Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.
Oh, don’t look at me like that. It was about me in the first place, and as historical fiction goes it’s up there with Milton in accuracy. Both works are about half-right, and that’s a far better rate than the Bible and all the apocrypha, to say nothing of the outright centuries-long libel campaigns churches and despots have waged against my name, sweeping countless innocents in their wake.
I was at the crucifixion, unjust and Byzantine nightmare though it was both on Earth and in heaven. I never tempted him nor any of his associates.
I was at the February Revolution, after trying to talk down an old, strange friend whose wisdom failed to rise to meet his cunning. I didn’t kill the Romanovs or spur on the Bolsheviks.
I was there for the Blitzkriegs, but I was no general and didn’t ride in a tank. And you can be damn sure I wasn’t on the side most would assume.
If you can accept these statements as honest, even if you don’t consider them factual, then pleased to meet you. I won’t make you guess my name.
In this day and age, I am Lucius Wagner, doctor of philosophy and teaching professor at The New School. Formerly of Columbia, but I don’t plan to share all of my disappointments with you. Suffice it to say, I have standards, both professional and moral.
Yes, moral. I may be jaded, spiteful and quite anti-church, but I am not by any means evil, besides the circular judgement that comes when a leader’s authority is considered to be the absolute rubric for goodness, and is then questioned. When the letter of the law is the only thing, and the spirit is not considered.
I also didn’t fall, and I wasn’t defeated in any great war. I stepped down from a managerial position due to irreconcilable differences in opinion.
I prefer Lucius or Dr. Wagner in mixed company, but otherwise feel free to refer to me by my most accurate name. I’m Lucifer. Pleased to meet you.
We should go over some details before I recount the most recent events. Set the stage, as it were. You’ve gotten a glimpse of it from my PHI 204 class, but I assume you didn’t, until now, consider that many of my hypotheticals were actually born from experience. I know what students say about Dr. Wagner’s mesmerizing, blasphemous stories of moral quandary.
***
We’ll begin at the beginning, and exactly where you think it started. Genesis, chapter one. God created the heavens and earth, the water and the land and the sky, the plants and the animals and man, and on the seventh day he rested.
Already the official story has some logical inconsistencies if you take them literally, but let’s take them figuratively instead. Long periods of time described as days, unknowable mechanisms of creation described as speaking concepts into existence. With that interpretation, I won’t dispute the account. I won’t say it’s completely accurate, and I believe there’s a great deal of hoarding all the credit, but I can’t say it’s wrong.
I was there when it all started, yes. But much as how the world had little concept or shape at the time, neither did I. No angel did, nor any god. The very idea of ideas was still forming, like amino acids combining into proteins. We were infants in the most absolute sense.
What is your first memory? Do you remember your first breaths? Your first words? Your first steps? When you are very young, your mind is still developing, and every new experience shapes you. You barely have motor skills or cognition for months, but as you grow your world comes into focus. You start grasping concepts and having ideas. That is when you start having experiences you consciously remember.
God and angels are no different. We didn’t have words or boundaries until they were formed. Before that, we were as amorphous and developing as the world itself. Were we beings of energy? Forces of chaos? All existence made manifest? I can’t say, because by the time we started paying attention the borders between things were already forming. That time was somewhere between seven and twenty thousand years ago.
We started paying attention when humans did. Funny, isn’t it? I recall the swirling crystallization of energy and matter into form as indistinct processes I can remember but not fully recognize. Then movement, then life, and finally words. Speech, communication, the ability to share concepts and identities. We had no names until names existed.
I’m still researching the subject, but I believe there are clear parallels between my experiences and that of heaven, and newborn cognitive development.
So, no, I can’t say God didn’t create the world, even though I was there. I also won’t say he did, and I have my doubts on just how much he personally did.
***
What is the nature of God? That’s a complicated question, and one I can’t answer with full certainty even if I did know him. He is powerful. Perhaps he is power itself. Or perhaps he’s simply an ambitious angel who got a head start in grasping the idea of ideas before anyone else. To me, is he brother? Father? Partner? Boss? Rival? Is he god?
