The Devil's pitchfork appears in the second half of the early middle ages, somewhere after 800 CE. He appears by the hands of ecclesiastical writers and artists: monks and bishops. Did those monks and bishops draw their inspiration from Greece and Rome of a 1000 years before? Or from looking on peasant flock who the monks were just then beginning to worry would be shepherded away by some physical, stalking Satan, prodded and poked from salvation to the gates of hell like some demonic inversion of John the Baptist's vision of salvation by Christ:
His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire. [Matthew 3:12, Luke 3:17]
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