I'm reading Elaine Pagels at 1 AM again.
The Origin of Satan. Not the theological Satan, the cartoon villain with the pitchfork and the goatee. The political Satan. The rhetorical Satan. The one that early Christian communities invented, piece by piece, document by document, not because evil needed a mascot but because institutions need an enemy to survive.
And I keep thinking about branding.
Which is probably not what Pagels intended. But once you see the pattern, it shows up everywhere. In the Gospel of Mark. In your competitor's homepage. In the positioning deck your agency built last quarter. In the way you talk about your own company when someone asks what makes you different.
Here's what Pagels actually argues, and it's more unsettling than any theology class ever let on.
The Hebrew Bible's satan (lowercase, no article) is a function, not a character. An adversary. A tester. In Job, the satan works for God. He's a prosecuting attorney in the divine court. Doing his job. Not evil. Just oppositional by assignment.
The transformation happens in the intertestamental period and accelerates through the Gospels. Satan goes from cosmic functionary to cosmic enemy. From tester to tempter. From God's employee to God's opposite. And Pagels traces this transformation not to theological revelation but to institutional need.
The early Jesus movements were fractured. Multiple communities, multiple interpretations, competing claims to authority. They needed cohesion. And the fastest way to build cohesion in any group, in any century, in any boardroom, is to identify a common enemy.
Not just a competitor. An enemy. Something that represents everything you're not. Something that makes your identity legible by contrast.
The Essenes did it first. The Dead Sea Scrolls are full of it: sons of light versus sons of darkness, the righteous community versus the forces of Belial. But the move the Gospel writers made was subtler and more devastating. They took the enemy and located it not in distant cosmic forces but in specific human communities. The Pharisees. The Temple authorities. The Jewish leaders who rejected the movement.
Real people became the enemy. And once real people become the enemy, the mythology writes itself. Every setback is persecution. Every internal disagreement is infiltration. Every question becomes a loyalty test.
Pagels calls this "the intimate enemy." The adversary who was once one of us. The one whose betrayal stings precisely because they were close enough to know better.
I read that phrase and I thought about every agency pitch I've ever sat through.
Watch what happens when a brand tells its origin story.
"We were frustrated with the way things were done in our industry."
There it is. The genesis of Satan. Not a theological claim. A positioning move. The industry becomes the enemy. The old way. The broken system. The thing that was supposed to work but didn't.
And then: "So we built something different."
The redemption narrative. The exodus. We left the corrupt temple and built a new one. Our way. The right way.
It's a powerful story. It works because it's the oldest story. Literally. Pagels traces it back to the second century BCE. The Essenes leaving Jerusalem. The Jesus movement separating from the synagogue. Every schism in Christian history following the same arc: they were corrupt, we saw the truth, we broke away, and our identity is defined by the thing we broke from.
Your brand is doing this. Right now. Whether you designed it to or not.
Girard helps here. He always does when the subject is enemies and imitation.
Rene Girard's scapegoat mechanism is the dark engine underneath Pagels' history. When a community is in crisis, when internal tensions threaten to tear the group apart, the community resolves the tension by identifying a scapegoat. Someone (or something) that can absorb the blame. The violence converges on the scapegoat, the community experiences catharsis, and unity is restored.
The scapegoat doesn't have to be guilty. That's the whole point. The mechanism works because the community needs it to work, not because the accusation is accurate.
Now think about how agencies position against each other.
"Most agencies just run your ads and send you a report."
That's a scapegoat. The unnamed "most agencies." The faceless enemy that absorbs all the frustration the prospect is carrying from their last three marketing relationships. The agency making this claim doesn't need to prove that "most agencies" actually operate this way. The prospect already believes it because they've lived it, or because they've heard other people say they've lived it, which in a mimetic world amounts to the same thing.
The mechanism works. The prospect feels seen. The agency feels differentiated. And nobody examines whether the enemy is real or manufactured.
Here's where it gets uncomfortable. I do this too.
The Cash Flow Method's positioning is built against an enemy. We named it deliberately. The enemy is guesswork-based marketing. The agency model that skips the research, copies the competition, and hopes the numbers work out. We call it the hidden layer, the intelligence underneath the surface, because we're defining ourselves against people who don't go underneath the surface.
That's a Satan. I chose it. I chose it consciously, which I think matters, but Pagels would probably raise an eyebrow at my certainty.
Because here's what Pagels keeps showing you across four hundred pages of meticulous scholarship: the communities that created their enemies always believed they were the righteous ones. The Essenes genuinely believed the Temple was corrupt. The Gospel writers genuinely believed the Pharisees had missed the point. Every institution that manufactured an adversary did so from a position of sincere conviction.
Sincerity doesn't make the mechanism less dangerous. If anything, it makes it more dangerous. Because when you genuinely believe your enemy is real, you stop examining whether the category of "enemy" is doing your thinking for you.
