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The Devil, the Illusionist: Master Enmity of Humanity or Masterpiece of God’s Wrath towards Man, The Epic Journey of the Angel of Fire.
Whether it is John Milton’s Satan, Dante Alighieri’s Dis, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Mephistopheles, Lucifer Morningstar in The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and Lucifer by Mike Carey, Mikhail Bulgakov’s Woland, Anne Rice’s Memnoch, Mark Twain’s Satan and No. 44, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Melkor, or mischief Loki, there are many different portrayals of the devil. Therefore, the very aim of this article is to represent the depiction of the devil in the selected works through the lens of René Descartes, whose understanding of the devil is somewhat controversial in the Meditations, not only in his time, but also today. The article’s final conclusion is that what we refer to as Lucifer or the devil is not necessarily a character to be cursed, so long as we understand that the source of our choices depends on human free will, not the devil. This article presents a comparative study on issues of evil under the name of Mephastophilis in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Woland in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Lucifer in the 2016 American TV series Lucifer.