Iblis in The Book of the Rolls

"Iblis in The Book of the Rolls"
18 May 2022, rev. 2026

The Book of the Rolls, or Kitāb al-Mağāll, is a Christian Apocryphal work. Below, I give a summary and offer an interpretation of Iblis in this text. To give it structure, I subdivide the narrative into three sections ("Rifts").

This book was originally an esoteric text that was hidden from laity:

This book is one of the hidden books of Saint Clement the Apostle, disciple of Simon Cepha, which Saint Clement commanded to be kept secret from the laity.

The text addresses genealogy, eventually going on to promise that:

I will relate to thee mysteries, and what reason there was for the fall of the Devil, the prince, from heaven.

Following these statements and summaries, a rough narrative follows.

I. The First Rift: Iblis refuses fealty to Adam and dons a mask of the divine.

The text states that "God created Adam of dust, and formed Eve from his rib." Then, God appoints Adam as steward of the Earth:

O Adam, I have made thee king and priest and prophet and ruler and chief and governor over all creatures that are made. All creation shall obey thee and follow thy voice. Under thy grasp they shall be. To thee alone I have given this power; I have placed thee in possession of all that I have created.

The angels followed by exalting and glorifying Adam:

When the Angels heard this saying from the Lord they redoubled honour and respect to Adam.

The highest ranked member of the host refuses to join them:

When the Devil saw the gift that was given to Adam from the Lord, he envied him from that day and the schismatic from God set his mind in cunning towards him to seduce him by his boldness and his curse; and when he denied the grace of the Lord towards him, he became shameless and warlike.

Spiteful at Adam's status, Iblis then lays "claim to Godhead":

Iblis had laid claim to Godhead which had entered him in the second hour of that day, and God had hurled him down from heaven to earth.

"The godhead" is the seat or locus of divinity. It is the substratum of the qualities that encompass the divine; all of these qualities, taken together.

"To claim" has multiple potential meanings. The text is unclear about its intended meaning. I will briefly list and remark on a few of the possibilities.

The expression to claim can mean take, allege, assert or demand.

If it is to take, then Iblis tries to forcibly take or wrest the seat of divinity for himself. If it is to allege, then Iblis can be seen as suggesting to the divine that humanity is unfit as a steward, without further proof. If it is to assert, then Iblis proclaims before the divinity this view, implicitly backed by support. If it is to demand, Iblis overtly and forcibly asserts his view, with the implication of a covert threat.

A variant that combines several of these views is that Iblis dons a mask of the divine and speaks with a like voice, attempting to impose his view, cow humanity, and then unseat mankind from its newly appointed status as the steward.

In another variant that combines the first of the views above and potentially others is that Iblis takes possession of the divine for a brief period of time. The countenance of the divine would briefly be shaken, like the Sun in a full eclipse.

In any case, in this variant of the narrative, Iblis is ultimately indicted, cursed, and exiled by divinity, not for trying to replace divinity as an end in itself, but for refusing to follow a consensus of honoring humanity and respecting the decision to elevate and appoint mankind as steward over creation. That is, Iblis is punished for aiming to reimpose a primeval natural and divine hierarchy on creation.

In the First Rift, Iblis takes a divine visage in opposing humanity.

II. The Second Rift: Iblis is so named, and is cursed and exiled.

Regardless of how we interpret his attempted "claim to Godhead," we learn that the Devil is given the name, Iblis, to signify his new state.

God ... deprived the Devil of the robe of praise and dignity and called his name Devil, he is a rebel against God, and Satan, because he opposes himself to the ways of the Lord, and Iblis, because He took his dignity from him.

This second mention of Iblis concerns his name, as one of several for the Devil. The word, Iblis [إِبْلِيس], builds on the Arabic root, BLS: to persist in grief.

That is, the uniqueness of Iblis and his version of a narrative of ascent and fall lies in its image of Satan gaining his namesake in his curse and exile. Deprived of his former respect and dignity, Iblis is physically cursed and defamed.

In the Second Rift, Iblis is given his name and is cursed and exiled.

III. Iblis embarks on a struggle against Adam and his progeny.

Following his curse and exile, Iblis reenters Eden and incites the exile of Adam and Eve, following by harrying their progeny as they branch out over Earth.

Satan remained in his envy to Adam and Eve for the favour which the Lord shewed them, and he contrived to enter into the serpent, which was the most beautiful of the animals, and its nature was above the nature of the camel. He carried it till he went with it in the air to the lower parts of Paradise.

The text explicates the animus of Iblis as he settles into the serpent.

The reason for Iblis the cursed hiding himself in the serpent was his ugliness, for when he was deprived of his honour he got into the acme of ugliness, till none of the creatures could have borne the sight of him uncovered, and if Eve had seen him unveiled in the serpent, when she spoke to him, she would have run away from him...

It then remarks on how Iblis, in the serpent, taught tongues to birds.

... he contrived to hide himself in the serpent, the cunning creature, to teach the birds with round tongues the speech of men in Greek and such like.

The profunidty of Eden is somehow wed to the depths of malice in Iblis, the seat of all the sorrows the cursed one reveals in the works and ways of humanity.

Eden is a fountain of God lying eastwards, to a height of eight degrees of the rising of the sun, and this is the mercy of God on which the children of men put their trust, that they shall have a Saviour from thence, because God, may He be exalted and glorified! knew in His foreknowledge what the Devil would do to Adam.

In the Third Rift, Iblis struggles against humanity across all worlds.