Can creatures who can appear soft and cherubic be capable of evil? Those who say they travel with angels are loath to admit it. "Reports of evil angels are legion," acknowledges Eileen Freeman, publisher of the newsletter AngelWatch, but she says, "I refuse to give them any free publicity." Only last week in a Binghamton, New York, court, a man pleading "not responsible" claimed that an angel had told him to molest the five-year-old boy he was babysitting. No less an authority than St. Paul warned the faithful, in his second letter to the Corinthians, that Satan could be "transformed into an angel of light." For Satan was once an angel -- indeed, one of the most exalted as well as the most complex and the most human.
The celestial being who would become Satan had many names in heaven. Most of Western tradition identifies him as Lucifer, the Morning Star, the most brilliant of all the denizens of the empyrean. He is Sammael, according to the rabbinical literature of the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., highest of those who flit around the throne of God, created above the seraphim and distinguished from others by the fact that he possessed twice the maximum allotment of wings: 12. To Muslims, he is Iblis, a word perhaps derived from the Greek diabolos, the proudest of all God's creatures. And it was pride that would lead to Satan's rebellion and eventual expulsion from heaven. But even in the depths of hell, he retained an awe-inspiring dignity. In the words of Milton's Paradise Lost, "With grave aspect he rose, and in his rising seemed a pillar of state . . . princely counsel in his face yet shone, majestic though in ruin."
It is that irrepressible pride that has given the chief of the fallen angels such power to tempt humankind. If humankind was created just a little lower than the angels, what are we to make of an angel who has failed? Is he then not just like us -- yet immortally so? For poets like Milton, Satan was the archetypal antihero, the rebel waging eternal guerrilla warfare against his Creator. "To reign is worth ambition though in hell: Better to reign in hell than serve in heav'n." Indeed, to some, Satan even provides lessons in piety. The Sufis, the mystics of Islam, imagined that the pride of Iblis may have been blind ideological purity, a supremely flawed political correctness. According to one account, when he was asked to bow before Adam, God's newest and best-beloved creation, Iblis refused. "There is only one God," he declared, "and I will make obeisance only to Him." More of a monotheist than God himself, Iblis was banished from Heaven.
Christian legends are different. Lucifer vaingloriously sought to overturn the regime in heaven and waged war against God's loyalists. Defeated by the Archangel Michael, the angel who would be God was cast into his inferno, to brood in the darkness, "hatching vain empires." With him went about a third of the heavenly host, a horde of fallen angels.