The many faces of Satan and his demons: An artistic and literary history

Satan—the Adversary, Prince of Darkness, and Father of Lies—was a latecomer to the repertoire of Christian art. Early Christians, more interested in images of salvation than damnation, preferred depicting the Good Shepherd, the saints, the celestial banquet, the Madonna and Child, and similar attractive subjects.

When Satan does finally make his debut in the middle of the sixth century, he looks like an angel.

His earlier surviving likeness is a mosaic in the Church of Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. It shows the Last Judgment with Christ enthroned between two angels who receive the blessed sheep and condemned goats. Despite his halo and feathered wings, the effete blue angel hunched on Our Lord’s left is actually the Devil. His pallid color indicates his supposed native element, the air. It makes an unhealthy contrast with the fiery red of the good angel on Christ’s right. This odd interpretation is unique and easily misunderstood.

Another concept was already starting to develop. A scruffy, scrawny, spike-haired humanoid black devil with skimpy wings can be seen in the Rabbula Gospels (sixth century) and the Book of Kells (eighth century). This is how the denizens of Hell usually look in the art and literature of the Christian East, as well as in Western works influenced by the East. Lest anyone take offense at these “little black boys,” it should be noted that Christian Egyptians and Ethiopians also represented evil spirits this way. These figures are so distorted and cartoonish that they would not be mistaken for actual dark-skinned peoples.

The Middle Ages

During the European Dark Ages, inherited images of Satan mixed with remembered scraps of classical and barbarian paganism to give the Fiend new features. He acquired the goatish hooves, horns, and shaggy fur of the Greco-Roman nature god Pan. And by mimicking Nordic monsters, Satan grew huge as a giant, serpentine as a dragon, finny as a sea monster, or hairy as a wild man of the wood.

As the Middle Ages wore on, demons’ wings became scaly or leathery instead of feathery. They could turn into animals of every sort: beasts, birds, reptiles, fish, insects and especially dragons, goats, apes, pigs, cats, or dogs with glowing eyes but seldom lions and never lambs, oxen, or asses. Like today’s science fiction monsters, they hybridized more and more animal features—wings, claws, fangs, horns, tails, tusks, and stingers. Humanoid devils carried extra faces on their bellies, knees, rumps, or crotches and rarely wore as much as a loincloth. Red or black was the commonest color for infernal bodies but they also came in yellow, blue, gray, ghastly white, or faery green.

A popular topic that challenged Northern artists’ skill at demon-building was The Temptation of St. Anthony, where the patient old Desert Father endures diabolical attacks first in the air while levitating in ecstasy and later on the ground beside his hut. Nine uniquely designed theriomorphic devils lay hold of the floating monk in Martin Schongauer’s influential engraving (1470-75). Hieronymus Bosch devoted an entire triptych to the subject to illustrate the whole ordeal (1501). St. Anthony is dropped from the air, harassed at prayer, and disturbed while reading. His tormentors include lascivious women as well as the usual throng of bizarre kcomposite creatures and ominous structures. One panel of Matthias Grûnewald’s Isenheim altarpiece (1512-16), which was painted for a plague hospital, shows a pack of animal-headed demons looming over the fallen saint to pull his hair, claw, peck, and beat him while a man covered with sores watches.

Medieval and Renaissance artists found many other occasions to depict infernal powers in painting, carving, weaving, and printing. Among their favorite subjects were: the Fall of Man (where the Serpent wears a woman’s face), the Temptation of Christ (where the Fiend is easily repulsed), exorcisms (where tiny black devils fly out of freed bodies), the Harrowing of Hell (where the Risen Christ rams the staff of his resurrection banner down Satan’s throat), and the Art of Dying (where an angel and a demon fight over the expiring man’s soul).

Even more popular was the Last judgment, a scene that typically adorns the portals of Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals. Well below Christ the Judge on his throne, ugly humanoid devils chivy coffles of the damned towards their doom. Yet these tangled rows of tightly packed naked bodies are not as terrifying as one vignette carved by Gislibertus for the Cathedral of Autun, France (twelfth century): a pair of disembodied claws about to close over a man’s head.

The famous thirteenth century statue The Tempter on the façade of Strasbourg Cathedral takes a different approach to representing evil. This fashionably clad demon is the very model of a dimpled Gothic dandy. He smiles as he offers a luscious apple to one of the Foolish Virgins. She cannot see what the viewer below can: his back is covered with toads and snakes.

