How old is the "child of Satan" trope? Surely it must be older than stuff like Rosemary's Baby. There's children of devils in some of our oldest literature—Merlin is said to have been the child of an incubus, for example—but I'm talking about something much grander here, the idea of a full-on reverse Incarnation. The notion of the biblical "antichrist", which is used rather vaguely and generally to refer to false prophets, has fused with notions of Satan and devil children, producing the popular fictional idea of Satan's Child, or sometimes Satan's Incarnation in human form. This isn't "Biblical", strictly speaking, but it's great for horror movies.
Anyway I feel like this idea is pretty modern and probably roughly cognate with the first popularization of actual Satanism, prompting fears of a Satanic Incarnation. It seems like a vaguely significant evolution of occult belief. The earlier generation of ceremonial occultists might have boasted of dealing with dark powers such as Goetian demons, and stories of people doing deals with Satan (usually in some guise like Black Philip or Old Scratch) are centuries old, but there's something new and different about just...openly worshipping Satan. None of this midnight-at-the-crossroads stuff, just...going to a building, probably rather a dull building in fact, to give homage to the Prince of Darkness.
Hm, I thought I saw someone for a second there. Anyway, I find myself curiously taken with the idea of Satan working out some trick for achieving an approximate Incarnation, and therefore getting to experience something that the Christian God had reserved for His own use—direct knowledge of what it was like to be a human being. What's more, the Christian God is restricted by his own rules to a single Incarnation, or maybe a double one, depending upon how you interpret the rules. But Satan wouldn't be restricted, and therefore Satan could have as many pseudo-Incarnations as they liked, learning a bit more every time.
Heck...isn't there a chance that Satan might end up outdoing the original, if they worked at it hard enough? Wouldn't THAT be wild!?
~Chara of Pnictogen
