|
|
Article: The Origin of Satan.
- Article from:
- Contemporary Review
- Article date:
- August 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Contemporary Review Company Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Writing about Satan in the late twentieth century may seem like a kind of self-inflicted marginalization. In our secular, scientific world such a figure has surely been relegated to the same backwater of history as witches, demons, vampires and ghouls. This is territory for the dedicated antiquarian to fish in. Paddling his lone canoe of scholarship against all the currents of modernity, he may dredge up some remains from the fossil record of the often dark childhood of the human psyche. These may be variously quaint, revolting, or horrific, but they are also, surely, redundant. What relevance has the Devil to our world of microchip technology and sophisticated scepticism ...