Camp Gagnon - The UNCOMFORTABLE Truth About Lucifer

Episode Date: September 20, 2026

Today we’re diving into the origins of the single most recognizable villain in human history: Satan. We’re going beyond pop culture depictions, red horns, and pitchforks to trace how four words across three different languages evolved over thousands of years—from an adversary with a "job" in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Enochian Watchers to John Milton’s iconic Paradise Lost. Is our modern image of Lucifer clearly laid out in Scripture, or is it a legendary puzzle stitched together across centuries? WELCOME TO RELIGION CAMP! 🏕️ Shoutout to our sponsors: Perplexity and Blue Chew -Start your free trial of Perplexity Computer today at https://pplx.ai/camp and experience the next phase of AI. #ad Want the even WILDER theories? SIGN UP TO THE PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/cw/CampGagnon ✝️☪️✡️🕉️☦️ Religion Camp Merch: https://camp-rd.com 🎟️ 🎫 Comedy Tour Tickets Here: https://markgagnonlive.com 🏕️ Get Today In History Email Here (Free): https://www.dailytodayinhistory.com Timestamps: 0:00 - Christos YAPPIN 4:19 - Different Versions of Satan 7:06 - Four Words of ‘Satan’ 10:05 - When ‘Satan’ Was a Job 11:42 - The Book of Job 13:42 - How Satan Became a Name 16:26 - Book of Isaiah 18:31 - How We Get ‘Lucifer’ 20:30 - Most Beautiful Angel + Heaven’s Musician 22:44 - Jesus as The Morningstar 24:50 - Book of Enoch’s Watchers 26:44 - New Testament Satan 29:53 - Satan's Fall From Heaven 31:07 - Dragon of Revelation 34:52 - Who Rules Hell? 36:46 - Milton’s Paradise Lost 44:28 - Drop Your Thoughts! #religion #lucifer #uncomfortable #faith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Discover coffee plus on nispresso.com. radiant angel, the most beautiful of them all, stands in heaven at the height of his glory. But pride creeps in. He refuses to serve. And so he raises an army, wages war on God himself, and loses. He's cast down, hurled out of heaven like a burning star, and in the darkness below, he becomes the ruler of hell, the enemy of all mankind, literally the devil. And his name before the fall was Lucifer. I'm sure you've seen this story. You've seen it in paintings or movies on heavy metal album covers, maybe even in Sunday sermons, it might be the single most recognizable villain origin story in all of civilization, but there's just one problem. It's not

really in the Bible. And that name itself, Lucifer, in a lot of Bibles, it's not even there. And where it is, it shows up exactly once, buried in a poem that flat out tells you it's not even talking about the devil. In fact, the thing that we all picture when we imagine the devil, might not even be the devil at all. So how did four words in three different languages get stitched together in the Bible to create the most terrifying figure we can imagine? Well, today we're going to find out. We're going to track the devil from the beginning of the Hebrew Bible

all the way through the New Testament and dive into the hidden centuries in between to discover who the tempter of humanity. The Prince of Darkness actually is. So sit back, relax, and welcome to Religion King. What's up, dude? Welcome back to Religion Camp. My name is Mark Gagnon, and thank you for joining me in my tent where every single Sunday we explore the most interesting, fascinating, and controversial stories from every religion

from around the world from all time forever. Yes, that is what I do here. I try to figure out what every religion believes. And more importantly, what the people of those religions orient their lives around. That's why I do the show, really, is I'm fascinated by what people around the world are actively doing when they're connecting with the divine, right? Like there's all these people around the world, and for many of them, their relationship with God or the gods is the single most important thing in their life. And for me to not know anything about it, it feels like a real missed opportunity to try to expand my knowledge of the world.

Secondly, I like to find all the things that the religions do that are the same. I try to find all the common threads that they're all doing and take all the good stuff and try to apply it to my life. Again, I'm not taking every single little thing. I'm not one of these like universalists, like, oh, everyone's going to heaven. I mean, some of the people in this room probably aren't going to heaven. But I'm doing this because I want to find what are the actual practices that people are doing that I can try to apply. Oh, you pray a lot? I should be praying more, you know?

Oh, you believe in this sort of mystical practice? Well, maybe that occurs in my relationship with God. Things like that. And today we have a fascinating one. We're talking about Diablo. Yeah, the devil himself. But before we jump in, I want to say a few more things. One, I want to thank you.

Yeah, dude, you. Or girl, whoever you are, I don't really care how you identify. I just want to say thanks for being here, all right? Because every time you click on an episode or comment, like, anything like that, you help my dreams come true. You help religion camp grow, you help keep the lights on the tent, and you keep the fire burning here at the campsite. I've been doing this show, I mean, a little over a year, maybe even two years at this point, and I've been having a wonderful time so far. And I'm so grateful for all the people that tune in to, you know, make this show possible every single Sunday. It's one of the lights of my life.

