In the blue corner is the being supreme, the
lord of love and reigning world champion in the infinite battle of Good vs. Evil, the
one and only, God Almighty. In the red corner is heaven’s outcast, the
devil from down below, the one and only Master of Deception and Father of Lies, The Prince
of Darkness. That’s pretty much how the story goes, or
at least that’s the tale many people tell. But Satan, he’s a complicated entity. There’s much more to him than most people
know. He’s not just a devil with a pitchfork who
stands on your shoulder telling you to steal a candy bar; he has a long history, and he’s
gotten up to stuff you wouldn’t believe. Today you’re going to learn a lot more about
this overlord of the underworld! 50. Ok, so first you need to know who Satan is. It’s a bit more complicated than you think,
but we’ll try and make this one as short as we can. There’s a kind of devil in all the Abrahamic
religions, but in Christianity, he plays a bigger role than he does in Judaism and Islam. In all three religions, Satan is there to
make people impure, to lure them to the dark side. The Old Testament talks about an entity that
is an adversary of God. He’s there in the Book of Job, making life
really hard for Job. He kills Job’s children, his servants, and
for good measure, he covers Job in boils. He does all this to see if Job will renounce
his belief in God. So, there you go, Satan is there to mess with
people’s beliefs. Still, in that old book he was far from being
a cloven-hoofed beast with horns that can spin a young girl’s head around. In the New Testament, there is talk of fallen
angels. In the story of Matthew, there’s a devil-type
thing that tries to persuade Jesus to give up his belief in God. He’s yet again the tempter, the evil to
all the good in the world. In short, there are lots of stories. There’s Lucifer, sometimes interchangeable
as Satan, who is said to have rebelled against God, and with a gang of other fallen angels,
they wage war against God. Then you have Beelzebub, a flying demon who
also is a kind of a Satan character. In the Book of Revelations, you have the Red
Serpent, which you could call devilish, but what about this pitchfork swinging, constantly
cursing guy who isn’t very photogenic? Well, he was made up by some creative folks
in the Middle Ages. Dante Alighieri wrote about Satan in The Divine
Comedy in the early 14th century. This is how Satan is described in the “Inferno”
part: He has three faces. He has a chest of ice. He has mighty bat-like wings, crunching teeth,
and he is generally a rotten thing. When the King James Bible became a best-seller
after it was published in 1611, Lucifer, aka, the “Morning Star”, played a big part,
as it did in John Milton’s 1667 masterpiece poem, “Paradise Lost”. Now we have a much more wicked tempter, a
more monstrous figure who’s a real brute. Satan was no longer just an angel that had
switched jobs, he was something more terrifying. The cloven hooves and horns were often a feature,
which relates back to Pan, a mythological half-goat, half-man figure that was always
wild and irrepressibly horny. When you think about famine, plague, and the
rest of the crappy things that made Europe a horrible home for a long time, it only makes
sense that this devil turned into something absolutely terrifying. This is the guy evangelists conjure up in
their nightmares. He’s the entity that possessed witches and
made Hollywood tons of money. The bottom line is the devil evolved throughout
history. Ok, we had to get that out of the way. Now for some short facts. 49. Not surprisingly, when you go filling people’s
heads with stories of this beast, it affects some folks in a bad way. In 2018, an Australian man beat his best friend
to death because he thought his friend was Satan. Satanic serial killer, Richard Ramirez, once
shouted at a victim, “Swear on Satan.” This one survived. Many did not. In fact, a lot of killers have claimed to
either be in the service of Satan or believe they are killing Satan. Either way, most people would believe Satan
isn’t to blame. As you’ll see in this show, the devil is
often a scapegoat. Well, that’s what the law thinks. 48. A 2016 Gallup poll revealed 79 percent of
the American respondents said they believed in God, but only 61 percent of people said
they believed in the devil. 47. A similar poll went out in the UK, but only
18 percent of people said they believed in the devil. 46. U.S. televangelist Paul Crouch once said that
if you play a part of Led Zeppelin’s song “Stairway to Heaven” backward there is
a Satanic message in there. This is how it allegedly goes:
“Here's to my sweet Satan. The one whose little path would make me sad,
whose power is Satan. He will give those with him 666. There was a little toolshed where he made
us suffer, sad Satan.” Guitarist Jimmy Page once said it was hard
enough to write the songs forwards, never mind backward, too. By the way, some experts now say the number
in the bible that represents the number of the beast is 616. 45. There is a Church of Satan, but its founders
don’t actually believe Satan, or God for that matter, exists. One of the high priests said believers are