A mosaic of the Last Judgment inside the Basilica of Torcello in Venice makes an interesting contrast with the previous examples because it was made by Byzantine craftsmen in the late twelfth century. The composition is spare and basic but its Satan is novel. Although he sits on a throne of man-eating dragons like other Italian images, this dark-skinned demon with white beard and hair parodies God’s role as the Ancient of Days and his fully clothed “son,” the Antichrist, sits on his lap. The heads of the damned bob like apples in the surrounding flames.

Michaelangelo’s huge fresco of the Last Judgment (1536-41) behind the altar of the Sistine Chapel the best-known—and once the most controversial—version of this topic. All that nudity and exaggerated musculature offended contemporary viewers, so strategic draperies were added by the “breeches painter.” Wingless angels are hard to distinguish from men but the swarthy demons’ faces are more individualized than usual. Although the Devil is absent, two characters from Greek mythology take charge of the condemned—Charon, boatman of the River Styx, and donkey-eared Minos, judge of the Underworld. The latter resembles one of Michaelangelo’s critics and is having his private parts bitten by the snake around his waist. There are other unexpected touches of humor. While torrents of risen bodies soar up to Heaven or tumble towards Hell, some humans dispute the Lord’s verdicts. Angels have to punch down a few damned souls; others play tug of war with a devil who has grabbed a saved man’s hair.

Such incidents are not unique. In the late fifteenth century Sforza Hours, a scaly green Satan tugs on the scale with which St. Michael weighs souls even though the unruffled archangel is standing on his body and other angels are swatting his fellows out of the sky. A black demon with bright butterfly wings (!) tries to yank a man away from an angel in Hans Memling’s Last Judgment (1466-73).

What awaits them below is devouring: a personified Hellmouth that swallows up sinners until locked for eternity on the Last Day. One of the oddest presentations of the Hellmouth appears in a triptych by Hans Memling entitled Of Earthly Vanity and Divine Salvation (1485). It shows an androgenous, dark-skinned Satan whose torso is banded with colors like a rainbow flag and carries an extra face on its abdomen. On avian feet, he dances upon the backs of three sinners—a man, a woman, and a cleric—lying face down in a pool of fire.

Medieval people must have had a special horror of being eaten because this motif appears so often in visions of the Underworld. Giotto’s Last Judgment fresco for the Arena Chapel in Padua (1306) emphasizes this fate as the worst punishment in Hell. Satan is a blobby blue-gray horned and bearded giant seated on a throne of living dragons who devour the damned. Serpents emerging from his ears do the same. He holds a writhing victim in each hand while munching on a third and excreting yet another.

But the most elaborate rendering of this torment shows up in the loveliest Gothic manuscript—Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1413). Here the devils are shaggy, tan, and goat-like except for their bat wings and three-clawed feet. They herd the damned around a furnace on which Satan their huge king reclines. Three devils work bellows keep lost souls burning while also tortured by snakes. Satan snacks on grilled mortals, then spews them out of his mouth like a geyser. Although clerics typically appear in scenes of Hell, they are unusually conspicuous in this picture. Even odder, no identifiable women are shown.

Popular as Last Judgment artworks were, illustrating the entire Book of Revelation offered exciting new subject matter. Artists had been slow to recognize this until a Spanish monks named Beatus of Liébana wrote his Commentary on the Apocalypse in the late eighth century. This seminal work survives in dozens of manuscripts copied over the course of 700 years. One early example, the Morgan Beatus (ca. 950) is a charmingly naïve specimen of Mozarabic art where the Great Red Dragon is a limbless serpent. A century later, the French St-Sever Apocalypse shares the same intense color palette but the imagery is far more sophisticated. Here Satan is a black, shock-headed giant.

Albrecht Dürer and The Apocalypse

With the shift from Romanesque to Gothic style, illuminators preferred intricacy to boldness. Standalone volumes of Revelation had space to illustrate every apocalyptic episode. These pictures were so delicate and graceful that the reader could easily forget they were depicting the violent End of the World. The Cloisters Apocalypse (1330), an exquisite example of Anglo-Norman manuscript making, shows the Great Dragon as winged and bipedal with seven identical dragon heads. This concept, which had previously appeared in twelfth century German books, became a common—but not exclusive—visual formula until the end of the Middle Ages.

