Iblis motivation is jealousy of humanities favoured position in the eyes of God. He doesn’t want to hurt God. He wants to take humanity with him. This is perhaps why we get the idea of devils being fiery beings and hell being fiery, because the jinn are said to be made of fire, and the shaitan are considered to be destined for hell. What makes a jinn a shaitan is being one of Iblis sympathizers.
The angels are watching jinn as much as they are watching humanity. This is part of why the shaitan are not able to run amok across the earth. The angels keep the divine order.
The shaitan remind me of Captain Ahab except they still love God whereas Ahab wanted to kill Him in that Abhad knew he was damned. Iblis knows it also, having heard it directly from God.
Can anything change Iblis’s fate? Arguably yes, because supposedly the same laws of mercy apply to Iblis as well. But Iblis is intensely wilful. There are some schools of thought, fringe as they might be, that say this issue is already over with and resolved. In the Black Book of the Yezidi, they speak of a spirit that was given sovereignty of earth, a sort of prince of creation. Melek taus, the peacock angel, who was said to have had a falling out with God, but to later have reconciled or be destined to reconcile.
I do notice peacocks are often in art depicting the garden of Eden. In Islamic art too. Yes, and are considered to be bearers of “eyes”. Not unholy as some might think. To the Greeks, the eyes in a peacocks tail were the eyes of the goddess Hera, and she was said to be chronically irritable.
Do Jinn have pre Islam roots? They do, and in fact, before the spread of the teachings of Mohammed and even for a time after the establishment of that faith, they were even worshipped or perhaps venerated. Sometimes these concepts aren’t clear. I suspect much of Christian demonology was ripped from pre-Islamic jinn worship. The jinn being perhaps ancestral hero deities, as they did call the desert nomads jinn as well.
Satan is rarely mentioned in the old testament. Satan is a suspect concept in all pre-Christian beliefs, and not a meaningful figure in Judaism at all. They are more concerned about the angel Azazel than they are Samael. Samael in their belief is just an angelic beaurocrat. The one who tallies your sins. Where as Azazel is the agent of death directly, the grim reaper.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~