Spirits beneath the status of gods and subject to them. Belief in such spirits has existed in all religions throughout history, but not all imagined them to be evil. In ancient Greece, for example, the word daimon meant a divine power, usually an individual protector who intervened between the gods and mortals. During the Hellenistic period, there was also a tradition of individual demons, but they were thought to be controlled through a hierarchy.
It was the monotheists of early Judaism who first characterized all gods and spirits, other than their own true God, as evil and postulated the existence of a single chief adversary, wholly evil in the way that God was all good. A common view in other monotheistic religions, like Zoroastrianism, was that there was permanent battle going on within the universe between the powers of Light and Dark. In Christianity, the chief demon who represented absolute evil was a fallen angel from within the religion itself. He came to be known by various names, the Devil, Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebul (sometimes corrupted to Beelzebub), the Demiurge, the Prince of Darkness, and many others. In Christian thought, the chief task of this fallen angel was to tempt men and women away from the path of righteousness and so to obtain increased power over his main adversary, the Archangel Michael, the leader of God’s heavenly host.