“insane” and he says Satan just represents someone who is an "adversary" or an "opposer",
someone who questions everything. Recently, a British member of the Church of
Satan said Satanism has less to do with doing bad things than it does with being atheist
and libertarian. In the U.S, you can pay $225 and get a lifetime
membership for the Church of Satan. 44. Some people believe if Jesus is the son of
God then the anti-Christ is the son of Satan. An example would be Damien Thorn in the Omen
movies. 43. It’s been said the first of those Omen movies
was cursed, with the reason being a lot of really unlucky things happened to the cast
and crew. The weirdest of them all involved effects
artist John Richardson. He was the guy responsible for creating the
famous decapitation scene in the movie. During the filming of his next movie, he got
into a car crash. He survived, but his passenger was decapitated. On top of that, an animal trainer was killed
by a tiger after making The Omen, and during the filming of The Omen, a stuntman was attacked
by trained Rottweilers. 42. The Pope has been accused of being the antichrist
from time to time. Martin Luther once said the Pope “is the
true end times Antichrist who has raised himself over and set himself against Christ.” 41. Quite a few American presidents have at one
point been accused of being the antichrist. Those include Donald Trump, Barack Obama,
John F. Kennedy, and Ronald Reagan. Hilary Clinton has been called out, too. 40. Ok, so some people think the mark of the beast
will appear on us all at some point. It comes from something written in the Book
of Revelations. It goes like this:
“He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark
on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one
who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” What could that mean? Maybe subcutaneous technology could be the
mark of the beast. In the past, people used to say the number
666 was hidden in barcodes. That’s been debunked, but people have now
moved onto microchips under the skin. Some evangelicals have already said those
chips will be the mark of the beast that gets under everyone’s skin. 39. Quite a few well-known people have said the
Freemasons worship the devil. We don’t have any proof to back that up. Now we’ll talk about some really dark things
the devil has supposedly been involved with. 38. According to the “Canon Episcopi”, a text
of medieval canon law dating back to the 10th century, witchcraft was alive and well in
Europe back then. It says witches flew around on broomsticks,
and one of their favorite destinations was the forest. The forest is where they made love to demons,
and sometimes killed infants in the name of Satan. 37. Things got much more heated in the 15th century. That was when the book “Malleus Maleficarum”
was written, a treatise on witches that detailed the exploits of people possessed by Satan. It might sound funny to you, but it led to
massive persecution of people accused of being witches. Thousands of people were tortured and killed
during decades of witch hunts. 36. The first European folks to make the New World
their home weren’t much better. The Puritans of New England talked about babies
being born with claws and horns, which was a sure sign the devil had infiltrated the
woman. Some of those puritans believed the Native
Americans were “children of the Devil.” 35. It was mostly thanks to the Enlightenment
thinkers in the 17th and 18th centuries that belief in witchcraft started to die. Unfortunately, some parts of Europe and the
New World remained in the dark and dismissed what those thinkers said. Witch hunts stopped in most places, but belief
in Satan remained strong. 34
Satan doesn’t just appear in Christian bibles, he also shows up in the Talmud and has been
discussed by Jewish rabbis at length, with some positing that Satan was involved in the
story of Moses returning from Mount Sinai and that he may have played a role in the
Purim story, which tells of how the Jews were saved from the Persian Empire. 33
And speaking of the Talmud, the origin of the name Satan actually comes from the Hebrew
word which means “opposer” or “adversary” and was used in the Hebrew bible as a term
for both human enemies of the Jewish people, as well as supernatural foes. 32. In 1966, after the Beatles member John Lennon
said his band was “more popular than Jesus”, people in the Southern United States took
to burning Beatles’ records even if they loved them. Some people believe Lennon made a pact with
the devil so he could get famous. The devil got his due, though, because Lennon
was shot dead in the street. 31. In the 1960s, the Beatles were accused of
putting Satanic messages in their music. Decades later, an article in the Vatican newspaper
praised the band for their melodic tunes. Now for something that may frighten you. 30. In 2018, The Atlantic reported that priests
in the U.S. were being asked to perform an unusual number of exorcisms. The article said, “The official exorcist
for Indianapolis has received 1,700 requests so far in 2018.” That’s a lot for just one state, especially
as there are only around 100 official Catholic exorcists in the U.S.