Also, it's not possible to do this show without the Greek freak sitting next to me. The Orthodox legend, Christos Pashtimbalos. How are you? And you said some of the people in this room? What? What? There's only two of us. Well, I mean, statistically.

Some. I might be talking about me. 50%. Also, I might be talking about room in the broad sense. We're in a building with, you know, 30 other people. We're in the room with all the listeners. Yeah, and the guy watching at home. Like, maybe, maybe this is the episode that he listens to and is like, you know what?

I should I should pray to God. Or a girl listening. Or a girl. I mean, they're already probably praying. You know what I mean? I feel like girls are a bit more connected with the divine. They're tapped in, you know? But who knows?

All I'm saying is someone's got to go to hell. And it's not going to be me, all right? But what's in hell? Who's actually commanding it? Who's the devil? Right? And now when you think of the devil, there's probably a few specific images that come to mind.

You might be thinking of like red skin, horns, maybe like a fork tail. he's always naked which i find funny got a little butt hanging out pitch fork probably next to like a bunch of fire that's the medieval version and then there's like the beautiful version which is crazy this is like the gorgeous fallen angel with like black wings that's like proud but also like tragic and then there's the modern one which is like a guy in a suit which is always it's always a guy in a suit it's always like i'm the devil and he's got like he's more he went to like suit supply and you know he's got like a like a nice like tailored suit that's like a nice like a nice little taper on the legs. He's very charming. He's like kind of witty. And he's like,

like an anti-hero. You know, there's that version. And these are three completely different characters, and pop culture kind of treats them as one. And we use the names in the same way. I mean, there's so many names. Again, this is coming from a specifically like a Christian framework. But I mean, we're kind of talking about the same figure regardless of, you know, which Abrahamic religion were really diving into. But you got Lucifer, Satan, the devil, the surrogate, The serpent, the dragon, Bielzebub, Christos, the Prince of Darkness. There's all these different names that people use for the devil. And you can use any of them in a sentence, and everyone knows basically who you're talking about.

And they all basically point to the same person in our heads. But the question is, are they all the same? If you go through the source material, are we actually talking about the same entity when we're using all these words? So where does this even come from? And like, when you look at the chapter and the verse in the Bible, it starts to feel like, wait, that's it. Like, there's all this mention of Jesus Christ. You know what I mean?

You read the New Testament. It's like, Jesus is all up in there. And all of a sudden, you're like, well, who's the opposite of Jesus? Okay, the opposite of God is the devil, so he should be in there a lot. And he kind of is, but it's not in the way that you think. Someone took a serpent from one story and an accuser from another story and a falling star from another story and then a dragon from another story and then a Babylonian king from another story.

And the early church kind of like glued this together. into one entity. And then you have centuries of artists and preachers and poets that basically sanded down these stories until the differences were basically moot. And now we're all kind of thinking about the same thing. But today, we're going to pull apart all those threads. Not to, like, destroy it or be like, oh, the devil's actually not real. Actually, your Bible's fake.

That's not the point, okay? The point here is to figure out how we come to learn these things and how we get these images in our mind. And who really paints them and, like, really get to the bottom of who, the devil really is, like in the text and then who he is kind of in our minds. And to do that, we're going to go through all the names because almost every misunderstanding in this entire subject comes from different words, specifically four different words in three different languages and kind of what gets lost in the translation. So the very first word we're going to go through

is coming from Hebrew, and that is Satan, or in the kind of original pronunciation, that is Satan. And actually, in its original... Blend wellness into your coffee routine with the coffee plus range infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function, and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover coffee plus on espresso.com. It's not a name, it's a job.

It's a noun that literally just means like adversary. It means like an opponent, an accuser, someone standing in your way. And you could use it for like an enemy army. Like, oh, those bad guys over there, that's Satan. Or you can use it for like a rival in a court. And when it shows up with the little Hebrew word the in front of it, so like ha satan, it literally means the adversary or the accuser. It's like calling someone like, this is the prosecutor in almost like a court sense.

And then the second word is coming from our good pal over here, Christos. It's a Greek word that means literally this slanderer. And the word is diabolos. And it's basically someone that accuses you. It's kind of similar to the first one, right? This is someone who throws words at you to basically bring you down. And this is the one that you probably already know. It literally is like, you know, diabolos.

It's basically where we get the English word, the devil. And the same idea as Hebrew, right? This is an accuser. This is an opponent. And then the third word is actually coming from Latin. And this word is the one that we're going to focus on a lot. and this is Lucifer. In Latin, it's two different pieces.

