The Devil’s blackness was established in Christian tradition centuries before Islam

Evidence

In older Greek legend ghosts were sometimes “of a horrid black color,” and, in his paintings of the underworld, Polygnotus depicted the demon Eurynomous as blue-black. An early reference to the Devil as black occurs in the Life of St. Anthony, and a demon cast out of an image in the Acts of Bartholomew is “like an Ethiopian, black as soot.” Pope Gregory the Great describes the black demons that carry off wicked souls to Hell. This became one of the most common aspects of demons through the Middle Ages. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 203

Categorization

• QUESTION: The tradition of the black devil predates and is independent of Islam — worth chasing how this pre-existing Satanic blackness later got grafted onto Muslims.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s core thesis: the image (diabolized blackness) existed in Christian imagination before any Muslim-contract construct. Supports ‘fear without an object.’