The War in Heaven | Fate & Fabled

Nearly every mythology or religion we cover on this show deals with conflicts between hero and villain, winners and losers, good and evil. But have you heard about the epic battle that kind of started it all, or might be the one to end it? What or who causes people to do bad things? Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, among many other religions, share common stories about a powerful force that wages war against God, only to get cast down to earth, bringing chaos and viciousness along with it. And while they have important differences, all three stories about cosmic conflict shape so many of our beliefs about how to spend our finite time on earth. So what are the origins of this common story? Did they evolve separately? Was it one of the three Abrahamic faiths that was primarily responsible and the other two borrowed from it? Or do all three stem from an entirely separate, even older belief system? The answer may surprise you. The war in heaven in the Christian Bible isn't the beginning of the story, but the end of it. The book of Revelations is an apocalyptic tale where mystical symbols and mythical beasts signal the end of the mortal world. The sun goes dark, stars rain from the sky, and amid all the chaos going on down on earth, a war breaks out in heaven where one group of angels, led by the archangel Michael, fights a dragon called Satan who wants to dethrone God. Satan and his crew of rebellious angels aren't powerful enough to gain control of heaven, so Michael kicks them out and they fall down to earth, where Satan continues to battle against God's human followers. This biblical boss battle is believed to be foreshadowed several times in certain interpretations of the Christian Bible. Some theologians see in the book of Isaiah a The King James Version of the Bible directly lifted the lowercase word Lucifer in their translation of the original Hebrew from Latin. However, this morning star could have been a reference to Jesus or the king of Babylon. Oh. And even though this war in heaven shows up in the Christian Bible's depiction of the end of the world, it also echoes a story from the beginning where a serpentine creature tempts Adam and Eve, the original humans, to eat forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge. As punishment for trying to be as knowledgeable as God, Adam and Eve are forced to leave paradise. This is one story that the Christian Bible uses to explain the origin of sin, or human wrongdoing. But wars in heaven don't belong to just one Abrahamic faith. In Islam, God asks all the angels and a jinn named Iblis to bow down to his newest creation, humans. Jinn are invisible beings that God created from fire, and that hot nature was on display when Iblis refused to obey his every command. God kicks Iblis to the heavenly curb for his arrogance. But because of an ongoing beef with humankind, Iblis commits to tempting humans to misbehave. Iblis is still believed to lead humans astray with the help of his crew of rebellious jinn called Shaitan. Sound familiar? These mythical struggles between good and evil have spawned thousands of spinoffs. Like John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost, where fallen angels rising up against God serves as a metaphor for the English people rising up against King Charles I. Or modern sitcoms like The Good Place, where afterlife accountants assign numerical values for human actions on Earth. Kind of like Islam, Rakib, and Atiid, two angels who record people's good and bad behavior to be tallied up at the time of their death. Hopefully they didn't listen to too many Shaitan or too much red hot chili peppers and end up in the bad place. All these stories personify forces of good and evil as angels and demons, goodies and baddies. The sort of protagonists and antagonists in stories across culture and time. Satan isn't always depicted as a literal dragon or a red devil with horns. Jewish scripture also has stories of Satan. Sorry, that's the Satan. The Satan? Yeah, in Hebrew, the Satan means the accuser or the adversary. Rather than being one bad guy, it's kind of like a force of temptation inspiring people to turn away from God. So less of a monster and more of a metaphor. Exactly. The Satan is an inclination to stray away from the righteous path that could come from anywhere. Even from yourself. One of the stories in the Hebrew Bible where Satan is personified isn't an all-out brawl, but rather a verbal debate. God thinks his human follower Job is a good, upstanding believer. But the Satan acts like a prosecutor in heavenly court, arguing that Job only believes because he's had a good life. So God should test Job to see if his belief in God can withstand a string of personal tragedies. Job passes the test, God wins the argument, and nobody gets thrown out of heaven. From there, the Satan's function in the Hebrew Bible remains pretty similar, acting as an adversary or obstacle that gets between Jewish people and their responsibilities to God. But instead of being a literal angel who walks the earth, Jewish scholars argue the Satan can also be one's own sinful impulses or evil inclinations. Imagine God as DJ Khaled and the Satan as the haters who don't want you to win. So how did these different religions end up with such similar stories? While it's true that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity share some of the same religious texts, prophet figures, and the idea of a singular god, many scholars believe the war in heaven story may have originated in an even older faith. In ancient Persia, somewhere around 1000 BCE, a prophet named Zoroaster conceived of a religion where there was only one god, Ahura Mazda, who created the world. A pretty revolutionary worldview for his time. But because Ahura Mazda is good, Zoroastrians believed an opposite force called Angra Manu was responsible for evil. As the story goes, Ahura Mazda and Angra Manu are engaged in a constant battle with earth as its playing field. They create opposite forces like light and darkness. They influence people to do good or bad things. But the playing field isn't even, because Zoroastrians believe that Ahura Mazda will defeat Angra Manu at the end of time. Many scholars say Zoroastrian stories made their way through other cultures when Persians came in contact with Jews in Babylon, and later when conquered ancient Persia. They incorporated parts of Zoroastrianism into their own faiths, so the idea of a struggle between good and evil deities stuck around, but it also continued to evolve. The Christian Bible, the Hebrew Bible, and the Quran all contain hundreds of stories from different time periods and sources, many of which conflict with each other. Put that through millennia of translation, scholarly interpretation, and influence from other cultural traditions, and you're bound to see some variance. That's how we get stories about angels and demons that range from an apocalyptic showdown to a divine mock trial. But the breadth of these stories about conflict in heaven is what makes them so useful. They show up in pop culture, they're used to explain political infighting, and they act as explanations for some of humanity's biggest questions. How did the world begin, and what could the end of it look like? Why does evil exist in the world? Why is it so hard to do the right thing? Even religious traditions that incorporate literal personified angels and demons use these literary cosmic battles to teach us about our own internal battles between right and wrong choices. War and heaven stories reflect back to us the complex moral questions we face in our lives on Earth. All right, so for my pantheon pick for this episode, I'm gonna go maybe a little non-traditional or very traditional. I'm gonna go with Jesus. The Jesus? The Jesus, yes indeed. Okay. I think he embodies a lot of good philosophy that I would want to have in utopia. Treat others the way you want to be treated is a good mantra. Also love the idea of unlimited bread and wine, selfishly. And he can also heal people and bring them back from the dead. And with some of the fiery personalities on our pantheon, I feel like he's a good choice. A good choice and a bold choice, but let's see how it works in our utopia. I'm excited. Why not? Okay. I mean, there's a lot of good philosophy there. Treat others the way you want to be treated. Likes to do a lot of favors. Unlimited bread and wine, which I am here for.