Let me get specific about how this plays out in brand building.
There are three ways the Pagels pattern shows up in modern positioning. I've seen all three. I've done all three. I'm trying to be honest about that.
The Accidental Enemy. This is the most common. The brand doesn't sit down and choose an adversary. It grows one organically. A founder gets burned by a vendor, starts a competing company, and the origin story becomes the burning. Every piece of content, every sales conversation, every team meeting is subtly oriented around "we're not like them." The them is vague. The them shifts. Sometimes the them is a specific competitor. Sometimes the them is "the industry." Sometimes the them is a previous version of the founder themselves.
The accidental enemy is dangerous because it's invisible. Nobody named it, so nobody can examine it. It just shapes the culture the way gravity shapes water. You don't see it until you ask: who are we against? And then you realize the answer has been running your entire messaging strategy without anyone approving it.
The Borrowed Enemy. This is the mimetic version. The brand looks at what's working for a competitor, sees that the competitor has an enemy, and adopts the same enemy. "They're positioning against the old way? We'll position against the old way too."
This is what happens when you see five postcards in a mailbox that all say "we're not like the other guys." They've all borrowed the same Satan. They've all adopted the same scapegoat. And the result is that none of them are actually differentiated, because differentiation requires a specific enemy, not a generic one.
Girard would call this mimetic rivalry at the level of mythology. The agencies aren't just copying each other's tactics. They're copying each other's creation stories. They're all claiming to have left the same corrupt temple, and none of them notice that the exodus has become the orthodoxy.
The Chosen Enemy. This is what Pagels' work implies you should do if you're going to do it at all. Choose your adversary deliberately. Name it specifically. Understand that you're engaging in a mythological act, that you're constructing a narrative that will shape how your team thinks, how your clients perceive you, and how your competitors respond.
When we built TCF's positioning around "guesswork-based marketing," that was a chosen enemy. We can define it. We can point to specific practices that constitute it: skipping buyer research, copying competitor language, making creative decisions from the conference room instead of from the data. It's specific enough that we can be held accountable for being different from it. And it's specific enough that imitating us requires doing the actual work, not just borrowing our language.
But I hold this loosely. Because Pagels taught me that every community believes its enemy is the real one. And the moment I stop questioning whether my chosen enemy is a genuine problem or a convenient mythology is the moment the mythology starts running me instead of the other way around.
There's a passage in The Origin of Satan that I keep coming back to. Pagels describes how the author of the Gospel of John, writing decades after Jesus, transforms "the Jews" from Jesus' own community into his cosmic opponents. The people who were closest to the movement become its greatest enemies. The intimate enemy again.
And she notes, almost in passing, that this rhetorical move, this mythological construction, this positioning decision, would shape two thousand years of Christian history. Pogroms. Inquisitions. The Holocaust. All downstream of a narrative choice made by a writer trying to differentiate his community from a rival community in a contested religious marketplace.
I am not comparing brand positioning to the Holocaust. I am saying that narratives have consequences that outlive their authors. The enemy you name today becomes the lens your team uses to see the world tomorrow. The mythology you build, even accidentally, even casually, even in a pitch deck you wrote on a plane, shapes what your organization is capable of perceiving and what it renders invisible.
So what do you do with this?
I don't have a clean framework. Pagels doesn't offer one either. She's a historian, not a consultant. But here's what I'm trying to practice, imperfectly, with full awareness that I'm inside the pattern even as I describe it:
Name your enemy out loud. If you can't name it, it's running you. If you can name it, at least you can examine it.
Check whether your enemy is specific or generic. "The old way" is a generic Satan. Anybody can claim to oppose it. Specific enemies require specific alternatives, which require actual differentiation, which requires actual work.
Ask whether your enemy is a real problem or a convenient one. Is "guesswork-based marketing" a genuine practice that harms the clients we serve? Yes. I believe that. But I also know that my belief is exactly what Pagels' subjects believed about their enemies. So I keep asking.
Watch for the intimate enemy pattern. The moment your brand story starts requiring a traitor, a former ally who betrayed the mission, you're deep in Pagels territory. That doesn't mean the betrayal wasn't real. It means the narrative is doing things beyond describing what happened.
It's late. The yerba mate is cold. I've got Pagels open to chapter four and my laptop open to a client's brand deck, and I keep reading one and seeing the other.
The origins of Satan weren't supernatural. They were institutional. A community needed coherence, and coherence required an enemy, and the enemy was manufactured with enough sincerity that it became real. Two thousand years real. Crusades real. Cultures-destroyed real.
Your brand story probably won't start a crusade. But it will shape what your team sees when they look at the market. It will shape what your clients believe when they hire you. It will shape what you're capable of building and what you're incapable of noticing.
Choose your Satan carefully. Or at least notice that you already have one.