Then, as one art historian observed, Albrecht Dürer of Nuremberg “took hold of the Apocalypse as Dante did of Hell.” Dürer’s portfolio of 14 woodcuts published in 1498 became the model treatment of Revelation throughout the sixteenth century and beyond. Existing as prints allowed mass circulation but quality, not quantity, won their success. Dürer’s powerful images and dynamic compositions surge with unmatched energy to capture the ineffable in mere black lines. By using local scenery and contemporary costume, events seem to unroll right in the artist’s own day.

As for the hellish monsters of the End Times, Dürer offers three different quadrupeds, each with seven distinct heads, some based on such unlikely creatures as a duck, snail, rabbit, camel, turtle, and ostrich (plates IX, XI, and XIII), plus the Beast from the Sea as a bear-pawed lion with ram’s horns (XI). The rebel angels cast out of Heaven (X) include bat-winged Lucifer with the head of a horned ass and four other composite creatures, one of whom suggests a dachshund wearing a tortoise shell. Satan, finally chained and forced into the fiery Pit (XIV), is a winged, scaly biped with a vaguely cat-like face and asymmetrical horns.

Dürer’s Apocalypse shaped versions of Revelation by his contemporaries Lucas Cranach and Jean Duvet. The illustrated Luther Bible (1534) bears its stamp. In the mid-sixteenth century, its designs were copied in stained glass for the Sainte-Chapelle of Vincennes, near Paris, and in a set of eight tapestries woven for Emperor Charles V. Its influence affected Orthodox icon-painters on Mt. Athos and in Russia. Its example is still fruitful: contemporary Catholic artist Daniel Mitsui recast the War in Heaven from Dürer’s plate X in Japanese style with samurai angels battling an Asian Red Dragon.

But the Apocalypse woodcuts were not Dürer’s last word on Satan. His equally memorable engraving The Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) shows a fully armored Knight—the Christian Man—riding through the perilous wildwood. He is undismayed by the two horrors who threaten him. Death, a half-rotted corpse whose crown is entwined with snakes, rides a pitiful nag and holds up an hourglass to warn that life is short. The Knight’s faithful dog runs between the two horses while a lizard scuttles the other way. Carrying a polearm (possibly a bec de corbin or “raven’s beak”), the Devil walks behind, trying to pluck the Knight’s sword belt with his claws. He is the epitome of a Northern demon: a hairy, pig-snouted, goat-legged androgyne, with floppy ears, dewlaps, mismatched horns, and a banded tail. This figure is more horrifying than the Satan in Dürer’s final Apocalypse plate. And he is yet to be chained.

Reformation and Counter-Reformation

Obscene and scatological elements occur in medieval art but Evil has never looked uglier than in Northern art of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

This visual vocabulary was thoroughly exploited in all media for Reformation  propaganda. Through illustrated books, tracts, and broadsheets, Evangelicals stridently proclaimed that Rome was accursed Babylon and the papacy was Antichrist. For example, a Lucas Cranach woodcut in Luther’s Septembertestament (1522) a tipsy Beast-riding Great Whore wears the papal tiara askew on her curly head while contemporary rulers pay homage. In the Wittenberg Bible (1534), the Two Witnesses, attired like Lutheran divines, boldly confront a giant tiara-wearing winged lizard. Catholic responses were feeble because the Church did not yet understand how to reach the general public.

When the Counter-Reformation finally emerged, its high art was more concerned with celebrating the joys of Heaven than rousing fears of Hell. Thus, The Temptation of St. Anthony Abbot by Annibale Caracci (1597) is not only a tamer affair than earlier versions, the saint is comforted by a vision of Our Lord and his angels. Likewise, angels are more prominent than demons in Jacob Jordaens’ Last Judgment (1653). The new triumphalist spirit glows in Guido Reni’s Baroque masterpiece, St. Michael (1636). Here the splendid archangel clad in sky-blue Roman armor crushes manlike Satan underfoot. This became Catholics’ favorite image of St. Michael down to modern times. Sculptures with the same iconography also became popular in the Hispanic world.

Overlapping both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the Great European Witch Hunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries flooded the Continent with new diabolical images illustrating what witches do and what retribution awaits them. The crudely drawn devils in these sources are usually horned, bat-winged, and bipedal with ugly humanoid faces. Their master Satan wears the horns, beard—and at times even the whole body—of a giant he-goat to preside over the perverse revels of the Witches’ Sabbat. One panoramic view of these festivities is Jan Ziarnko’s 1612 engraving for the Tableau l’Inconstance des mauvais anges (The Inconstancy of the Evil Angels) by Pierre de Lancre, a judge who condemned 50-80 people to the stake in the French Basque country.)

