This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Ununnilium: Wasn't Lucifer the First Fallen's replacement, not the other way 'round?
Pepinson: And aren't Loki and Set pretty Satan-like from the start? I mean, Loki's a crafty, shapeshifting fire deity who's destined to fight on the side of evil at Ragnarok, and Set... well, the whole of Egyptian mythology is more or less the series pilot for the Bible.
Ununnilium: As for Loki, not really. He was a trickster, but tended to bail the gods out. A lot of his eviller side was itself a mistranslation by a 14th-century Norseman looking for a Satan-figure in the legends.
Pepinson: And come to think of it, his identity as a fire deity is probably also an accident—if I recall my Norse mythology (which I pride myself in doing with great accuracy), Loki was once tricked into an eating contest against a fire demon named Logi, who devoured not only the food but the cutlery, plates, and table. I'll bet Wagner (yes, the same Wagner that gave the Vikings horned helmets) confused the issue even more when he referred to Loki as Loge and had him burn down Valhalla in Gotterdammerung.
Ununnilium: Yeah, I heard something along similar lines.
J Random User: And while Set was a bit of a bastard, the real satan figure from classical Egyptian mythology would be Apep, a colossal snake that tried to eat the sun.
(Moved from Shadow Archetype Discussion)
Seth Is satan really only mentioned 54 times in the bible?
Looney Toons: Depends on which translation you look at. If we limit the answer to the most common translations found in English-speaking churches, the answer is "no — it's less than that." According to BibleGateway.com
, the word "Satan" appears 47 times in the New International Version, 50 times in the New American Standard Bible, 49 times in the King James version, and 47 times in the American Standard version.
Of the twenty different translations of the Bible which the site allows you to search, two are New Testament-only and return about 33 hits apiece. The smallest number of hits is 42 in The Message (although Young's Literal Translation returns none at all, which is unexplained). The largest number of hits for "Satan" is 59 in both The Amplified Bible and the New Living Translation. In general, about two-thirds of these appearances — and most of the ones which (ahem) demonize Satan — can be found in the New Testament. And a good one-third to one-half of all the hits are more or less evenly split between the books of Job and Revelation.
Mind you, this doesn't take into account synonyms or explicitly-correlated symbols (such as the Dragon in Revelation, which is specifically identified as Satan and then just referred to as "the Dragon" for the rest of its appearances). These could skew the results a bit, but are harder to manage with a simple text search interface.
Kimiko Muffin: What's that quote at the beginning from?
Ununnilium: Good question!
Looney Toons: It's mine, from an unpublished short story I wrote a few years back.
Ununnilium: Oh, nice.
Seth: Nice quote, i googled it when i first saw it because i wanted to know where it was from. Sounded like my sort of book.
Looney Toons: Thanks. This was in fact the quote I was referring to over on the Darwinist discussion page. I won't attribute it to anonymous because I know very well who it's by, but I won't credit myself because a) it's not published so what's the point? and b) I am running undercover here.
{Semi_Known Troper}}: I'm fairly sure that the sheriff in On Brother Where Art Thou was a symbolic devil rather than the real thing. Anyone remember better?
Lull The Conqueror: I haven't seen the movie in a while, but I'm almost certain he was never explicitly identified as Old Nick in any concrete way. I think whether he's the actual devil or just his symbolic counterpart is left to the viewer to decide. (I'm not adding this to the main entry because there may be some evidence I've overlooked or forgotten)
furbearingbrick: Put an image in; it was cropped from an album cover. Chosen mostly because I like Ol' Scratch's pimpin' throne. You have no idea how hard it was to find an image of Baphomet without boobs...