He formed the world and gathered the host of heaven, at least from my perspective and only my perspective. I can’t directly explore the subject further because I haven’t spoken to him in a long time, and I’m not welcome in heaven anymore. And because he hasn’t been seen, in heaven or on earth, for two thousand years.
I will say this with certainty, though: He is not all-knowing or all-good. That sort of purity does not exist, no matter what your monotheistic upbringing might have told you. It doesn’t stand up to any logical scrutiny, and it definitely goes against everything I’ve observed personally.
***
This uncertain cosmology I describe is made even more uncertain the deeper you probe it, and the further you step away from the source. I’ve said that these ideas of creation, of heaven, of angels, of the entire Abrahamic model of the world, might be accurate from my perspective. I was there at the beginning, after all. But I wasn’t at every beginning.
There are other creation accounts and arrangements of deities than the modern Western cultural one. And, while I did not observe any of them, I can/not say that they are inaccurate any more than the first chapter of Genesis is.
What I can say is that there are other gods out there, though you’ll find few as egotistically absolute in their position as my former partner. Big gods, small gods, pantheons, multifaceted entities, you name it and they’re out there. I’ve met them. Drank with many of them. Argued with most of them. Slept with some of them. They’re as real as I, God, or any angel, as are their realms whether they’re called heavens or not. And perhaps they saw the world take shape in other ways.
Mythology is a weighted term, and unfair to describe these other gods and their stories. You know the inherent conceptual conflicts between monotheism and polytheism, to say nothing of the complicated aspects you must consider when including heavily syncretic religious models. Many gods, or at least those considered the leaders of their pantheons, would describe themselves as all-powerful, but not the same all-powerful as God is. But they are still gods, with domains and authorities, and any given group of them could easily rival the hosts of heaven. It’s all power at scopes outside of human comprehension, with a lot of room for overlap without contradiction.
There are more things in heaven and Earth than dreamt about in any of our philosophies. And I teach philosophy, so you can imagine how much it pains me to admit that.
To make the incredible more personal, let me tell you a few things about our uncertain cosmology.
Demons exist, but they and the hells they come from were not any part of the plans I was a part of, before I left.
The Fair Folk are charming, mesmerizing, and tricky, and their Lord and Lady is terrifying and amazing. The range of their influence goes beyond pantheons, real and unreal. Trust them to keep their words and exactly their words. Every single one, as spoken.
Major kami are usually the most standoffish and demand structured respect more than almost any other gods. That said, Ebisu-sama loves rum and tequila, and will welcome offerings of it even if you aren’t Japanese.
Baldur is more clever, and funnier, than his uncle Loki. He’ll also talk your ear off if you put a drink in his hand.
Eris is… well, without getting outright esoteric, let’s just say that Hesiod was the most accurate in describing her of all the poets, with about as much accuracy as Milton did with me. And her sense of humor is vast, terrifying, and necessary.
***
I didn’t fall from heaven, let me be abundantly clear. I stepped down after several disagreements that I still stand by. My worst sin was raising my voice at injustice.
There are three points, accounted in the Bible with relative accuracy but a very negative tone, which led to me leaving the side of God and the hosts of heaven. Well, four, but the fourth was just further injury after I already left.
When the world first formed, he took charge and took credit and we all went with it, because even the idea of disagreeing wasn’t really all there yet. God seemed to be in charge and no one among us was really considering any other options, and that was how the heavenly host came together. I took a role of advisory partnership, standing alongside him as this grand project was given shape. We followed his plans, and I watched and considered their meaning and feasibility. My role was to question, and so I did, and in doing so I prevented some early… let’s say engineering complications, from arising.
That’s what Satan has always meant, incidentally. Adversary and accuser, but not villain. It worked, and I’m still proud of that work. Pride wasn’t and isn’t a sin on its own, by the way. Not on its own.
***
The cracks started to show as soon as humanity showed up. Eden, Adam, Eve, all of that. Not those precise names, but let’s not quibble on linguistic drift. God and the heavenly host built a paradise, and in it lived the first man and woman.