Witch-hunting also stoked anxieties over demonic possession, especially in France and England, leading to spectacles of public exorcism, embarrassing hoaxes, and unjust executions. But not even the most famous case, the so-called Devils of Loudun (1634), where an entire Ursuline convent was allegedly possessed through the machinations of a corrupt priest, inspired any serious artworks or devised any new visual motifs.

The Enlightenment and the Romantic era

By the late seventeenth century, religious wars had ended and witch-hunting was tapering off. As those horrors faded, skepticism about the supernatural spread among the educated classes. Although folk belief in demons persisted for centuries, the ideas of thinkers like Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Baruch Spinoza prevailed. Empirical science and clear-eyed reason reduced the Devil to an outmoded superstition or, at most, a symbol of Evil or a vehicle for satire. The Enlightenment disenchanted the world.

Ironically, these intellectual trends were bracketed by the writing of the two most influential portraits of Satan in Western literature—John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667-74) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1772-1832). The Fall of Man and the damnation of Dr. Faustus were scarcely novel subjects but Milton and Goethe permanently shaped public perceptions of them as Dante had for Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven in his Divine Comedy.

But Lucifer, the titanic fallen archangel, and Mephisto, the sardonic, debonair spirit “who always negates” would find their best illustrators in the Romantic Era. Just as in Milton’s poem, Lucifer’s ruined beauty dominates Gustave Doré’s set of 50 wood engravings for Paradise Lost (1866). Goethe himself was delighted with Eugene Delacroix’s Faust portfolio of 17 lithographs (1828) which also happen to be landmarks of printmaking. In addition to these black and white images, Delacroix also painted Faust meeting Mephisto in oils, the better to show the latter’s red hair, foxy features, and forked goatee.

By the time Goethe completed Faust, the Age of Reason had provoked its antithesis, the Age of Romanticism. Heart now ruled instead of Head, feelings outweighed thought, and a thirst for sublime, contrarian, chaotic experience overwhelmed moderation. Although the Romantics held no theological belief in Satan, they recreated him as the great cosmic Rebel, a darkly glamorous source of creativity and freedom, opponent of the tyrannical Christian Deity. Both God and Satan were regarded as ambivalent—even interchangeable—figures.

Important versions of the Romantic Satan-figure are literary, for example: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), where the mythic fire-bringer is a counterpart of Satan, Lord Byron’s Cain (1821), and Victor Hugo’s La légende des siècles (The Legend of the Centuries, posthumously published 1886-91).

Bizarrely heterodox poet and artist William Blake provided unique images as well as words. For instance, God is transformed into Satan in “Job’s Evil Dreams,” a plate for his edition of the Book of Job (1805-06). His illustrations for Milton’s Paradise Lost show Satan as a splendid nude whose flesh looks fluid as quicksilver (1807-08). His drawings for the Book of Revelation, however, make Satan a man-headed scaly serpent and give the manlike Great Beast seven distinct human heads.

On the other hand, his Neoclassical contemporary Benjamin West painted huge, grandiose canvases on apocalyptic subjects that employ traditional iconography: The Woman Clothed in the Sun Fleeth from the Persecution of the Dragon (1797) St. Michael and the Dragon (1797), The Destruction of the Beast and the False Prophet (1804), and Death on a Pale Horse (1817).

Even a beautiful Prince of Darkness could support Christian orthodoxy. Le genie du mal (The Spirit of Evil, 1848) by Belgian sculptor Guillaume Geefs is a bat-winged male nude handsome as Adonis. Slumped in despair, he sits chained to a rock while holding his worthless crown and broken rod of office. To underscore the finality of defeat, the sculpture is mounted directly under the pulpit of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Liege so the message of Christ can pour over it day after day.

Humor is also useful for mocking Satan and his minions. Witty caricatures by Louis le Breton adorn Collin de Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal (1863), a descriptive catalog of demons. Lucifer appears as a sulky naked child in this compilation by an enthusiastic Catholic revert.

But Evil is grotesque for grimmer purposes in the art of Francisco Goya, who was depressive to the point of madness. Saying “The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters,” he sprinkled demons and witches throughout his bitter portfolio of etchings Los caprichos (1799). He painted the Devil on the wall of his own house as the giant goat-god of folklore in The Witches Sabbath (1821).