So, Lux being like the root there, meaning like light and then Fere, meaning to carry. So this is literally like the carrier of light. This is the light bringer. And to a Roman, this word is not really scary, right? Like, because it was just their ordinary poetic name for a specific thing in the sky, which is the morning star. So this is the bright point of light that rises just before dawn, which is technically actually like the planet.

at Venus. And Romans would look at it and they would see like Venus kind of glittering in the sunrise and they would be like, oh, that's the morning star. That is the bringer of the light. Literally all the light is about to come up at dawn. That is a star that brings the light. That is Lucifer. It literally carries us into the morning. And then the fourth word is another Hebrew phrase that really the whole story here kind of hinges on it. And that phrase is Hela ben Shakar. This is the shining one, son of the dawn. This is also like a a morning star image and also originally not specifically a name for the devil. So the entire story of Lucifer is the story of how these four ordinary words get mixed together and then turned into

a single terrifying villain. And it happens literally over like a thousand years with one translation and one interpretation at a time that gets sort of like passed over generation by generation. So let's go all the way back to their beginning to the oldest layer where the word Satan doesn't necessarily mean devil at all. And it comes from the the Hebrew Bible. If you read the Hebrew Bible, what Christians basically call the Old Testament, and you go through kind of looking for the devil, the grand cosmic enemy of God, the rebel, the angel, the ruler of hell, he's not really there in the way that you would expect. So in the oldest text, the word Satan is still doing its day job. It just means the adversary. So take the

book of numbers, for example. There's a prophet named Balam, who's riding a donkey down the road, and God is displeased with him. So an angel, a messenger of God himself, is sent. to block the road and stop him. And the Hebrew text says that the angel stood in the road as a Satan, which is interesting, right? This is an angel of God that is going to, you know, basically accuse or kind of chastise in a way, Belom because he's displeasing to God. And basically working as an adversary, as an opponent standing in the way. So one being called a Satan in that scene is an angel of God doing the will of God, not the devil, just God's own ancient functioning as an obstacle. And that's how neutral the world.

word is, right? Like accusing someone that did something bad that they did something bad isn't an evil act. But in that sense, you would be an accuser. You would be a Satan. So you see the same thing over and over in the Hebrew Bible. And once you're kind of looking for it, it's almost like funny. So like political enemies of the wise King Solomon, they are called his Satan's, which makes sense. And then when David's men worry that he might turn on their side in a battle, they warn that he himself could become a Satan against them in the fight. So it's just a word for a human rival or a threat or just like a thorn in your side, something blocking your way. So kings have Satan's in the way that modern politicians have opponents.

So already, Satan is not one guy. It is that title like we said. But as we've just seen, that's not the only word that the story uses. Because in a few places, the adversary steps out of the human world and into the throne room of heaven. So this takes us to the book of Job, which is fascinating. It's one of like the strangest but also like most powerful and like, in my opinion, like scariest stories on the whole Bible. and it opens with a scene in heaven. And it says the sons of God,

aka the divine beings of like this heavenly court, come and present themselves before God. And among them comes Ha Satan, literally the adversary. And this is still being used as a title. So it's not a name. But this entity is basically a member of the court of God. It's almost like the prosecuting attorney

in God's like royal counsel, going against God. And this is the one who's basically there to like bring, you know, hard questions. So God points out how faithful his servant Job is, and then this Hasatan, this accuser basically says, sure, yeah, Job is very faithful. You know, you've given him everything. But if you take it all away, if you take away all the happiness and light from Job's life, watch how he curses you. So he's like the skeptic in the room who wants to be the

one to actually put Job to the test. And crucially, he can't do it without God's permission. Like God sets the limits and then the accuser basically goes to town just like ruining Job's life. So just pause right there and think about what this character is in the biblical sense. Still, like, there's no horns, not really like in hell, actually like in the court of heaven somehow. And there's not like a clear rebellion. There's no war. He's not God's equal, right? Like he's not like an equal like sort of anti sort of God. He's a member of the heavenly staff with like a weird job working under God's authority. So is it possible that's like the devil as we know it? Is possible that's just like an angel that accuses and kind of like tests the waters it's difficult to

really say but you almost get the same exact picture in the book of Zechariah so there's a courtroom vision the high priest is standing before the angel of the lord and again satan the accuser stands at his right hand to accuse him and in that story god rebukes the accuser so it's the same role kind of same like kind of courtroom setting and the same word and here's where it starts to kind of move late in the Hebrew Bible. So in the book of Chronicles, there's a story where Satan, again, that title rises up and incites King David to take a census, something that turns out to be a very grave sin, read the whole story. And for the first time, the Hebrew word drops the so it's not the adversary. So it's no longer like a title, like a job description, it's just

Satan. And by dropping the the there, the title now just sounds like a name, like a descriptor for a specific thing. Now, there's actually an older version of the same. census story in the book of Samuel and in that older telling. Well, who incites David to take the census? This is where it's interesting. It's actually not Satan. It's God. It's fascinating. The same event is retold generations later and the cause has shifted from God to this newly independent figure called Satan, not even the Satan, just Satan. And that is a genuinely debated passage. I don't want to oversimplify this and be like, oh, like the biblical authors are conflating God and Satan. That's not what I'm doing here. I'm just.

just trying to point out that you can see something changing across the centuries and the stories and how people are understanding these events in their real lives and ultimately who to attribute the events to. So the Hebrew Bible gives us our start. You have this accuser in a courtroom, kind of like, you know, like a figure starting to stand on his own, but it doesn't really give us the fallen angel. It doesn't give us the Lucifer. So where does that come from? Well, we have to go to a poem about a king. Fellows, this episode is sponsored by Blue Chew. Look, life is about preparation.

