LUCIFER'S CHOICE

The darkest angel, who was little but not the littlest, was constantly punished by God for some unknown reason. Maybe for being dark. The confusing part was that God would say, “I’m only doing this because I love you,” and would embrace him, kiss his bruises, bind up his broken bones. The ones God himself broke! So the darkest angel, whose name was Lucifer, felt that this was the price of love, it was the most normal way to be, because why would God be different than that? And no one else was willing to oppose him. Because this was a MONO-theism, not a DUO-theism.

So one day God said, “That’s it. I’m throwing you out of heaven.” And Lucifer said, “You can’t do that because . . .I’m jumping!” and the last two words were uttered as he fell from a rainbow. There was no going back. He had wings, very DARK wings, but they were bound at that point. It took him years to unbind them. They turned out to be leather, not feathers.

Actually he was quite powerful, but he never used his power to destroy people -- that was God’s thing. What he did was get very close, intimate, entwined -- then jerk away and leave them yearning. The yearning got them into all sorts of trouble as they searched for some equivalent, some healing, some forgetfulness. It grieved God. That pleased Lucifer. “Now what do you think of free will, Big Guy? Shall I start a democracy?”

How did it all get so turned around? Why do we all want to love Lucifer and defy God? People are obsessed with Lucifer, his seductive darkness, his secrets -- what IS he up to? Can we go, too? Curiosity comes from all the warnings NOT to go with him. Worse than the Pied Piper, he is, he is! We hear the grownups whispering but they won’t tell us anything.

We look to the mythology and find a god of light! Lucifer, the flaring match. Lucifer, the dawn star. He flies above the abyss. (Sounds like a shaman to me.) We look to science and they tell us that this is because the dawn star is a planet, contrarily named Venus. (Is Lucifer transexual? That would explain a lot!) In addition, this planet is INSIDE Earth’s orbit -- an inner circle -- so it can only be seen in the morning and evening. Sometimes it’s a morning star and sometimes it’s an evening star. Whether or not it is “bi-”, it is certainly “diurnal.” It moves. You cannot steer by it. But you cannot mistake it.

The forces of darkness think of themselves as a closed club, one you’re too young, too naive, to know about, though if you’re attractive enough Lucifer might come to slip beneath your covers. You won’t like that. You SHOULDN’T. It’s forbidden. He’s OTHER.

Then along comes a new Dawn Star and displaces Lucifer. This time it’s Jesus who is the Morning Star. Always someone horning in. Now there’s a tritheism. Next I suppose some Cavalry officer with a bad reputation will be trying to get into the game. (He was blonde, but very dark inside.)

Women love the bad guys. Like Custer’s wife, they claim, follow and eulogize them. The hidden message is “Don’t mess with me -- I’m more powerful than my boyfriend, the Devil, because I can control him.” Or maybe they just like the drama of it all. There are groups for that, so they can tell their wild stories and how they suffered. STILL suffer. Write books about it and get rich.

Christianity is so entwined with Zoroastrianism (thus spoke Zarathustra !) and Manichaeism, which all came out of the same region and thus the same imagery, that they echo each other all the time. Ahura Mazda is also known as Ohrmazd, Hourmazd, Hormazd, Hurmuz, Aramazd and Azzandara. Ahura Mazda's counterpart is Angra Mainyu, the "evil spirit" and the creator of evil who will be destroyed before frashokereti (the destruction of evil). The names didn’t catch on but the binaries of light and darkness, good and evil, never changed. Would Lucifer by any other name be as wicked? Just as dark? Just as seductive? If his wings had feathers would we be any less or more willing to be enfolded and rocketed away into the darkness, full of power?

Here’s the twist. This next year will be obsessed by the polarized politics that have gotten us stuck for the last few years. Will it be Lucifer Gingrich or Lucifer Obama? Which one is the real demon lover? It seems plain to me that it is neither. The real Devil cannot be named because those who control the planetary networks of military, corporate, and financial power can afford to be anonymous. You’ll never know their names. They’ll never be hauled into court. You’ll never find their wealth. They live in darkness, that seductive Black Hand world where people are “taken care of” in more than one sense. None of the strutting despots who are being thrown out of their palaces were ever truly Lucifer. Not even the financial moguls who have been caught were truly Lucifer.

A strange phenomenon in the last few days has been anonymous crime. “Flash” robberies where more than a hundred people, coordinated by cell phones, show up at a store and clear the shelves -- overwhelming all defenses. Someone is in the streets of Great Falls at night setting fire to one car after another, a dozen at once. Anonymous hackers are stealing from security businesses -- the BEST high-level security businesses! Stealing and revealing government documents and secrets. It’s hard to know whether these last are on the side of the good or the bad. They are Anonymous. They are Occupy. We TALK sunshine and transparency. But can we handle the truth?

It’s about time we did. This essay started with a story, the kind of fantasy with “Freudian” and superstitious overtones that the media dearly love and that seep into our assumptions without ever being checked against reality. By luring you in with a story, maybe it’s possible to wake up the sleeping. Otherwise we risk Custer’s Last Stand, which was not about Indians at all. It was about hubris, about thinking you know everything and that the right is on your side and that there is no risk. The Devil is in the details.