I am still reading the intriguing and informative volume about the devil by Paul Carus

Sacred Tree and Serpent, from an ancient Babylonian cylinder

I will continue to quote from 'Michelangelo: His Life, His Times, His Era' (1921) by Georg Brandes because I enjoyed reading this book and because Brandes also dedicated a number of pages to examining Leonardo da Vinci. I have somewhat of an interest in Leonardo because it's easy for me to understand him and his actions, and I have already acquired a few old books about him. "Michelangelo's whole nature made it impossible for him to see in Raphael anything but an imitator and plagiarist who owed him everything. Contempt and hostility pervaded whatever recognition of merit the younger artist may have elicited. Toward Leonardo Michelangelo can scarcely have felt disdain, but beyond doubt he did entertain a frank hatred of this rival. In versatility both artists were equally outstanding. Both were painters, sculptors, draftsmen, poets. Leonardo apparently also shone in music, but to restore the balance Michelangelo's gifts as an architect were more marked. Both were eminent engineers. Each reached the summit in painting and sculpture. Michelangelo had the good fortune to leave behind many more works than Leonardo, whose creations seemed to be ill-starred and whose genius, moreover, led him to dissipate his energies even more than did Michelangelo. But the main difference is that Michelangelo was content with mastery in the fine arts and notable stature as a poet, while Leonardo superimposed on the artist the thinker, scientist and inventor in the grand manner, his discoveries far outnumbering his works of art. Leonardo's mind was a perpetual ferment. He brooded, searched, probed, analyzed, investigated, dissected everything, even the pigments he used. Then he would collect himself and after the most painstaking preparation discharge his energy in "everlasting" masterpieces that were either destroyed by time or the heedlessness of man or that crumbled of their own accord. Even when he had created something enduring, his spirit persisted in regarding it as unfinished and continued to play with it. Yet the two great men, in the face of their diversity, have many traits in common, vast as may be the gulf between brusqueness and grace, intuition and research. In their art both held fundamentally aloof from orthodox Christianity; both were fond of omitting haloes and all the other ecclesiastic paraphernalia. They shared a delight in studying the human body. When Leonardo represented clothed figures, he first drew their nude outlines, as did Raphael after him - witness Leonardo's drawings for the Adoration of the Kings and the Last Supper. Both showed little concern for contemporary dress, in the representation of which most Florentine painters delighted. When commissions dealt with biblical themes, Michelangelo was drawn to the Old Testament, which he unfolded before us all the way from the majesty of the Creation to the genre paintings of the Ancestors of Christ. Leonardo, on the other hand, turned to the New Testament, when appropriate, though he carefully avoided the Passion and one can scarcely envision him painting a Crucifixion. Under his brush the Last Supper becomes a great love feast and the Madonna and child a pure idyll. Both have a definite affinity for antiquity. But while this was all-encompassing with Michelangelo, setting the whole tone of his art, it was of a lesser significance to Leonardo. His architectural designs show a certain interest in the ancient column orders, which he was fond of combining with Byzantine domes. He derived his figure arrangements from ancient art as well. Oddly enough, we find him complaining on one occasion that he was unable to equal the symmetry of the ancients. Like other masters of the Renaissance, Leonardo, in his architectural endeavors, was influenced by Vitruvius, whom he often cites. In his theories of proportion he proceeded from the principles of the ancient Greek sculptors. In his representations of rearing horses he was inspired by the equine figures on ancient gems - his biting war horses in The Battle of Anghiari are reminiscent in attitude of an ancient cameo showing the fall of Phaethon. Throughout his work one finds small hints of antiquity. One of the figures in the Adoration of the Kings reminds of Praxiteles' Faun, another of a bronze Narcissus in Naples. The hermaphroditic features in not a few of Leonardo's pictures echo the preference, at one period of antiquity, for blending masculine and feminine traits in the figure of Bacchus, to say nothing of Hermaphroditus proper. Leonardo's St. John, in the Louvre, seems indeed of indeterminate sex, as do so many of the youthful male figures Leonardo was fond of drawing. Among their many resemblances, the two titans share a deficiency in education by the standards of their time, in that neither learned Latin in youth. Michelangelo, throughout his life, was preoccupied with so many things that he never found the time to make up for this lack. Leonardo, no less ambitious and more given to study, made an effort in the fourth decade of his life to learn Latin and apparently achieved a certain fluency, since he frequently gives Latin