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The concepts of hell and Satan developed separately.
Satan is the seducer. Hell is the place of punishment. Satan is in hell, but he's not the creator of hell, just its strongest prisoner. Originally hell (i.e., hole) was simply the abode of the dead. And the dead were ruled by the Crone goddess - a woman/vulture hybrid, a harpy... Satan is almost entirely absent from the bible - pretty much just found in Job, and identified with the serpent in Eden.
The serpent, the tree of life, and the virgin/goddess/mother are all very old mythological concepts. Think of all the snake/goddesses of the chthonic tradition continued in the Greek myths. Hydra, Echidna, Medusa, all earth/snake/females and all killed by males associated with the sky, winged horses, & Olympus.
Zeus is the sky personified as a father. Jupiter literally means sky-father. The Earth Goddess cult ruled from Europe to the Levant and beyond for millennia. The sky gods didn't arrive until the horse nomads invaded from the Steppe about 4500BC, only fully penetrating Greece and the Levant around 2500-1500BC.
One myth of Greek origins traces the Gods back to Hyperborea. This is not Iceland or Ireland but the Altai mountains of Mongolia. If one faces into the North wind, one can walk from Macedonia to Mongolia with the wind never at one's back. The hyperborean myth is a remembrance of the origins of the pre-Indo-Europeans in what is today Mongolia.
When the earliest matriarchal pre-Semites encountered Northern patriarchal sky-pantheons, the Earth Mother who was identified with the apple and the snake was demoted to Eve.
These ideas are worked out rigorously by Robert Graves in The White Goddess Frazer in The Golden Bough and by the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas in various titles.
Ted Keer
(Edited by Ted Keer
on 6/07, 9:02pm)
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