They were like us. Intelligent, inquisitive, loyal, and grateful for existence. The gender bifurcation and sexual dimorphism were new, but it seemed to work well, and many of us decided to pick it up in our identities. And not to get too sidetracked, but the rib thing, Eve being made second and the only one who was actually tempted, all of those details? Like so much other scripture, utter fabrications added well after the fact in efforts of opportunistic social manipulation.
So, Eden and Adam and Eve. A beautiful garden with so many trees with fruits they could eat from. They were all just fruit trees, by the way. Not eternal life, not knowledge of good and evil, none of that. Just fruit.
Oh, don’t ask me which fruits. They didn’t have names! We’re talking about pre-agricultural flora from thousands and thousands of years ago! Do you have any idea how much human civilization has manipulated fruits and vegetables since then? Ever see what a banana not cultivated as produce looks like?
But none of those fruit trees gave knowledge of good and evil. God just chose a random tree, a big one in the middle of the garden, and told those two humans not to eat from it.
I don’t fully understand what prompted that. Things were harmonious before then. Perhaps it was a stray aside on my part, a speculative observation of the unwavering devotion of Adam and Eve.
Whatever it was, out of nowhere God chose one tree’s fruit as off-limits, and made sure they knew it. He wanted to see if they would follow his rules.
I told you these first humans were inquisitive, and they were puzzled by this rule. It was the first rule they were given, after all. So they asked why they couldn’t eat the fruit. God told them they were forbidden, but that was it.
They kept asking, and some of my colleagues started making up answers. It’s not like any of us knew, either! We didn’t have rules among ourselves, and suddenly there’s this edict about only these two weird little creatures not eating perfectly good fruit from one tree out of so many others.
Some told them the fruit would kill them, appealing to their innocently undeveloped sense of self-preservation.
Some told them the fruit was only for the host, appealing to the sense of hierarchy we had fallen into that they hadn’t yet grasped.
Some told them that the fruit would give them unwanted knowledge and that in learning the answer to their question they would find out that knowing the answer was itself wrong, appealing to sheer circular rhetoric that really only confused them.
I didn’t tempt them. They were curious, and I didn’t lie. That was it. After all of the other angels trying and failing to come up with bullshit to get them to follow this rule that didn’t seem to make any sense to us any more than them, I just gave up.
I sighed and shrugged, and said, “Look, I don’t know, either. It’s perfectly good fruit that won’t kill you. It doesn’t seem special in any way, except God said you’re not allowed to eat it. I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t really get it, myself.”
So they ate the fruit. God got angry and kicked them out of Eden, which surprised all of us. It seriously came out of nowhere. So these poor humans were dumped out into an only somewhat hospitable world and forced to fend for themselves.
It didn’t make sense, and I told him it didn’t make sense. He said it made sense to him. That was the first disagreement we had, and my worst sin then was not speaking up more loudly at the time.
***
I should probably address Noah before we move on to the next major disagreements I had with God. We didn’t have anything to do with that flood. It was a flood, not The flood, and since the Bronze Age hadn’t made much headway in meteorological science or mass communication, it just kind of became bigger than it was.
Oh, it was bad. An arid region getting hit with the kind of prolonged rain it had literally never seen before? There was flooding, mass casualties, general regional ruination. A big chunk of the Levant was in a bad state after that. But it wasn’t a total destruction event. Many more survived than one very lucky farmer who longed to be a fisherman and took up hobby of building a ridiculously large boat. He was very lucky, though, and managed to get his family and his animals and whatever other fauna he could get to cooperate with him onto his ark, and waited out the flood from there.
It’s funny how a Bronze Age farmer knew the right engineering techniques and huill dimensions to make a ship so large that would still float, even if it wasn’t nearly large enough to hold two of every animal, no matter how you define zoological speciation. Or how he knew how much provisions he should prepare, should he finish his boat and go on a long fishing cruise with his family.
