Heavily abridged. Hyperlinked title.

[Opinion. The author is a Greek classicist who follows an interesting winding path into all kinds of cultural subjects..

There are modern cases of people who worshipped Satan and sought his benefits through worship and supplication: Aleister Crowley and Anton LaVey come to mind.

It appears the very name Satan comes from the mediaeval Norse Surt.]

Where Does the Canonical Image of Satan Come From?

Spencer McDonald

Tales of Times Forgotten: 6 Jun 2026

The conventional image of Satan developed gradually over the course of many centuries. Some aspects of Satan’s iconography (in particular the cloven hooves, horns, and pitchfork) are very ancient, while others (such as him being red and having a goatee and a tail with a point on the end) are fairly recent developments.

For the first over five centuries of Christianity’s existence, Christians never depicted Satan in art at all. Even after Christians did begin to depict Satan in art, for centuries, images of him were rare and occurred exclusively in the context of manuscript illustrations of Biblical scenes.

The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that their deities, in some sense, inhabited the images they made of them, and they told stories about the gods performing miracles through their images. Early Christians believed that the Greek and Roman deities really existed and had real supernatural powers, but they believed that they were really demons, not true deities. (In fact, the apostle Paul himself expressly endorses this view in 1 Corinthians 10:20.)

Early Christian texts frequently reference the fear that demons might inhabit pagan statues and exert their powers through them for evil. This is the reason why some early Christians defaced pagan statues by chiseling out the face or carving a cross over it; the purpose was to remove the statue’s power and make it no longer a suitable vessel for demons to inhabit. [And why Muslims do not depict any images at all.]

The Greeks and Romans believed that Pan/Faunus was a lustful god who often seduced or raped beautiful nymphs and attractive boys, and they depicted him in art as a man with goat horns, shaggy goat legs (including cloven hooves), a beard, and an erect penis.

Pan and Daphnis

Even before Christians began to depict Satan in art, they already associated him with goats because of the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats, which occurs in the Gospel of Matthew 25:31–46. In this parable, Jesus says that, when the Son of Man returns, he will separate the righteous from the wicked as a herdsman separates sheep from goats, putting the righteous on his right and the wicked on his left. Then he will allow the righteous to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he will cast the wicked into “the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matthew 25:41).

Art historians have long suspected that the Devil’s cloven feet and horns may be a borrowing from the iconography of Pan. Given the fact that many ancient and early medieval Christians believed that the Greek and Roman deities were really demons, and the fact that both Pan and Satan were associated with goats and uncontrolled lust, it may have made sense for Christians to model their depictions of Satan on those of Pan.

The association of the Devil with a pitchfork most likely derives from the Parable of the Wheat and the Chaff, which is attributed to John the Baptist in Matthew 3:12 and Luke 3:17. In Matthew’s version of the parable, John the Baptist says of Jesus (NRSVUE trans.): “His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Although the original parable describes Jesus as wielding a winnowing fork rather than Satan, once Satan came to be seen as driving the wicked into Hell, the association of the winnowing fork with Satan became virtually inevitable.

Both Catholics and Protestants became convinced that there was a European-wide conspiracy of witches who had made secret pacts with Satan to receive supernatural powers in exchange for using those powers to hurt Christians. They believed that the sorcery sect was Satan’s final and greatest effort to undermine Christianity and try the faithful before God’s imminent final judgment.

In the mid-nineteenth century, some artists were still depicting Satan’s skin as black or ashen gray. The Dutch-French Romantic painter Ary Scheffer’s 1854 painting The Temptation of Christ, for example, shows Satan as a nude man with ashen gray skin and dark gray wings—a depiction that recalls those in the Book of Kells and the Melisende Psalter from centuries earlier.

The Great Satan also appears in modern depictions. [C’mon, how could I resist???]

  

3 minutes ago, unblocktheplanet said:

The Great Satan also appears in modern depictions.

He's only Satan to the Wokes and lefties, you guys are destroying our heritage, the west is becoming the middle east, riddled with evil men who want to marry 9 year olds.

He'll go down in the history books as Donald the great

18 minutes ago, unblocktheplanet said:

The Great Satan also appears in modern depictions. [C’mon, how could I resist???]

The Great Satan is the collective negative acts of everyone.

Not one man.

False Bible teachers have been predicting the Anti-Christ for a long time.

Hitler , Napolean, Obama (joke!), and now Trump.

And then technology is the mark of the beast - Covid vaccine, the microchip

It doesn't exist.

The "Mark of the Beast" isn't coming.

We were all born with it.

Edited 58 minutes ago58 min by save the frogs

Explains why every second bloke on Walking Street already looks halfway there. Horns optional.

24 minutes ago, SAFETY FIRST said:

He's only Satan to the Wokes and lefties, you guys are destroying our heritage, the west is becoming the middle east, riddled with evil men who want to marry 9 year olds.

He'll go down in the history books as Donald the great

So in your view Trump is better because he didn't want to marry a young girl, but just get a shakuhatchi on his tiny mushroom?

Friends of the devil are still holding back the legally demanded release of all the Epstein Files, including the 4 FBI interviews with the woman who says Trump wanted to get serviced the child.