In this extremity of behavior, we witness how influential this personage can be upon our mortal being. In the spiritual and intellectual sense, this dark demon is able to prey upon us via the large array of our weaknesses.
It is interesting to note, while a saint or angel motivates our personal inner strength, the devil asks us nothing but the indulgence of our worldly desires. He is happy to speed down life’s low road, laughing crazily behind the wheel. The interpretation of this dream image is split, dependent on our reaction and interaction with this powerful allegorical being.
Are we drawn within its charms and ease, or are we repulsed by its lack of any and all restraint. In the psychological sense of the former example, we in fact be overcompensating for the mundane reality of our day to day existence.
Among devils and demons, Satan by antonomasia denotes the Adversary, an adversary as proud as he is evil.
The translators of the Jerusalem Bible observe that the word ‘Satan’, the Adversary, is apparently borrowed from legal phraseology (Psalm 109: 6-7). The word came more and more to denote ‘an evil being... and eventually a proper name... [that] of the power of evil... synonymous with the dragon, the devil, the serpent... alternative names or personifications of the evil spirit... Satan, like the serpent of Genesis 3, tempts man to sin.’
The word reached African tradition via Islam, but in this context he is no anti-god, for nothing can exist which is against Gueno. He is an evil spirit who works through hints and promptings to evil.
In Hermetic tradition,
Satan is another name for saturn in the guise of the principle of the Spirit taking material shape. The Spirit turns in upon itself, sinking into matter, and from this rises the myth of the fall of Lucifer, the bearer of light.... The myth of Satan epitomizes the problem of what may be termed evil.... Its existence, relative to human ignorance, is no more than a disto tion of primal light which, although buried in matter, shrouded in darkness and reflected in the turmoil of human awareness, perpetually struggles to break free. Through the suffering which it causes, this distortion may nevertheless become the means through which a true scale of values gains recognition and the starting-point for the transformation of awareness which, from then on, becomes able to reflect without distortion primeval Light.
The Cathars regarded Satan as the Demiurge who created the world. Satan was visible and spoke through his prophets since the God of Goodness was invisible to human eyes. There are undoubtedly links between the ideas of Jewish ascetics of the twelfth century and the teachings of the Cathars and between the latter and the Book of Bahir in repect of Satan’s cosmic role, and between the demonology of the Cathars and that of the Kabbalists in respect of Satan’s wives, lilith, especially, was held traditionally to be the wife of Satan. Despite the inevitable contacts between Provencal Jewish scholars and the Cathars, the former were all too well aware of the gap which separated them from the Cathars’ demonology and their belief that the world was so evil that it could only be Satan’s creation.