The goat-god motif was taken in quite a different direction by the French occultist “Éliphas Lévi” who had once been a Catholic deacon named Alphonse Louis Conant. His drawing “The Sabbatic Goat” (1856), became the standard model for the demon Baphomet/ Satan down to the present and solidified the theory that the Devil was merely a misunderstood pre-Christian Horned God. Presented as a mystic symbol of Balance, the enthroned androgynous figure was supposedly inspired by a Templar idol and ultimately derived from a local deity worshipped in the Mendes district of ancient Egypt.

Needless to say, only an infinitesimal fraction of Lévi’s fellow Parisians saw Baphomet as a positive entity. But the majority probably did not imagine Satan as an actual threat to their souls, either. Second Empire France was too worldly to worry about such things. France gets disproportional attention here because it was a prime incubator of cultural trends.

Secularism and horror

As the industrializing Western world turned more secular, the Devil steadily lost his religious significance while retaining other uses. Diabolical elements enhanced horror stories and theatrical works. (Levi’s treatise Dogma and Ritual of High Magic and The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz both appeared in 1856.) Satan was an eye-catching gimmick for advertising, an ironic tool for exposing human folly, and a common political metaphor. (An 1872 Thomas Nast cartoon for Harper’s Weekly attacked free-love advocate Victoria Woodhull as Mrs. Satan.) Aesthetic applications, however were still savored.

Aesthetics proved to be the gateway for new explorations of the infernal. Charles Baudelaire, one of the “accursed poets” who emerged in mid-nineteenth century Paris, said that “reality lies only in dreams,” a guiding principle of the Symbolist movement that was emerging from Romanticism. Initially a protest against vulgar materialism, Symbolist taste for the mystical and mythical shaded at its extreme towards fascination with erotic, perverse, and morbid themes—the artistic milieu of Decadence.

Two writers whose influence percolated across Decadent circles in letters, art, and music can stand for the lot. Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857-68) and his colleague Arthur Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer (A Season in Hell,) shocked readers—and censors—with their ambivalent treatments of Satan and human wickedness, but neither man was truly a Satanist. After wildly libertine lives, both men received the last rites of the Church.

There were, however, actual practicing Satanists among rival coteries of occultists in Paris in those days, including an ex-priest and an ex-nun who sacrificed their own child at a Black Mass. J.-K. Huysmann novelized that horrific environment in Là-bas (Down There, 1891) and, chastened by what he had observed, became a Catholic.

Despite Decadent artists’ obsessions with sex and death, they produced surprisingly few overtly demonic images. One astonishing exception was painted by a morally upright Theosophist, Jean Delville. His Les Trésors de Sathan (The Treasures of Satan, 1895) shows a nude Devil with neon-orange skin dragging a heap of comatose humans, souls enslaved by sensual vice, across the sea floor towards the lower depths. Here Satan’s bat wings terminate in huge tentacles studded with suckers like the limbs of a kraken.

Eventually, Decadence had nothing more left to decay. Symbolism melted into the sinuous delights of Art Nouveau until Modernism displaced them. Darwin and Freud had undercut mankind’s need for the supernatural: God had not made Man and the Devil merely represented repressed urges. But fueled by Science, Progress roared ahead. Then Western Civilization cut its collective throat by waging World War One and the Epoque would never be Belle again.

Malaise and the Big Screen

The horrors of the past hundred years have added no distinctive new features to the iconography of Satan. One noted reimagining of traditional forms is Jacob Epstein’s monumental bronze St. Michael’s Victory over the Devil (1958) mounted by the entrance to Coventry Cathedral. The archangel flings his arms wide like a victorious athlete while Satan, his bald head sprouting horns, lies chained and supine below him. Epstein had also created a controversial gilt bronze Lucifer (1945) who has a woman’s face, prominent male genitalia, and feathered wings, shown the moment before the brightest angel’s fall.

With all the achievements of past ages accessible, were new approaches to diabolical imagery needed? What could an evocation of devilry add to depictions of modern miseries? Would adding Satan’s face make Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) look more disturbing? Film of the latest atrocity or perversion speaks for itself. But the old demonic motifs could still be recycled and deployed across new visual platforms.