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And before we get anywhere near the famous falling star line, Isaiah tells us directly what the passage is. He says, you, meaning like the people of Israel, will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon. Now, that could be the emperor that had conquered and humiliated Israel, possibly like Nebuchadnezzar. This is, you know, a victory song. It's basically Israel, like, kind of dancing above, like the tyrant who crushed them.

Like, that's ultimately what this passage is about. And contained in it is the part that kind of changed our understanding of theology. It says this, how art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning. This kind of sounds like the devil's like Orda Story just kind of dropped randomly right in the middle of the Bible, except look at what's being said. The poet, the poet actually writing this is mocking the king. Like he said that, right? So he's saying, you shone so bright, you climbed so high, you told yourself, I will ascend to heaven. I will raise my throne above the stars. I will make myself like the most high. And now look, you've been cut down to the ground.

You've fallen so far from her glory. Like the morning star fading when the sun comes up, you're going down to the grave with everybody else. So it's kind of like a disc track. It's kind of like an etherbeat kind of situation. You know what I mean? It's an insult. And it seems like it's being taken at the emperor's arrogance. So like that fall from heaven is the fall of this proud king

from the height of his power that basically humiliated the nation of Israel. And now the people are getting kind of their laugh at the end of it. Now notice something here. While we're here, this is really important because this is where the devil's whole motive, kind of where everything comes from. will ascend, I will raise my throne, I will make myself like the most high. That's the pride. When people are talking about pride, that's ultimately what they're talking about. That's the ambition to be God's equal. Though the way we usually tell it, Lucifer, as the entity we are more

familiar with, is jealous of God. And that specific word, jealous is more the poets than the text. Scripture gives us the arrogance, and then we kind of add like the envy on top of it. So how do we get Lucifer, meaning the devil? Like, how did those two things get connected? Well, it's actually kind of simple. So in the original Hebrew, the phrase is Halel ben Shakhar. That's the one I was talking about. Shining one, Son of the Dawn. Shining one, son of the dawn, that sounds like the morning star. And then the Hebrew gets translated into Latin, centuries later by the scholar Jerome. And Jerome does a very natural thing. He

translates shining one, son of the dawn, into the ordinary Latin word for that star, which, as you guessed it, is Lucifer. That is the lightbringer. So at that point, Jerome isn't naming the devil. He's a literally translating the star, the celestial body that comes up right before the dawn. It's literally the planet Venus. Then more than a thousand years later, the King James translators reach this verse, and the Latin says Lucifer. But instead of translating it into English as like the morning star that comes up right before the dawn, they do something different. They just keep the Latin word and then capitalize it like a name. And now it's Lucifer, capital L. And that's basically how it was done.

The Hebrew phrase for the planet of Venus turned into a Latin word for the planet of Venus. And then it kind of got frozen into an English word that now is like a person's name inside a poem that's making fun of a Babylonian king. Like I know it's kind of complicated, but once you kind of break it down, you're like, oh, that's interesting. And it actually happens multiple times because there's actually a second poem in the book of Ezekiel that people will read in the exact same way. And this one is actually like a lament over a different foreign king. of Tyre, which at the time is like a very rich kind of like trading port city. And just like Isaiah, the language gets so grand. It literally says, you were the seal of perfection, full of wisdom and perfect in beauty. You were in Eden, the Garden of God. And so, of course, later readers are

reading this and they decided it couldn't possibly be about a mere human king. This is not some type of poetry. This is literally secretly about Satan. And that passage is where two more things that you know about the devil really comes from. First, the most beautiful angel, kind of that depiction we were talking about of like this beautiful kind of tragic angel with black wings it's kind of coming from ezekiel perfect in beauty brought down by his own pride verse 17 your heart was lifted up because of your beauty your beauty so it's like gorgeous and tragic and like you know like this angel that's doomed by vanity and pride that's this chapter spoken originally it seems like to a phoenician king now it's possible it's maybe doing two things at once but based off of reading the entire text you're like

oh this is about this king of tyre and then second And this is the weird one, the angel of music. You probably heard before that Lucifer was like, you know, so skilled at music. He was like the heavenly sort of like band leader, right? He's like the choir director and like music is like essential to him, which, you know, sparks so many different kind of conversations in like the modern era of like music being used as like a satanic weapon because people associate Satan with, you know, being this very proficient musician.

