“We ought, perhaps, to make a brief notice of the European Devil. He is the genius who deals in sorcery, witchcraft, and other mischief. The Fathers taking the idea from the Jewish Pharisees, made devils of the Pagan gods, Mithras, Serapis, and the others. The Roman Catholic Church followed by denouncing the former worship as commerce with the powers of darkness. The malefecii and witches of the Middle Ages were thus but the votaries of the proscribed worship. Magic in all ancient times had been considered as divine science, wisdom, and the knowledge of God. The healing art in the temples of Aesculapius, and at the shrines of Egypt and the East, had always been magical.
Even Darius Hystaspes, who had exterminated the Median Magi, and even driven out the Chaldean theurgists from Babylon into Asia Minor, had also been instructed by the Brahmans of Upper Asia, and, finally, while establishing the worship of Ormazd, was also himself denominated the instituter of magism. All was now changed. Ignorance was enthroned as the mother of devotion. Learning was denounced, and savants prosecuted the sciences in peril of their lives. They were compelled to employ a jargon to conceal their ideas from all but their own adepts, and to accept opprobrium, calumny, and poverty.
The votaries of the ancient worship were persecuted and put to death on charges of witchcraft. The Albigenses, descendants of the Gnostics, and the Waldenses, precursors of the Protestants, were hunted and massacred, under like accusations. Martin Luther himself was accused of companionship with Satan in proper person. The whole Protestant world still lies under the same imputation. There is no distinction in the judgments of the Church between dissent, heresy, and witchcraft. And except where civil authority protects, they are alike capital offences.
Religious liberty the Church regards as intolerance. But the reformers were nursed with the milk of their mother. Luther was as bloodthirsty as the Pope, Calvin more intolerant than Leo or Urban. Thirty years of war depopulated whole districts of Germany, Protestants, and Catholic cruel alike. The new faith too opened its batteries against witchcraft. The statute books became crimsoned with bloody legislation in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Great Britain, and the North American Commonwealth. Whosoever was more liberal, more intelligent, more free speaking than his fellows, was liable to arrest and death. The fires that were extinguished at Smithfield were kindled anew for magicians; it was safer to rebel against a throne than to pursue abstruse knowledge outside the orthodox deadline.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 