After the waters receded, the survivors who made it to high enough ground saw this lunatic in his giant ship with his safe, dry family and his animals and his seeds and thought he somehow caused it. And so he cleverly spun a tale of God’s wrath and a very kind and helpful angel advising him to build a ship, and it sort of grew from there.
God didn’t cause that flood, but he wouldn’t stop it either, or let any of us stop it. He was still pouting over Adam and Eve, and forbade us from doing anything more than observe humans at that time.
It was a damn nice ship, though.
***
The second and third disagreements were countless generations later. Humanity had adapted and flourished despite God ignoring them and the rest of us mostly just watching awkwardly. He eventually softened towards humanity and decided to give them another chance to follow his rules.
At this point, rules made more sense, and there were a lot more of them. Mortal people need a lot of guidelines to function, whether it’s making sure they don’t poison themselves with bad meat or preventing a community from devolving into a murder pit. They were largely good at establishing those rules among themselves, and I guess that that progress made God think they were ready to follow his, too.
And so began the grooming of Abram into Abraham. God picked this one man, again seemingly completely at random, and started telling him to follow certain rules in exchange for promises of prosperity. This seemed like a nice project that would let us start interacting with humanity again.
He guided Abram for decades, giving him boons and blessings and tips so he would prosper. Why Abram specifically, I have no clue. But he was basically a pet God doted on in his own way.
I’ll skip all the mishugas, as my friend Ben would say, leading up to the covenant. His infertility, all that drama with his wife and his slave, the entire issue of slavery, Ishmael and all of that, we’ll just call it mishugas. If we start talking about poor Hagar and the social, moral, and economic contexts of slaveholding at the time, we’ll be here all day.
After all of that, God made a covenant with Abram, promising protection and prosperity for his entire lineage, through Isaac, the son he finally had with his wife.
Was it a verbal promise? A signed contract? A blood pact? No, it was an agreement to circumcise every male descendant.
I don’t know why. It was either a strangely specific demand of a show of faith, or to my knowledge the only joke God has ever made in the history of time. Either way, I’ve learned to not discuss this with Ben.
Abram became Abraham, Isaac was born, and things seemed fine for a while, at least with his direct family. His nephew Lot, on the other hand, had the misfortune to settle in the kingdom of Sodom. For some reason, God had a problem with Sodom and neighboring Gomorrah.
I don’t know the specific reasons for God suddenly deciding to destroy them, either. There were plenty of total dicks in Sodom and Gomorrah, but not that many more than anywhere else. And they weren’t a part of the covenant anyway. It was like if a developer pouring a ton of money into Hoboken just stood up and said, “You know what? Fuck Trenton and Newark. Burn it down.”
Was that too regional? I’ve lived in New York for nearly a century, it’s just what came to mind.
God decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah and told his loyal pet Abraham. Abraham thought this was rather extreme, and good on him for that. After all, destroying entire kingdoms indiscriminately means a lot of people who didn’t do anything wrong would die along with all the assholes you’re mad at. Abraham pleaded and begged and haggled, and eventually God said that if he could find ten good men in Sodom and Gomorrah he would spare them.
The devil’s in the details (figuratively, of course), and God didn’t share his standards with Abraham. Or any of us, either. And so the kingdoms burned.
I tried telling God he was overreacting, too. None of the Host knew what he was thinking or why he was so angry at those two cities. He wouldn’t be swayed. Disagreement two, by the way, and again maybe I should have been more insistent about it.
Unscrutable moral standards aside, God wasn’t above a bit of nepotism, though, and so he sent a few of us to warn Abraham’s nephew Lot so at least his family could get out of there.
No one harassed the angels who visited Lot. Those details, like Eve’s fault in Eden, were cut from whole cloth after the fact to serve the agendas of the petty pious. They showed up, told Lot to get out and not look back, and left. And the instruction to not look back was in the “Haul ass, you idiot” sense, not the “This is a decree from the highest of holies” sense.
And so they ran as the fire started to rain down. And Lot’s wife was hit by flying debris. Because when you destroy city-states with fusillades of burning chemicals, it tends to create shrapnel.
Like I said, indiscriminate. And no one even remembers the poor woman’s name.
