Is Jehovah Satan?
That was what many Gnostics, both medieval and modern, believed.
Gnosticism is the idea that liberation from the world of matter (believed to be sinful) is available to someone who cultivates esoteric wisdom that the masses cannot easily grasp.
The particular form of gnosis might vary – it might involve chanting mantras, or contemplating mystical visions, or inquiring into the nature of the self. The main notion is that liberation from the world of the senses requires some kind of knowledge inaccessible to the hoi polloi.
The early Gnostics were antagonistic to the early Christians. They thought the religion was simple-minded and ant-intellectual.
Many leading Gnostics were part of the Jewish emigre population in Alexandria, one of the great centers of learning in antiquity.
This was the Syro-Egyptian Gnostic school.
There was also a Persian school, but that was regarded as a distinct religion – Manicheanism.
The Jewish-Christian conflict of those days was reflected in the anti-Gnostic polemics of Church leaders and the Gnostics have had a bad reputation among Christians ever since, sometimes unfairly.
Many beliefs that Christians now regard as heretical, such as, Arianism – the notion that Jesus is not divine, but only a man – began with the Gnostics.
But Gnosticism is increasingly understood to be rooted not in heretical Christianity but in heretical Judaism.
One of the most typical of the Gnostic beliefs was that from the original creator of the universe who is an impersonal monad, emanations issued, each more remote from divinity than the one before.
Among the lowest of these divine emanations was a demiurge or a lesser/false god, to whom the creation of the physical world is attributed.
The demiurge was seen as imperfect, even evil.
Yaldabaoth, Yahweh in the Bible, Satan, Ahriman (in the Persian tradition) were all regarded as demiurges.
It is this conflation of Satan and Yahweh among the Alexandrian gnostics that was revived in the 18th century by William Blake, the English poet, that underlies the tension of such famous lines as
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”
Blake’s Tiger suggests a darker deity than the benign Father of orthodox Christian belief.
So, when you see websites springing up all over the Internet, equating Yahweh with Satan, it’s a continuation of this ancient Gnostic and neo-Gnostic error.
Error, because Yahweh is not Satan.
And Satan is not the same as Saturn, despite the visual resemblance of the two words.
Saturn is an Indo-European term.
Satan is Semitic (HaSatan in Hebrew) and it is not a proper but a common noun. It should be translated “the adversary.” From its root (S-T-N), the Arabs get Shai-tan.
A closer equivalent to Satan in the West is the Egyptian Set, the murderous brother of Osiris.
Although at one period considered a “good” God, Set was later seen as evil, perhaps by association with the Semitic Hyksos rulers of Egypt in the early part of the 2nd millenium before Christ.
The Hyksos linked Set with the Phoenician god, Baal.
[Baal only means “lord” and was used to denote a variety of deities. There was Baal Hadad and there was Baal Hamon, to whom child sacrifices were offered.]
Because Baal is also known as El (Lord, singular), and the term Elohim (plural) is often used to refer to God in the Old Testament, the Gnostics in turn equated Baal with Yahweh.
The Gnostic equation was:
JEHOVAH = BAAL =JUPITER = SATURN = SATAN
It ought to have read:
SET = BAAL(ZEBUB) = SATAN