ood and the evil, like the Zeus of the Iliad. [115] The
story of the serpent in Eden--an Aryan story in every particular,
which has crept into the Pentateuch--is not once alluded to in the Old
Testament; and the notion of Satan as the author of evil appears only
in the later books, composed after the Jews had come into close contact
with Persian ideas. [116] In the Book of Job, as Reville observes, Satan
is "still a member of the celestial court, being one of the sons of the
Elohim, but having as his special office the continual accusation of
men, and having become so suspicious by his practice as public accuser,
that he believes in the virtue of no one, and always presupposes
interested motives for the purest manifestations of human piety." In
this way the character of this angel became injured, and he became more
and more an object of dread and dislike to men, until the later Jews
ascribed to him all the attributes of Ahriman, and in this singularly
altered shape he passed into Christian theology. Between the Satan of
the Book of Job and the mediaeval Devil the metamorphosis is as great
as that which degraded the stern Erinys, who brings evil deeds to light,
into the demon-like Fury who torments wrong-doers in Tartarus; and,
making allowance for difference of circumstances, the process of
degradation has been very nearly the same in the two cases.

The mediaeval conception of the Devil is a grotesque compound of
elements derived from all the systems of pagan mythology which
Christianity superseded. He is primarily a rebellious angel, expelled
from heaven along with his followers, like the giants who attempted
to scale Olympos, and like the impious Efreets of Arabian legend who
revolted against the beneficent rule of Solomon. As the serpent prince
of the outer darkness, he retains the old characteristics of Vritra,
Ahi, Typhon, and Echidna. As the black dog which appears behind the
stove in Dr. Faust's study, he is the classic hell-hound Kerberos, the
Vedic Carvara. From the sylvan deity Pan he gets his goat-like body, his
horns and cloven hoofs. Like the wind-god Orpheus, to whose music the
trees bent their heads to listen, he is an unrivalled player on the
bagpipes. Like those other wind-gods the psychopomp Hermes and the wild
huntsman Odin, he is the prince of the powers of the air: his flight
through the midnight sky, attended by his troop of witches mounted on
their brooms, which sometimes break the boughs and swee