Page:The Natural History of the Christian Devil.pdf/7

 of Devils: ye cannot be partaker of the Lord's table, and of the table of Devils" (1 Cor. x. 20, 21). The early fathers of the Church regarded the Roman Gods as Devils who gained power over those who sacrificed to them; hence the refusal to cast incense on an altar of one of the Gods: the homage would have placed the incense-thrower in the power of the Devil there worshipped. The cloven foot of the Christian Devil was probably derived from the God Pan, the joyous pipe-playing God of the spring-blossoming woods, whose lower limbs were the limbs of a goat; when the merry Pan was slain by the melancholy Christ, the God's light-dancing legs became the appanage of Satan. The clubbed foot often given to the Devil, so that he goes limping, is a sign that he is fallen from his original high estate: as Hephaistos was flung from Olympus by Zeus and lamed for ever, so Satan is imaged as lame, having fallen from heaven. His horns are also symbols of his former glory: when Moses talked with God "his face shone", according to our translation (Ex. xxxiv. 29), but the Vulgate has it that he had horns, and in the great statue of Moses by Michael Angelo at St. Peter's, Rome, two horns spring from his head. Horns are ancient symbols of the rays of the sun, and hence of divine strength; the halo with which Christians decorate Christ and his saints is a solar symbol, and the horns of the despised Devil have exactly the same signification as the halo of the God. When Christians mockingly affixed the horns of Pan to the brow of their own Satan, they ignorantly bound upon him the symbol of divinity. Similarly the German word for idol is Ab-Gott, ex-God, and no more significant name could be chosen.

Significant too is the fact that all Devils are ugly; the triumphant religion caricatured and outraged its rivals, so as to divorce from them the hearts of the people. "The evolution of demons and devils out of deities was made real to the popular imagination in every country where the new religion found art existing, and by alliance with it was enabled to shape the ideas of the people. The theoretical degradation of deities of previously fair association could only be completed where they were presented to the eye in repulsive forms. The great representations of evil, whether imagined by the speculative or the religious sense, have never been, originally, ugly. The Gods might be described as falling swiftly like lightning out of heaven, but in the popular imagination they retained for a long