In fact, the Devil has been centre stage within popular Western culture for the past 40 years. When, in the 1973 film The Exorcist, a voice inside the possessed girl, Regan, announced, And Im the Devil! Now kindly undo these straps, he was announcing, in Terminator mode, that he was back. The girl in whom the Devil had taken up residence spoke with a deep contralto voice, screamed obscenities, vomited and levitated, rotated her head 180 degrees and walked like a spider. Audiences were horrified and appalled, yet captivated and fascinated.

This modern enchanted world is one of multiple meanings, where the spiritual occupies a space between reality and unreality. It is a domain where belief is a matter of choice and disbelief willingly and happily suspended. And in this new realm of limbo, the Devil finds a new space.

As the revised Anglican baptism service suggests, belief in the Devil is now very much a matter of choice, even within the Christian Church. It was not always so. For the better part of the past 2,000 years, it was as impossible not to believe in the Devil as it was impossible not to believe in God. To be a Christian was not only to believe in the salvation that was available through Christ, but also to expect the punishments inflicted by Satan and his demons in the eternal fires of hell for those not among the chosen. The history of God in the West is also the history of the Devil, and the history of theology is also the history of demonology.

When belief wasnt a matter of choice: the 'Hell fresco (1415) by Giovanni da Modena

For some forms of modern conservative Christianity, marginalised within Western secular and liberal theological thought, the Christian story of the Devil is very much alive still. The belief remains that the Devil is active and will remain so until finally consigned to an eternity in Hell at the end of history. The existence of the Devil and his capacity to act in history, nature, and human lives, remains for many Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, a satisfactory explanation of natural misfortune and human suffering.

And the modern world often does seem at times to be so evil and human actions so wicked that only a supernatural explanation can suffice. That Satan and evil always seem to be winning the battle against God and the good has always been only partially and paradoxically mitigated by the Christian conviction that, at the end of the day, he has been carrying out Gods will. Christianity has always wrestled with the apparent contradiction between a God who is both all-powerful and all-good, and yet appears either unable to control the Devil or unwilling to do so.

Still, the story of the Devil is one that had lost its central role in Western intellectual life by the middle of the 18th century. By then, for an educated elite if not for the masses, the Devil was no longer a matter of fact but of fiction, and even occasionally a folkloric figure of fun. For some, the Devil became merely a metaphor for the evil within us. For others, he became merely a personification of an impersonal force. It was no longer a valiant struggle against sin, the world and the Devil but rather, as the new baptism service has it, a matter of standing bravely and opposing the power of evil. For others, it was a convenient excuse for men, as Daniel Defoe put it in 1727, to shift off these crimes on Him which are their own.

It was the rise of secular scepticism about the Devil that made possible his effective elimination from liberal Christian theologies. His relegation to the darker corners of the Christian mind was perhaps the most important consequence of the growth of liberal Protestantism from the beginning of the 19th century. Yet, ironically, this very marginalisation of the orthodox Christian story of the Devil in the modern West has allowed for a proliferating of lives of the Devil in modern popular culture.

The Devil still exists within the Christian story, but also beyond it, an objectification of the often incomprehensible evil that lies within us and around us, threatening to destroy us. The spell of disenchantment has been broken. The Devil now has new domains and new borders. Hedged in by the traditional Christian story on the one side, on the other by modern secular agnosticism, he prowls around, looking for someone to devour, yet again, both delectable and dangerous, fascinating and terrifying, familiar and alien, in a newly enchanted world.

Philip Almond is professorial research fellow at the University of Queensland and author of 'The Devil: A New Biography (IB Tauris)

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Giving the Devil his due