ETHIOPIAN SATAN TYPIFIES INDOCTRINATED EURO-CHRISTIAN PERCEPTION

"To captivate the imagination of the ignorant masses, the priest depicts God as a white man and the devil as a black man, if he is dealing with white potential converts; but he makes the same God black when he is among black savages. Actually, he would even make the devil white if he himself were not white. In this manner the priest insinuates himself everywhere, caressing the passions instead of fighting them. And so he triumphs by capturing souls through underhanded methods. But wherever he has trodden, his footprints remain, and they can be completely erased only through centuries of effort and the relentless action of an incorruptible science. Indeed, even after Europeans stop believing in the devil, they will go on for a long time thinking of the Negro as a mean, deceitful, and cunning being, the repository of all those vices which their fearful medieval ancestors ascribed to Satan himself...

"The myth of the Devil, which is an integral part of the history of Christianity, is barely broached in theological treatises. Should one decry the effects of religious propaganda on the mentality of European Christians, an example of which is the black and hideous devil with Ethiopian features that are distorted and caricatured, a learned theologian would have no problem proving that church dogma and doctrine deny such a fact. This I have attempted to do, inasmuch as a layman can see through the arcana of the divine science. Nevertheless, as soon as one moves away from this carefully structured field of knowledge to venture into the folk traditions, such as the lives of the saints, and everything else that makes up the better part, if the least recognized one, of the history of the Church, it is a different story. There the myth of Ham, made more vulgar and striking by its conjunction with the fiction of Satan, takes on an importance that reveals clearly the extent of the aberration into which the ignorant masses have fallen, an aberration which some scholars and scientists are now trying to perpetuate by means of the absurd theory of the inequality of the human races."

P.416-417, The Equality of the Human Races, "Religious Myths and Words of the Ancients," by Antenor Firmin (1885, 2002)