quotations. But it did not come easy, as seen from the word lists he made to aid his memory. Different as were these two incompatible men, they shared a propensity for pursuing vast schemes. We know that Michelangelo flirted with the idea of shaping into human form a huge rock that lay between Carrara and the sea, to serve mariners along the Riviera as a lighthouse. Leonardo, as an architect, was given to similar dreams. He wished to erect a royal tomb, to consist of a man-made mountain measuring two thousand feet across the base, surmounted by a circular temple, the floor of which would have lain at the height of the spires of the Cologne cathedral. The interior was to have been as wide as the nave of old St. Peter's in Rome. Leonardo's architectural plans show a tendency, foreign to Michelangelo, for harnessing mechanical forces to the purposes of beauty. Since Aristotile da Fioravantio, a Bolognese engineer who had lived and worked in Moscow, had moved a tower without damage, Leonardo proposed to the government of Florence a plan for lifting the Baptistry by mechanical power and installing it in an elevated position, with steps leading up to it. The Signoria was cautious enough not to essay such a scheme. In sharp contrast to Michelangelo, Leonardo loved to dwell on the representation of feminine grace. Yet the attitude of both men toward women is not dissimilar. No woman is mentioned by name in any of Leonardo's manuscripts, with only two exceptions: a model, and an aged housekeeper. History tells of not a single liaison involving Leonardo with a woman; and the same thing is true of Michelangelo. He eschewed contemporary fashion, hair dress, foot gear. The toga seemed to him the ideal costume for men. But in contrast to Michelangelo, he delved deeply into the art of portraiture. We possess not a single likeness from Michelangelo's hand. His bronze statue of Julius II was soon melted down, or it was done over Julius' tomb. The drawing of Cavalieri, the only other portrait Michelangelo is known to have made, is lost. We know, however, that he regarded portraiture as a low form of art. On the other hand, nothing has so memorably impressed Leonardo's stature upon posterity as the marvelous portraits he and his disciples have left us especially that wonder of wonders, the Mona Lisa. One has only to regard Raphael's artless pen-and-ink copy of it to sense Leonardo's profound grasp of womanhood. Perhaps he found in woman some part of the mysterious power that dwelt within his own soul. Such is Leonardo, ever and always mysterious, effortless, yet without a trace of mysticism."

I'm still reading 'The History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil' (1900) by Paul Carus. This book too has plenty of interesting information, such as the following. "The Old Testament contains many noble ideas and great truths; indeed it is a most remarkable collection of religious books, than which there is none more venerable in the literature of the world. Yet there are tares among the wheat, and many lamentable errors were, even by some of the leaders of the old Israelites, regarded as essential parts of their religion. The writers of the Bible not only made God responsible for, and accessory to, the crimes which their own people committed, e.g., theft (Exodus xi.), and murder and rape (Numbers xxxi. 17-18); but they cherished also the same superstitions that were commonly in vogue among savages. Thus the command. So the temptation of Abraham, the slaughter of the first-born in Egypt, the brimstone and fire rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah, the evil spirit which came upon Saul, the pestilence to punish David - all these things are expressly said to have come from God. Even the perverse spirit which made the Egyptians err (Isaiah xix. 14), the lying spirit which was in the mouths of the prophets of Ahab (1 Kings xxii. 23; see also 2 Chron. xviii. 20-22), ignorance and indifference (Isaiah xxix. 10), are directly attributed to acts of God. The prophet Zechariah speaks of Satan as an angel whose office it is to accuse and to demand the punishment of the wicked. In the Book of Job, where the most poetical and grandest picture of the Evil One is found, Satan appears as a malicious servant of God, who enjoys performing the functions of a tempter, torturer, and avenger. He accuses unjustly, like a State's attorney who prosecutes from a mere habit of prosecution, and delights in convicting even the innocent, while God's justice and goodness are not called in question. It is noteworthy that Satan, in the canonical books of the Old Testament, is an adversary of man, but not of God; he is a subject of God and God's faithful servant. And why was Christ a better Saviour than the gods and heroes of Greece? Simply because he was human and realistic, not mythological and symbolical; he was a sufferer and a man - the son of man, and not a slayer, not a conqueror, not a hero of the ferocious type, ruthless and bloodstained; he fulfilled the moral ideal which had been set up by Plato, who, perhaps under the impression of Aeschylus's conception of the tragic fate of Prometheus, says of the perfect man who would rather be than appear just: "They will tell you that the just man who is thought