his own ruin.
But if by authentic Satan we mean the earliest historical conception from which these later Satans developed, we have to go further back. And when we do, we find something much simpler.
The Adversary.
The one who opposes, challenges, accuses, and tests mankind, originally as an agent operating under divine authority. God's Will. That creates an uncomfortable problem for anyone who claims that Satan has always represented individual sovereignty and rebellion against external authority.
The earliest Satan is not sovereign.
He does not stand apart from God.
He does not reject God's authority.
He exercises an adversarial function within it.
The irony is difficult to miss. Thousands of years later, Satan would become a symbol of rebellion against God. But in one of the earliest passages in which the Hebrew word śāṭān appears, the satan standing in the road is God's own angel.
Before Satan became the Rebel, Satan was the Adversary.
