Conceptually, people think of the Devil as masculine. He is the ultimate “bad guy”, double emphasis on the “bad” and the “guy”. Traditionally theologians have largely conceptualized the Devil as a man, or manlike figure, and denoted him with the masculine pronoun, ‘he’.[6] However, as Faxneld notes, not all have agreed with this summation. As the Devil is an angel, this means he does not conform to the gender norms that men and women are formed in. Christian theological tradition does not require that the Devil conforms to a particular sex, indeed it was recognized that demons could take the forms of any gender as they chose.
Anyone who has read the ancient Greek tales will be familiar with the way that the Greek deities could change gender at will, often using this to trick their victims and even at times the heroes of the tale. Minerva in Homer’s Odyssey is one example, but Odin was known to do the same thing, and many others. In fact, it was a consistent theme throughout the pagan pantheons to have gods transgressing all boundaries, including gender boundaries.
From a Christian perspective these beings were neither fake, nor gods. They were a combination of legends and people’s encounters with demonic beings. It is easy to understand why the early Church, and many in the Medieval Church, viewed Satan neither as male nor female, but as a boundary transgressing being, who took on the form that was useful in the moment.
In many medieval and early modern representations of the Devil he is shown to be an “hermaphrodite monster”. Demons were viewed as ontologically unstable creatures that crossed gender and species boundaries. “Gender-bending would then be another sign of the liminal and blasphemously category-defying nature of Lucifer and his demons (figures 2.2 and 2.3).” Faxneld shares with us some abominable examples of how the early modern artists visualized the Devil in figures 1 and 2.
As you can see, it was common for the Devil, and demons, to be visualized as inherently unstable beings that conformed not only to no gender boundaries, but no natural boundaries either. The devil is the ultimate boundary breaking entity, which is really a good description of evil itself. Evil intent consists in the desire and intention to transgress the boundaries laid out by God himself. Indeed, one of the words for sin in the Bible is transgression, which literally means to transgress the boundaries of what the Lord says is good. Evil inherently transgresses all of God’s good boundaries.
But not only was the Devil represented by such boundary transgressing beings, he was also conceptualized or represented as a woman, or a serpent-woman. For instance, in one Christian work “Livre pour l’enseignement de ses filles (‘Book for the Education of his Daughters’, 1371–1372), the author,
“…Geoffrey attempts to instil in his daughters the lesson that women should defer to fathers and husbands in anything but domestic matters and makes his point by retelling how Eve broke this rule when she conversed with the serpent, ‘whiche as the Hystorye sayth hadde a face ryght fayre lyke the face of a woman’.”
It may be strange for us to conceptualize a feminine Satan, because it is more common to view him as masculine, but this was a consistent image throughout Church history.
“…A more straightforwardly female Satan can be seen in the actually very common depictions of the snake in the Garden of Eden with a woman’s head on its serpentine body and sometimes also the breasts of a woman…Exactly when the notion of a female snake was established is difficult to say, but the earliest translation of the Bible into Latin rendered the word as serpens—feminine gender.”
Indeed, according to J. B. Trapp “it was the most frequent way of representing the Edenic serpent from the late twelfth century until the late sixteenth century, when the human features of the creature disappear and it becomes, once more, only reptilian.” This is interesting that the devil would be represented by feminine imagery, but again, note, the Devil is not a man nor a woman, Satan is a fallen spiritual being. The Devil is inherently in a different category. Even if you want to argue the Scriptures lean towards presenting him as male figure, note, the view that he transgressed all boundaries is inherent in his rebellion against God’s good boundaries and in his role as ‘The Evil One’.
The most famous image representing the Devil’s transgender nature is the Baphomet. Baphomet is a hermaphrodite figure, and one of the most recognized symbols of Satan in the last century or so. Baphomet was first visually conceptualized by French occultist Éliphas Lévi “in his book Dogme et rituel de la haute magie (‘Dogma and Ritual of the High Magic’, 1855) and elsewhere.”
Note, we are not seeking here to establish precisely how Scripture describes the gender of the Devil. The point is to establish that a lot of historical Christian theology viewed the Devil as a being that transgresses all boundaries, and early feminists were inspired by this and took this idea and ran with it. They turned this transgender being into a liberator of women.
Notice how evil always inverts. “The Light of the World” became “the Dark Ages”. The revival of satanic darkness became “the Enlightenment”. And the enslavement of women to sin and self-destruction became “Women’s Liberation”.
If you want to discern if something has satanic roots, look for the inversion. Once you spot it, you’ll scent the sulfur soon enough.
