Seth
“No Egyptian deity ever became the principle of evil, but one god, Seth, displays the destructive element more than the others. . . . Seth was a god of the dry, arid south, where the red deserts stretched lifeless to the rocky, burning mountains on the horizon. Because of Seth’s association with the desert, he was usually portrayed as a reddish animal of unknown identity, and redhaired people were considered in some special way his own.”
—Jeffrey Burton Russell, from The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, 1988.
bright son of the morning
“How did you come to fall from heaven, bright son of the morning,
how thrown to the earth, you who enslaved the nations?”
—Isaiah, Isaiah, 14: 12, King James Version of the Holy Bible, 1611. As quoted in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.
falling like lightning
“I saw Satan falling like lightning from heaven.”
—Jesus Christ, Luke, 10: 18, King James Version of the Holy Bible, 1611. As quoted in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.
The Devil’s nickname
“The Devil is usually black, symbolizing the absence of light and goodness. His skin is black, or he is a black animal, or his clothing is black. Sometimes he is a black rider on a black horse. His next most common hue is red, the color of blood and fire; he dresses in red or has a red or flaming beard; redheaded men and women are more subject to his influence than others. Occasionally he is green, owing to his association with the powers of vegetation, of forest wilderness, and of the hunt. . . .
The Devil comes from the north, domain of darkness and punishing cold. Curious connections exist between Satan and Santa Claus (Saint Nicholas). The Devil lives in the far north and drives reindeer; he wears a suit of red fur; he goes down chimneys in the guise of Black Jack or the Black Man covered in soot; as Black Peter he carries a large sack into which he pops sins or sinners (including naughty children); he carries a stick or cane to thrash the guilty (now he merely brings candy canes); he flies through the air with the help of strange animals; food and wine are left out for him as a bribe to secure his favors. The Devil’s nickname (!) “Old Nick” derives directly from Saint Nicholas.”
—Jeffrey Burton Russell, commenting on the popular folklore of Europe in the middle ages. From The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, 1988. Santa is Satan . . . I knew it!
the prince of darkness
“. . . the prince of darkness, the enemy of the human race, . . . was bigger even than any of the beasts he had seen in hell before. . . . For this beast was black as a crow, having the shape of a human body from head to toe except that it had a tail and many hands. Indeed, the horrible monster had thousands of hands, each one of which was a hundred cubits long and ten cubits thick. Each hand had twenty fingers, which were each a hundred palms long and ten palms wide, with fingernails longer than knights’s lances, and toenails much the same. The beast also had a long, thick beak, and a long, sharp tail fitted with spikes to hurt the damned souls. This horrible being lay prone on an iron grate over burning coals fanned by a great throng of demons. . . . This enemy of the human race was bound in all his members and joints with iron and bronze chains burning and thick. . . . Whenever he breathed, he blew out and scattered the souls of the damned throughout all the regions of hell. . . . And when he breathed back in, he sucked all the souls back up and, when they had fallen into the sulphurous smoke of his maw, he chewed them up. . . . This beast is called Lucifer and is the first creature that God made.”
—from The Vision of Tundale, a “minor masterpiece” of the eleventh century. Found in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.
black as any coal
“Alas, alas, and woe!
Lucifer, why did you fall so?
We who were angels so fair
and sat so high above the air,
now we’ve become as black as any coal,
ugly and tattered as a fool.”
—Dante (1265–1321), from his Divine Comedy. Found in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.
the black mass
“The tension between skepticism and credulity in the seventeenth century produced a new phenomenon, the black mass, a strange combination of disbelief in Christianity and belief in the Christian Devil. . . .
Several elements distinguish such phenomena from witchcraft: first, the focus was more exclusively on sex; second, the obscene rites were presided over by a priest. . . .
Such fantasies plumbed the lowest depths in the black masses of the 1670s. A brisk trade in fortunetelling, aphrodisiacs, and poisons was uncovered by the Paris police in 1678. As the scope of the crimes among reputable families and nobility was revealed, a special court was established to deal with them. The investigations brought to light magic and black masses as well as drugs and poisons. The affair got out of hand as people began to see how they might use lurid accusations against their enemies for their own political and economic advantage. In 1680 a number of priests were indicted for saying mass on the bodies of naked women at the center of a ring of black candles, of leading the congregation in sexual intercourse, of ritual copulation on the altar, of sacrificing animals, of murdering children and using their blood in the preparation of aphrodisiacs, of desecrating the Eucharist, of using the chalice to mix children’s blood with sexual fluids, of invoking the Devil, and of making a written pact with him. . . . The king terminated the proceedings of 1682, issuing an edict eliminating prosecution for witchcraft. The black mass, a product of the cynical, skeptical, yet credulous seventeenth century, was not revived until the late nineteenth century.”
—Jeffrey Burton Russell, from The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History, 1988.
he cried out: Golden star!
“Toward the star trembling pale on the horizon
He pressed, leaping from one dark foothold to another. . . .
He ran, he flew, he cried out: Golden star!
Brother! Wait for me! I am coming! Do not die yet!
Do not leave me alone. . . .”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885), from La fin de Satan, “Satan’s End”. Found in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.
shadow belongs to the light
“The shadow belongs to the light as the evil belongs to the good, and vice versa.”
—Carl Jung (1875–1961). As found in The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History by Jeffrey Burton Russell, 1988.
Ludwig the Stern
“Duke Ludwig the Stern (1228–1294) of Bavaria, after executing his wife in a fit of rage, was so stricken with remorse that his hair turned white in a single night—although he was only 28”
—Ripley’s Believe it or Not!, 18th series, December 1971.