29. In 2020, in Panama, seven people died in a
mass exorcism. The victims included a pregnant woman and
her five young kids. An extremist religious group was blamed for
the deaths when it was discovered members of the group held natives captive and beat
them with bibles, burned them with torches, and cut them with machetes. This particular sect was denounced as “Satanic”
by local church authorities. 28. The novel “The Exorcist” was partly based
on the alleged demonic possession of a 14-year old American kid known as Roland Doe. That wasn’t his real name. The exorcism was kind of like the movie, in
that the boy allegedly spoke in a weird voice, things flew on their own around the room and
the kid couldn’t stand to be near a holy cross. At one point marks just appeared on the kid’s
body. It’s also said he got up and broke a priest’s
nose. 27. In 2014, two women in the U.S. were charged
with murder after killing two children, aged one and two, during an exorcism. The women said the kids’ eyes had turned
black due to the devil being inside them. They badly beat two older kids, but they thankfully
survived the ordeal. We found more recent cases of children being
killed in exorcisms in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere. If you think belief in demonic possession
is dead, you are very wrong. 26. Parts of the bible talk about Jesus doing
exorcisms. This is from Mark 1:25/6, “Jesus rebuked
him, saying, ‘Be silent, and come out of him!’ And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and
crying out with a loud voice, came out of him.” It’s a pity all exorcisms aren’t so quick
and easy. 25. The saying, “The devil is in the details”
actually comes from, “God is in the details.” 24. Satan goes by other names as well as the devil,
including, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, the Prince of Darkness, Lord of the Flies, the
Antichrist, the Father of Lies, and Moloch. Ok, back to more dark details. 23. In 1692, in Salem Village, Massachusetts,
a group of young girls were accused of being in league with Satan. What happened next became known as the Salem
Witch Trials. The accused girls, as well as women, and men,
appeared at a special court to address the accusation that they were getting friendly
with the devil, which of course wasn’t true at all. 22. 20 people in all were hanged by the neck in
Salem for the crime of practicing the devil’s magic, but over time around 150 people were
accused of being witches. One of the men who was executed was pressed
to death, which had to be a very painful way to go. The authorities thought if he was tortured
he might spill the beans, but there weren’t any beans to spill. A Massachusetts General Court soon reversed
the guilty verdicts, but that came too late for the 20 victims. The youngest of the accused was a four-year-old
girl named Dorothy Good. She told the court her mom had been talking
to the devil. She was also said to bite people like a wild
animal. The next fact is just plain crazy. 21. Believe it or not, animals played a big part
in the hysteria that happened at Salem. Yep, cats, dogs, and other animals were also
said to be possessed by Satan. Some folks believed the animals were a kind
of team member for the witches, and like some of the accused witches, they had to go. In one instance, a girl had convulsions and
it was believed she was a witch. She said the neighbor’s dog had bewitched
her. That dog was immediately shot. A local minister later declared the dog innocent
of any wrongdoing. Later, another mutt took a bullet, even though
the locals said it was a victim of evil. 20. Did they really do a float test on accused
witches, or is that just made up? It’s not fiction at all and was in vogue
in the 17th century. Sometimes called “dunking” or “ordeal
by water”, it would involve throwing a person, usually a woman, into a river. If she sank, she was innocent of working with
the prince of darkness, but if she floated, well, obviously she was in league with Satan. You might ask what the rationale was behind
that, but let’s remember the Age of Reason was still a century away. Some people said water was pure, and that’s
why it wouldn’t accept witches. You really wouldn’t want to show off your
treading-water skills in those days. 19. You might wonder what the difference is between
a demon and the devil? Basically, the devil is the CEO of evil and
