“It will be perceived from these extended illustrations that the Satan of the Old Testament, the Diabolos or Devil of the Gospels and Apostolic Epistles, were but the antagonistic principle in matter, necessarily incident to it, and not wicked in the moral sense of the term. The Jews, coming from the Persian country, brought with them the doctrine of two principles. They could not bring the Avesta, for it was not written. But they, we mean the Asidians and Pharsi – invested Ormazd with the secret name, and Ahriman with the name of the gods of the land, Satan of the Hittites, and Diabolos, or rather Diobolos of the Greeks. The early Church, at least the Pauline part of it, the Gnostics and their successors, further refined upon their ideas; and the Catholic Church adopted and adapted them, meanwhile putting their promulgators to the sword.
The Protestant is a reaction from the Roman Catholic Church. It is necessarily not coherent in its parts, but a prodigious host of fragments beating their way round a common centre, attracting and repelling each other. Parts are centripetally impelled towards old Rome, or the system which enabled old Rome to exist; parts still recoil under the centrifugal impulse and seek to rush into the broad ethereal region beyond Roman, or even Christian influence. The modern Devil is their principal heritage from the Roman Cybele, “Babylon the Great Mother of the idolatrous and abominable religions of the earth.”
But it may be argued, perhaps, that Hindu theology, both Brahmanical and Buddhistic, is as strongly impregnated with belief in objective devils as Christianity itself. There is a slight difference. This very subtlety of the Hindu mind is a sufficient warrant what the well-educated people, the learned portion, at least, of the Brahman and Buddhist divines, consider the devil in another light. With them the Devil is a metaphysical abstraction, an allegory of necessary evil; while with Christians the myth has become a historical entity, the fundamental stone on which Christianity, with its dogma of redemption, is built. He is as necessary, as Des Mousseaux has shown, to the Church as the beast of the seventeenth chapter of the Apocalypse was to his rider.
The English-speaking Protestants, not finding the Bible explicit enough, have adopted the Diabology of Milton’s celebrated poem, Paradise Lost, embellishing it somewhat from Goethe’s celebrated drama of Faust. John Milton, first a Puritan and finally a Quietist and Unitarian, never put forth his great production except as a work of fiction, but it thoroughly dovetailed together the different parts of Scripture.
The Ilda-Baoth of the Ophites was transformed into an angel of light, and the morning star, and made the Devil in the first act of the Diabolic Drama. Then the twelfth chapter of the Apocalypse was brought in for the second act. The great red Dragon was adopted as the same illustrious personage as Lucifer, and the last scene in his fall, like that of Vulcan-Hephaistos, from heaven into the islands of Lemnos; the fugitive hosts and their leader “coming to hard bottom” in Pandemonium. The third act is the Garden of Eden. Satan holds a council in a hall erected by him for his new empire and determines to go forth on an exploring expedition in quest of the new world. The next acts relate to the fall of man, his career on earth, the advent of the Logos, or Son of God, and his redemption of mankind, or the elect portion of them, as the case may be.
This drama of Paradise Lost comprises the unformulated belief of English speaking “evangelical Protestant Christians.” Disbelief of its main features is equivalent, in their view, to “denying Christ” and “blaspheming against the Holy Ghost.” If John Milton had supposed that his poem, instead of being regarded as a companion of Dante’s Divine Comedy, would have been considered as another Apocalypse to supplement the Bible, and complete its demonology, it is more than probable that he would have borne his poverty more resolutely, and withheld it from the press. A later poet, Robert Pollok, taking his cue from this work, wrote another, The Course of Time, which bade fair for a season to take the rank of a later Scripture; but the nineteenth century has fortunately received a different inspiration, and the Scotch poet is falling into oblivion.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 