And it kind of comes from one line in the King James Bible. It literally says, the workmanship of thy to brettes. and of thy pipes was prepared in thee, in the day that thou wast created. So what does that mean? It's kind of hard to read like old English, but tabrets are basically like these little drums. And then pipes are obviously like wind instruments. So like it seems like these instruments are built right into him. He's like heaven's musicians.

Except if you crack open modern Bibles like the ESV or the NIV, the instrumentation that's actually found in that translation is just kind of gone. Newer translations read the same kind of Hebrew as. jewelry. So it says like settings and mountings because the whole verse is just like a big list of like gemstones. So the angel of music may be once again like kind of this artifact of one's translation choice hardened into a sort of cultural thing that we all believe to know. And, you know, it's the same move as like the Lucifer thing being like an actual description for a star that then becomes like a name with a capital L. Just kind of a different verse. But that would just be too simple because

that's not the end of the story. The very same morning star image, the Latin Lucifer, the Greek Lightbringer, shows up elsewhere in the Bible, but as a title of honor. Yeah, this is where things get really weird and where like you get like Gnostic tradition kind of tying into this. Again, I'm not trying to make that argument. I'm just trying to show like how scholars have understood this. So this term lightbringer actually gets used for the coming of the Messiah. So in the book of Revelation, Jesus himself is called the bright morning star. The same imagery, the same light rising before the dawn. If Morning Star automatically meant devil, then there's a pretty serious problem here, because then the Bible gives that same title to the Messiah. So it can't have like a connotation

to it, right? So what turned this particular Morning Star into the devil wasn't the word, it's kind of what happens next. When a later generation of readers pick up Isaiah's insult about a king and then hear something, I guess, bigger, maybe more insidious, kind of in between the lines. So, so far it seems like we have. New from an espresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with a coffee plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like coffee plus B12 to help support immune function, and coffee plus B6 to keep your day moving.

Or go with the flow and choose ginseng delight. Our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Coffee Plus on Espresso.com. I have a little bit of a problem, historically speaking, right? By the time of Jesus, a lot of Jews and then Christians clearly did believe in something much closer to the devil that we picture, right?

They are picturing many times a powerful, personal, supernatural enemy of God. It kind of like, you know, evil incarnate, and there's armies of evil spirits and all sorts of stuff. But we just saw that the oldest Hebrew text don't really lay that out. So what happens from the oldest Hebrew text to like early Christendom? And the answer is one of the most overlooked chapters of all of religious history. And it's the centuries between the Old and the New Testaments. This is a period that scholars will often call the Second Temple era.

And it's ultimately from this era where the devil, like capital D devil that we know was born. So in these hidden centuries, Jewish writers were wrestling with this question, right? If God is good, where does evil come from? This is, as philosophers will describe it as the problem of evil. God is all powerful. He's all good. He's very just, he's very merciful. Why is there so much evil?

So so much unexplained tragedy. And a rich new body of literature basically explodes to answer this question. So you have books full of angels and cosmic rebellions and really kind of wrestling with the origins of evil all trying to answer this question. And the most famous from this era is the book of Enoch. This is one that I think is just fascinating. And it basically tells a story that most people assume is in Genesis,

but it's not. So in First Enoch, a group of angels called the Watchers, look down at human women and they desire them, and then choose to descend to Earth and then basically come together and make a pact to rebel against God. And so they come to Earth,

they take human, like, mortal wives, and then they teach humanity a bunch of forbidden things, like knowledge that they're not supposed to have, things like, you know, weapons and sorcery and, you know, alchemy and all that kind of stuff. And their monstrous offspring that they have with these human women are basically like, these giants that, you know, bring violence into the world.

And God had them all kind of basically like bound up and then imprisoned to basically wait for judgment. So it has like a full-blown fallen angels epic of, you know, these angels, these watchers that come down, they rebel against God. And then, you know, there's punishment. And it all sounds pretty familiar. And a huge amount of what people think is in the Lucifer story actually traces to this era of imaginative Jewish literature written in that kind of in between second, second temple

period, and it's not directly in Genesis and or really the rest of the Bible. And this is the era when the puzzle pieces really come together. So like that neutral kind of accuser title hardens into a proper enemy named Satan. And the idea of angels who rebelled and like fall basically take the center stage and heaven gets kind of like this war cosmology. And now you've got a supernatural villain with a backstory and he's got a very clear motive. He's very prideful and jealous and he's got an army. And all of this comes just in time. for the New Testament. So by the time the book of Matthew starts happening, the writers aren't inventing the devil from scratch. They are inheriting a developed figure that kind of came out of

this in between period. And then they build on it. So in the New Testament, the parts written in Greek, the word satanas, literally Satan, Satan shows up around like three dozen times. And it's clearly not a job description anymore. It's clearly not a title. It is a personal, supernatural enemy of God and of God's people. He's also just not like an accuser. He's like, he's a tempter more so. Like he's not like trying to like, like it's similar, but he's not like calling people out. He's literally coming to trick them. So he's the one who confronts Jesus in the wilderness and tries to get him to sin by offering the offering him the entire world, offering him bread, even though he's, you know, fasting and starving. He also shows up as the opponent. Jesus even turns to his own disciple Peter on point and says,

