Twenty years ago.
Here's something about evolution:
Some changes don't occur unless they must. Never mind; it's a tangent. Twenty years ago I was working the
same↗ jokes↗, building the
same argument↗, I still use today. Actually, that last also points back to a
1999 version↗. But the later iteration of those two old threads includes a particular detail, which is information from a book by Jeffrey Burton Russell, an American historian and theologian who wrote a five-volume history of the Devil.
In the
first posting↗, you can even see me withholding my own opinion, in doing so, a rhetorical form that hasn't aged well. But at the same time, it's true that back then I was
building↗ the
arguments↗ I
still↗ use↗ today↗. And, well, something, something, mumble, murumur,
really didn't age well↗.
But Russell's work has been there, influencing how I perceive the historical record of Christianity, for twenty years.
And this post isn't really about him.
†
Not quite twenty years ago↗, I mentioned Elaine Pagels, and her book,
The Origin of Satan, "which is part of a freaky coincidence" I passed over explaining. Nor do I see that I ever got back 'round to it, but I'm not looking that hard. I was just looking for the first reference.
The story starts a handful of years before that, when raiding the catalog for a paper in a class on Christian history. Because friends and I perceived stakes in the ongoing music censorship arguments, and had listened to plenty of "Satanic" heavy metal in our time, the journal article about Satan—irrelevant to my needs in the moment—caught my eye. And it's true, I didn't really understand enough about religion as an historical question to comprehend the full implication of the article, but, sure, at least my time with Satanism and then witchcraft prepared me for the idea that Satan was a weird, superstitious construction.
Fast-forward several years. I can't help but notice: Satan, again. And, oh, hey, wait a minute, why does
that name seem familiar? And when I picked up the book, and looked at the table of contents, well, there it was. The article, "The Social History of Satan", had become the second chapter of Pagels' 1995 examination of
The Origin of Satan.
And there we have our freaky coincidence. Nor is it insignificant. As I recall, the most serious, as such, book on Christianity in my collection at the time was a '92 reissue of the English translation of Barthel's
What The Bible Really Says°. Most of the rest had to do with witchcraft and postrenaissance magickal philosophy and metaphysics.
†
These scholars have provided powerful, influential work, are two of the three brightest stars illuminating my understanding of Christianity in history. And it's true, Russell is both affable and sometimes pretentious; his earlier survey of witchcraft demonstrated well his talents, but was permeated throughout with apparent Christianist prejudice. I mention it because it feels like it has a reference point, a low-key, slowburning version of a Hobbesian contempt toward the witches who get what they deserve. And Russell is really weird about the point that he would rather, instead of his historical survey of the Devil, be known for his survey of Heaven in Christian thought, and the one about how tales of Christian flat-earth belief was a ninetenth-century anti-Christian conspiracy.
Oh, right. This isn't about him.
Except when it is.
No, really, the Devil volumes are extraordinary work.
†
This landed with me just last week, from Elaine Pagels' 2018 memoir:
Back, then, to Satan. How to start? I began exploring a handful of stories in the Hebrew Bible, in apocryphal Jewish sources, in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and in writings of Jesus's followers, to see how, some two thousand years ago, various people had spun the figure of Satan out of their own conflict and pain. How, then, did this figure of Satan originate? Who invented him, and why? ....
.... What first surprised me was to see that Satan does not appear in the Hebrew Bible—not, at least, as Christians and Muslims know him, as an evil supernatural power. Christians who identify the snake in Paradise as Satan actually are projecting a far more recent invention into that ancient story, since the Genesis folktale pictures the serpent only as a cunning, talking snake, perhaps a stand-in for the humans' inner voice. A handful of stories in the Hebrew Bible do speak of a supernatural character they call "the satan"—a name that characterizes his role as an "adversary," but in these stories he acts more like a strorytelling device than a dangerous enemy. As in the story of Job, his presence often marks misfortune, a setback, or a twist in the plot. But before the first century CE, groups of dissident Jews, including Jesus's followers, began to turn this rather unpleasant angel into the far more powerful, malevolent figure whom Christians and Muslims see as personifying evil, making war on God and humankind alike.
Reading a book by Jeffrey Burton Russell, who has written five books on the devil and his origin, I was stopped by one sentence: "The figure of Satan has nothing to do with social history." Impossible! I thought; that's obviously wrong. People who take Satan seriously, whether thousands of years ago or today, aren't simply imagining ethereal spirits clashing in the stratosphere. Anyone who says, for example, that "Satan is trying to take over this country," has in mind certain people right here on the ground, seen as Satan's agents—and likely could give you names and addresses!
That misguided sentence spurred me to write what I privately—and ironically—called "the social history of Satan." How, after all, could an imaginary being have a social history? But I'd begun to see that Satan does—and wanted to track it down. Why were Christians writing about Satan? How do they associate him with certain people, and who are those people? What practical difference does it make to put Satan into a story?
(155-157)
There are, throughout her book, any number of small affirmations that only make sense, not so much just to me, but to a limited range of discourse. My bit on Job, for instance, wasn't affirmed, but, rather, educated.
Nonetheless, the Russell reference was a,
stop reading and go pour a beer so you can raise a glass, moment. Talk about guilty pleasures; I really can't explain how absurdly perfect those paragraphs felt. And, no, I'm not special. Rather, it just worked out that way, a nearly perfect coincidence, revealed these years later, so instrumental to the value of a freaky coincidence once upon a time.
Or, in a less solipsistic world, there's someone out there I can share a joke with, except no, really, I can't; it's just not practical. Still, though, she somehow managed to share it with me, even having no idea she was doing so. In a certain way, that would charm her perception of the Universe, and that seems like it should be enough.
Still, there really aren't so many who could appreciate the magnitude of that intersection 'twixt Russell and Pagels, occurring before I knew who either of them were, nor what I was getting into that one day when pulling sources for something about archaeology and death cult in the Levant and happened to notice the bit about about Satan in a search return. After all, it's just me; that value is an internalized measurement. But the day Pagels flared at Russell is fundamental to my understanding of history, with the greater period of that study noted occasionally at Sciforums.
It's not so much that I could chortle through the moment and say, "Of
course it was Russell!" but, rather that the moment was so recursive, encompassing the whole of an identifiable period in my intellectual growth. That is,
cheap, self-indulgent jokes are easy finds. But this? Learning is supposed to be its own reward. Experiential gems like this are rare in these adventures. It isn't just that I can make the joke; the X marked at the intersection of Pagels and Russell signifies a treasure of utterly subjective value, but, generally speaking, this really is an extraordinary example of its kind.
____________________
Notes:
° From which I learned of the painting detailed above: The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child before Three Witnesses: Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, and the Painter, by Max Ernst, 1926.
Pagels, Elaine. Why Religion? New York: Ecco, 2018.