The Devil was still being worshipped—after a fashion—with the usual occult trappings in modern times, but the practices of a few ceremonial magicians went mainstream with Anton La Vey’s Satanic Bible (1969). He is invoked as a symbol of “liberating” selfishness, not an actual being, in La Vey’s Church of Satan. But the Satanic Temple, founded in 2012, is simply a maliciously clever way to mock Christianity. It sets up statues of Éliphas Lévi’s Baphomet in public places and has attempted to offer after-school Satan clubs for children, with a cuddly, smiling Devil as its emblem.

Of course, diabolism had long been a mainstay of horror writing, both literary and pulpish, but film has more direct emotional impact. For instance, Chernabog, the animated demon in the Night on Bald Mountain sequence of Fantasia (1940), adds extra tingling in the spine to the eerie music. Myriads of devilish horror movies have been made—check how many titles include the words “Satan,” “devil,” or “demon” for a sense of the subject’s popularity. Consider the enduring impact of The Exorcist (1972) on public awareness of this phenomenon.

Besides frightening, demons in the media can also amuse, instruct, satirize, or do a bit of each at once. Here are some examples. Hilarious comic novel Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (2006), which shows an angel and his infernal counterpart collaborating to stop the Apocalypse, was made into a cable TV series in 2019.

Deals with the Devil fantasies, a plot going back to the medieval tale of Theophilus, are perennially popular. One of the best is Stephen Vincent Benet’s short story, “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1936). This Yankee version of Faust was turned into an opera and given an excellent film adaptation as All that Money Can Buy (1941).

Epistolary writing from a devil’s viewpoint, what the author called “demonic ventriloquism,” makes The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (1941) a witty and much-imitated classic of Christian apologetics. It has been dramatized for the stage and as an audio performance as well as a comic book,

The darkest and most elaborate satirical use of Satan in recent times is Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita. With techniques anticipating magic realism, it braids together politics, philosophy, and personal referents in a devastating critique of Stalinist Russia. Satan and an entourage that includes the demon Behemoth in the form of a giant, pistol-wielding black cat, wreaks havoc in Moscow; Pilate broods over the Innocent he condemned to death; a censored writer struggles with a novel about Pilate. Although finished in 1940, the book was not published in full until 1969. It has been adapted in so many times in so many forms—cinema, television, music, ballet, graphic novel—and languages, that the website <masterandmargarita.eu> exists to keep them straight.

Although the Devil could still be deployed with artistry, the modern era saw him slide into triteness. Even lurid or gruesome imagery lost its ability to shock—see one flaming skull, see them all. His usual image hardened into a tired cliché: the horned red figure with trim goatee, cloven hooves, and pointy tail who wields a pitchfork. (Batwings and rakish charm are optional.) In that overused form, he has advertised entertainment, hot sauce, and mineral water; served as a sports mascot, gang emblem, and tattoo design. Cartoons showing a comic personal tempter on the left confronting a sweet guardian angel on the right are far removed from the Last Judgment mosaic in Ravenna. So, what might today’s Satan look like? A cgi nightmare or a trivial joke?

This writer has a different suggestion. In 1988, mass graves were discovered in the Kurapaty forest near Minsk, now in Belarus. Some 30,000 victims of Stalin’s purges were shot there between 1937 and 1941. Nearby, in a local cemetery was the grave of an official involved in the massacres. Following custom, his portrait had been mounted on his tombstone under a piece of glass. But over the years, black mold had gotten under the rim, slowly creeping toward his fading face—an utterly bland, utterly unremarkable face. If Satan now took visible form, he might borrow that minion’s countenance. But why would he need to? The Lord of this World moves among us unseen, ever inspiring, inciting, delighting in evil done by human hands.

Vade Satanas!

Note: Links are provided to some of the art mentioned; readers can easily find images of artworks mentioned by Googling names of the artists and the works.

Suggested Reading:

Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France. Routledge: London, 2004.

Nancy Grubb, Revelations: Art of the Apocalypse. Abbeville: New York, 1997.

Philippe Jullian, Dreamers of Decadence: Symbolist Painters of the 1890s. Praeger: New York, 1975.

Jeffrey Burton Russell, Satan: The Early Christian Tradition. Cornell: Ithaca NY, 1981.

___. Lucifer: The Devil in the Middle Ages. Cornell: Ithaca NY, 1984.

___. Mephistopheles: The Devil in the Modern World. Ithaca NY, 1986.

Frederick van der Meer: Apocalypse: Visions from the Book of Revelation in Western Art. Alpine Fine Arts Collection: New York, 1978.