demons are his managers. You could say those who demons possess are
the folks on the lower end of the pay scale. 18. The American anthropologist, Erika Bourguignon,
spent a lifetime studying demons and she said 488 societies in the world believed in demonic
possession. You don’t need Satan to have demons, but
you need evil. In the past, if you were mentally ill sometimes
people would say you were a victim of demonic possession. That still happens today in some societies. A psychiatrist in northern Thailand once said
he took his team to the villages far from the city. In some villages he found autistic kids locked
in cages. Their families would offer chicken sacrifices
to the evil spirit so it would leave the kid’s body. Coming up next is something called “The
Satan Defense.” 17. Satan gets the blame for a lot of bad things
that people do, so you could call the poor fella a handy scapegoat. In 2016, a guy appeared in court after shooting
two teenagers. One of them died and the other was badly injured. What was the guy’s defense? He actually said Satan made him do it and
so he was actually innocent. The guy, named Kody Lott, was actually incensed
when the media said killing two kids on their way home from school for absolutely nothing
was senseless. Lott said the devil told him to do it, so
how was it senseless. He will stay in prison until at least 2046. God might feature in the courtroom, but the
justice system has no time for Satan. That’s kind of weird when you think about
it. 16. Satan has little to do with Halloween. No one is exactly sure how the tradition started,
but it likely goes back to harvest festivals that were held pre-Christianity. The Christians, however, got hold of it and
started calling it All Hallows' Day, which was a day to celebrate saints and the faithful
that had died. This somehow turned into a night where people
walk around dressed as Hello Kitty and maniacs put glass in candy. This next one is seriously messed up. 15. There is no shortage of people who claim they
are the devil. These egomaniacs are everywhere and they span
all age groups. A recent case involved a naked woman breaking
into a family’s house. The owner told her to leave, to which the
woman laughed and then claimed she was the devil. All hell broke loose when the woman attacked
the man and his family, even though he had a gun. 39 shots were fired but the woman wasn’t
hit. Not only that, but she also managed to fight
off all the family. The man later said, “She had the strength
of four grown men.” Maybe she was the devil, or she’d been taking
some serious drugs. You can find multiple stories every year in
the USA where people who do horrible things claim to be the devil. For some reason they are usually women. 14. There is a term, “She-Devil”, but it usually
refers to a woman who manipulates men and does horrible things to them. While sometimes we refer to Satan as a ‘he’,
in reality, or super-reality, the devil is sexless. However, in Hebrew, the noun for Satan is
a masculine noun. 13. If Satan is real, he must work around the
clock, so much so he makes Elon Musk look lazy. That’s because around 150,000 people die
in the world every day of the week. Considering most of those people will not
be faithful to God and will no doubt have a rap sheet of sins a mile long, the intake
process for hell must keep Satan really busy. 12. In the bible, it doesn’t say Satan created
Hell. Nope, he was condemned to live in the inferno. He’d probably prefer a three-bedroom suite
in Manhattan, but sinners can’t be choosers. The bible actually teaches us that Satan spends
most of his time on Earth. Hell is a little confusing, so we thought
we’d refer to that paragon of truth, Billy Graham. In his writing he says the “everlasting
fire was created for the devil and his angels”, and he also says that the devil can roam “through
the earth going back and forth in it”. There’s also the theory that sinners will
be cast into the pits of hell only on judgment day, so right now they are on remand. Those who wrote the big book talk about Jesus
mentioning “eternal life” and “eternal punishment”, but some Christian scholars
argue that eternal punishment just means being wiped out, like completely being deleted from
the big server in the sky. So, hell could be absolutely nothing. The idea of a goat-man with a pitchfork burning
your toes with his cigar is entirely a modern fancy. It would have been alien to JC.
