Christian & Abrahamic understanding of ‘the devil’ is a result of the Roman Empire’s long conquest for power.
In 326 ce Emperor Constantine issued an edict that, “Excluded ‘heretics and schematics’ from the officially sanctioned church,” and their interpretation of good and evil.
The Pagans understood and accepted the ‘nature of evil’ as part of the human condition and an aspect of the Creator. The Kemetic/Egyptians call him Seth, the god of confusion. The Indians call her Kali, the goddess of destruction and rebirth, and the Greek Pagans called this god Pan. The god of the wild, wooded glens and fertility.
To these people, “The term “demon” (daimon) was devoid of exclusively malevolent implications and was liberally applied to both greater and lesser divine beings. According to Plato, demonic possession was responsible for passionate feelings of love, prophetic trance, and insanity; the latter was not even considered to be simple misfortune, but a sign of the presence of the gods conferring divinatory powers.”
To see the world and oneself in this manner is far more empowering than the Church’s dualistic model, and Rome could not make these Nature loving, sovereign-hearted pagans submit to their dualistic and disempowering doctrine.
So they did it by force. “The demonizing of the pagan gods and of their worship also influenced the popular conception of Satan. The well-known image of the devil as goat-footed and horned is reminiscent of the Greek god Pan and of the ‘fauni and silvani’ of the Roman forests.”
“Henceforth, the old pagan religions were gradually forced into illegality and oblivion. In 399 ce, the pagan cults were prohibited; in 407, an imperial edict ordered the destruction of pagan temples. By the seventh century, the Syrian monk John of Damascus triumphantly declared that “the worship of demons” had all but ceased: ‘Altars and temples of idols have been overthrown. Knowledge of God has been implanted…’.”
What then is the ‘true devil’ here? The very ones that preach the existence of a so-called ‘Devil’ are the same ones who commit acts of violence to enforce that belief on two-thirds of humanity.