17. Before their transgression, indeed, they had celestial bodies. But they fell and changed to an aerial quality, and they are not allowed to occupy the purer stretches of yonder airy space, but those misty parts, and this serves as a sort of prison for them until the time of judgment. These are the apostate angels, and their chief is the devil.
18. The devil (diabolus) in Hebrew means flowing downward (deorsum fluens), because he despised a calm station at heaven’s height and fell in downward ruin by the weight of his pride; but in Greek devil means accuser, whether because he reports the guilty deeds to which he is himself the tempter, or because he accuses the innocence of the elect with false crimes. Whence the angel’s voice says in the Apocalypse: “The accuser of our brethren has been cast down, who accused them in the sight of God day and night.”
19. Satanas signifies in Latin the adversary, or deserter. He is the adversary, for he is the foe of truth, and struggles to resist the virtues of the holy; and the deserter, because he became an apostate and did not stand by the truth in which he was created; and the tempter, because he demands that the uprightness of the just be tried, as is written in Job.
20. Antichrist is so named because he is going to oppose Christ. It is not as certain simple-minded persons understand, that he is called Antichrist because he is going to come before Christ, that is, that Christ will come after him; not so, but Antichrist in the Greek means in the Latin contrarius Christo, for ἀντὶ in Greek means contra in Latin.
21. For when he comes he will say falsely that he is Christ, and he will fight against him, and will oppose the sacraments of Christ, in order to destroy the Gospel of truth.
22. For he will try to repair the temple at Jerusalem and to restore all the ceremonies of the old law; moreover he is Antichrist who denies that Christ is God, for he is opposed to Christ; all who go out of the church and are cut off from the unity of faith are themselves Antichrist.
37. They say that Janus is the gate (janua), as it were, of the universe, or the heavens or the months; they make Janus with two faces because of the East and the West; when they make him with four faces and call him the double Janus they refer this to the four quarters of the universe or to the four elements or seasons. But when they make this pretence they make a monster, not a god.
56. They say that Diana [Apollo’s] sister is at the same time Luna and the divinity of roads. And they represent her as a maiden because nothing grows on a road. And both [Apollo and Diana] are falsely represented as having arrows because the sun and moon send their rays from heaven down to the earth.
81. Pan is a Greek name; the Latin is Silvanus; the god of the country people whom they invented to represent nature, whence he is called Pan, that is, all. For they pretend that he is made out of every kind of element.
82. For he has horns to represent the rays of the sun and moon; he has a skin, marked by spots, because of the stars of heaven; his face is red to represent the ether; he carries a Pan’s-pipe of seven reeds because of the harmony of the heavens in which are seven sounds, and the seven notes of the voice.