For some reason this just popped into my head.
I am curious about the origin of the stereotypical, comical devil. I don’t mean the idea of the devil but more the red skin, horns and pitchfork. Was this something created by the visual media or does it have deeper origins?
Mods-It this is not GQ-worthy, please move it to the correct forum.
A lot of folks feel that the “Christian devil” with horns, tail, and goat-feet is a slandering of the old pastoral religions and of the fauns/sileni/Pan of Greek religion. One artist I talked to said that she did a paingting showing such a figure slinking off to become the Christan devil. For deatils, see various books on the history of Witchcraft, especially the Pelican book Witchcraft and Chadwick W. Hansen’s revisionist history of the Salem With Trials, Witchcraft at Salem and Margaret Murray’s The God of the Witches.
IIRC, devils were depicted in Medieval art with pitchforks on the sides of cathedrals, in paintings, and in the vision literature of the time, as part of their role as torturers of the souls in Hell. They were usually shwn in black or other dark colors, IIRC. I don’t know when red devilsd started up. Maybe it was a borrowing from Oriental art, which had some colorful demons in addition to the dark ones. Or maybe it was Hel = Fire = red that gave us red devils.
In any case, I think all the features you associate with the modern comic image of devils started off in more serious representational art. All comics had to add was making the devil’s suit a loose fit, as when Jon Lovitz did it on Saturday Night Live. (My favorite skit – Lovitz as the Devil is dictating “The Satanic Verses” to Salman Rushdie, while the bottom of the screen reads “Re-Enactment” for an episode of “Iran’s Most Wanted”.)
Thank you. I don’t know why Pan didn’t occur to me. Your explanation sounds very plausible and I am heading to the library to pick up those books.