Scourge same period we meet with the private use of the "discipline" by such saintly persons as King Louis IX of France and Elisabeth of Hungary. Semi-literal usages such as "the scourge of God" for Attila the Hun (i.e. "God's whip with which to punish the nations") led to metaphoric uses to mean a severe affliction, e.g. "the scourge of drug abuse". The scourge is described as one of the tools used in Wicca, primarily in the Gardnerian Tradition. The purpose of using the scourge is not to cause pain or to torture, but for purification purposes, particularly for Initiates. The
God as the devil century) accuses the Persian prophet Mani, founder of the Manichaean sect in the 3rd century AD, identified Jehovah as "the devil god which created the world" and said that "he who spoke with Moses, the Jews, and the priests [...] is the [Prince] of Darkness, [...] not the god of truth." According to their critics, these heretics referred to the Abrahamic God variously as "a demiurgus", "an evil angel", "the devil god", "the Prince of Darkness", "the source of all evil", "the Devil", "a demon", "a cruel, wrathful, warlike tyrant", "Satan" and "the first beast of the book of Revelation".