“Satan Before the Lord” by Corrado Giaquinto (1703-1768)

The following is from Mircea Eliade’s “Mephistopheles and the Androgyne or the Mystery of the Whole” in his The Two and the One.

The motif of the association, indeed the friendship, between God and the Devil is particularly noticeable in a type of cosmogenic myth that is extremely widespread and can be summed up as follows: In the beginning there were only the Waters, and on those Waters walked God and the Devil. God sent the Devil to the bottom of the ocean with orders to bring him a little clay with which to make the World. I omit the details of this cosmic dive and the results of this collaboration by the Devil in the work of Creation. All that concerns our purpose are the Central Asian and South-Eastern European variants which stress the fact that God and the Devil are blood-brothers, or that they are co-eternal or, indeed, God’s inability to complete the World without the Devil’s help.