The Devil’s Reading List

Or how to disrupt religious orthodoxy in six easy steps

Satan in his pandemonium, by John Martin, 1825–26.

Evil may not be what you think it is. There exists a rich and underappreciated counternarrative of humanity’s encounter with the “dark side” in Western life, which may leave you wondering whether your search for a personal, spiritual, and ethical philosophy lies…east of Eden.

Six literary works, in some cases widely known but little read, will spur you to consider new questions about how we’ve been conditioned to understand the adversarial force called Lucifer or Satan.

Genesis, Chapter 3

Many of us grew up learning the story of humanity’s fall from grace in the biblical parable of the garden of paradise, where the serpent — long associated with Satan — seduces Eve, and then she Adam, into eating forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But take a fresh reading (or first reading) of the sparsely detailed chapter 3 of Genesis. When revisiting this familiar story, you’ll see, in virtually any translation, not only that the serpent’s argument is based in truth — the first couple do not perish for eating the apple, and their eyes are, in fact, opened to good and evil (indeed, some scholars contend that the garden’s two trees, the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, are the same) — but also that Eve…