get behind me Satan when Peter tries to steer him off of his own path. And he shows up as the deceiver and the afflictor basically kind of entering Judas before the betrayal. He's tormenting Paul. He's working against the mission at every turn. Now at this point, by the New Testament, he's the head of a kingdom of darkness directly opposed to the kingdom of God. And by no means is he working alone. This is where the Bible actually does put him in charge of the demons under a different name. the name Bielzebub. When Jesus' critics are accusing him of casting out demons, they say that he's doing it by Bielzebub, the ruler of the demons. And Jesus' own answer, how can Satan cast out Satan? So even just in Christ's own words found in the New Testament, he treats Bielzebub and Satan as the same guy.

So yeah, he's got titles, right? Ruler of the demons, the god of this world, the prince of the power of the air. He's like the head of something. But you see where the kingdom is, right? Like just even in those lines. The New Testament never directly sets like his throne in hell. Like it actually says like his kingdom is this one. The New Testament says like, you know, like his kingdom is almost like the world, right? He's the god of this world, the prince of the power of the air. And he's basically like has the grip of the sin basically in the world. And keep that in mind because that's really, really important. And it's not just in the Gospels. Paul writing the earliest Christian letters that we have add some of these sharpest strokes to this entire picture.

He warns that Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light, which for a figure that we're about to keep calling the lightbringer, it's like very spot on. He calls him the god of this world who blinds people's mind. He describes his own suffering as a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan, basically like an affliction that God permits, kind of like the story of Job. And then Paul promises that the god of peace will soon crush Satan,

under your feet, an echo of the Serpent of Eden, which is going to matter for the knot that we're going to untie in just a second. Now, this is much closer to the devil that you've imagined, right? He's personal and very active and very dangerous, but there's still a few things that are kind of missing here. The New Testament calls him the tempter and the enemy and the evil one, but it doesn't call him Lucifer. That name is nowhere in the Greek. The connection hasn't been made just yet. There's one line, though, one sentence from Jesus that becomes the bridge. So in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus says, I watch Satan fall from heaven like lightning. Fall from heaven. You see that? That's the phrase that we were talking about earlier. Now go back and put it next to Isaiah's taunt,

how you have fallen from heaven, oh shining one, son of the dawn. So now two different passages, two different original contexts, one about a king, one very clearly about Satan, but they share that that image falling from heaven. And once a reader hears those two lines next to each other, there's a line that gets drawn and it gives a very deeper meaning to this whole thing. The single echo in there is the crux of the entire Lucifer legend that we thought was kind of plainly told in the Bible. And at some point, it is somewhere in the Bible, right? But someone at some point puts Isaiah's falling morning star next to Jesus's falling Satan

and very reasonably decided that they were describing the same event. And perhaps they are, but it's not really super clear in the text. Now, there's one more text to talk about in this, and it's the closest that the Bible actually comes to answering these questions for us, and it comes from the Book of Revelation. It's one of the strangest books in the whole Bible. We've done entire episodes on it. You should absolutely check that out, like scene by scene, but regardless, just for this episode, here's what we need to know. Revelation describes a war in heaven. You have a great red dragon, cast down to the earth, and then it does something none of the other texts do.

It stops and identifies the dragon, and it literally calls the dragon, that. ancient serpent who is called the devil and Satan the deceiver of the whole world now that line is like the rosetta stone it is hugely important it's like a master key in a single sentence revelation kind of puts together the names that were it seems like separate throughout the early parts of the bible and ties them all into one the dragon the ancient serpent which then pulls from the garden of eden all the way back in genesis a serpent that genesis doesn't clearly say is you know Satan kind of makes reference that there's like the serpent that is tempting Adam and Eve. But regardless, you have that one line that connects it all together. You have the devil,

which is the Diabolos, the literally like the Greek slanderer. And then you have Satan. This is the Hebrew word for the adversary. And four separate threads basically tied into one right there in one sentence at the very end of the whole Bible. And that's the one verse that really lets Christian tradition reach all the way back to Eden and be like, hey, the serpent that's tempting Eve, that's the devil all along. It says it right there in Revelation. Honestly, it's the one verse that changes how we look at the devil throughout the entire Bible. If we don't have that one verse, it's much more difficult to connect all of these things. And then Revelation 12 is also the one place that the Bible flat out says that there is a war in heaven.

Michael and his angels versus the dragon and his kind of fallen angels or demons. And this is also where we get a third of the angels fell. So the dragon's tail sweeps and then a third of the stars out of the sky. and throws them down onto earth. And this is the source. This is the war and the number. Though, again, fair warning, trying to be like completely unbiased here.

