Satan's Sex Change.

I only mentioned this fact in passing in my last blog post, about Satan (the Adversary, in Hebrew), aka Lucifer in Latin, or Phōsphoros in Greek, both names meaning 'Light-Bringer', also being Venus, or Aphroditē, the Roman and Greek goddesses of love, and Astartē, their Phoenician equivalent, which I didn't mention.

Lucifer, the Morning Star, as male, is the brother of Vesper, the Evening Star, and the son of Aurora, the Dawn, and Cephalus, meaning 'Head'. That's the Roman version of the story.

The Greek version is that Eōsphoros, the 'Dawn-Bringer', Phōsphoros' other name, is the son of Ēōs, 'Dawn', and Kephalos, 'Head', an Aeolian prince she had kidnapped because she'd taken a fancy to him, forcing him to be her lover. Hesperos (Latinised as Hesperus), the Evening Star, is his brother.

Astronomically, of course, the Morning and Evening Stars are identical, and neither of them are 'stars' at all, but the planet Venus, the second planet of the Solar System. The planet was worshipped as a god or goddess in numerous cultures. To the Aztecs, for example, Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent God, and Tlāloc, the god of rain, water and earthly fertility, were both Venus, as was Xolotl, the god of fire and lightning. In the First Babylonian Empire period, the goddess was known as Ninsi'anna, meaning 'divine lady, illumination of heaven', and later as Dilbat. 

Venus, Aphroditē and Astartē are also Ishtar, Inanna, Asherah, Anat, Athirat, Ashtartu, Ashratu, Elat (which means 'goddess'), and go by many other names in the Middle East, North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean of the Ancient World, including Egyptian Isis. As Asherah, she was the consort of Canaanite El, Canaanite/Ugaritic Ba'al (= Babylonian Bel), and Yahweh, as attested by the inscription found at Kuntillet ʿAjrûd, in the NE Sinai Peninsula, the site dating from the 9th/8th Centuries BCE. (See Dever, 1984). She was the 'Queen of Heaven' (a title also borne by Hēra and Juno) whose worship is so deprecated by Jeremiah in Jer. 7:18; 44:17-23.

All these seemingly different goddesses are, in fact, one and the same goddess: Robert Graves' 'White Goddess', regardless of what one thinks about his theory of poetry - or his poetry. She was a goddess of life, birth and death, of fertility and reproduction, not just of humans, but of all living things, including the animals and crops that humans depended on for their survival.

Her place was usurped by the patriarchal gods, just as men usurped the power of women, and established patriarchal society, as opposed to matriarchy, and patrilineal, as opposed to matrilineal, descent (a curious exception to this is Jewish society, which is patriarchal, but retains matrilineal descent). Not long afterwards, all the patriarchal gods became one, and the one God of the monotheistic faiths had established his sway.

God's former consort, Asherah, aka Venus, Aphroditē, Astartē, etc., and former female rival (the 'Queen of Heaven', no less), could not be tolerated or treated as anything like an equal. She had to be turned into a 'he', and downgraded to the status of a created being - first as an angel, then as a fallen angel, in the mythology of Christianity and Islam (Satan is somewhat more ambiguous and less outrightly evil in Judaism), to be punished, along with 'his' fellow fallen angels, or 'demons', with an eternity in Hell. Daimons, by the way, were 'spirits' to the Greeks, and there are good ones and bad ones, the latter being called kakodaimones. In Homer and Hesiod, the gods are daimons.

Islam treats 'Iblis' or 'Shaitan' ('Shaytan', alternate Anglicisation) as a jinni, one of the jinn, a creature of fire, which makes one wonder how he and his fellow demons are going to suffer in the Islamic version of Hell, Jahannam.

In early and medieval Christianity, Satan is the archonta tēs exousias tou aeros, 'the ruler of the powers of the air' (Eph. 2:2), and he is for an early modern Christian, like John Milton, too. In the Ptolemaic cosmology, the Earth was made of earth, was stationary, and was at the centre of the Universe, being made of the heaviest and densest element. It was completely surrounded by a layer of water, a lighter and less dense element. Above that was another layer, of air, completely surrounding it; then a concentric spherical layer of fire, followed by the orbit of the Moon.

After that, everything is made of the fifth element, or quintessence (quint essentia), aether, in the Ptolemaic cosmos. The different spheres had different inhabitants: Satan and his followers used to be made of aether, when they were angels, but now they are demons, they are made of air, and live there, or may visit Earth. Or perhaps they are made of fire, and live in the layer of fire, just below the orbit of the Moon, if the Islamic account is correct, and also get to visit Earth.

It hardly matters that the Ptolemaic cosmology has been replaced by the Copernican one, as this world-picture is here serving a mythological, and not a scientific, purpose. Furthermore, who, outside of Christian fundamentalist and Islamic circles, believes in these mythologies any more?

Nevertheless, human beings are poor things without their myths, and will invent new ones if deprived of their old ones: Rudolf Bultmann's attempt to 'demythologise' Christianity was an abject failure, and left Kelsey (1974) wanting to remythologise it. Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate the Satan-myth, and remythologise him - or rather, her - for the twenty-first century.

After all, if Mel Gibson, in The Passion of the Christ (2004), can have a female Satan (Rosalinda Celentano), why not the rest of us? But is there any reason why she should continue to be portrayed so negatively? Just because he's got his hang-ups, do the rest of us have to share them?