unjust will be scourged, racked, bound'; will have his eyes burnt out; and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be hung up at the pale." Alluding to Plato, Apollonius, a Christian martyr, declares: "One of the Greek Philosophers said: The just man shall be tortured, he shall be spat upon, and last of all he shall be crucified. Just as the Athenians passed an unjust sentence of death, and charged him falsely, because they yielded to the mob, so also our Saviour was at last sentenced to death by the lawless." The old Greek saviours simply changed names and became Christian saints, or at least contributed important features to the legends of their lives. Christianity is a religion of peace, but the Western nations are warlike, and at the very beginning of the Christian era the need was felt to have the spirit of belligerency consecrated by religious sentiment and represented in struggling saints and angels. There can scarcely be any doubt that the original doctrine of Jesus of Nazareth was an ethics of peace; not only peacefulness and gentleness of mind in general, but peace at any price, and a non-resistance to evil. The warlike spirit among later Christians and the worship of belligerent archangels and saints were introduced into the writings of the early Church from pagan sources and the importance of this phase of Christianity grew with its expanse among the energetic races of the North. The Teutonic nations, the Norsemen, the Germans, the Anglo-Saxons and their kin, whose conversion is the greatest conquest Christianity ever made, proved no less belligerent than the Greek and Roman, but they were their superiors in strength, in generosity, in fairness toward their enemies, and in purity of morals. The religion of the Teutons was in the main a religion of fighters, and we do not hesitate to say that they, more than any other people on earth, developed the ethics of struggle. War, strife, and competition, are frequently regarded as in themselves detestable and immoral, but the Teutons discovered that life means strife, and that therefore courage is the root of all virtue. Their highest ideal was not to shrink from the unavoidable, but to face it squarely and unflinchingly. Their chief god was the god of war, and their noblest consummation of life was death on the battlefield. They despised the coward who was afraid of wounds and death. They respected and even honored their enemies if they were but brave. They scorned deceit and falsity and would rather be honestly defeated than gain a victory by trickery. And this view did not remain a mere theory with them, but was practised in life. The Teutons were repeatedly defeated by the Romans, by Marius, Caesar, and others who were less scrupulous in their methods of fighting, but in the long run they remained victorious and built a Teutonic empire upon the debris of Rome. The idea of evil played an important part in the religion of the Teutons. Loki, the god of fire, the cunning mischief-maker among the Asas, is believed to have brought sin and evil into the world. In the younger Edda, Loki takes part in the creation of man, whom he endows with the senses, passions, and evil desires. Loki's children are (1) the Fenris wolf, (2) the Jormungander, i.e., the Midgard serpent, and (3) Hel, the queen of Nifelheim, the world of the dead. The worst deed which Loki accomplished was the death of Baldur, the god of light and purity. After that he was outlawed and resided no longer in Asgard. The most remarkable feature of Teutonic mythology is the conception of doomsday or Ragnarok (the twilight of the gods), boding a final destruction of the world, including all the gods. At present the powers of evil are fettered and subdued, but the time will come when they will be set loose. Loki, the Fenris wolf, the Midgard serpent, and Hel, with their army of frost giants and other evil beings, will approach; Heimdall, the watchman of the gods, will blow his horn, and the Asas prepare for battle. The combat on the field Vigrid will be internecine, for the Asas are to die while killing the monsters of wickedness whom they encounter, and the flames of Muspil will devour the wrecks of the universe. The world had a beginning, it therefore must come to an end; but when the world is destroyed a new heaven and a new earth will rise from the wreck of the old one, and the new world will be better than the old one. Leifthraser and his wife Lif (representing the desire for Life and potential Life) remained concealed during the catastrophe in Hodmimer's grove and were not harmed by the flames. They now become the parents of a new race that will inhabit the new abode, called Gimel (the German Himmel), and among them will be found Odhin, with his sons, Thor, Baldur, Fro, and all the other Asas. When Christianity spread over Northern Europe it came into contact with the Teutonic and Celtic nations, who added new ideas to its system and transformed several characteristic features of its world-view. Christianity to-day is essentially a Teutonic religion. The ethics of Christianity, which formerly was expressed in the sentence "Resist not evil," began, in agreement with the combative spirit of the Teuton race, more and more to emphasise the necessity of struggle."