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Satan was an angel in Heaven but he grew discontented with serving God and sought to overthrow God, so God banded Satan to Hell. In John Milton's classic work Paradise Lost, Satan says "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven." This appears to be the mantra of sokes in the martial arts.

A "soke" is considered the founder of a martial art. Many "new" martial arts have been founded because a student in a martial art became discontented serving under the master of the art and wanted to be the master. Because of this, the master banded the student from the art. The student then created a new martial art and made himself a master in the art. It appears that it is "Better to reign in your own martial art than to serve in an existing martial art."

When correctly used, the Japanese term "Soke" refers, not to the founder of a specific martial arts system, but to a student who has inherited, or is named by the predecessor as the successor of, the leadership of the system. However, nowadays, the term is often used to refer to the founders of martial art systems themselves as well as to the "founders" of martial art styles.

Theoretically, every martial arts system, even the very first one, whatever that may have been, had a founder, or a soke. From that one soke, now there are thousands. Why have the martial arts generated so many "Sokémons"?

One way to found a new martial art is to come up with a new way to fight, but how many different ways may a human being with two arms and two legs fight? Basically, to fight another person or animal with empty hands, a human may strike (using hands, feet, elbows, etc.) or grapple (using throws, pins, hold owns, locks, chokes, pressure points, etc.). This means you really need only two martial art systems: (System A) striking and (System B) grappling. This means you only need two sokes. However, how do you accommodate the super egos of so many martial art masters that also desire to be sokes?

You do it by creating variations of one of the original two martial arts, such as by only using kicks from (System A) and creating (Style A1), or only using throws from (System B) and creating (Style B1). Do you still need more styles? Then use parts of (System A) and (System B) to create (Style A1B1), (Style A1B2), etc. and then create versions of each of these style (Style A1B2a), (Style A1aB2b), etc.). In this manner, you may create an infinite number of styles, each with its own soke.

Why do we need so many variations anyway? There are few other sports with so many variations, and ever fewer with a supreme master for each variation. As an example, let us examine the lowly ball. A small may be small, such as a table tennis ball, or large, such as a basketball. It may be soft, such as a tennis ball, or hard, such as a baseball. It may be round, such as a soccer ball, or oblong, such as a football. When these differences are combined with the different types of materials with which balls may be made, you come up with hundreds, perhaps thousands of ways a ball may be constructed. Now consider all the sports that use a ball for play. There are many of them, but still relatively few considering the number of types of balls that are available. Why is this?

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