In his work A religião popular portuguesa (1990), Moisés Espírito Santo proposes that in Portugal's popular belief the proverb “The Devil is not as ugly as they paint him” is taken into account, a maxim that translates very well the alternative way in which the “fallen angel” is conceived and contradicts the discourses about Evil and its supreme representative, officially disseminated by the most traditional religious institutions. My proposal in this work is to reflect on how the Devil of portuguese popular religiosity, represented several times in the country's literature, spread in Brazilian Cordel literature, not only prolonging elements of the Portuguese “base”, but taking new contours that constituted one of the topoi of the textual genre Cordel. Both in portuguese popular religiosity and in Brazilian Cordel, certain elements can be seen, especially with regard to the humanized characteristics of the Devil, which are considerably opposed to the way in which more traditional religious institutions have disseminated and disseminate the demonic figure, with discourses that reinforce, even in our days, its existence and role in society.