Plenty of scholars think that the war there isn't a flashback to the beginning of everything, but something that happens at the end of everything. But again, maybe this is kind of, in this sort of like apocalyptic literature genre, this is a way to reference things that happened at the beginning, but also things that happen at the end. It's metaphorical, so to speak.

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Most AI tools are still answering questions, but perplexity computer is completing full projects. Now, let's get back to the show. We imagine Satan ruling hell. Like down there, he's running the place. You go to hell. You see Satan and he's dishing out punishment. But the Bible doesn't really say that. When the dragon loses the war, he isn't sent down to basically reign in hell.

He's thrown down to Earth. So at the very end, in Revelation, Satan gets thrown into the lake of fire and is tormented day and night. So he's not the warden at that point. He's an inmate. Matthew even says that the fire was prepared for the devil and his angels. So it's built basically as his punishment. The demons themselves beg Jesus not to send them there. Hell in the Bible is at the end of everything, not the devil's kingdom.

It's actually his sentence. It's actually the place where the devil ultimately ends up to crush evil. once and for all. So now we can take a step back and look at all the pieces that we have, right? You have the accuser from Job's heavenly courtroom story, the rebel angel from the book of Enoch, which again is non-canonical. I don't want to conflate that necessarily with the Bible. It's just the same kind of literature that's circling in this time period. And then you have the falling morning star from Isaiah's taunt against Babylon and the king there. And then you have Jesus' line about Satan falling like lightning. And then you have the serpent in the garden. And then you have the dragon of

revelation, tying the serpent, the devil, and Satan all into one. None of those texts on their own gives you clearly the Lucifer story, but somebody read them altogether, as if they were chapters of a single biography, and out of that reading, this story was born. And there was one more guy who took all of this and then wove them into a narrative for the first time and this is going to sound crazy, try to make Lucifer the good guy. Now, this is just a bit of a diversion that I think is interesting because once again it just sort of shows how this name and this kind of title and this idea in our minds kind of got made. So it was in 1667, a blind English poet named John Milton published an epic poem called Paradise Lost. And it's a great book. You should read it. It's fascinating.

It's like a classic piece of literature. And honestly, the devil that we picture in our heads today in a large part is the devil that John Milton described. Paradise Lost has been hugely influential on how the West perceives the devil, whether they've read it or not. It's just kind of intercepted into our subconscious. So Milton, being a writer, took all of those scattered biblical fragments that we just talked about and did what no theologian had really done before. He turned them into a singular character and turned that character into the protagonist. So his Satan, as John Milton describes it, is magnificent and proud and eloquent and defiant and kind of wounded. This is the Satan who stands on the Burning Lake, refuses to surrender,

and declares that it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven. And that line right there is a kind of a beautiful sort of poetic understanding of the devil that we all know, but also kind of an example of the problem. It's the most famous thing that anyone has written about the devil, but it's kind of the opposite of what the Bible says, because like we just saw, scripture never lets him rain in hell at all. It's not clearly stated. Milton gave the devil the one thing that the Bible refused to give him, which is a throne.

and like an autonomous kingdom, again, in a separate sort of celestial realm being in hell. And, you know, in this story, he's charismatic, and he is, frankly, the most compelling character in the poem, so compelling that even the poet William Blake later said that Milton was secretly of the devil's party without even knowing it. And this is more or less the first time that we see the modern devil appear with all those threads really tied up together. All the pieces of this puzzle kind of completed to give a full picture of the Lucifer that you and I know today. picture that is, I mean, frankly, like, so vivid that for the English-speaking world, it kind of, in a way, like, overwrote the Bible. Most people today, when they're thinking of Lucifer, they're not thinking about Isaiah or Job. They're thinking about John Milton. So, who is Lucifer?

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Discover coffee plus on nispresso.com. Right, the devil, the one figure that we're maybe so sure that we all know, doesn't necessarily have the origin story that we thought we did, not based off of the biblical text that we have. There's not a single chapter, no clean little moment where a proud, angel falls and then hell basically opens up to receive him and all like the legions fall out with him like a lot of that stuff we built out of these fragments of scripture and over time developed this character but still even after all of that after pulling all the threads apart

there's still questions that are still unanswered like is the devil equal and opposite to god is this a rival power that is locked in a cosmic war is this like the Voldemort to the Harry Potter where like they both have great power, but Harry Potter just gets the best of him by a little bit. And if God created Lucifer, like, you know, he created everything. So obviously, like he created Lucifer as an angel, then why are they enemies at all? Like, why would God allow this angel to become so prideful

that it became an adversary? You know, is it the beauty of free will, giving angels free will? What kind of free will do angels even have? And the, you know, all-powerful nature of God, why doesn't he just like stop it now, right? Like, why doesn't he just snap his fingers and call it a day. Like you destroy the devil, you destroy evil, you end all suffering, you fix