11. The French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote
a play about hell called, “No Exit.” A well-known phrase from that play is, “Hell
is other people.” In the play, people die and end up in a waiting
room, but the thing is, they are there for eternity. They soon get on each other’s nerves, and
that waiting room becomes a kind of hell. It sounds a lot like social media. Ok, we’ve reached the top ten now, time
to ramp up the evil. 10. Some Christians, mostly of the ilk that have
Jesus bumper stickers, believe in something called “The Rapture.” This is when the world ends and the goodies
on Earth with the once faithful dead will be beamed up “in the clouds, to meet the
Lord in the air.” This great kidnapping will lead to eternity
in heaven. As for those left behind, things aren’t
supposed to be great for them. Maybe they will have a date with Satan at
some point, or they might go on to act in a very popular TV series. By the way, most Christians don’t actually
believe the big snatch will ever happen. 9. God was sometimes really wrathful; you certainly
didn’t want to get on the wrong side of God. In Genesis 3:14, God has some stern words
with Satan, saying, “Cursed are you above all livestock and all wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will
eat dust all the days of your life.” 8. You should know that you shouldn’t make
deals with Satan because whatever he gives, he’ll take back double. He once offered Jesus all the kingdoms of
the world, but in the small print, there was a proviso stating that in return Jesus had
to worship Satan. Jesus’ response to this offer was, “Away
from me, Satan!” 7. You’ve heard of the Seven Deadly Sins, but
did you know some people say behind each one is a demon who can tempt you into committing
that sin. The sins are: Pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed,
gluttony, and lust. Satan himself is behind wrath. A prince of hell named Belphegor is the gluttony
guy. He tries to convince folks to get really rich,
which we all know in the real world gluttony has its fair share of problems. 6. What do you think is the most committed sin
by men? Greed? Sloth? Nah, it’s lust, according to some research
we read. Think about how often every day you have a
sexual thought… for women that sin was pride. 5. Speaking of sexual thoughts, there are demons
called Incubi and succubi. The former is a demon in male form that makes
love to women in their sleep and the latter does the same but she is female and chooses
sleeping men. Such stories were around a long time before
Christ appeared on the scene, so they are not only Christian stories. In the past, these demons were sometimes accused
of messing with a man’s health, while women were said to sometimes be impregnated by them. Maybe demons weren’t the problem… Now for something very real. 4. There is a book called “The Devil’s Bible”
that was written by a monk over a period of decades in the 13th century. It’s quite the tome, too, weighing in at
165 pounds (75kg). Some people believe the devil himself was
behind the book, but most folks think that the writer just had a lot of time on his hands. If you wrote all day every day the book would
take about 20 years to finish. It got the name Devil’s Bible because of
an illustration on page 290. The legend behind the book says that a monk
had broken his vows and faced being walled up alive. His other option was to agree to write a book
that contained all human knowledge. That wasn’t going to be easy, but what’s
a monk gonna do. He tried writing the book, but it was too
hard, so the story goes that he asked Lucifer for help in exchange for his soul. All he had to do was feature that picture
of the devil. 3. Ok, so how would you contact the devil if
you wanted to do a deal with him? He’s obviously a busy demon, and you can
bet he has a lot of requests. We looked online for, “How to contact Satan”,
but there are no clear guidelines. There are a bunch of rituals you can find
online that tell you how to summon demons, which usually involve evocation spells. There is a new book out there containing such
spells, although the International Association of Exorcists condemned it saying it was like
putting a grenade in people’s hands. It’s aimed at kids, too, telling them if
they have too much homework or life aint going so well, they might want to draw some lines
on the floor and “dial up some demons.” 2. The good news is that after looking at a bunch
of Christian websites not one agreed that the devil can read your thoughts. Satan, unlike God, is not omniscient. Nowhere in the bible does it say the devil
can plant things in your head. Watch out though, because this is in the bible:
“Brothers and sisters, be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like
a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith.” An interpretation of this could be that the
devil is always there, just waiting for you to show some weakness. When he sees you are weak, he can somehow
use his trickery to create circumstances around you that will tempt you to sin. He also has a network of demons doing such
bad work, demons that must have been busy during all those Catholic Church abuse scandals. 1. So, what is the fate of Satan? Can’t we just get rid of him? According to the Book of Revelation, at some
point Satan will be forced to hang up his gloves. This is what’s written about his forced
retirement. “And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown
into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever
and ever.” Amen. Now you should watch this, “50 Insane Cold
War Facts That Will Shock You!” or, have a look at this, “50 Insane Facts About Vietnam
War You Didn't Know.”