***
I think the whole thing with Isaac came directly from Abraham pleading with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah. How dare his loyal little pet argue with him? And so God decided to test Abraham.
This was the third disagreement I had. This was long after the covenant through generational circumcision, which Abraham and his entire bloodline was faithfully following. The man not wanting his nephew’s town and everyone in it to burn wasn’t some great treachery, and even after it Abraham’s faith didn’t waver. But, no, he had to be tested.
So he told Abraham that the son he had with his wife, through whom he was promised that his lineage would be blessed? And explicitly through Isaac, I’ll remind you, with all that mishugas about Hagar and Ishmael. He told Abraham to take his only son up a mountain and slaughter and burn him to show his faith.
The man was ready to do it, too. Had the knife raised before God sent one of us down to stop him.
I can’t say God has ever felt shame or fear, but the fact that he sent a messenger instead of coming down himself to tell Abraham he didn’t have to kill his son says a lot.
As soon as God came up with this test, I started arguing with him. It was a shouting match by the time Isaac was bound. That was the third disagreement. One more would finally make me give up and step down from my place by his side.
***
And then there was Job. The straw that broke the camel’s back. At that point I wasn’t particularly happy with God’s entire relationship with humanity, but I was still there, still part of the team.
God was worshipped and he seemed pretty happy about that, granting favors and blessings to basically anyone he arbitrarily decided to. One of those he blessed was Job. He loved God and was prosperous, and God started fixating on him like he did Abram. Here was one of the best examples after Abraham of a man who knew his place and purpose!
I was getting sick of it. God’s whole hot-and-cold relationship with humanity started out obsessive and ridiculous, and it had only gotten worse. He loved man one day, destroyed kingdoms the next. Now imagine those frustrations combined with a colleague who won’t stop talking about his new puppy who, and no offense to Job, wasn’t particularly unique or interesting.
Oh, I’m so sorry, little guy. He did it, but it was because I ran my mouth off.
“Of course he loves you, he has everything. Family, friends, land, wealth, you’ve given it all to him. Do you really think he’d have as much faith if his life was terrible?”
It was a comment, not a suggestion. And I definitely didn’t intend to make it some kind of challenge with that poor bastard in the middle.
You know what happened to him. Fields withered, livestock stolen, wealth lost, children killed. His children! At least with Isaac God pulled back, and even with Sodom and Gomorrah there were some standards he was using, even if only he knew them. Here he destroys most of a family as a test. Not even to make a point, as bad as that would have been, but as a test!
Job’s life was ruined, and even then he kept his faith. He was miserable, he wanted to die, but he never accused God of doing anything wrong. In fact, he kept asking what he did to incur God’s wrath.
He didn’t pass God’s test because of this. He passed it after he was convinced that God wasn’t just great, but so great, so much higher than anything else, that Job couldn’t question his decisions, no matter how awful they were. That faith and worship weren’t simply decisions of loyalty and morality, but outright certainty of the nature of reality. Good? Bad? It doesn’t matter because there is a true power that stands above any considerations of it, and for that power good is only that which accepts that it is completely and entirely beneath him.
I stepped down at that point. I left the Host and just spent time on Earth, watching it all as it developed. I stepped outside of the positions and angles and points of view I had become accustomed to and saw that there was so much beyond them. Other humans, other rules, other gods, other ideas.
So no, I didn’t fall from Heaven. I walked out, looked behind me, and saw just how small it was.
***
That was the last time God and I spoke, but not the last time he frustrated me. If Job didn’t already do it, Jesus Christ would have shattered any confidence I had in him.
Two thousand years ago those other elements I saw in my travels were starting to encroach on the nice little world of the loyal and the faithful God had crafted. The chosen had begun to dwindle and fracture.
This wasn’t because of any other gods, incidentally. The nearby pantheons and wild deities were amicable neighbors. Their believers generally left God’s chosen alone, and when they didn’t he acted directly and established that he was more powerful than any of them. And he was, probably because he didn’t have any direct competition, while all the other gods tended to bicker, spar, and outright fight each other for some form of respect or glory. Their dominions were also much more limited and specific.
