Interest in Satan has intensified in the past decade, even before President Bush began to speak of the “axis of evil.” Elaine Pagels, who phenomenologically brackets the question of the existence of Satan, has careful delineated the rise of Satan as it were in her works, drawing special attention to how the cosmological split implied by his existence also became a social split in the hands of sectarian groups like the Essenes between “sons of light” and “Sons of Darkness,” which then runs like a dividing line throughout the history of Christianity in which enemies, both within and without, are identified as “agents of Satan,” with Ayotollah’s characterisation of U.S.A. as “the great Satan” representing the inversion of this legacy.