the problem of evil. These are still questions that people are deliberating. Theologians have many answers for, but even after the deep dive, it's still hard to say for certain. And frankly, with all the spiritual warfare in the Bible, like demons and possessions and, you know, voices in the wilderness, we still can't say for certain that Lucifer is a single person in all of these instances. And maybe he is. Maybe he is a force. And, you know, all of these sort of connections aren't. accurate, but it's maybe not as certain as, for me at least, I thought that it was. So at the end of all this, I mean, it's kind of ironic, right? Because God, in a way, created the angels. And if you sort of go based off this Christian sort of, you know, angelic understanding, in a way, allowed Satan

to be created. He allowed evil to exist. And so much of how we picture Satan based off a biblical text and then, you know, later depictions, we also helped contribute to making Satan. We also contributed to understanding and trying to visualize what this entity really is. Because the, you know, single, you know, fallen angel that doomed humanity that fell out of the sky, it's not in one single verse. It's something that is kind of put together over centuries. And, I mean, as ironic as it is to say, the devil always really was in the details. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a brief synopsis of, where we get our understanding of the devil.

I mean, yeah, it's an interesting thing. I remember, like, even just being, like, in class, like reading about these things, like, when I was going to, like, Bible study, and just being like, okay, so I thought it was, like, clear because I remember getting told the story that everyone kind of knows. Like, oh, the devil's in heaven. He's beautiful. He's playing music.

He's very prideful. And then he doesn't want to serve human beings because that's what the angels have to do. They ultimately have to, like, serve God and serve God's creation that are humans. and so he rebels gets cast out of hell and that's where he basically reigning until like the end of times when Christ basically destroys Satan and now he's on earth like kind of like tempting

human beings and like you know he's in the domain of the world etc and it's interesting because even just looking into it was like oh it's not actually said that clearly you can understand how people tied all together and how they got to that point but it's not laid out so clearly and my version is really John Milton's version

and I'm kind of drawing that connection Which again is helpful to paint these things in like a very like Just kind of like eloquent poetic modern version that people can understand I think there's a use case for that I'm not even bagging on it but it's interesting I mean creatures is anything you picked up from this that goes against what your initial understanding of Diablo was So the Greek version is the avalos Diabolos yeahvalos well and that's where Diablo comes from a lot of people record the whole episode

Yep I pronounced it wrong well you couldn't I thought it was diabolos it is So what are you saying? In Greek, B is a V. Oh, brother. B is a V? The original alphabet. D. So out A, V, C, D.E?

Exactly. Really? Well, it's Alphavita. Enough of this, all right. Alpha beta. Alpha beta? No, it's supposed to be Alpha Veda. Yeah, because dumb Americans.

Okay. Including myself. Also, the best devil portrayed in a film. Elizabeth Hurley and bedazzled with Brendan Fraser. You've never seen this? No. So they show her as a baddie. She's so hot. Oh, my God. See, you are just a dog. You can't see. This is the devil tempt you. The devil doesn't show up as pointing out, you know, horns. He shows up as everything you've ever wanted. And I think we're about to see everything that Chris just has ever wanted on the screen right here. Show me. That's the devil. But dazzled? I've never been heard of this movie. That's crazy, Mark. What happens in the movie? Brendan Fraser sells his soul for three wishes

Every wish always just comes out bad Because he doesn't wear it correctly Typical storyline Yeah, monkey pop Yeah, great storyline A great movie though Does he smash the devil? He does not

He's in love with some mother chick An angel I don't want to give it away Oh goodness, all right, fine You guessed it though No, did I really? Look at me, dude, look at me I feel like that's sacrilegious

How me, I don't know I guess maybe some people did hook it with angels I don't want to get into it. Look, if you guys know anything more about this, if you're an expert in Grim Wars or the Origins of Satan, please, by all means, drop a comment. We did actually an episode about, like, how we, the medieval depictions, so, like, pulling it from, like, Pan

and, like, why people see them as, like, Baphomed and, like, all that kind of stuff, which is a fascinating episode, you can check that out as well. But I'd love to know what your thoughts are. Anything I got wrong, anything I missed again. I'm not immune to correction. I'm just a comedian with a Wi-Fi connection, trying to figure this all out with my friends that are helping me research.

So, by all means, let me know. also if you like history content great news we have history camp where we go through everything that's ever happened if you like crazy deep dives and like modern stuff kind of like conspiracies going through occult stuff going through like you know crazy interviews of people that have had near-death experiences and trying to understand ultimately really what's going on out here well great news camp gaggon is a place for you camp ganon as they say in montreal that is the main channel where i do interviews and as well as deep dives just like this and if you just like to rock with the religion vibe well great news you're in the right place we drop these every single sunday and i'm so glad you guys are here I really appreciate you tuning in and being a part of this. So God bless you all.

Have a beautiful Sunday. Go to church and I'll see you next week. Peace. Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings. The end of jobs or the end of human struggle.

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