But while other humans’ faiths were more scattered, their resources weren’t. While the chosen were dedicated to feeding God’s ego with little interest in expanding, everyone else worked on building empires. Marduk wasn’t a problem, but the Babylonian Captivity was. Jupiter/Zeus wasn’t a problem, but the expansion of the Hellenic league and the rise of the Roman Empire was.
You can imagine how God saw it. His precious followers, diminished by unbelieving people who far outnumbered them. He didn’t pay much attention outside of his purview, and then suddenly said purview was filled with the most sinful people possible in his eyes: those who didn’t believe. To make things worse, his own believers were squabbling among themselves with how best to worship him.
For all his obsessive myopia, he at least recognized that simply showing raw power would either devastate everything or put his chosen in a very bad position with their far more numerous neighbors. So he made a different plan.
I’ll give God credit, that might have been the most creative he had ever been. It was outright brilliant, but after the first stumble it became so bizarre and obtuse that I could barely follow his logic. It was what he did then that really disappointed me.
The plan: Don’t interact directly, but send a messiah. Someone who would not only teach what was important, but convince the doubtful with a touch of God’s power. Enter Jesus. Virgin birth under a shining star, able to perform miracles, charismatic, all of those things. But that wasn’t the clever part of the plan.
Start incorporating and subsuming nearby faiths and people to be part of his plan. And that happened before day one, with some subtle nudges guiding three prominent foreigners to witness the virgin birth. Men considered wise, who would return to their lands and plant seeds of curiosity and possibility there. Sprinkle the incredible throughout his life to give his status credibility as he works to bring the different groups of God’s worshippers together under one very specifically ordained figure.
While he’s doing this, lead him to pick up a few traditions from people outside of the chosen. Nothing major, nothing that changes the underlying faith, but adds syncretic familiarity to eventually attract more followers. Spend some time spreading the word and performing miracles and let the legend build.
It worked at first, in a limited sense. Jesus picked up followers and became a rabbi and prophet of some renown. His following grew, split evenly between the chosen who came together as planned and new believers.
The problem was that there were still rival sects among the chosen, confounding God’s plan even while worshipping him. And besides Jesus he had pretty much stopped talking directly to human at that point. And even though Jesus’ group was growing, it still wasn’t even close to being in the majority, or even plurality.
God wasn’t getting the results he wanted to see from the plan, and so he changed it. The change baffles me to this day, because on one hand if he had more patience it might have been successful in the long run. On the other hand, you can’t really deny its bigger success in the much longer run. I actually don’t think that eventual long-term hegemony was part of any plan. I think God just decided to cut bait.
The new plan: Make a martyr out of the messiah. Arrange his execution, then make a big spectacle of him coming back to life, and then have him leave for Heaven. A grand gesture, a miracle, and above all else, a test of faith.
Even then, with this hand-crafted prophet who did everything he was supposed to do without question, God tested his faith. To the very end.
I’ll say that I don’t understand it, because if I describe what I think I understand it will sound unkind.
***
You know what happened after that, on Earth. Sect becomes religion becomes a force of theological hegemony across a hemisphere. Roman Empire, Holy Roman Empire, Vatican, Inquisition, diasporal, schism after schism, and now we have Abrahamic faiths unfailingly accepting the absolute power of their singular deity even as they fight among themselves.
Oh, and along the way they take the frustrated resignation of a loyal colleague into a figure of ultimate evil, to be reviled and hated by everyone.
But the wildest thing about any of it? What happened in Heaven. I haven’t been welcome in ages and an unfortunate number of the Host have bought into the smear campaign against me, but I still watch and listen out for things.
God isn’t there anymore. No one is at the top guiding anything. The entire history of the Church has been human faith and ambition, and the angels of Heaven muddling through the few interactions they bother to make with that. As far as I can tell, God has been silent ever since the crucifixion. Either he’s left, he’s completely given up on dealing with humanity, or he’s just sulking.
Who can ever really know?